[p7]
“OH, WELL, YOU KNOW
HOW WOMEN ARE!”

SHE emerges from the shop. She is any
woman, and the shop from which she emerges
is any shop in any town. She has been shopping.
This does not imply that she has been buying anything
or that she has contemplated buying anything,
but merely that she has been shopping—a
very different pursuit from buying. Buying implies
business for the shop; shopping merely implies
business for the clerks.

As stated, she emerges. In the doorway she
runs into a woman of her acquaintance. If she
likes the other woman she is cordial. But if she
does not like her she is very, very cordial. A
woman’s aversion for another woman moving in
the same social stratum in which she herself moves
may readily be appraised. Invariably it is in
inverse ratio to the apparent affection she displays
upon encountering the object of her disfavor.
Why should this be? I cannot answer. It is
not given for us to know.

[p8]
Very well, then, she meets the other woman at
the door. They stop for conversation. Two men
meeting under the same condition would mechanically
draw away a few paces, out of the
route of persons passing in or out of the shop.
No particular play of the mental processes would
actuate them in so doing; an instinctive impulse,
operating mechanically and subconsciously, would
impel them to remove themselves from the main
path of foot travel. But this woman and her
acquaintance take root right there. Persons dodge
round them and glare at them. Other persons
bump into them, and are glared at by the two
traffic blockers. Where they stand they make a
knot of confusion.

But does it occur to either of them to suggest
that they might step aside, five feet or ten, and
save themselves, and the pedestrian classes generally,
a deal of delay and considerable annoyance?
It does not. It never will. If the meeting
took place in a narrow passageway or on a
populous staircase or at the edge of the orbit of
a set of swinging doors or on a fire escape landing
upon the front of a burning building, while one
was going up to aid in the rescue and the other
was coming down to be saved—if it took place
just outside the Pearly Gates on the Last Day
[p9]
when the quick and the dead, called up for judgment,
were streaming in through the portals—still
would they behave thus. Where they met
would be where they stopped to talk, regardless
of the consequences to themselves, regardless of
impediment to the movements of their fellow
beings.

Having had her say with her dear friend or
her dear enemy, as the case may be, our heroine
proceeds to the corner and hails a passing street
car. Because her heels are so high and her skirts
are so snug, she takes about twice the time to
climb aboard that a biped in trousers would take.
Into the car she comes, teetering and swaying.
The car is no more than comfortably filled. True,
all the seats at the back where she has entered
are occupied; but up at the front there still is
room for another sittee or two. Does she look
about her to ascertain whether there is any space
left? I need not pause for reply. I know it already,
and so do you. Midway of the aisle-length
she stops and reaches for a strap. She makes an
appealing picture, compounded of blindness,
helplessness, and discomfort. She has clinging
vine written all over her. She craves to cling,
but there is no trellis. So she swings from her
strap.

[p10]
The passengers nearest her are all men. She
stares at them, accusingly. One of them bends
forward to touch her and tell her that there is
room for her up forward; but now there aren’t
any seats left. Male passengers, swinging aboard
behind her, have already scrouged on by her and
taken the vacant places.

In the mind of one of the men in her immediate
vicinity chivalry triumphs over impatience.
He gives a shrug of petulance, arises and begs
her to have his seat. She is not entitled to it on
any ground, save compassion upon his part. By
refusing to use the eyes in her head she has forfeited
all right to special consideration. But he
surrenders his place to her and she takes it.

The car bumps along. The conductor, making
his rounds, reaches her. She knows he is coming;
at least she should know it. A visit from the
conductor has been a feature of every one of the
thousands of street-car rides that she has taken
in her life. She might have been getting her fare
ready for him. There are a dozen handy spots
where she might have had a receptacle built for
carrying small change—in a pocket in her skirt,
in a fob at her belt, in her sleeve or under her cuff.
Counting fob pockets and change pockets, a man
has from nine to fifteen pockets in his everyday
[p11]
garments. If also he is wearing an overcoat, add
at least three more pockets to the total. It would
seem that she might have had at least one dependable
pocket. But she has none.

The conductor stops, facing her, and meanwhile
wearing on his face that air of pained resignation
which is common to the faces of conductors
on transportation lines that are heavily patronized
by women travelers. In mute demand he extends
toward her a soiled palm. With hands encased
in oversight gloves she fumbles at the catch of a
hand bag. Having wrested the hand bag open,
she paws about among its myriad and mysterious
contents. A card of buttons, a sheaf of samples,
a handkerchief, a powder puff for inducing low
visibility of the human nose, a small parcel of
something, a nail file, and other minor articles
are disclosed before she disinters her purse from
the bottom of her hand bag. Another struggle
with the clasp of the purse ensues; finally, one
by one, five coppers are fished up out of the
depths and presented to the conductor. The
lady has made a difficult, complicated rite of
what might have been a simple and a swift
formality.

The car proceeds upon its course. She sits in
her seat, wearing that look of comfortable self-absorption
[p12]
which a woman invariably wears when
she is among strangers, and when she feels herself
to be well dressed and making a satisfactory public
appearance. She comes out of her trance with
a start on discovering that the car has passed her
corner or is about to pass it. All flurried, she
arises and signals the conductor that she is alighting
here. From her air and her expression, we
may gather that, mentally, she holds him responsible
for the fact that she has been carried on beyond
her proper destination.

The car having stopped, she makes her way to
the rear platform and gets off—gets off the wrong
way. That is to say, she gets off with face toward
the rear. Thus is achieved a twofold result:
She blocks the way of anyone who may be desirous
of getting aboard the car as she gets off
of it, and if the car should start up suddenly, before
her feet have touched the earth, or before
her grip on the hand rail has been relaxed, she
will be flung violently down upon the back of
her head.

From the time he is a small boy until he is in
his dotage, a man swings off a car, facing in the
direction in which the car is headed. Then, a
premature turn of a wheel pitches him forward
with a good chance to alight upon his feet,
[p13]
whereas the same thing happening when he was
facing in the opposite direction would cause him
to tumble over backward, with excellent prospects
of cracking his skull. But in obedience to
an immutable but inexplicable vagary of sex, a
woman follows the patently wrong, the obviously
dangerous, the plainly awkward system.

As the conductor rings the starting bell, he
glances toward a man who is riding on the rear
platform.

“Kin you beat ’um?” says the conductor. “I
ast you—kin you beat ’um?”

The man to whom he has put the question is
a married man. Being in this state of marriage
he appreciates that the longer you live with them
the less able are you to fathom the workings of
their minds with regard to many of the simpler
things of life. Speaking, therefore, from the
heights of his superior understanding, he says in
reply:

“Oh, well, you know how women are!”

We know how women are. But nobody knows
why they are as they are.

Please let me make myself clear on one point:
As an institution, and as individuals, I am for
women. They constitute, and deservedly too, the
most popular sex we have. Since away back
[p14]
yonder I have been in favor of granting them
suffrage. For years I have felt it as a profound
conviction that the franchise should be expanded
at one end and abridged at the other—made
larger to admit some of the women, made smaller
to bar out some of the men. I couldn’t think of
very many reasons why the average woman should
want to mix in politics, but if she did wish so to
mix and mingle, I couldn’t think of a single valid
reason why she should not have full permission,
not as a privilege, not as a boon, but as a common
right. Nor could I bring myself to share,
in any degree, the apprehension of some of the
anti-suffragists who held that giving women votes
would take many of them entirely out of the state
of motherhood. I cannot believe that all the
children of the future are going to be born on
the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
Surely some of them will be born on
other dates. Indeed the only valid argument
against woman suffrage that I could think of was
the conduct of some of the women who have been
for it.

To myself I often said:

“Certainly I favor giving them the vote. Seeing
what a mess the members of my own sex so
often make of the job of trying to run the country,
[p15]
I don’t anticipate that the Republic will go
upon the shoals immediately after women begin
voting and campaigning and running for office.
At the helm of the ship of state we’ve put some
pretty sad steersman from time to time. Better
the hand that rocks the cradle than the hand that
rocks the boat. We men have let slip nearly all
of the personal liberties for which our fathers
fought and bled—that is to say, fought the Britishers
and bled the Injuns. Ever since the Civil
War we have been so dummed busy telling the
rest of the world how free we were that we failed
to safeguard that freedom of which we boasted.

“We commiserate the Englishman because he
chooses to live under an hereditary president
called a king, while we are amply content to go
on living under an elected king called a president.
We cannot understand why he, a free
citizen of the free-est country on earth, insists on
calling himself a subject; but we are reconciled
to the fiction of proclaiming ourselves citizens,
while each day, more and more, we are becoming
subjects—the subjects of sumptuary legislation,
the subjects of statutes framed by bigoted or
frightened lawgivers, the subjects of arbitrary
mandates and of arbitrary decrees, the subjects,
the abject, cringing subjects, of the servant classes,
[p16]
the police classes, the labor classes, the capitalistic
classes.”

Naturally, as a Democrat I have felt these
things with enhanced bitterness when the Republicans
were in office; nevertheless, I have felt
them at other times, too. And, continuing along
this line of thought, I have repeatedly said to myself:

“In view of these conditions, let us give ’em
the vote—eventually, but not just yet. While
still we have control of the machinery of the
ballot let us put them on probation, as it were.
They claim to be rational creatures; very well,
then, make ’em prove it. Let us give ’em the
vote just as soon as they have learned the right
way in which to get off of a street car.”

In this, though, I have changed my mind. I
realize now that the demand was impossible, that
it was—oh, well, you know what women are!

We have given woman social superiority;
rather she has acquired it through having earned
it. Shortly she will have been put on a basis of
political equality with men in all the states of the
Union. Now she thinks she wants economic
equality. But she doesn’t; she only thinks she
does. If she should get it she would refuse to
abide by its natural limitations on the one side
[p17]
and its natural expansions for her sphere of
economic development on the other. For, temperamentally,
God so fashioned her that never
can she altogether quit being the clinging vine
and become the sturdy oak. She’ll insist on having
all the prerogatives of the oak, but at the
same time she will strive to retain the special considerations
accorded to the vine which clings. If
I know anything about her dear, wonderful, incomprehensible
self, she belongs to the sex which
would eat its cake and have it, too. Some men
are constructed after this design. But nearly all
women are.

Give her equal opportunities with men in business—put
her on the same footing and pay to her
the same salary that a man holding a similar job
is paid. So far so good. But then, as her employer,
undertake to hand out to her exactly the
same treatment which the man holding a like
position expects and accepts. There’s where Mr.
Boss strikes a snag. The salary she will take—oh,
yes—but she arrogates to herself the sweet
boon of weeping when things distress her, and,
when things harass her, of going off into tantrums
of temper which no man in authority, however
patient, would tolerate on the part of another
man serving under him.

[p18]
Grant to her equal powers, equal responsibilities,
equal favors and a pay envelope on Saturday
night containing as much money as her male co-worker
receives. That is all very well; but seek,
however gently, however tactfully, however
diplomatically, to suggest to her that a simpler,
more businesslike garb than the garb she favors
would be the sane and the sensible thing for business
wear in business hours. And then just see
what happens.

A working woman who, through the working
day, dresses in plain, neat frocks with no jangling
bracelets upon her arms, no foolish furbelows at
her wrists, no vain adornments about her throat,
no exaggerated coiffure, is a delight to the eye
and, better still, she fits the setting of her environment.
Two of the most competent and dependable
human beings I know are both of them
women. One is the assistant editor of a weekly
magazine. The other is the head of an important
department in an important industry. In the evening
you would never find a woman better
groomed or, if the occasion demand, more ornately
rigged-out than either one of these young women
will be. But always, while on duty, they
wear a correct and proper costume for the work
they are doing, and they match the picture. These
[p19]
two, though, are, I think, exceptions to the rule
of their sex.

Trained nurses wear the most becoming uniforms,
and the most suitable, considering their
calling, that were ever devised. To the best of
my knowledge and belief there is no record where
a marriageable male patient on the road to recovery
and in that impressionable mood which accompanies
the convalescence of an ordinarily
healthy man, failed to fall in love with his
nurse. A competent, professional nurse who has
the added advantage on her side of being comely—and
it is powerfully hard for her to avoid being
comely in her spotless blue and starchy white—stands
more chances of getting the right sort of
man for a husband than any billionaire’s daughter
alive.

But I sometimes wonder what weird sartorial
eccentricities some of them would indulge in did
not convention and the standing laws of their profession
require of them that they all dress after
a given pattern. And if the owners and managers
of big city shops once lifted the rule prescribing
certain modes for their female working staffs—if
they should give their women clerks a free hand
in choosing their own wardrobes for store hours—well,
you know how women are!

[p20]
Nevertheless and to the contrary notwithstanding,
I will admit while I am on this phase of my
topic that there likewise is something to be said
in dispraise of my own sex too. In the other—and
better half of this literary double sketch-team
act, my admired and talented friend, Mrs.
Mary Roberts Rinehart, cites chapter and verse to
prove the unaccountable vagaries of some men in
the matter of dress. There she made but one mistake—a
mistake of under-estimation. She mentioned
specifically some men; she should have included
all men.

The only imaginable reason why any rational
he-biped of adult age clings to the habiliments
ordained for him by the custom and the tailors of
this generation, is because he is used to them. A
man can stand anything once he gets used to it
because getting used to a thing commonly means
that the habitee has quit worrying about it. And
yet since the dawn of time when Adam poked fun
at Eve’s way of wearing her fig-leaf and on down
through the centuries until the present day and
date it has ever been the custom of men to gibe at
the garments worn by women. Take our humorous
publications, which I scarcely need point out
are edited by men. Hardly could our comic
weeklies manage to come out if the jokes about
[p21]
the things which women wear were denied to them
as fountain-sources of inspiration. To the vaudeville
monologist his jokes about his wife and his
mother-in-law and to the comic sketch artist his
pictures setting forth the torments of the stock
husband trying to button the stock gown of a stock
wife up her stock back—these are dependable and
inevitable stand-bys.

Women do wear maniacal garments sometimes;
that there is no denying. But on the other hand
styles for women change with such frequency
that no quirk of fashion however foolish and disfiguring
ever endures for long enough to work
any permanent injury in the health of its temporarily
deluded devotees. Nothing I can think
of gets old-fashioned with such rapidity as a
feminine fashion unless it is an egg.

If this season a woman’s skirt is so scantily
fashioned that as she hobbles along she has the
appearance of being leg-shackled, like the lady
called Salammbo, it is as sure as shooting that,
come next season, she will have leapt to the other
extreme and her draperies will be more than
amply voluminous. If this winter her sleeves are
like unto sausage casings for tightness, be prepared
when spring arrives to see her wearing practically
all the sleeves there are. About once in
[p22]
so often she is found wearing a mode which combines
beauty with saneness but that often is not
very often.

But even when they are at apogee of sartorial
ridiculousness I maintain that the garments of
women, from the comfort standpoint, anyhow,
are not any more foolish than the garments to
which the average man is incurably addicted. If
women are vassals to fashion men are slaves to
convention, and fashion has the merit that it alters
overnight, whereas convention is a slow moving
thing that stands still a long time before it
does move. Convention is the wooden Indian
of civilization; but fashion is a merry-go-round.

In the Temperate zone in summertime, Everywoman
looks to be cooler than Everyman—and
by the same token is cooler. In the winter she
wears lighter garments than he would dream of
wearing, and yet stays warmer than he does, can
stand more exposure without outward evidence of
suffering than he can stand, and is less susceptible
than he to colds and grips and pneumonias. Compare
the thinness of her heaviest outdoor wrap
with the thickness of his lightest ulster, or the heft
of her so-called winter suit with the weight of
the outer garments which he wears to business,
[p23]
and if you are yourself a man you will wonder
why she doesn’t freeze stiff when the thermometer
falls to the twenty-above mark. Observe her in
a ballroom that is overheated in the corners and
draughty near the windows, as all ballrooms are.
Her neck and her throat, her bosom and arms are
bare. Her frock is of the filmiest gossamer stuff;
her slippers are paper thin, her stockings the
sheerest of textures, yet she doesn’t sniff and her
nose doesn’t turn red and the skin upon her exposed
shoulders refuses to goose-flesh. She is the
marvel of the ages. She is neither too warm nor
too cold; she is just right. Consider now her
male companion in his gala attire. One minute
he is wringing wet with perspiration; that is
when he is dancing. The next minute he is visibly
congealing. That is because he has stopped to
catch his breath.

Why this difference between the sexes? The
man is supposed to be the hardier creature of the
two, but he can’t prove it. Of course there may
be something in the theory that when a woman
feels herself to be smartly dressed, an exaltation
of soul lifts her far above realization of bodily
discomfort. But I make so bold as to declare that
the real reason why she is comfortable and he is
not, lies in the fact that despite all eccentricities of
[p24]
costume in which she sometimes indulges, Everywoman
goes about more rationally clad than
Everyman does.

For the sake of comparing two horrible examples,
let us take a woman esteemed to be over-dressed
at all points and angles where she is not
under-dressed, and, mentally, let us place alongside
her a man who by the standards of his times
and his contemporaries is conventionally garbed.
To find the woman we want, we probably must
travel to New York and seek her out in a smart
restaurant at night. Occasionally she is found
elsewhere but it is only in New York, that city
where so many of the young women are prematurely
old and so many of the old women are prematurely
young, that she abounds in sufficient profusion
to become a common type instead of an
infrequent one. This woman is waging that battle
against the mounting birthdays which nobody
ever yet won. Her hair has been dyed in those rich
autumnal tints which are so becoming to a tree
in its Indian summer, but so unbecoming to a
woman in hers. Richard K. Fox might have designed
her jewelry; she glistens with diamonds
until she makes you think of the ice coming out
of the Hudson River in the early spring. But
about her complexion there is no suggestion of a
[p25]
March thaw. For it is a climate-proof shellac.
Her eyebrows are the self-made kind, and her
lips were done by hand. Her skirt is too short for
looks and too tight for comfort; she is tightly
prisoned at the waistline and not sufficiently confined
in the bust. There is nothing natural or
rational anywhere about her. She is as artificial
as a tin minnow and she glitters like one.

Next your attention is invited to the male of
the species. He is assumed to be dressed in accordance
with the dictates of good taste and with
due regard for all the ordinary proprieties. But
is he? Before deciding whether he is or isn’t,
let us look him over, starting from the feet and
working upward. A matter of inches above his insteps
brings us to the bottom of his trouser-legs.
Now these trouser-legs of his are morally certain
to be too long, in which event they billow down
over his feet in slovenly and ungraceful folds, or
they are too short, in which event there is an
awkward, ugly cross-line just above his ankles.
If he is a thin man, his dress waistcoat bulges
away from his breastbone so the passerby can
easily discover what brand of suspenders he
fancies; but if he be stoutish, the waistcoat has
a little way of hitching along up his mid-riff inch
by inch until finally it has accordion-pleated itself
[p26]
in overlapping folds thwartwise of his tummy,
coyly exposing an inch or so of clandestine shirt-front.

It requires great will-power on the part of
the owner and constant watchfulness as well to
keep a fat man’s dress waistcoat from behaving
like a railroad folder. His dinner coat or his
tail coat, if he wears a tail coat, is invariably
too tight in the sleeves; nine times out of ten it
binds across the back between the shoulders, and
bulges out in a pouch effect at the collar. His
shirt front, if hard-boiled, is as cold and clammy
as a morgue slab when first he puts it on; but as
hot and sticky as a priming of fresh glue after
he has worn it for half an hour in an overheated
room—and all public rooms in America are overheated.
Should it be of the pleated or medium
well-done variety, no power on earth can keep it
from appearing rumply and untidy; that is, no
power can if the wearer be a normal man. I am
not speaking of professional he-beauties or models
for the illustrations of haberdashers’ advertisements
in the magazines. His collar, which is a
torturer’s device of stiff linen and yielding starch,
is not a comparatively modern product as some
have imagined. It really dates back to the Spanish
Inquisition where it enjoyed a great vogue.

[p27]
Faring abroad, he encloses his head, let us say in
a derby hat. Some people think the homeliest
thing ever devised by man is Grant’s Tomb.
Others favor the St. Louis Union Depot. But I
am pledged to the derby hat. And the high or
two-quart hat runs second.

This being the case for and against the parties
concerned, I submit to the reader’s impartial judgment
the following question for a decision: Taking
everything into consideration, which of these
two really deserves the booby prize for unbecoming
apparel—the woman who plainly is dressed in
bad form or the man who is supposed to be dressed
in good form? But this I will say for him as
being in his favor. He has sense enough to wear
plenty of pockets. And in his most infatuated
moments he never wears nether garments so tight
that he can’t step in ’em. Can I say as much for
woman? I cannot.

A few pages back I set up the claim that
woman, considered as a sex and not as an exceptional
type, cannot divorce the social relation from
the economic. I think of an illustration to prove
my point: In business two men may be closely
associated. They may be room-mates besides;
chums, perhaps, at the same club; may borrow
money from each other and wear each other’s
[p28]
clothes; and yet, so far as any purely confidential
relation touching on the private sides of their
lives is concerned, may remain as far apart as the
poles.

It is hard to imagine two women, similarly
placed, behaving after the same common-sense
standards. Each insists upon making a confidante
of her partner. Their intimacy becomes a thing
complicated with extraneous issues, with jointly
shared secrets, with disclosures as to personal likes
and dislikes, which should have no part in it if
there is to be continued harmony, free from heart-burnings
or lacerated feelings, or fancied slights
or blighted affections. Sooner or later, too, the
personality of the stronger nature begins to overshadow
the personality of the weaker. Almost
inevitably there is a falling-out.

I do not share the somewhat common opinion
that in their friendships women are less constant
than men are. But the trouble with them is that
they put a heavier burden upon friendship than
so delicate, so sensitive a sentiment as real friendship
is was ever meant to bear. Something has
to give way under the strain. And something
does.

To be sure there is an underlying cause in
extenuation for this temperamental shortcoming
[p29]
which in justice to the ostensibly weaker sex
should be set forth here. Even though I am taking
on the rôle of Devil’s Advocate in the struggle
to keep woman from canonizing herself by main
force I want to be as fair as I can, always reserving
the privilege where things are about even, of
giving my own side a shade the better of it. The
main tap-root reason why women confide over-much
and too much in other women is because
leading more circumscribed lives than men commonly
lead they are driven back upon themselves
and into themselves and their sisters for interests
and for conversational material.

Taking them by and large they have less with
which to concern themselves than their husbands
and their brothers, their fathers and their sons
have. Therefore they concern themselves the
more with what is available, which, at the same
time, oftener than not, means some other woman’s
private affairs.

A woman, becoming thoroughly imbued with
an idea, becomes, ninety-nine times out of a hundred,
a creature of one idea. Everything else on
earth is subordinated to the thing—cabal, reform,
propaganda, crusade, movement or what not—in
which she is interested. Now the average man
may be very sincerely and very enthusiastically
[p30]
devoted to a cause; but it does not necessarily
follow that it will obsess him through every waking
hour. But the ladies, God bless ’em—and curb
’em—are not built that way. A woman wedded
to a cause is divorced from all else. She resents
the bare thought that in the press of matters and
the clash of worlds, mankind should for one moment
turn aside from her pet cause to concern
itself with newer issues and wider motives. From
a devotee she soon is transformed into a habitee.
From being an earnest advocate she advances—or
retrogrades—to the status of a plain bore. To
be a common nuisance is bad enough; to be a common
scold is worse, and presently she turns scold
and goes about railing shrilly at a world that
criminally persists in thinking of other topics than
the one which lies closest to her heart and loosest
on her tongue.

Than a woman who is a scold there is but one
more exasperating shape of a woman and that is
the woman who, not content with being the most
contradictory, the most paradoxical, the most
adorable of the Almighty’s creations—to wit, a
womanly woman—tries, among men, to be a good
fellow, so-called.

But that which is ordinarily a fault may, on
occasion of extraordinary stress, become the most
[p31]
transcendent and the most admirable of virtues.
I think of this last war and of the share our women
and the women of other lands have played in it.
No one caviled nor complained at the one-ideaness
of womankind while the world was in a welter of
woe and slaughter. Of all that they had, worth
having, our women gave and gave and gave and
gave. They gave their sons and their brothers,
their husbands and their fathers, to their country;
they gave of their time and of their energies and
of their talent; they gave of their wonderful
mercy and their wonderful patience, and their yet
more wonderful courage; they gave of the work
of their hands and the salt of their souls and the
very blood of their hearts. For every suspected
woman slacker there were ten known men slackers—yea,
ten times ten and ten to carry.

Each day, during that war, the story of Mary
Magdalene redeemed was somewhere lived over
again. Every great crisis in the war-torn lands
produced its Joan of Arc, its Florence Nightingale,
its Clara Barton. To the women fell the
tasks which for the most part brought no public
recognition, no published acknowledgments of
gratitude. For them, instead of the palms of victory
and the sheaves of glory, there were the
crosses of sacrifice, the thorny diadems of suffering.
[p32]
We cannot conceive of men, thus circumstanced,
going so far and doing so much. But
the women—

Oh, well, you know how women are!

[p7]
“ISN’T THAT
JUST LIKE A MAN!”

I UNDERSTAND that Mr. Irvin Cobb is going
to write a sister article to this, and naturally
he will be as funny as only he can be. It is
always allowable, too, to be humorous about
women. They don’t mind, because they are accustomed
to it.

But I simply dare not risk my popularity by
being funny about men. Why, bless their hearts
(Irvin will probably say of his subject, “bless
their little hearts.” Odd, isn’t it, how men always
have big hearts and women little ones? But
we are good packers. We put a lot in ’em) I
could be terribly funny, if only women were going
to read this. They’d understand. They know
all about men. They’d go up-stairs and put on a
negligee and get six baby pillows and dab a little
cold cream around their eyes and then lie down
on the couch and read, and they would all think
I must have known their men-folks somewhere.

But the men would read it and cancel the order
for my next book, and say I must be a spinster,
living a sort of in-bred existence. Why, I know
at least a hundred good stories about one man
alone, and if I published them he would either
[p8]
grow suspicious and wonder who the man is, or,
get sulky and resent bitterly being laughed at!
Which is exactly like a man. Just little things,
too, like always insisting he was extremely calm
at his wedding, when the entire church saw him
step off a platform and drop seven feet into
tropical foliage.

You see, women quite frequently have less wit
than men, but they don’t take themselves quite so
seriously; they view themselves with a certain
somewhat ironical humor. Men love a joke—on
the other fellow. But your really humorous
woman loves a joke on herself. That’s because
women are less conventional, of course. I can
still remember the face of the horrified gentleman
I met one day on the street after luncheon, who
had unconsciously tucked the corner of his
luncheon napkin into his watch pocket along with
his watch, and his burning shame when I observed
that his new fashion was probably convenient but
certainly novel.

And I contrast it with the woman, prominent
in the theatrical world, who had been doing a
little dusting—yes, they do, but it is never published—before
coming to lunch with me. She
walked into one of the largest of the New York
hotels, hatted, veiled and sable-ed, and wearing
tied around her waist a large blue-and-white
checked gingham apron.

[p9]
Now I opine (I have stolen that word from
Irvin) that under those circumstances, or something
approximating them, such as pajama trousers,
or the neglect to conceal that portion of a shirt
not intended for the public eye, almost any man of
my acquaintance would have made a wild bolt for
the nearest bar, hissing like a teakettle. Note: This
was written when the word bar did not mean to
forbid or to prohibit. The gingham-apron lady merely
stood up smilingly, took it off and gave it to the
waiter, who being a man returned it later wrapped
to look as much like a club sandwich as possible.

Oh, they’re conventional, these men, right
enough! Now and then one of them gathers a
certain amount of courage and goes without a hat
to save his hair, or wears sandals to keep his feet
cool, and he is immediately dismissed as mad. I
know one very young gentleman who nearly broke
up a juvenile dance by borrowing his mother’s
pink silk stockings for socks and wearing her best
pink ribbon as a tie.

How many hours do you suppose were wasted
by the new army practicing salutes in front of a
mirror? A good many right arms to-day, back in
“civies,” have a stuttering fit whenever they approach
a uniform. And I know a number of conventional
gentlemen who are suffering hours of
torment because they can’t remember, out of uniform,
to take off their hats to the women they
[p10]
meet. War is certainly perdition, isn’t it? And
numbers of times during the late unpleasantness
I have seen new officers standing outside a general’s
door, trying to remember the rule for addressing
a superior, and cap or no cap while not
wearing side arms.

You know how a woman would do it. She
would give a tilt to her hat and a pull here and
there, and then she would walk in and say:

“I know it’s perfectly horrible, but I simply
can’t remember the etiquette of this sort of thing.
Please do tell me, General.”

And the general, who has only eleven hundred
things to do before eating a bite of lunch on the
top of his desk, will get up and gravely instruct
her. Which is exactly like a man, of course.

Men overdo etiquette sometimes, because of
a conventional fear of slipping up somewhere.
There was a nice Red Cross major in France who
had had no instruction in military matters, and
had no arrogance whatever. So he used to salute
all the privates and the M. P.’s before they had a
chance. He was usually asking the road to somewhere
or other, and they would stand staring after
him thoughtfully until he was quite out of sight.

And as a corollary to this conventionality, how
wretched men are when they are placed in false
positions! Nobody likes it, of course, but a
woman can generally get out of it. Men think
[p11]
straighter than women, but not so fast. I dined
one night on shipboard with the captain of the
transport on which I came back from France, and
there was an army chaplain at the table. So, as
chaplains frequently say grace before meat, I put
a hand on the knee of a young male member of
my family beside me and kept it there, ready for
a squeeze to admonish silence. But the chaplain
did not say grace, and the man on my right suddenly
turned out to be a perfectly strange general
in a state of helpless uneasiness. I have a
suspicion that not even the absolute impeccability
of my subsequent conduct convinced him that I
was not a designing woman.

But, although we are discussing men, as all
women know, there are really no men at all.
There are grown-up boys, and middle-aged boys,
and elderly boys, and even sometimes very old
boys. But the essential difference is simply exterior.
Your man is always a boy. He grows
tidier, and he gathers up a mass of heterogeneous
information, and in the strangest possible
fashion as the years go on, boards have
to be put into the dining-room table, and
the shoe bill becomes something terrible, and during
some of his peregrinations he feels rather like
a comet with a tail. The dentist’s bills and where
to go for the summer and do-you-think-the-nurse-is-as-careful-as-she-should-be-with-baby’s-bottles
[p12]
make him put on a sort of surface maturity. But
it never fools his womankind. Deep down he
still believes in Santa Claus, and would like to
get up at dawn on the Fourth of July and throw
a firecracker through the cook’s window.

That is the reason women are natural monogamists.
They know they have to be one-man women,
because the one man is so always a boy, and has
to have so much mothering and looking after. He
has to be watched for fear his hair gets too long,
and sent to the tailor’s now and then for clothes.
And if someone didn’t turn his old pajamas into
scrub rags and silver cloths, he would go on wearing
their ragged skeletons long after the flesh had
departed hence. (What comforting rags Irvin
Cobb’s pajamas must make!)

And then of course now and then he must be
separated forcibly from his old suits and shoes.
The best method, as every woman knows, is to
give them to someone who is going on a long, long
journey, else he will follow and bring them back
in triumph. This fondness for what is old is a
strange thing in men. It does not apply to other
things—save cheese and easy chairs and some
kinds of game and drinkables. In the case of caps,
boots, and trousers it is akin to mania. It sometimes
applies to dress waistcoats and evening ties,
but has one of its greatest exacerbations (beat that
word, Irvin) in the matter of dressing gowns. If
[p13]
by any chance a cigarette has burned a hole in the
dressing gown, it takes on the additional interest
of survival, and is always hung, hole out, where
company can see it.

Full many a gentleman, returning from the
wars, has found that his heart’s treasures have
gone to rummage sales, and—you know the story
of the man who bought his dress suit back for
thirty-five cents.

I am personally acquainted with a man who
owns a number of pairs of bedroom slippers, nice
leather ones, velvet ones, felt ones. They sit in
a long row in his closet, and sit and sit. And when
that man prepares for his final cigarette at night—and
to drop asleep and burn another hole in his
dressing gown, or in the chintz chair cover, or
the carpet, as Providence may will it—he wears
on his feet a pair of red knitted bedroom slippers
with cords that tie around the top and dangle and
trip him up. Long years ago they stretched, and
they have been stretching ever since, until now
each one resembles an afghan.

Will he give them up? He will not.

There is something feline about a man’s love
for old, familiar things. I know that it is a
popular misconception to compare women with
cats and men with dogs. But the analogy is
clearly the other way.

Just run over the cat’s predominant characteristic
[p14]
and check them off: The cat is a night wanderer.
The cat loves familiar places, and the
hearthside. (And, oddly enough, the cat’s love of
the hearthside doesn’t interfere with his night
wanderings!) The cat can hide under the suavest
exterior in the world principles that would make
a kitten blush if it had any place for a blush. The
cat is greedy as to helpless things. And heavens,
how the cat likes to be petted and generally approved!
It likes love, but not all the time. And
it likes to choose the people it consorts with. It is
a predatory creature, also, and likes to be neat and
tidy, while it sticks to its old trousers with a love
that passeth understanding—there, I’ve slipped
up, but you know what I mean.

Now women are like dogs, really. They love
like dogs, a little insistently. And they like to
fetch and carry, and come back wistfully after
hard words, and learn rather easily to carry a
basket. And after three years or so of marriage
they learn to enjoy the bones of conversation and
sometimes even to go to the mat with them. (Oh,
Irvin, I know that’s dreadful!) Really, the only
resemblance between men and dogs is that they
both rather run to feet in early life.

This fondness for old clothes and old chairs and
familiar places is something women find hard to
understand. Yet it is simple enough. It is compounded
of comfort and loyalty.

[p15]
Men are curiously loyal. They are loyal to ancient
hats and disreputable old friends and to some
women. But they are always loyal to each other.

This, I maintain, is the sole reason for alluding
to them as the stronger and superior sex. They are
stronger. They are superior. They are as strong
as a trades union, only more so. They stand together
against the rest of the world. Women do
not. They have no impulse toward solidarity. They
fight a sort of guerilla warfare, each sniping from
behind her own tree. They are the greatest example
of the weakness of unorganized force in the
world.

But this male trades union is not due to affection.
It is two-fold. It is a survival from the
days when men united for defense. Women didn’t
unite. They didn’t need to, and they couldn’t
have, anyhow. When the cave man went away
to fight or to do the family marketing, he used to
roll a large bowlder against the entrance to his
stone mansion, and thus discouraged afternoon
callers of the feminine sex who would otherwise
have dropped in for a cup of tea. Then he took
away the rope ladder and cut off the telephone,
and went away with a heart at peace to join the
other males.

They would do it now, if they could.

But the real reason for their sex solidarity is
their terrible alikeness. They understand each
[p16]
other. Knowing their own weaknesses, they know
the other fellow’s. So they stand by each other,
sometimes out of sympathy, and occasionally out
of fear. You see, it is not only a trades union, it
is a mutual benefit society. Its only constitution
is the male Golden Rule—“You stick by me and
I’ll stick by you.” “We men must stick together.”

I’ll confess that with a good many women it is,
“You stick me and I’ll stick you.”

But that solidarity, primarily offensive and defensive,
has also an element in it that women
seldom understand, and almost always resent. Not
very many years ago a play ran in New York
without a woman in the cast or connected with the
story. There is one running very successfully
now in Paris. Both were written by men, naturally.
Women cannot conceive of the drama of life
without women in it. But men can.

The plain truth is that normal women need
men all the time, but that normal men need
women only a part of the time. They like to have
them to go back to, but they do not need them in
sight, or even within telephone call. There are
some hours of every day when you could repeat
a man’s wife’s name to him through a megaphone,
and he would have to come a long ways back,
from golf or pool or the ticker or the stock news,
to remember who she is.

When a man gets up a golf foursome he wants
[p17]
four men. When a woman does it, she wants three.

It is this ability to be happy without her that
a woman never understands. Her lack of understanding
of it causes a good bit of unhappiness,
too. Men are gregarious; they like to be together.
But women gauge them by their own needs, and
form dark surmises about these harmless meetings,
which are as innocuous and often as interesting
as the purely companionable huddlings of sheep
in pasture.

Women play bridge together to fill in the time
until the five-thirty is due. Men play bridge because
they like to beat the other fellow.

Mind you, I am not saying there are not strong
and fine affections among women. If it comes to
that, there is often deeper devotion, perhaps, than
among men. But I am saying that women do not
care for women as a sex, as men care for men.
Men will die to save other men. Women will
sacrifice themselves ruthlessly for children, but not
for other women. Queer, isn’t it?

Yet not so queer. Women want marriage and
a home. They should. And there are more women
than men. Even before the war there was, in
Europe and America, an extra sixth woman for
every five men, and the sixth woman brings competition.
She bulls the market, and makes feminine
sex solidarity impossible. And, of course,
added to that is the woman who requires three or
[p18]
four men to make her happy, one to marry and
support her, and one to take her to the theater
and to luncheon at Delmonico’s, and generally
fetch and carry for her, and one to remember her
as she was at nineteen and remain a bachelor and
have a selfish, delightful life, while blaming her.
This makes masculine stock still higher, and as
there are always buyers on a rising market, competition
among women—purely unconscious competition—flourishes.

So men hang together, and women don’t. And
men are the stronger sex because they are fewer!

Obviously the cure is the elimination of that
sixth woman, preferably by euthanasia. (Look
this up, Irvin. It’s a good one.) That sixth
woman ought to go. She has made men sought
and not seekers. She ruins dinner parties and is
the vampire of the moving pictures. And after
living a respectable life for years she either goes
on living a respectable life, and stays with her
sister’s children while the family goes on a motor
tour, or takes to serving high-balls instead of afternoon
tea, while wearing a teagown of some passionate
shade.

It is just possible that suffrage will bring women
together. It is just possible that male opposition
has in it this subconscious fear, that their superiority
is thus threatened. They don’t really want
equality, you know. They love to patronize us
[p19]
a bit, bless them; and to tell us to run along and
not bother our little heads about things that don’t
concern us. And, of course, politics has been their
own private maneuvering ground, and—I have
made it clear, I think, that they don’t always want
us—here we are, about to drill on it ourselves,
perhaps drilling a mite better than they do in some
formations, and standing right on their own field
and telling them the mistakes they’ve made, and
not to take themselves too hard and that the whole
game is a lot easier than they have always pretended
it was.

They don’t like it, really, a lot of them. Their
solidarity is threatened. Their superiority, and
another sanctuary, as closed to women as a monastery,
or a club, is invaded. No place to go but
home.

Yet I have a sneaking sympathy for them.
They were so terribly happy running things, and
fighting wars, and coming back at night to throw
their conversational bones around the table. It is
rather awful to think of them coming home now
and having some little woman say:

“Certainly we are not going to the movies.
Don’t you know there is a ward caucus to-night?”

There is a curious situation in the economic
world, too. Business has been the man’s field ever
since Cain and Abel went into the stock and farming
combine, with one of them raising grain for
[p20]
the other’s cows, and taking beef in exchange. And
the novelty is gone. But there’s a truism here:
Men play harder than they work; women work
harder than they play.

Women in business bring to it the freshness of
novelty, and work at their maximum as a sex.
Men, being always boys, work under their maximum.
(Loud screams here. But think it over!
How about shaking dice at the club after lunch,
and wandering back to the office at three P.M. to
sign the mail? How about golf? I’ll wager I
work more hours a day than you, Irvin!)

The plain truth is that if more men put their
whole hearts into business during business hours,
there would be no question of competition. As I
have said, they think straighter than women, although
more slowly. They have more physical
strength. They don’t have sick headaches—unless
they deserve them. But they are vaguely resentful
when some little woman, who has washed the
children and sent them off to school and straightened
her house and set out a cold lunch, comes
into the office at nine o’clock and works in circles
all around them.

But there is another angle to this “woman in
the business world” idea that puzzles women. Not
long ago a clever woman whose husband does not
resent her working, since his home and children
are well looked after, said to me:

[p21]
“I’ve always been interested in what he had
to say of his day at the office, but he doesn’t seem
to care at all about my day. He seems so awfully
self-engrossed.”

The truth probably is that they are both self-engrossed,
but women can dissemble and men cannot.
It is another proof of their invincible boyishness,
this total inability to pretend interest.
Even the averagest man is no hypocrite. He tries
it sometimes, and fails pitifully. The successful
male dissembler is generally a crook. But the
most honest woman in the world is often driven
to pretense, although she may call it savoir faire.
She pretends, because pretense is the oil that lubricates
society. Have you ever seen a man when
some neighbors who are unpopular drop in for an
evening call? After they are gone, his wife says:

“I do wish you wouldn’t bite the Andersons
when they come in, Joe!”

“Bite them! I was civil, wasn’t I?”

“Well, you can call it that.”

He is ready to examine the window locks, but
he turns and surveys her, and he is honestly
puzzled.

“What I can’t make out,” he says, “is how you
can fall all over yourself to those people, when
you know you detest them. Thank heavens, I’m
no hypocrite.”

Then he locks the windows and stalks up-stairs,
[p22]
and the hypocrite of the family smiles a little to
herself. Because she knows that without her there
would be no society and no neighborhood calls,
and that honesty can be a vice, and hypocrisy a
virtue.

I know a vestryman of a church who sometimes
plays bridge on Saturday nights for money. What
he loses doesn’t matter, but what he wins his wife
is supposed to put on the plate the next morning.
One Saturday night he gave her a large bill, and
the next morning she placed a neatly folded green-back
on the collection plate as he held it out to
her. He stood in the aisle and eyed the bill with
suspicion. Then he deliberately unfolded it, and
held out the plate to her again.

“Come over, Mazie,” he said.

And Mazie came over with the balance.

You know what a woman would have done.
She would have marked the bill with her eye, and
later on while waiting at the rear for the chair offertory
to end, she would have investigated. Then
on the way home she would have said:

“I had a good notion to stand right there, Charlie
Smith, and show you up. I wish I had.” But
the point is that she wouldn’t have.

There is no moral whatever to this brief tale.

But perhaps it is in love that men and women
differ most vitally. Now Nature, being extremely
wise, gives the man in love the wisdom of the serpent
[p23]
and the wile of the dove (which is a most alluring
bird in its love-making). A man in love
brings to it all his intelligence. And men like
being in love.

Being in love is not so happy for a woman.
She becomes emotional and difficult, is either on
the heights or in the depths. And the reason for
this is simple; love is a complex to a woman. She
has to contend with natural and acquired inhibitions.
She both desires love and fears it.

The primitive woman ran away from her lover,
but like Lot’s wife, she looked back. I am inclined
to think, however, that primitive woman
looked back rather harder than she ran. Be that as
it may, women to-day both desire love and fear it.

If men fear it, they successfully hide their cowardice.

It is in their methods of making love that men
cease to be alike. Up to that point they are very
similar; they all think that, having purchased an
automobile, they must vindicate their judgment
by insisting upon its virtues, and a great many of
them will spend as much money fixing over last
year’s car as would almost buy a new one; they
always think they drive carefully, but that the
fellow in the other car is either a road hog or a
lunatic who shouldn’t have a license; they are
mostly rather moody before breakfast, although
there is an obnoxious type that sings in the cold
[p24]
shower; they are all rather given to the practice
of bringing gifts to their wives when they have
done something they shouldn’t; and they all have
a tendency to excuse their occasional delinquencies
by the argument that they never made anybody
unhappy, and their weaknesses by the fact
that God made them men.

But it is in love that they are at their best, from
the point of view of the one woman most interested.
And it is in their love methods that they
show the greatest variations from type. Certain
things of course they all do, buy new neckties,
write letters which they read years later with
amazement and consternation; keep a photograph
in a drawer of the desk at the office, where the
stenographer finds it and says to the office boy:
“Can you beat that? And not even pretty!” carry
boxes of candy around, hoping they look like cigars;
and lie awake nights wondering what she
can see in him, and wondering if she is awake too.

They are very dear and very humble and sheepish
and self-conscious when they are in love, curious
mixtures of determination and vacillation;
about eighty per cent, however, being determination.
But they lose for once their sex solidarity,
and play the game every man for himself. Roughly
speaking (although who can speak roughly of
them then? Or at any time?) they divide into
three types of lovers. There are men who are
all three, at different times of course. But these
[p25]
three classes of lovers have one thing in common.
They want to do their own hunting. It gives them
a sense of power to think they have won out by
sheer strength and will.

The truth about this is that no man ever won
a woman who was actually difficult to get, and
found it worth the effort afterwards. What real
man ever liked kissing a girl who didn’t want
to be kissed? Love has got to be mutual. Your
lover is frequently more interested in being loved
than in loving. And the trump cards are always
the woman’s. These grown-up boys of ours are
shy and self-depreciatory in love, and they run like
deer when they think they are not wanted. So
the woman has to play a double game, and gets
blamed for guile when it is only wisdom. Her
instinct is to run, partly because she is afraid of
love and partly because she has to appear to be
pursued. But she has to limp a bit, and sit down
and look back rather wistfully, and in the end of
course she goes lame entirely and is overtaken.

This is the same instinct which makes the
pheasant hen feign a broken wing.

There is a wonderful type of woman, however,
who goes as straight to the man she loves as a
homing pigeon to its loft.

Taking, then, the three classes of men in the
throes of the disease of love, we have the following
symptoms, diagnosis and prognosis.

First. The average lover. Temperature
[p26]
remains normal, with slight rise in the evenings.
Continues to attend to business. Feeling of uneasiness
if called by endearing names over office
’phone. Regular diet, but smokes rather too
much. Anxiety strongly marked as to how his income
will cover a house and garage in the country,
adding the cost of his commutation ticket,
and shows tendency to look rather wistfully into
toy shop-windows before Christmas.

Diagnosis: Normal love.

Prognosis: Probably permanent condition.¹

Second. The fearful lover. Temperature inclined
to be sub-normal at times. Physical type,
a hulking brute of a man, liking small women,
only he feels coarse and rather gross when with
them. He is the physical type generally attributed
to the cave man, but this is an error. (See
cave man, later.) His timidity is not physical
but mental, and is referable by the Freud theory
to his early youth, when he was taught that big,
overgrown boys did not tease kittens, but put them
in their pockets and carried them home. Has the
kitten obsession still. Is six months getting up
enough courage to squeeze a five-and-a-half hand,
and then crushes it to death. Reads poetry, and
is very early for all appointments. Appetite
small. Does not sleep. In small communities
[p27]
shows occasional semi-paralysis on the curb after
Sunday evening service, and lets a fellow half his
size see her home. (See cave man, later.) Is always
in love, but not with the same woman. Is
easily hurt, and walks it off on Sunday afternoons.
Telephones with gentle persistence, and prefers
the movies to the theater because they are dark.
This type sometimes loses its gentleness after marriage,
and always has an ideal woman in mind.
Some one who walks like Pauline Frederick and
smiles like Mary Pickford.²

Diagnosis: Normal love, with idealistic complications.

Prognosis: Condition less permanent than in
case A, as less essentially monogamous. Should
be careful not to carry the search for the ideal to
excess.

Third. The cave man. Temperature normally
high, with dangerous rises. Physique rather
under-sized, with prominent Adam’s apple. Is
attracted by large women, whom he dominates.
Is assured, violent and jealous. Appetite fastidious.
Takes sleeping powders during course of
disease and uses telephone frequently to find out
if the object of his affections is lunching with another
man. Is extremely possessive as to women,
and has had in early years a strong desire to take
[p28]
the other fellow’s girl away from him. Is pugnacious
and intelligent, but has moments of great
tenderness and charm. Shows his worst side to
the neighbors and breathes freely after nine o’clock
P.M., when no one has come to call.³

Diagnosis: Normal love, with jealousy.

Prognosis: A large family of daughters.

A great many women believe that they can
change men by marrying them. This is a mistake.
Women make it because they themselves
are pliable, but the male is firmly fixed at the age
of six years, and remains fundamentally the same
thereafter. The only way to make a husband
over according to one’s ideas then would be to
adopt him at an early age, say four. But who
really wants to change them? Where would be
the interest in marriage? To tell the truth, we
like their weaknesses. It gives women that entirely
private conviction they have that John
would make an utter mess of things if they were
not around.

Men know better how to live than women. The
average man gets more out of life than the average
woman. He compounds his days, if he be a
healthy, normal individual, of work and play,
and his play generally takes the form of fresh
air and exercise. He has, frequently, more real
charity than his womankind, and by charity I
[p29]
mean an understanding of human weakness and
a tolerance of frailty. He may dislike his neighbors
heartily, and snub them in prosperity, but in
trouble he is quick with practical assistance. And
although often tactless, for tact and extreme honesty
are incompatible, he is usually kind. There is
often a selfish purpose behind his altruism, his broad
charitable organizations. But to individual cases of
distress he is generous, unselfish, and sacrificing.

In politics he is individually honest, as a rule,
but collectively corrupt. And this strange and disheartening
fact is due to lethargy. He is politically
indolent, so he allows the few to rule, and this
few is too frequently in political life for what it
can get and not what it can give. Sins of omission
may be grave sins.

Yet he is individually honest in politics, and in
most things, and that, partly at least, is because,
pretty much overlaid with worldliness, he has a
deep religious conviction. But he has a terrible
fear of letting anyone know he has it. Indeed, he
is shamefaced about all his emotions. He would
sooner wear two odd shoes than weep at a funeral.

Really, this article could run on forever.
There’s that particularly manlike attitude of accusing
women of slavishly following the fashions!
Funny, isn’t it, when you think about it? Do
you think a man would wear a striped tie with a
morning coat when his haberdasher says others are
wearing plain gray? Or a straw hat before the
[p30]
fifteenth of May? Have you ever watched the
mental struggle between a dinner suit and evening
clothes? Do you suppose that women, realizing
that the costume they wore was the ugliest ever
devised, would continue wearing it because everyone
else did? And then look at men’s trousers
and derby hats!

It is men who are the slaves, double chained,
of fashion. The only comfortable innovation in
men’s clothes made in a century was when some
brave spirit originated the shirtwaist man. Women
saw its comfort, adopted and retained the shirtwaist.
But the leaders of male fashion dictated
that comfort was bad form, and on went all the
coats again. Irvin Cobb is undoubtedly going to
say that it is just like a woman to wear no flannels
in winter, and silk hose, and generally go about
half clad. But men are as over-dressed in summer
as women are under-dressed in winter.

But in spite of this slavish following of fashion,
men are really more rational than women. They
have the same mental processes. For that reason
they understand each other. Like the village fool
who found the lost horse by thinking where he
would go if he were a horse, a man knows what
another man will do by fancying himself in the
same circumstances. And women are called designing
because they have fathomed this fundamental
simplicity of the male! A woman’s emotions
and her sensations and her thoughts are all
[p31]
complexes. She doesn’t know herself what she
is going to do, and is frequently more astounded
than anyone else at what she does do. It’s a lot
harder being a woman than a man.

So—women know men better than men know
women, and are rather like the little boy’s definition
of a friend: “A friend is a feller who knows
all about you, and likes you anyhow.”

We do like them, dreadfully. Sometimes
women have sighed and wondered what the house
would be like without overcoats thrown about in
the hall, and every closet full of beloved old
ragged clothes and shoes, and cigar ashes over
things, and wild cries for the ancient hat they
gave the gardener last week to weed in. But quite
recently the women of this country and a lot of
other countries have found out what even temporary
absence means. A house without a man
in it is as nice and tidy and peaceful and attractive
and cheerful as a grave in a cemetery.
It is as pleasant as Mark Twain’s celebrated combination
of rheumatism and St. Vitus dance, and
as empty as a penny-in-the-slot chocolate machine
in a railway station.

Not so very long ago there was a drawing in
one of the magazines. It showed a row of faces,
men with hooked noses, with cauliflower ears, with
dish-faces, and flat faces, with smallpox scars,
with hare lips. And underneath it said: “Never
mind, every one of them is somebody’s darling.”

[p32]
Women don’t really care how their men look.
But they want to look up to them—which is a
reason I haven’t given before for their sex superiority.
It is really forced on them! And they want
them kind and even a bit patronizing. Also they
want them well, because a sick man can come the
closest thing in the world to biting the hand that
feeds him. And loyal, of course, and not too tidy—and
to be hungry at meals. And not to be too
bitter about going out in the evenings.

And the one thing they do not want is to have
their men know how well they understand them.
It is one of their pet little-boy conceits, this being
misunderstood. It has survived from the time
of that early punishment when each and every one
of them contemplated running off and going to
sea. Most of them still contemplate that running
off. They visualize great spaces, and freedom,
and tropic isles, and—well, you know. “Where
there ain’t no Ten Commandments and a man can
raise a thirst.” (You know, Irvin!)

Yes, they contemplate it every now and then,
and then they go home, and put on a fresh collar
for dinner, and examine the vegetable garden, and
take the children out in the machine for a few
minutes’ fresh air, and have a pillow fight in the
nursery, and—forget the other thing.

Which is exactly like a man.