“I approve of women exercising,” assented Cornelia, “if it can be done in a nice way. I don’t care for Marathon runners and champion swimmers and that vulgar display of limbs in the newspapers.”
“Cornelia,” I said, “you use the word ‘nice’ too much; you overwork it. Your son told me the other day that, whenever he mentions a new girl acquaintance in your presence, you have only one question about her: ‘Is she nice?’ ‘It gets on my nerves,’ he says, ‘to hear that everlasting: Is she nice?—Is she nice?—Is she nice?—till I don’t care whether she is nice or not; and I feel like saying, No, she is horrid; but she sings like an angel, and she dances like a wave, and she makes a sparkling quip, and she has brains of her own, and she is attractive, and she is reasonable, and she is a good sport, and she doesn’t squall when we get caught in the rain. I don’t go around asking girls whether they are nice. How should I know? Mother means well and is perfectly fine herself, and all that. But somehow, you know, it strikes me as kind of nasty for a fellow to be always thinking whether a girl is nice.’ And there, my dear Cornelia, you get a bit of the spirit of the younger generation, which is, I think, essentially sounder and healthier than the perpetual incensing of ‘purity’ by some earlier generations.”
“In what way is it sounder and healthier?”
“Why, I mean that it isn’t the presence of sexual characteristics and impulses in an adolescent or in an adult that renders him or her ‘not nice.’ That is a part of nature and of humanity. What is not nice is perpetual preoccupation with these impulses. And perpetual preoccupation with them results from isolation with them, and exclusion from anything else of equal or superior interest. I am convinced that many of your ‘modern’ girls are discovering that fact for themselves. And it is because they dread the bondage and guess the degradation of confinement to a single instinct—it is because of this that they are groping so eagerly for other interests. For many of them, bobbed hair and cigarettes are signs that they are filling and freeing their minds with advertising, real estate, journalism, medicine, law, field geology, geographical exploration, and political organization.”
IV
CAREERS FOR WOMEN
“Is that the sort of woman that you would have married,” said Cornelia, “if you had married?”
“Let us not discuss the woman I would have married. Or rather let me remind you of this about her: the reason why the woman I would have married decided not to marry me was her clear-eyed perception, after some tears and emotional stress, that love was not enough to live on: that what I could offer her was not enough to make up a life for the many-sided being that she knew herself to be.”
I paused a moment for a response. But Cornelia kept silence, looking out over the blue water. I continued:—
“If a girl is so placed in the world that she can find expression for the versatility of human nature in a really satisfactory domestic life and really satisfactory society and luxurious travel and beautiful surroundings and the fine things in literature and art and the rearing of really superior children—why, then she may not be tempted at all by advertising and real estate. But can’t you see, Cornelia, that for the immense majority of girls the only way of getting anything but their conjugal and maternal capacities valued or expressed, and the only way of getting even their feminine charms to a suitable market lies through some such avenues as I have mentioned?”
“Yes,” said Cornelia, “I know girls are going in for these things more and more; that is why I am so much worried about my son. I don’t want him to become interested in that sort of girl. She wouldn’t make him happy. She wouldn’t be a good wife for him. Yet, just now, he seems to have a mania for ‘girls that do things.’ I know it’s the fashion for girls to ‘do things’ nowadays; but don’t you hate to see them doing them?”