"Their hypocrisy is a perpetual marvel to me, and a constant exercise of cleverness of the finest sort."
Thackeray, "Mr. Brown's Letters to a Young Man."
"It would take a large volume to contain the authentic accounts of deception practised by women."
Dr. E. J. Tilt, "The Change of Life."
Women are particularly susceptible to the disease of Respectability. Our sisters esteem rank and birth; they bow down to all kinds of idols with a veneration seldom equalled in men. Form, ceremonies, modes of dress, points of etiquette, and social observances mean more to them than to us; and it is difficult to prove to them the hollowness and inutility of mere seems, because externals satisfy their sense of decorum and give them pleasure. The average bourgeois woman reads the court news and aristocratic tittle-tattle with avidity mingled with envy. Baubles, insignia, uniforms, and the pomps of officialdom attract and dazzle her, and she would rather know a stupid peer than a sage, unpretentious philosopher, man of science, or poet.
Notice the large proportion of women in the crowds that gather outside a West End mansion, or at the door of a church, on the occasions of a ball or a fashionable wedding. Many women will travel long distances, and endure severe fatigue and discomfort to gain a transitory glimpse at titled personages. Lacking the power of analysis, and being deficient in imagination, they admire the popular and ostentatious, and contemn the persons and the things of true worth. Besides this, women's sense of humour is less keen than that of men; they fail to see the droll side of customs and fetishes, and they get angry with those who jest and chuckle at grotesque ceremonies and functions. It matters not to the middle-class woman how good or wise a man or woman may be if they do not conform to preposterous codes and usages.
The romantic youth who imagines that most women are more sentimental and romantic than himself, discovers his error when he becomes a lover, and is received as a suitor in the family of his inamorata. He finds the Little Muddleton Road folk extremely practical and respectable. Materfamilias may possibly have been slightly tinged with romance and poetry in her teens; but at fifty she is a slave to Respectability, and she teaches her daughters, in season and out, that they must, before all else, be "Respectable members of society." Is it a matter for wonder? Naturally, the romantic youth puzzles over this shrewd, business-like phase of woman's character; but he forgets that "human beings, cramped under worse than South Sea Isle taboo," develop astuteness in order to survive. You cannot expect women who have been fenced around by Respectability and restricted to the back parlour and the kitchen, to be wild, free, natural creatures, and nymphs of the woodland. We ought not to have imprisoned them in this way at the beginning. By this time, alas! the majority of them appear to hug their fetters.
The black shadow of the plague of Respectability is over love and the relations of the sexes, and women suffer more than men from this terrible blight. Respectability isolates the sexes before marriage, and only allows them to discover each other's idiosyncracies, caprices, and foibles when they are inseparably united ankle to ankle and wrist to wrist, to hobble on through life, and pretend that they are enjoying the penance. I do not say that the shackles always gall. It is almost a sheer question of chance if they do not. For this fearful uncertainty Respectability is much to blame. Girls are immured and guarded, like vestal virgins of old; there is no wholesome widespread social commingling of the sexes. Boys are free; but what is their liberty worth to them, when girls are watched, chaperoned, and secluded at the very age when their society is most sought by the youth of the opposite sex? This nunnery system is practically restricted to the middle-class Respectables. What is its effect upon the morals and the weal of the order? Most disastrous. The young man, in a very large number of instances, gains his knowledge of womankind among the flashy, flighty, and even more undesirable specimens of the sex. He meets the Little Muddleton Road girls at parties occasionally, but if he walks home from chapel with one of them, Paterfamilias or Mamma intervenes, and cuts short the friendship, or they want to know the young fellow's "intentions" towards Ethel. His own parents tell him he is too youthful, or too poor, to think of wooing yet; and I have even known mothers who excluded all girls from the house for fear that their sons should fall in love prematurely.
Now, it is quite probable that the young man has no "intentions," beyond gaining a friend in one of the Little Muddleton Road girls. He may simply desire social intercourse with one of the feminine kind, out of obedience to an eternal and immutable law of attraction. But no, such intimacies, unless they are distinctly understood to be the prelude to marriage, are rarely permitted by the Respectables. "It is not proper for Ethel to be seen about with that young Simpkins. What will Mrs. Robinson think?" Therefore Ethel is interdicted from communication with the estimable Simpkins, and injured propriety is appeased and quieted.
I say without hesitation that such isolation is ruinous to the morals of the community. Finding how exceedingly difficult it is to associate with the daughters of the Respectables, young Simpkins finds companions among the female outcasts of society, women who besmirch his romance, and degrade his pure passion to the lowest animal lust. The world is full of love, could he but find it; but Respectability locks it up in fusty dens, and says: "You mustn't be a close friend of my daughter. That will never do! If you were engaged to her it would be a different matter; but you're not, and people would talk." So Simpkins goes away, and "picks up" very questionable girls in the street, and buys his first experience of "love." And the saddest thing is that he forms his opinion about women from these types, which is, of course, unwise, to say the least. But is he wholly to blame for this? No, he is one of the victims of Respectability, the grim tyrant who mars and blasts millions of human lives in England. At thirty-five Simpkins is a blasé, cynical young man-about-town, a sufferer, probably, from inordinate sexuality, with a profound contempt for all women, founded on his miserable experiences with female harpies and panders. "A fool and sinner," cries the moralist. Yes, but there are many like to him amongst us; and they were once decent, healthy, chivalrous young men.