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The Comic Again
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (July 13, 1912) : 26
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      The heat of present verbal conflicts has brought out nothing more amusing than the widely expressed fear, that if economic independence and a different civic status are given to women, women will cease to marry. The heat of present verbal conflicts has brought out nothing more amusing than the widely expressed fear, that if economic independence and a different civic status are given to women, women will cease to marry. The fear continually flames up, and it shows such a diverting attitude on the part of those who express it. On inspection their words are found to contain the astonishing belief that the only reason why women marry is because nothing else is open to them. If it is a man who protests that there is danger to the birthrate he discloses a pathetic state of modesty on the part of his sex. They have only contrived to bring about contracts of marriage by concealing from the party of the second part how very much nicer everything else was. The security of their position depended entirely on continued concealment, and here they are about to have their ruse brutally exposed. It is a marvel that the entire movement has not ended in a world-chuckle. When it is a woman who declares that women may cease to marry — though it very seldom is — one fairly blushes for the lady. This open confession of centuries of make-shift and second-best, muffled in the most plausible cant, causes genuine embarrassment to run through the shimmer of laughter which plays about the subject.
      The Anglo-Saxon is so drolly oriental at heart and seraglio instincts appear so funnily incongruous when they are unexpectedly uncovered in a conversational fray. If the modern trend is really against the nature of women, wherein lies the danger, since it can come to nothing? Yet danger is precisely the word displayed on all the frantically flying banners. We are even told that Sparta ended, and ended in four generations, because women undertook the government and conducted it with such ability that they had no time for marriage. Which is to call the closing of a subject the effect, the effect the cause, while the genuine cause is left out of the calculation entirely. In this case the women only governed because the men were all away in the wars; and if men are never at home to marry, but are always away getting killed, cessation in four generations could hardly have been prevented. By letting the government go to pieces the women would not have saved things.
      This terror of extinction is too uncomplimentary to the men, not to speak of its slur on Nature. Nature has never shown any hesitation or inability in managing us. It is we who are still struggling to establish the most rudimentary management of Nature. If we deviate she pulls us back every time. If two geniuses or two extremely tall people marry we might hope for a superman or a giant in the second generation, but Nature swings us back to the mode and we get an ordinary, if not an uncommonly ordinary, human being of average height. Nature wields us with such supreme ease! She starts each person off as near the normal as her laws will allow, which is a great deal nearer than our antecedents deserve, and for us to suggest that she would be in the least outrivaled by the allures of bachelor apartments, office desks, and personal bank-accounts is for us to land ourselves in the midst of the irresistibly comic, a vicinity we constantly skirt is for us to land ourselves in the midst of the irresistibly comic, a vicinity we constantly skirt.
      Another of the wholly solemn contentions is that if women attain too great education and freedom they will be intolerant of the men they now contentedly marry. Precisely, and it is here that the two contentions are connected. What could be a more sure way for Nature to raise the standard of her race, which philanthropy is constantly lowering, than by making the better type of man marry — a thing she has always found it most difficult to do? The women of the future will have none but the best, which will have the double virtue of increasing the finer kind and making it exceedingly difficult for the drab and average gentleman to reproduce himself. It is not at all a dreadful prospect. It sounds as though we all might some day be very charming people.
      When we hear it said, “But if the women become so much better than they are now what is going to become of the men who are are now?” every one seems to consider it entirely hopeless that the men should change. Their only solution is that the women should be prevented from changing. This again is uncomplimentary to the men. Every one seems to be battering the men in an unconscious but thorough way. It surely is not out of the question that men should take a step forward. They are static to a degree, but not wholly so. Their only solution is that the women should be prevented from changing. This again is uncomplimentary to the men. Every one seems to be battering the men in an unconscious but thorough way. It surely is not out of the question that men should take a step forward. They are static to a degree, but not wholly so.
      It occurred to the women that they were rather cowardly and rather parasitical and rather dull, and they said, “It would be a good and amusing idea to make ourselves more worth while, and it could in all probability be done” — with the result which every one has seen. A result not yet cataclysmic, though it is a result, that is only a beginning. The women will have their hands very full for a long time to come. They will not have so much as a single eye for criticizing the attempts of other stumblers. What could be a more perfect opportunity for the men to put their own house in order? When the women pause to take account they may find, if the men have been very agile, that they are still the weaker sex. Upon which every one can again settle down for some thousands of years until the situation again gets musty.
      In the interval it seems safe to assume that the women will marry, and, there being nothing else to marry, they will probably marry the men. There is precedence back of it, there is the ingrained habit of doing it, there is a penchant for it, and then, as four final and clinching arguments, there are the women themselves, unavoidable nature, the — one might as well be honest — the men, and, above all, the babies.
 

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