Cornelia sighed: “If it only were! But you don’t know anything about the revolution that takes place in a girl’s mind, and in her character, the moment she puts on the badge of those who have ceased to care for ‘intactness!’”
“I’m not sure that I do.”
“Well, the next time that you see three girls with bobbed hair and knickers—abominable word!—and with cigarettes in their mouths, edge up to them and overhear if you can what they are talking about: some unmentionable novel, some unprintable verse, some unspeakable ideas of some outrageous ‘reformer,’ something revolting that is sanctioned in Europe but, alas, has not yet been sanctioned here, some silly ‘martyr’ who has got into jail for some offence against decency, some crazy girl who has ruined herself as completely as the heroine of the latest novel. Perhaps you will hear them discussing what I overheard a group of our modern maidens debating not long ago—whether if a man and a woman registered at a hotel as husband and wife, the laws of this state would not recognize them as such.”
“These are ‘strong’ topics,” I said. “I don’t think they are the only topics that girls with bobbed hair discuss, though they doubtless are discussed by girls with bobbed hair—and also by some girls whose hair reaches to their knees. But what you are always forgetting, Cornelia, is that life is full of strong topics. We can’t get away from them or keep them from the knowledge of our children, unless we are ready to abolish eyes and ears. At the most, we can only cover them over a little and keep still about them. I think you fall into the same fallacy regarding the conversational discussion of them which you fell into regarding the discussion of them in current fiction. You conceive it an error of the first magnitude to admit the existence of evils which every one knows exist. What I should try to ascertain, if I edged up to a group of ‘modern’ girls in conclave on these themes, is the point of view from which they were speaking—the amount of common sense which they were bringing to bear upon the vices and follies of their contemporaries.”
Cornelia likes the ad hominem form of argument. “If you had a daughter of seventeen,” she said, “should you enjoy seeing her blow the smoke through her lips and hearing her wisely consider the legal consequences of registering at a hotel under the names of ‘John Doe and Wife’?”
“If I had a daughter,” I replied cautiously, “I have a sentimental notion that I should like to have one who at the age of seventeen would feel the æsthetic impropriety of smoking, and who at any rate would not feel her nerves on edge without tobacco. But suppose Heaven visited the sins of the father upon the child by giving me a—well, a ‘modern’ daughter. If my daughter, after emitting the smoke, ejaculated the word ‘Geese!’ with a good accent, and a clear cool sound of conviction, and a kind of contemptuous remoteness from Greenwich Village problems, why I think I should feel mightily reassured. I should be positively glad to have heard her express her mind on this strong topic. And if tobacco helped her to express her mind, as it helps me to express mine, I might even feel mildly grateful to the tobacco.”
“You know you would not,” said Cornelia.
“Perhaps you are right. But at any rate, I can conceive of no person more properly subject for satire than a man with the fifth cigar of the morning in his mouth taking up the battle axe to make war against the first cigarette of his wife or daughter.”
“You are merely talking for argument. I hate you when you do that. You get so far away from me that I can’t talk with you.”
“No,” I insisted, “I am not talking for argument. I am pleading in behalf of your sex, for equality of access to the good things of life, whatever we may finally decide are the good things. I am pleading for a little moral justice toward your sex, and for the necessity, if there is to be justice, of a little discrimination. You don’t seem to discriminate at all among your ‘modern’ girls. It simply isn’t true that they are all discussing suppressed novels and illicit love affairs. Many of them are far more interested in horseback riding, duck-shooting, hockey, golf, or hiking to Yellowstone Park. I am not sure what our girls are going to get out of their political activities; but I know what they are going to get out of their athletic activities. I am an uncompromising and enthusiastic adherent of athletic life for women—not Country Club women alone, but all women.”