CHAPTER XXVII
PETTICOAT GOVERNMENT
Description of all the Anglo-Saxon fads.
I loathe the domination of woman, but I ever crave for her influence, and I believe that any man of refinement and thinking, that any lover and admirer of woman, will echo this sentiment.
I know of one country only where the government by woman was given a real trial, and that is New Zealand. The law was passed and the experiment was made. The law, I believe, had to be repealed after six months. The Government had taken such a tyrannical form that that loveliest of spots on the earth was on the eve of a revolution, of a desperate struggle for liberty.
Things were pretty badly managed in a small Ohio city when I was visiting it four years ago. The following year women put up their names as candidates for the City Council in every ward, and were all returned. They did manage the city. The following year the experiment had been made, and not one woman was returned again.
The American men are so busy, so long absent from home, that many of their womankind have to find out a way of using the leisure time left at their disposal, with results that are not always altogether satisfactory. Some devote that time to literature, to the improvement of their brilliant native intellect; some spend it in frivolities; some indulge in all the fads of Anglo-Saxon life.
The women of good society in America are what they are everywhere else—satisfied with their lot, which consists in being the adored goddesses of refined households; but there exists in that country among the middle—perhaps, what I should call in European parlance, lower middle—classes, restless, bumptious, ever-poking-their-noses-everywhere women, who are slowly, but surely and safely, transforming that great land of liberty into a land of petty, fussy tyranny, and trying—often with complete success—to impose on the community fads of every shape and form.
If there is one country in the world where the women appear, in the eyes of the foreign visitor, to enjoy all manner of privileges and to have the men in leading-strings, that country is America. You would imagine, therefore, that America should be the last country where the New Woman was to be found airing her grievances. Yet she is flourishing throughout the length and breadth of that huge continent. She is petted by her husband, the most devoted and hardworking of husbands in the world; she is literally covered with precious stones by him; she is allowed to wear hats that would 'fetch' Paris in carnival time or start a panic at a Corpus Christi procession in Paris or a Lord Mayor's Show in London; she is the superior of her husband in education and almost in every respect; she is surrounded by the most numerous and delicate attentions, yet she is not satisfied.
The Anglo-Saxon New Woman is the most ridiculous production of modern times, and destined to be the most ghastly failure of the century. She is par excellence the woman with a grievance, and self-labelled the greatest nuisance of modern society. The New Woman wants to retain all the privileges of her sex, and secure besides all those of man; she wants to be a man and to remain a woman. She will fail to become a man, but she may succeed in ceasing to be a woman.