Obviously the cure is the elimination of that sixth woman, preferably by euthanasia. (Look this up, Irvin. It’s a good one.) That sixth woman ought to go. She has made men sought and not seekers. She ruins dinner parties and is the vampire of the moving pictures. And after living a respectable life for years she either goes on living a respectable life, and stays with her sister’s children while the family goes on a motor tour, or takes to serving high-balls instead of afternoon tea, while wearing a teagown of some passionate shade.
It is just possible that suffrage will bring women together. It is just possible that male opposition has in it this subconscious fear, that their superiority is thus threatened. They don’t really want equality, you know. They love to patronize us [p19] a bit, bless them; and to tell us to run along and not bother our little heads about things that don’t concern us. And, of course, politics has been their own private maneuvering ground, and—I have made it clear, I think, that they don’t always want us—here we are, about to drill on it ourselves, perhaps drilling a mite better than they do in some formations, and standing right on their own field and telling them the mistakes they’ve made, and not to take themselves too hard and that the whole game is a lot easier than they have always pretended it was.
They don’t like it, really, a lot of them. Their solidarity is threatened. Their superiority, and another sanctuary, as closed to women as a monastery, or a club, is invaded. No place to go but home.
Yet I have a sneaking sympathy for them. They were so terribly happy running things, and fighting wars, and coming back at night to throw their conversational bones around the table. It is rather awful to think of them coming home now and having some little woman say:
“Certainly we are not going to the movies. Don’t you know there is a ward caucus to-night?”
There is a curious situation in the economic world, too. Business has been the man’s field ever since Cain and Abel went into the stock and farming combine, with one of them raising grain for [p20] the other’s cows, and taking beef in exchange. And the novelty is gone. But there’s a truism here: Men play harder than they work; women work harder than they play.
Women in business bring to it the freshness of novelty, and work at their maximum as a sex. Men, being always boys, work under their maximum. (Loud screams here. But think it over! How about shaking dice at the club after lunch, and wandering back to the office at three P.M. to sign the mail? How about golf? I’ll wager I work more hours a day than you, Irvin!)
The plain truth is that if more men put their whole hearts into business during business hours, there would be no question of competition. As I have said, they think straighter than women, although more slowly. They have more physical strength. They don’t have sick headaches—unless they deserve them. But they are vaguely resentful when some little woman, who has washed the children and sent them off to school and straightened her house and set out a cold lunch, comes into the office at nine o’clock and works in circles all around them.
But there is another angle to this “woman in the business world” idea that puzzles women. Not long ago a clever woman whose husband does not resent her working, since his home and children are well looked after, said to me:
[p21]
“I’ve always been interested in what he had to say of his day at the office, but he doesn’t seem to care at all about my day. He seems so awfully self-engrossed.”