If a man means less than he says, and a woman always means more, we may see at a glance that it is easier to subtract than to add. But this is not the chief difficulty. A man, if I may be pardoned the dogmatism, always speaks in the original, while woman must be translated, and it is vastly easier in any case, to translate his hyperbole than her meiosis. When woman was simpler, she had less of this quality. When she said no, and simply meant yes, man learned to translate and understand her. Even a man could work out by the least subtle of reasoning that when she said “No!” most fiercely she really was saying, “Idiot! why don’t you make me say yes!” But after a time, perhaps because she suspected, for good reason, man’s discovery of the cypher, because she saw that it was not enough to turn the alphabet upside down, woman began to qualify rather than to invert, and man was no longer in possession of the key. The whole arithmetic of the calculation was infinitely lifted, and rose from the rule of three into the higher realms of pure mathematics. If she always called him back he would know just what to do. If a little absence always made her heart grow fonder, the process was capable of exact and circumstantial procedure. But no longer is it so. She may, indeed, still mean yes when she says no. She reserves her constitutional rights. But to read her language now, to filch from her swift talk the true meaning, to trace in the deceptively deep stream of her feminine philosophy the faintly shining pebbles of pure fact, is a function calling out the highest that is in man.
In Miss America, then, we have this quality at its best, or its worst, as you may view the matter; and the quality in her is coupled with others that belong to her, and perhaps to her only. The degree of independence which she has achieved has had a natural effect upon her relations to courtship. This independence has not merely accentuated the elusiveness which belongs to her as a woman. The quality of being hard to get is not new in woman, or in any degree original in any race. Ranging from the conditions in which barbaric woman is knocked down by the strongest bidder, to those in which she is knocked down to the highest, there is a uniform, because instinctive, outward habit of indifference or aloofness in the sex. But Miss America’s independence affects the whole question of her choice and the method of her choice. And, committed as she is, by virtue of being a woman, to a vast and fateful chance, she has, more certainly than any other woman in the world, a choice. For good or ill, and in whatever degree social station and social habit may modify the practice, she has an actual participation in the forming of the matrimonial partnership. The world has seen marriage by capture, by service, by purchase, by social convenience, by free and natural choice. The experiment of marriage by free choice has received in our own country its fullest trial. Marriage by social convenience and by purchase still survive, even with us, and there are many among us who think that marriage for love may not be final as a national trait, and that we will discover that the compact of marriage, being in the interest of society and actually under the government of society should be made directly in conformity with the convenience of society. Meanwhile, the trait is under scrutiny, the practice is under trial.
Marriage for love, is marriage in which woman is the arbiter, so that Miss America is carrying out, side by side with her brother’s experiment in democracy, an extraordinary and unprecedented experiment in social practice. She believes, and reasonably, that Plato prophesied this system in his conservatively worded remark that “people must be acquainted with those into whose families and with whom they marry and are given in marriage.” She believes that if marriage is to be “chiefly by accident and the grace of nature,” it shall be left to her to illustrate the grace of nature. And most men who are candid with themselves know that while man may have the nominal initiative, she is in charge of the situation. There is a German saying that a man cannot be too careful in choosing his parents. It is equally true that a man cannot be too careful in letting the right woman pick him out.
If I have been able to grasp it, the American girl’s idea is that marriage is best when it is a culminated friendship, that is to say, when it includes friendship. This is a new idea, of course, revolutionary in more than may at first appear. Indeed, we might more correctly call the American idea, marriage for friendship. Balzac has said a very severe thing of love that does not include “an indissoluble friendship”; but it cannot be denied that we often are perplexed to see that in this business the greater does not always seem to be including the less. If the American girl shall succeed in definitely incorporating friendship into the essentials of marriage she will have accomplished a great triumph. “As to the value of other things,” says Cicero, “most men differ; concerning friendship all have the same opinion.”
If she shall succeed in making friendship an essential of marriage, Miss America will, indisputably, have founded the American practice of a pre-matrimonial acquaintance. We shall go on believing that when we meet her with a “Fate-can-not-harm-me-I-am-engaged” look, she cannot, as often happens in other civilizations, be in ignorance of his name. And we can see at a glance that by insisting that she shall know the man she is to marry, Miss America is assuming an intimate and personal dominion over courtship. She not only is assuming a power and a responsibility, but confessing the delicate truth of her individual jurisdiction. It will make no difference what formula she uses for “You may speak to father.” The euphemisms behind which she now can hide herself are as diaphanous as her finest veil.
Yet, is there any to doubt her mastery of the situation she has invented? Is there any to doubt that in her new situation she has a new power? I know what has been said of the women who have gone before. “And this I set down as an absolute truth,” said Thackeray, “that a woman with fair opportunities and without an absolute hump may marry whom she likes.” And I do not mean, and perhaps should specifically protest that I do not mean, that Miss America is a whit more assertive in her selection than the women of whom Thackeray has chosen to say this much. But there is a sense in which Miss America, by virtue not only of peculiar privileges, but of peculiar endowments, is giving a new significance to courtship. Her attitude of mind is not to be confused with mere independence. We have many antecedent examples of independence. “At all events,” wrote Mrs. Carlyle to her insistent suitor, “I will marry no one else. That is all the promise I can and will make.” She thought that an agreement to marry a certain person at a certain time was simply absurd. Miss America’s independence is the product of conditions which have produced a sex attitude of mind as well as an individual attitude of mind.
It has seemed as if the development of this sentiment, and the realization of responsibility, were making the American girl more conservative in certain ways, and that she was, in the matter of early marriages for example, drawing nearer to the older systems. Sentimentally, early marriages are a good thing. Perhaps they are practically also. Martin Luther and other wise commentators have pointedly advised them. But the century has scarcely offered approval. Stubbs, in his “Anatomy of Abuses,” complained bitterly that it should be possible for “every sawcy boy of xiiij., xvi., or xx yeres of age to catch a woman and marie her without any fear of God at all.” Early marriages were a source of great complaint in our colonial days. Probably the caution of our young women is responsible for the fact, now frequently quoted, that early marriages are less frequent. At the first sign of a new caution there is always the alarmist who jumps to the conclusion that he is to be put off until the time De Quincey set for the amusement of taking home a printing press,—“the twilight of his dotage”; and it will be said of this or that section when some one is in the mood to say it, as Heine said of France in 1837, that “girls do not fall in love in this country.”