“Get even!” laughed the Professor, “think of getting even by being odd! No. The American girl simply is experimenting in independence. If it pays, she will keep it up. If it does not pay, she will revert to the alternative.”
“Yes,” I admitted, “she always can do that.”
“And meanwhile,” pursued the Professor, “I insist that girl-bachelorism must not be considered as in any sense final. The suggestion that woman can get along without man is an impeachment of his charm and of her wisdom. One thing is always to be remembered: a man cannot reasonably expect to conquer a woman by not marrying her. If the girl bachelor does not know what is good for her, if her position is untenable, if she is losing precious time, a cynical attitude in the man bachelor does not seem at all likely to help the matter. The presumption that the American girl knows what she is about may be erroneous, but ill temper in the opposition will simply fortify her. She will smile and smile and be a spinster still.”
A Spinster
A spinster! How oddly the word sounded! How grotesque the contrast between the image called up by the name and the image that fills the eye of modern contemplation! The old maid of tradition has become a fantastic figure, as fantastic as if she had no actual successor—which possibly is the real fact, for old-maidism is not strictly a social condition but a state of mind. Nothing could better demonstrate this than the prominence and multiplicity of married old maids. It is a mere truism to say that old-maidism is not even restricted by gender. Who does not know the masculine old maid! He is an altogether different creature from the normal bachelor. Indeed, he sometimes is married. In this instance contemporary satire is entirely within facts; he alone is the new woman.
It is not always an easy matter to estimate or to define the effect of the new-spinsterism upon the mind of the opposition. If we were to judge from certain acrid comments, the new state of mind not only is more affirmative, but is vastly more aggressive than the old. A shrill tenor note here and there complains that the sopranos are sounding with an inelegant and disproportionate vigor. There is an ill-concealed admission that man in general is still wholly unadjusted to the affirmative attitude on the part of woman. Man cannot open the door for her or help her out of the coach unless she lets him precede her. The whole structure of gallantry is built upon her acquiescence in his leadership,—his giving upon her taking. If she is to ignore the tradition of his leadership and goes forth upon her own account, what is to prevent the occasional, perhaps even the frequent, awkwardness of her actual leadership? And when she ceases to follow she already has begun to restrain. So runs the charge. You would think, to hear some people talk, that the modern woman should be indicted for delaying the males.
It is hard to live down a tradition. Take the tradition about the college girl, for example, the tradition that she is a sombre person, strenuous, unlovely, dominated by an ambition to subdue man and emancipate her sex by sheer force of learning. You can call up a picture of her at work, her brain throbbing with great thoughts, her face seared by study, greeting you with a smileless challenge to talk to the point, mostly in Latin, and with a decent frequency in quotations from Plato and Epictetus. This gruesome tradition makes her the pallid, gloomy, absorbed, spectacled member of the household, with a soul above clothes, glorying in unfeminine incapacities, shuddering at fashion magazines and peevishly rebuking the frivolities of girlhood. She uses vast words, communes with literary gods, and stands forth as a sort of Book in Bloomers.
The College Girl of Satire