Woman Versus Women

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

WOMAN is undoubtedly one of those good things of which we cannot have too much, but women are anomalous creatures of whom we may certainly have too many.

For it is one of the mysteries of life that whereas an individual woman may combine the fascinations of Cleopatra with the wisdom of Minerva, nevertheless, when she has been sufficiently multiplied, her counterparts form an arid assembly of unrelated units from which all charm and dignity have fled, — a heterogeneous mass of individuals without form and void. Any one who has attended meetings composed exclusively of either sex must have felt the different impressions produced by a body of men, whose personalities all blend into a harmonious whole, and a collection of women, — isolated spots of yellow, green, and blue, which, like the little, many-colored dabs in an impressionistic painting, are supposed to become coherent when viewed in the right perspective.

Undoubtedly the superficial and external attributes of dress and personality are responsible for a share of the half-contemptuous amusement with which assemblies of women are regarded by their unorganized sisters. When we find gowns of varied hue, bonnets of diverse shapes, garments of every cut, coats of many colors, to say nothing of heads swollen with acute attacks of pompadour, or meek with the lowliness of English buns that never rise, we cannot hope for much dignity, while the voices alone, in all degrees of guttural and nasal, would preclude any impression of harmony.

A hall-full of black-coated brethren, all bareheaded and short-haired, suggests an outward likeness which may have no internal equivalent, yet which affects the onlooker with a sense of oneness. Men look more or less like birds of a feather whenflocking together. The individual is lost in the type,it is not Each,but All, that impresses us. Not so with women. The attention of the outsider is perhaps distracted by a strong-minded reformer with spectacles on nose and pouch on side, who, like Jenny Wren, always wears a plain brown gown and never dresses too fine, while by her side sits the studiedly frivolous spinster, decorated with crimps and furbelows, and redolent of patchouli and peppermint. Another specimen intrudes itself upon the wandering attention, and invites admiration of its alert intelligence, illustrated by palpably uncomfortable false teeth, the outward and visible sign of innate superiority. When one’s eye and mind are constantly distracted by the individual, how can one be impressed by the whole ?

There are women who are as eloquent, as logical, as convincing in argument and speech, as their husbands and brothers across the way; but surround them by their parti-colored female followers, and their words become as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. The terrible truth is that women — en masse — become ludicrous in proportion to their numbers and the earnestness of their purpose, whereas the defects of man are forgotten in the merits of mere men.

For the rights of Woman I am a firm advocate, and loyally I claim that a fine woman is a nobler work of God than an honest man, but for the rights of Women I have no sympathy since hearing their wrongs voiced by women themselves. Till women are willing to sacrifice the individuality wherein lies their true power, and are ready to don a uniform undictated by fickle Fashion; till they are ready to yield themselves to the perfect whole, let them not expect their public meetings to have any greater results than the laughter and applause of the unseen audiences from whom they demand respectful and silent attention. But far be it from me to wish to hasten the day when woman will be shorn of her strength by the cutting of her hair and the suppression of her individual taste. It is the unexpectedness, the variety of the type that gives woman her personal power. It is only when she becomes one of an organized body of women that she suggests a futile hen in a roosterless barnyard where female fowls cackle and complain, instead of realizing her ideal self, of the good, the true, the beautiful, which places her a little lower than the angels, and — let my own sex be revealed by the conviction — a little higher than man!