No Courtship at Ali

I READ ‘Courtship after Marriage’ on a mournfully windy Sunday evening, in an empty, underheated college library; but I hurried home to my third-floor front in a glow of warm gratitude. I was going to write an anonymous letter to the anonymous bachelor, to thank him. I was going to say: ‘Thank you, and again, thank you. It is comforting to know that a man understands and cares.’ Perhaps I might say a great deal more — but I must be careful not to sound sentimental; and, besides, I should have to make it an open letter, so that the editor might read it, to be sure he was n’t sending on anything silly, or in bad taste. I was afraid to write that letter, after all. And I sobered into my usual Sunday-night stoicism.

‘Afraid.’ That is it. We are afraid. I say ‘we,’ because I am daring to speak for many lonely unmarried women. In varying degrees, according to our various ages, we are afraid of being thought silly,sentimental,cowardly, unladylike; or — worst of all — we are afraid that some recent initiate into the mysteries of psychoanalysis, whom a little psychology has made mad, will announce with triumph that we have a Freudian complex. (If it is a Freudian complex to want a home, a husband, and children, then blessed be Freud.) So it is only when we are still very young that we say lightly, ‘When I have five children —.’ Soon it is modified to a quiet, ‘If I ever have a child’; and later, we say nothing. If we have n’t let the hope entirely darken, we are yet afraid to acknowledge the dream.

It would shock, or bore, or disgust the world in general, I suppose, if all the schoolteachers and office-workers who want to marry should suddenly tell the truth. The public prefers to believe that women cherish their economic independence more tenderly than they ever could cherish husbands and babies. And our pride helps to keep up the great delusion. Many of us, especially the older ones, would never admit our loneliness and disappointment, perhaps, even to ourselves; but the majority, I believe, have ‘ had to tell’ someone, — some equally lonely woman friend, — whether or not we told it in words, the story of frustrated hopes, of baffled instincts, of imprisoned powers. We form a kind of great secret society. The initiation is, mercifully, gradual; the dues are endless; the badge may be anything from a commutation ticket to a Phi-Beta-Kappa key; the password, seldom uttered, is always the same — loneliness.

It was a schoolteacher friend who, urging me to read soon ‘ Courtship after Marriage,’ wrote: ‘It is comforting to know that we are not. the only ones in whose lives passion is a problem. And when a friend who works in an office came to me, to discuss a problem of passion in her life, and wondered why people did n’t ‘realize what a starved life business women lead,’ I told her, in turn, to read the Atlantic article. She’s clever, that thirty-five-year-old ‘girl.’ She holds a position and draws a salary that command my admiration and awe, but not my envy, for I know her real ambition. It is that of hundreds of women, who are working successfully, and hard, and alone: she wants her own kitchen. She has proved that she can earn her own living; that she need never be a burden on anybody; that she could help her husband, if need be; that she could support her children, if it should become necessary; and there is no prospect of a husband and children for her.

But why not a kitchen, if she is earning an awe-inspiring salary? you ask. Well, for the sake of her elderly parents, she is keeping her home from being sold — the home in which she spends just fifteen short days of each long year. Many of us are in similar situations. We are supporting invalid fathers, or mothers who did not have a chance to learn how to earn their own livings; we are helping the brother who needs to get started in business; or we are putting a sister through college. If it is not relatives for whom our money is needed, permanently, we are temporarily tied, during those valuable first few years when, the books tell us, we should be having children, by the debts we have accumulated in getting our education. Especially is this true of college teachers and professional women. Well do we understand why the men of our own age are not daring to think of matrimony. They have the same debts; they are denying themselves everything, from subscribing to their favorite periodicals to fulfilling themselves as husbands and fathers. Such men have a right, though, if they are courageous and strong, to try to find wives who are willing to be poor and work with them.

We may not do that, modern novels and magazine stories to the contrary. Neither when we are young, nor when we are less young, would most of us venture to call on a man often enough to impress him with our possibilities as wives. We have learned, long ago, much about the patience and self-sacrifice and honesty that marriage requires. If there has been no one whom we had to take care of, there has often been someone whom we elected to take care of — some woman-friend, not so strong, not so capable of fighting her way in the world, or of carrying her own suitcase. We have neither tinsel nor tulle illusions about love and romance, and we have fought t he good fight against cynicism and the ‘modern’ attitude. It is unselfish, brave, and tender companionship that we want to receive and give, not the grande passion. (Of passion, indeed, we have had too much. We are weary in body and sick in soul from our vain attempts to endure unscathed the insidious, persistent assaults of passion.)

But how are men, who constantly hearand read the popular fallacies about how we love our independence — how are they to know that we are women who do ‘want to be taken care of’ just as much as we ‘want someone of our own to take care of’? How can we let them know that we ought to be wives and mothers, that we are not hopelessly modern women? We have not even the legitimate means of making ourselves gracious and pleasing. Most of us cannot afford to dress well, and in many cases, we must dress severely. How drab and unfeminine we must seem, especially as the years go by and we learn to hide the light that was once in our eyes.

The most desperat e t rouble is, though, that we have no homes in which to entertain men — often, not even one hospitable room where we may receive guests. Everyone knows what a boarding-house reception-room is — and is not. Girls in stories always make delicious little suppers for their callers. Where do they find the landladies who allow it? In the stories, I think.

How we want homes! How tired we are of it all, tired of other women’s taste — or lack of it — in wall-paper and rugs, in salads and desserts; tired of institutional meals, especially the sacrosanct Sunday dinner of hypothetical chicken and store ice-cream; tired, most of all, of chilly, badly lighted, inadequately cleaned rooms, with limited closet space and no view rooms t hat we come home to alone! We could stand it, if it were getting us anywhere, if there were anyone with whom to share the adventure of cramped, makeshift living — someone with whom we could work in some hope of a future (there is no future for two women friends); a future in which there should be not a room, but rooms, and even an attic and a cellar, and a kitchen.

I insist on the kitchen. That is to me the outward and visible manifestation of the inward longings of my spirit. ‘If I ever do go insane,’ I wrote calmly in a letter the other day, ‘you know what form it will take. I shall wander up and down the aisles of the hardware department in the nearest big store.’ Indeed, I have already begun visiting hardware departments, with no excuse except the joy of seeing piles of cool enamel ware, stacks of lustrous aluminum, heaps of dashing, shaggy mops. (I can clean house much better than I can teach.) You might expect me to haunt what is hideously known as the ‘infants” department. No; because there is no use. I may have a kitchen some day, if I can afford it; but a baby will never be mine, I am beginning to be sure. So, during an occasional week-end, I wash the dishes for my tired married friend, and help her take care of the baby, who is teething and not at all poetic.

There is no starry romance about dirty cooking-dishes and a fretful baby. I know it, and we know it — we, the lonely. But we prefer it to the equally unillumined realism of cleaning typewriters, or struggling with the pitiful, sub-normal boy, who ‘did n’t want to come to school anyway.’ The married friend was tired; but how much less we have to show for our weariness. I mean this selfishly, yes. We may be much-beloved social workers or schoolteachers, but the love of the poor and the love of ‘other women’s children’ (this is sent imental) is not all we want, nor is it all we need.

Our love for these poor people, for these children, does not use up all our capacities for love. A residuum remains, unconvertible, a strongly burning core; and so we are afraid t hat we, too, will ultimately ‘collapse, either mentally or morally’ — as well as physically, if I may add to the Anonymous Bachelor’s words. Many of us hide it, for years. We go about, capable, controlled, dignified, wise women, women who are trusted and admired and loved in our work — and justly so, I dare to think. We are well-trained enough to keep the two selves separate: the public self, and the private self that ought to be normal but has become abnormal, a little, or much. How much, we cannot quite judge, ourselves.

A few educators, physicians, and psychologists, who are not afraid of the truth, do not flinch from acknowledging the moral complications that are arising, and, I believe, increasing, as more and more unmarried women live unnatural, lonely, homesick lives. I do not know what the material remedy will be; but surely the first necessity is to be honest; and in order to be honest about the particular applications of the problem, — its pathological aspects, that is, — we all must be honest about the general problem.

And I had meant to be honest myself, to tell wit hout reserves, and unsparingly, of the agony of it all; of the beating against stone walls; of the black despair that even prayer can scarcely lighten; of the incredible cruelty of it of the waste.

But I am afraid.