The Joys of Being a Woman, and Other Papers

by Winifred Margaretta Kirkland

Now if any man, clearly perceiving his own possibilities, must envy woman the joy of having him for an experiment, how could the same man, if he should as clearly perceive woman’s greater possibilities, help envying woman the joy of having herself for experiment?

With this paragraph I have plumply arrived at feminism, and at the object of all my revelations, namely, to reassure men by stating that women do not intend to take themselves up as a serious experiment for ten thousand years or so; we shall not feel free to do so until we have taught Bobby to be unselfish enough to let us; he is not yet strong enough to try his own wings, much less strong enough to let us try ours. To allay man’s fears, it may be well to elucidate some aspects of our actions.

While there may be a little of eohippus exaltation in feminism, it is so little as to be negligible; our main purpose is still our age-old business of teaching by indirection. There are recurrent occasions when Adam grows sluggish in his Eden, and women have to contrive new spurs both for his action and his appreciation. As whips to make a lethargic Adam move where he should move, Eve is brandishing two threats, one her economic independence, the other, her use of the ballot. Adam thinks she really means to have both. Now our threatening to march from The Home and invade business, and by that action to let business invade The Home, is very simply explained. Once again our purpose is unselfish: it gives Adam false notions of economic justice to form a habit of not paying for services rendered, so Eve conquers her shyness and pretends that she will leave The Home if he does not pay her some scanty shillings to stay in it. Even the dullest man has now become convinced that women can earn money, so that we hope that in time even the most penurious husband will perceive the wisdom of giving his wife an allowance, and that’s all we’ve been after; and yet we have to make all this fuss to get it. If Adam were only a little easier to move, he would save us and himself a great deal of pushing.

Our suffrage agitation is as simple as our economic one. We mean only to wake you to the use of the ballot in your hands, when we ask you to give it to our hands. Already we have aroused you to two facts: if politics is too soiled a spot for your women to enter, then it is too soiled a spot for our men to enter, and therefore it is high time you did a little scrubbing; and also that if you refuse to enlarge the suffrage to admit desirable women, it is high time to consent to restrict it so as not to admit undesirable men. Again this is all we have been after, but again we have had to make a great deal of noise in order to wake you up.

But feminism to the male mind suggests not only commercial and professional and political careers for women, but something less tangible and more terrible, the advent of a bugaboo called the New Woman, who shall devastate The Home and happiness. It is a strong argument for our superiority that there is nothing that frightens a man so much as a woman’s threatening to become like him. Yet the time has come for frightening him, and we are doing it conscientiously, for, to confess truth, there is nothing that frightens a woman so much as becoming like a man. However, for his soul’s sake, she can manage to assume the externals of man’s conduct, but not even for his soul’s sake, much less her own, would she ever adopt his mental or spiritual equipment. Adam has such a tendency to ennui that the only way to keep him really comfortable is every now and then to make him a little uncomfortable. He was so well off in Eden, and consequently so dour and dumpish, that Eve had no choice whatever but to remove him from The Home entirely in order to save his character. We are hoping that we women of the present shall not be driven to such an extremity; for we know what her exile meant for Eve! We are busily fostering man’s fear of losing The Home, as the best way of making him appreciate it, and so of preserving it for him, and for ourselves.

As with The Home, so with the woman called New. She never was, she never will be, but to present her to man’s future seems the only way of making man satisfied with the woman of the past. We have had to stir men to appreciate us as women, by showing them how easily we could be men if we would. The creator granted to Adam’s loneliness an Eve, not another Adam, and should we at this late day fail the purpose of our making, and cease to be women? We have changed our manners and conversation a little, for the better success of our scare, but the woman who sits chuckling while she tends man’s hearth and him, is still as old-fashioned as Eve, and as new.

Men, who always take themselves as seriously as children, have been easy enough to frighten by means of a feminism that seems to take itself seriously. A really penetrating man might guess that when women seem to be so much in earnest, they must be up to something quite different from their seeming, and he might safely divine that, however novel woman’s purposes may appear to be, they will always be explicable in the light of her oldest purpose—man’s improvement. Now man’s improvement is a heavy task, and when nature entrusted it to woman, she gave her a compensating advantage. To become a genuine feminist, a woman would have to forego her most enviable possession—her sense of humor. Man can laugh, of course, noisily enough; but what man possesses the gift and the grace of seeing himself as a joke? Men who must do the work of the world are better off without humor, because they can thus more easily keep their eyes on the road, just as a horse needs blinders; but woman, who directs the work of man, needs to have her eyes everywhere at once. By another figure, such rudimentary humor as man does have is merely an external armor against circumstance; but woman’s humor is permeating, her armor is all through her system, as if her sinews were wrought of steel and sunbeams. A man never wishes to be a woman? Is it not an argument for the joys of being a woman, that no man seems to have had such fun in being a man that it has occurred to him to write an essay on the subject?

II
A Man in the House

THERE persists much of the harem in every well-regulated home. In every house arranged to make a real man really happy, that man remains always a visitor, welcomed, honored, but perpetually a guest. He steps in from the great outside for rest and refreshment, but he never belongs. For him the click and hum of the harem machinery stops, giving way to love and laughter, but there is always feminine relief when the master departs and the household hum goes on again. The anomaly lies in the fact that in theory all the machinery exists but for the master’s comfort; but in practice, it is much easier to arrange for his comfort when he is not there. A house without a man is savorless, yet a man in a house is incarnate interruption. No matter how closely he incarcerates himself, or how silently, a woman always feels him there. He may hide beyond five doors and two flights of stairs, but his presence somehow leaks through, and unconsciously dominates every domestic detail. He does not mean to, the woman does not mean him to; it is merely the nature of him. Keep a man at home during the working hours of the day, and there is a blight on that house, not obvious, but subtle, touching the mood and the manner of maidservant and manservant, cat, dog, and mistress, and affecting even the behavior of inanimate objects, so that there is a constraint about the sewing-machine, a palsy on the vacuum-cleaner, and a gaucherie in the stove-lids. Over the whole household spreads a feeling of the unnatural, and a resulting sense of ineffectuality. Let the man go out, and with the closing of the front door, the wheels grow brisk again, and smooth. To enjoy a home worth enjoying, a man should be in it as briefly as possible.

By nature man belongs to the hunt in the open, and woman to the fire indoors, and just here lies one of the best reasons for being a woman rather than a man, because a woman can get along without a man’s out-of-doors much better than a man can get along without a woman’s indoors, which proves woman of the two the better bachelor, as being more self-contained and self-contented. Every real man when abroad on the hunt is always dreaming of a hearth and a hob and a wife, whereas no real woman, if she has the hearth and the hob, is longing for man’s hunting spear or quarry. If she is indeed a real woman she is very likely longing to give a man the comfort of the fire, provided he will not stay too long at a stretch, but get out long enough to give her time to brush up his hearth and rinse his teapot satisfactorily to herself.