indelicate. We laugh at the
haughty American nation because it makes the negro clean its boots and
then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the negro by the fact
that he is a shoeblack; but we ourselves throw the whole drudgery of
creation on one sex, and then imply that no female of any womanliness
or delicacy would initiate any effort in that direction. There are no
limits to male hypocrisy in this matter. No doubt there are moments when
man's sexual immunities are made acutely humiliating to him. When
the terrible moment of birth arrives, its supreme importance and its
superhuman effort and peril, in which the father has no part, dwarf
him into the meanest insignificance: he slinks out of the way of the
humblest petticoat, happy if he be poor enough to be pushed out of the
house to outface his ignominy by drunken rejoicings. But when the
crisis is over he takes his revenge, swaggering as the breadwinner, and
speaking of Woman's "sphere" with condescension, even with chivalry, as
if the kitchen and the nursery were less important than the office in
the city. When his swagger is exhausted he drivels into erotic poetry
or sentimental uxoriousness; and the Tennysonian King Arthur posing as
Guinevere becomes Don Quixote grovelling before Dulcinea. You must admit
that here Nature beats Comedy out of the field: the wildest hominist or
feminist farce is insipid after the most commonplace "slice of life."
The pretence that women do not take the initiative is part of the farce.
Why, the whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls
for the capture of men by women. Give women the vote, and in five years
there will be a crushing tax on bachelors. Men, on the other hand,
attach penalties to marriage, depriving women of property, of the
franchise, of the free use of their limbs, of that ancient symbol of
immortality, the right to make oneself at home in the house of God by
taking off the hat, of everything that he can force Woman to dispense
with without compelling himself to dispense with her. All in vain. Woman
must marry because the race must perish without her travail: if the risk
of death and the certainty of pain, danger and unutterable discomforts
cannot deter her, slavery and swaddled ankles will not. And yet we
assume that the force that carries women through all these perils and
hardships, stops abashed before the primnesses of our behavior for young
ladies. It is assumed that the woman must wait, m