VARIOUS TYPES OF WOMEN

I suppose women are one of the essential provisions of Nature, but in our minds we have never been satisfied with the arrangement. We feel that there is some kind of imposition connected with it. We were simply thought of afterwards; we were not an inspiration of creation, but we were created to meet a necessity afterwards. This makes a difference. We are not quite normal as men are. We still have a futile instinct to escape from what we are. Thousands and thousands of years have not made us contented and at home in ourselves. No man ever wished himself a woman, but ask any one of us and if she is in a truthful mood she will admit that she wishes she were a man. I have no doubt Eve regretted she was not Adam.

Circumstances have favored us. From winning privileges, protections and perquisites as we came up through the ages, we are at last getting some queer advantages of the situation one way or another. But this makes no difference. If we obtain the balance of power we seek, live the lives men live and do the things they do, we shall still be women, subject as usual to fits of nerves and tears on account of the long strain of not being quite normal and at home in ourselves.

But when you have been a woman a long time, and have grown accustomed, you may say by defeat, to the sensations of being one, you may look back through your mind, which is quite different from looking back through your history, and pick up much strange information about yourself which you would never discover except in the retrospect.

For example, seeing the woman I used to be more clearly than I could possibly have seen and measured her then, it occurs to me that I may have been a kind of idiot, femininely speaking. What I mean is that I seem to have been almost totally devoid of that engaging self-consciousness which makes women noticeable and attractive to men. I am embarrassed lest my husband may have found me delinquent in the mere airs of femininity. I do not recall ever being coquettish or feeling attractive; merely honest, kind, devoted, and at times freakishly witty or gravely intelligent.

Maybe this was due to the fact that I was not pretty as men see prettiness, and knew it, although I always felt beautiful, and must have been absurdly contented with this inward conviction. Still I have known many a homely woman who was amazingly attractive, like that heroine in one of Madame de Staël’s novels to whose ‘bright dark homeliness’ she refers so flatteringly. That is the point--if you must be homely it is better to be dark about it. With black hair, black eyes and even a swarthy skin you have only to turn on your light from within to glow. I am too fair, not enough contrast between my blondness and any brightness of expression I could turn on. Besides, I have what would be called a lofty brow in a man, which gives me a damnably noble look so far as beauty is concerned. During the thin years of my earlier womanhood it was out of all sweetly feminine proportion to the lower part of my face.

I am only suggesting a probable explanation, you understand; not that I believe it myself, but hope some one else will. The feeling I have now is that I missed part of my conduct as a woman at a time when it might have contributed some to that happiness which I have also missed. What I should like to know is whether women who have flown their banners in many men’s hearts during their youth have memories of happiness that I have not got. Do they recall those episodes with pleasure? Or do they recall them at all? I have a queer, ruthless feeling that I could have forgotten many men, and remembered forever only one. I wish I knew what so many other women know about this. Maybe it is idle curiosity, but it feels like lines I failed to recite in living.

At this late day I wonder what Lundy really thought of me. I have observed this--that very few wives know what their husbands think of them. I even wonder sometimes with the gravest trepidations what he would think of me now. I have grown so sensible. I have almost lost the gift of doing anything foolish and sweetly feminine, if I ever had it. And yet the woman I never have been sits and looks through this bright veil of mysteries, as we sometimes gaze reverently at the masterpiece we never could have painted.

The only consolation I get in such a mood is a mean one. The women I have known who enjoyed all these benefits do not impress me as being eased by their experiences. I can think of a dozen who were belles in their youth, who were happily married, who enjoyed all the distinctions society and wealth can confer upon charming women. And now, at my age, they have a curious, beautifully painted, bankrupt expression, as if they had lost several fortunes and were facing the direst poverty in their old age. I may be mistaken about this. They may have acquired that restless, frantic look characteristic of them from habit on account of doing things instead of sitting for years thinking things as I have done.

Still, I feel like a stranger among them, as if they had practiced some kind of feminine wit and dexterity in living that I do not know. I believe it is something they learned of themselves which I cannot learn. They know how to make an attraction of their modesty.

Now I have often wondered whether modesty is a cultivated virtue or a quality of femininity. If it is a virtue to be attained by taking thought, I have lacked it through the whole of my life. For I have never been consciously modest, nor even felt the need of protecting myself anywhere, nor the least anxiety about remaining neatly folded and decent to the last.

One of the mysteries of feminine consciousness which I have never fathomed is why so many women feel in some vague danger from men. Why do they look under the bed to make sure no man is there? Years ago I was going to prayer meeting one evening in a city accompanied by a spinster. She was a dear good soul, but you may say almost conscientiously homely. This was during that period when we wore broad black leather belts to gear in our shirt waists and skirts. We were stepping primly around the corner to the church when my companion leaped into the air and screamed. Clinging to me in the wildest terror, she vowed that a man had seized her by the belt from behind. It was no use to ask her if she was sure it was a man: they always know it is a man if anything happens to them. He alone is the plausible explanation. It was a fact that she had lost her belt. The buckle had slipped and it lay directly behind us on the pavement. Now why did she do that? One might be tempted to suspect some indelicate lesion of the imagination if it were not for the fact that good women, pure enough in heart to see God, are subject to these vagaries.

When I had lived alone in this old cabin for ten years, without ever suspecting it of having a man concealed in it, a friend came to spend a month with me. She was seven years my senior, and you may say the very pincushion of every feminine virtue, very modest. Nevertheless, every evening before she retired she would take her candle and go man-hunting through the house, upstairs, downstairs, and even into both basements--just to make sure no man was in it.

Sometimes in the deeper, darker hours of the night she would appear like a ghost in my room to whisper excitedly that she was sure she had heard a man in the house. Then we would start forth to find this wraith of her imagination, two elderly women buttoned to the chin in our plain middle-aged nighties, her gray hair and my thin hair skewed so tightly that it left nothing to be revealed concerning our faded faces--terrible looking, but harmless creatures, bearing our quaking candles, thrusting them into such corners and places as burglars only inhabit in the feminine imagination. If we had actually discovered one it would not have been we but the burglar who must have fainted at the sight of us.

She could never realize the absurdity of these fruitless adventures, but I always felt embarrassed and apologetic to mankind in general. A woman must have more presumption than I have ever felt to imagine herself in any kind of danger from men.

But that is my point. They are the more womanly women, and the dearer kind to men. The telepathy of terror they experience toward this imaginary man is none the less telepathy when they are not alarmed if they are in social sight and distance of men. I suppose in the dark or when they are alone and unprotected their fears are due to the survival of a primitive instinct, out of date now, like the appendix in the human body, but brought up with them from that far time when women were in real danger of being seized and borne off by some marauding knight on his saddlebow.

I suppose in the daytime, in the parlor or on the street, when these same women are armed to the teeth with every charm, it is the same instinct of self-consciousness in a victorious mood. They are on the offensive then and more or less irresistible. For men certainly are more easily attracted by the self-conscious woman, whether she is shrinkingly or boldly so, than they are by one who sleeps soundly unmindful of them and who goes about her business the next day with no animated sense of them.

What I mean is that modesty of this kind is the fine art of self-consciousness, and to be without it is to be femininely stupid, no matter how much other sense you have. At my age, I suppose no woman with a proper sense of dignity would want romantic attention. It would come to the same thing as being caricatured. Even at that, I do get tired sometimes of seeing in every man’s eye with whom I deal that I have come to do business with him or that he has come to do business with me. I feel the need of a little more versatility of manners between us. I should like to take a pleasant feminine shot at him as I see other women do, but so far as I know I have never capered one such glancing remark at a man, even if I met him upon my own copygrounds, much less in a business way. And I have wished for compliments, not aimed at my brains or my diligence, as other women wish much more fortunately, but no man ever lies in that beautiful way to me.

I am not regretting the dignity of my conduct, nor the awful dignity with which I am treated; but I am merely intimating that it is dry stuff being a woman when some dull wisdom in you keeps you from acting altogether like one. It is a tearful thing to know that you will go down to your grave loved and honored for the good you have done and not for the sweetness and loveliness of the woman you were or might, could or would have been if you had used your mind less and your talents more.

It would be interesting to know how the modern woman is coming out at this point. They are bolder than we were. I read of one lately who left her husband listening on the front porch while she went back in the dark house and shot the burglar whom he was too sensible to face. And it is absolutely amazing to me how many of them kill their own husbands upon provocations that formerly drew only a few tears from a wife. To slay your husband, no matter what kind of husband he is, seems to me a frightful kind of suicide. Formerly only men killed their wives. Now they flunk and desert them. They have lost some power of endurance they used to have with all their faults in the married relation. As near as I can make out, two people who marry now are not one in the sense we used to be, because from the start they contemplate no such involving unity. We are founding a precarious domestic life upon the grounds of mutual intolerance.

I do not know how they have managed it, but it is perfectly clear to an observing person that modern men are shy of modern women not as fellow sports but as prospective husbands. Maybe it is because so many women sue for alimony, when they used to give up and do the best they could according to their marriage vows. Maybe it is because so many young women now will bring suit for damages on account of a breach of promise and prove the latter by the signature of a love letter.

In my day, if a girl was jilted she died of a broken heart, or became an old maid, or married better, and nothing was said of that earlier affair. Getting damages evens matters up, but it does seem strangely gross and unwomanly to do such a thing, as if the victoress sold her self-respect in the open court for so many thousand dollars. Can the definition of self-respect change with the changing times with a woman? I have often wondered how they feel when they win such a suit.

The effect of all this courage in women is to develop the bump of matrimonial caution in the best men to the point of absurdity. I remember very well the first hero we had in American fiction who dared not write letters like Saint Paul, with his own hand, to his lady love, lest these should be used as evidence against him. This was Annixter in Frank Norris’s novel, ‘The Octopus.’ We thought at the time that this was a false note in the story. Now the world is teeming with these discreet young bachelors.

The fashion of what we are is changing. Women do seem to have a better working knowledge of men than they had even a dozen years ago. But I am wondering how it will turn out. If you are by nature the weaker vessel, it is a dangerous thing to break too many of the stronger vessels. We need them. The safest and wisest way of getting the better of a man if you are a woman is by sticking to him.