“Alas, Professor!” I cried, “it makes little difference about the abnormality. Admit an exception and the law is dead. We could conjure with the law. What can we hope to do now? The American girl dotes on exceptions—especially on illustrating them.”
“You must remember,” said the Professor, her eyes glowing solemnly, and with the tone of being consciously judicial and at a great altitude, “you must remember certain facts about the selecting—the pairing—instinct. Now, in the case of man it is necessary that the selecting instinct be special and not general. So long as a man permits himself to think of woman as an abstraction, continues to admire ideals of womanhood and does not seek or is not drawn to seek charms in a particular woman, he is likely to remain a bachelor. His instinct must be, and has become by centuries of custom, an instinct for specific selection. On the other hand, the instinct of specific selection so favorable to the man, is distinctly unfavorable to the woman—that is to say, unfavorable to the woman if we accept marriage as her natural destination. A woman who grows up with the habit of mind which predisposes her to search for a particular man, is likely to remain unmarried. To favor pairing in her case, the instinct toward marriage must be general rather than specific. A woman does not select a mate from all the men in the world, as a man is supposed to select a mate from all the women in the world. She selects from among those who ask her, or, at most, from the group which she may have attracted into debatable ground.”
“But—” I interposed.
“Wait a moment,” pursued the Professor firmly. “This is not to say that a woman has no actual right to a privilege of selecting quite as definite as that permitted to man. It simply is saying that under present customs an effort toward specific selection on her part is not favorable to marriage. There may, and probably will, come a time when custom will permit to woman a more specific selection, without hazard as to the chance of marriage, and without loss of status on her part in any resulting marriage.”
“I am glad,” I said, “that you have touched that point, for of course woman could not afford to be specific at the loss of prestige. It seems to me that the present system gives an immense advantage to women, since, in any matrimonial emergency she may always retort, ‘Nobody asked you, sir.’ Man’s initiative gives her the benefit of the doubt in all after judgments from the world; for if man selects her, and she accepts him or yields to his selection, and there should possibly be error, plainly, as with Mark Twain’s mistaken lynchers, the joke is on him. She cannot escape responsibility, but her responsibility always is lesser, and all the privileges of reservation are on her side.”
“My personal opinion,” observed the Professor (I always accept this form of approach as a great concession), “is that she loses more than she gains by these conditions. It is generally believed that during the past century, particularly during the past half-century, woman, and especially the American woman, has been selecting more definitely than at any previous time in the history of civilized society. One result of the habit of a more specific selection on the part of woman is a decrease in the number of early marriages among women in circles or classes where these ideas prevail, and a general increase in the whole number of unmarried women. It may be that a further development of this instinct will still further increase the proportion of the unmarried, unless custom shall so far modify the arrangement of marriages that women may more equally participate in the selection without, as at present, exciting the antipathy of society, or, as you have suggested, destroying her prestige under the partnership. There is, of course, no final reason why matrimonial partnerships should not be arranged upon a basis of as perfect equality as any other partnership. It simply is a question of instinct on the one hand and expediency on the other.”
I quote the Professor’s opinions here with especial gratification, since in this instance they seem triumphantly free from sex bias,—a freedom which, indeed, is a growing trait with women. And there is something not always comfortable in the sign. Is the time coming when we no longer can say, “Just like a woman”?
Perhaps we may discover that sentiment has more to do with the case than has been supposed. If the progress of education has menaced sentiment, who shall say that the greatest of sentiments may not be the first to suffer? Nothing is truer than that all women are not equally capable of sentiment. Some women seem to like the symbol of an emotion quite as well as if it were the genuine article. To them the innocuous make-believe of love is quite as satisfactory as the real thing. They play with a great sentiment as they used to play with their dolls, which gave much less trouble than real children and furnished just as much sentimental excitement as if they actually had been alive. I suppose this is particularly true of imaginative women, who know how to drape their souls in nun’s garb and let their fancy play the devil. Their character is illustrated by the modern fashion which permits them to wear gowns sombre to superficial observation, but which, you may have the opportunity to discover, possess a riotously crimson lining.