The author, sharpening his phrases, walked in angry abstraction. He passed old acquaintances as if he had never seen them before....
Oh, it was true (he conceded), a thousand times true, that many women of this crude bringing-up did develop, when their time came, a splendid competence over all their special field. But it was a little too much to assume that every creature in the female form could be counted on to perform such a feat of pure character. And Romance, which gallantly or indifferently made these exact assumptions, defending and cherishing the queer but comfortable orientalization with the cloak of false "womanliness," scarcely pretended to believe its own agreeable fictions.
Here was Angela again, his little case in point. Angela was reasonably good-looking, adopted a flattering attitude toward eligible young men, knew her place, and kept no opinions on matters of interest to her betters; hence she was called a "womanly" woman. Being womanly implied the possession of certain home-making virtues, present and to come; hence it was assumed, and she inevitably and naïvely assumed, that she possessed these virtues. Odd as these deductions sounded, he himself, he could not deny, had swallowed them once,—that night at the Redmantle Club,—romantically accepting the appearance for the reality, willfully investing the humdrum commonplace with the full beauties of the ideal. But for him, at least, all obstinate optimisms concerning La Femme had exploded with a bang in a party-call. You did not gather figs of thistles. And now it was no longer conceivable to him that she who in quarter of a century had developed no human interests, tastes, resources at all, who seemed to lack even an average interest in Paulie and Neddy Warder, should all at once blossom marvelously into the responsible and "justified" matron. No, for him, Angela at forty, having "let herself go" now that nothing more was expected of her, sat forever in a room that she had not swept, plaintively reminding a fatigued Donald of the priceless gift of her Self.
And Donald, though his interest in exploring the creature once so elaborately mysteried was long since utterly exhausted, would probably take that argument amiss no more than Dr. Flower had done. Romantic males, with their poor opinion of the worth of a woman, might hope for true domesticity, true maternity: but in their hearts they had thought all along, with a wink, that "possession" was enough. It was "what a woman was for."
But in that they were mistaken. Possession was not enough. Being a female was not enough. Great heavens!—thought Charles Garrott, and muttered as he strode.... What a shame, what a staggering waste of rich human potentiality, to classify and file away one half the world as only "marital rights!"
Wasn't it about time to stop all this? Wasn't it time for modern writers to pull away the rosy veils and let the Angelas meet themselves—while they could still do something about it? Didn't it lay up needless future misery to go on deceiving helpless women into putting a preposterous overvaluation upon the mere possession of their sex? Lastly, and above all, wasn't it a colossal libel on all womanhood to accept the strut and mannerism born of this deception as the true essentials of "womanliness"?
Womanly!... Why, womanliness was a prime human quality, integrally necessary to the work of the world—a great positive quality, not a little passive one, productive, not sterile, of the spirit, not of the body. Womanliness was the mother and guardian of great social virtues: of a finer and deeper emotion, of more sensitive perceptions, of a subtler intuition of the sources of life, of an all-mothering sympathy, a more embracing tenderness. Womanliness had no more to do with the light bright plumage of the mating-season than a waxed mustache had to do with being a soldier.
There was a time, he understood well, when the fact of womanhood had implied substantialities: when being a wife meant also being a domestic factory superintendent, not to mention being a continuous mother. That time was gone forever. You might argue for the passing, you might argue against it: meanwhile it had happened. Inexorable economics had dried the heart from the old tradition; and in the sudden vacuum thus created there moved and thrived anomalous little creatures who never knew that they had lost all touch with reality. Untroubled by a rumor of change, Angela held contentedly to the remnant, a low ideal of herself. But it was not so with her finer sisters. For the passing of the old womanliness of four walls and dependence had flung a window wide to a nobler prospect and a vaster horizon. And already the woman of to-morrow was rising in her lusty strength to prove her fundamental racial virtue, her womanliness, upon nothing less than the world.
Well, hadn't he told Mary long ago that the object of all this was only to make women more like themselves? In that, he would stake his life, he had been exactly right.