Even in the professions and trades of a distinctly masculine character which woman has recently invaded, we meet constantly the mock-modern person, who under a veneer of modernity, still harbors all the superstitions, and exhibits all the mannerisms of the "old fashioned" woman.
Being old-fashioned in love, as in every other activity of life, presents a great temptation to the lazy, the unintelligent, the neurotic.
It is an excuse for all sorts of unethical forms of conduct, for failure or inactivity, and yet carries with itself a deceptive air of mock refinement and distinction.
The woman who boasts of being old fashioned can misbehave and retain for years her husband's or her environment's confidence in her purity. Being old fashioned, she is assumed by all to be a little "simple" and "silly" at times, but unlikely to ever cross certain boundaries. At the same time, she can pass cruel judgments on all the trangressors who have not been as shrewd or lucky as she.
As a basis for a discussion of the extent to which love will affect the modern woman and modern woman affect love, I shall select the picture drawn by George Bernard Shaw in McCall's Magazine for October 1920 of the woman of the new generation.
"What Women Had to Do Recently," Shaw writes, "was not to repudiate their femininity but to assert its social value, not to ape masculinity but to demonstrate its insufficiency. This was the point of my play Candida in which it is made quite plain that the husband's masculine career would go to pieces without the wife's feminine activity.
"As refinement was supposed to be proper to women and roughness proper to men fifty years ago, the great increase in companionship between men and women during that period was bound either to refine the men or roughen the women. It has done both. The feminine refinement which was only silliness disguised by affection has gone; and women are hardier and healthier, and the stock sizes of their clothes are larger in consequence. The masculine vigor that was only boorishness, slovenliness and neglect of person and clothes has fled before feminine criticism.
"But the Generalisation That Women are Refined and Men Rough by Nature is a superficial one, holding good only when, as often happens, the man's occupation is rougher than the woman's. The natural woman cannot afford to be as fastidious as the natural man; if she shirked all the unpleasantness that he escapes, the race would perish. As a matter of fact, there are coarse women and coarse men, refined women and refined men; and there is no reason to suppose that the proportions differ in the two sexes.
"There is, However, a Rebellion against Nature in the matter of the very unequal share of the burden of reproduction which falls to men and women in civilized communities. I say civilized communities advisedly, because the extremely artificial life of the modern lady has the effect of making her natural functions pathological. Whether the rebellion has been going on ever since ladies were invented I do not know, because history is silent on the subject, as it is on so many specifically feminine subjects. But I can testify that among women brought up amid the feminist movement of the second half of the nineteenth century there was a revolt against maternity which went deeper than that revolt against excessive maternity which has led to birth control. These more thoroughgoing rebels objected to the whole process, from the occasional event itself to the more permanent conditions it imposes. It is easy to dismiss this as monstrous and silly, but the modern conception of creative evolution forbids us to dismiss any development as impossible if it becomes the subject of an aspiration.