नारी विमर्श

[Dark Saint Alaick]

THE NEW CHIVALRY
Brave women and fair men!




This seems to be a good time for us to jar ourselves loose from some of
the prejudices and beliefs which we have outgrown. It is time for
readjustment surely, a time for spiritual and mental house-cleaning,
when we are justified in looking things over very carefully and
deciding whether or not we shall ever need them again.

Some of us have suspected for a long time that a good deal of the
teaching of the world regarding women has come under the general
heading of "dope." Now "dope" is not a slang word, as you may be
thinking, gentle reader. It is a good Anglo-Saxon word (or will be),
for it fills a real need, and there is none other to take its place.
"Dope" means anything that is calculated to soothe, or hush, or put to
sleep. "Sedative" is a synonym, but it lacks the oily softness of
"dope."

One of the commonest forms of dope given to women to keep them quiet is
the one referred to in a previous chapter: "The hand that rocks the
cradle rules the World." It is a great favorite with politicians and
not being original with them it does contain a small element of truth.
They use it in their pre-election speeches, which they begin with the
honeyed words: "We are glad to see we have with us this evening so many
members of the fair sex; we are delighted to see that so many have come
to grace our gathering on this occasion; we realize that a woman's
intuition is ofttimes truer than a man's reasoning, and although women
have no actual voice in politics, they have something far more strong
and potent--they have the wonder power of indirect influence." Just
about here comes in "the hand that rocks!"

[Dark Saint Alaick]

Having thus administered the dope, in this pleasing mixture of molasses
and soft soap, which is supposed to keep the "fair sex" quiet and happy
for the balance of the evening, the aspirant for public honors passes
on to the serious business of the hour, and discusses the affairs of
state with the electorate. Right here, let us sound a small note of
warning. Keep your eye on the man who refers to women as the "fair
sex"--he is a dealer in dope!

One of the oldest and falsest of our beliefs regarding women is that
they are protected--that some way in the battle of life they get the
best of it. People talk of men's chivalry, that vague, indefinite
quality which is supposed to transmute the common clay of life into
gold.

Chivalry is a magic word. It seems to breathe of foreign strands and
moonlight groves and silver sands and knights and earls and kings; it
seems to tell of glorious deeds and waving plumes and prancing steeds
and belted earls--and things!

People tell us of the good old days of chivalry when womanhood was
really respected and reverenced--when brave knight rode gaily forth to
die for his lady love. But in order to be really loved and respected
there was one hard and fast condition laid down, to which all women
must conform--they must be beautiful, no getting out of that. They
simply had to have starry eyes and golden hair, or else black as a
raven's wing; they had to have pale, white, and haughty brow, and a
laugh like a ripple of magic. Then they were all right and armored
knights would die for them quick as wink!

The homely women were all witches, dreadful witches, and they drowned
them, on public holidays, in the mill pond!

[Dark Saint Alaick]

People tell us now that chivalry is dead, and women have killed it,
bold women who instead of staying at home, broidering pearls on a red
velvet sleeve, have gone out to work--have gone to college side by side
with men and have been so unwomanly sometimes as to take the prizes
away from men. Chivalry cannot live in such an atmosphere. Certainly
not!

Of course women can hardly be blamed for going out and working when one
remembers that they must either work or starve. Broidering pearls will
not boil the kettle worth a cent! There are now thirty per cent of the
women of the U. S. A. and Canada, who are wage-earners, and we will
readily grant that necessity has driven most of them out of their
homes. Similarly, in England alone, there are a million and a half
more women than men. It would seem that all women cannot have homes of
their own--there does not seem to be enough men to go around. But
still there are people who tell us these women should all have homes of
their own--it is their own fault if they haven't; and once I heard of a
woman saying the hardest thing about men I ever heard--and she was an
ardent anti-suffragist too. She said that what was wrong with the
women in England was that they were too particular--that's why they
were not married, "and," she went on, "any person can tell, when they
look around at men in general, that God never intended women to be very
particular." I am glad I never said anything as hard as that about men.

There are still with us some of the conventions of the old days of
chivalry. The pretty woman still has the advantage over her plainer
sister--and the opinion of the world is that women must be beautiful at
all costs. When a newspaper wishes to disprove a woman's contention,
or demolish her theories, it draws ugly pictures of her. If it can
show that she has big feet or red hands, or wears unbecoming clothes,
that certainly settles the case--and puts her where she belongs.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

This cruel convention that women must be beautiful accounts for the
popularity of face-washes, and beauty parlors, and the languor of
university extension lectures. Women cannot be blamed for this. All
our civilization has been to the end that women make themselves
attractive to men. The attractive woman has hitherto been the
successful woman. The pretty girl marries a millionaire, travels in
Europe, and is presented at court; her plainer sister, equally
intelligent, marries a boy from home, and does her own washing. I am
not comparing the two destinies as to which offers the greater
opportunities for happiness or usefulness, but rather to show how
widely divergent two lives may be. What caused the difference was a
wavy strand of hair, a rounder curve on a cheek. Is it any wonder that
women capitalize their good looks, even at the expense of their
intelligence? The economic dependence of women is perhaps the greatest
injustice that has been done to us, and has worked the greatest injury
to the race.

Men are not entirely blameless in respect to the frivolity of women.
It is easy to blame women for dressing foolishly, extravagantly, but to
what end do they do it? To be attractive to men; and the reason they
continue to do it is that it is successful. Many a woman has found
that it pays to be foolish. Men like frivolity--before marriage; but
they demand all the sterner virtues afterwards. The little dainty,
fuzzy-haired, simpering dolly who chatters and wears toe-slippers has a
better chance in the matrimonial market than the clear-headed, plainer
girl, who dresses sensibly. A little boy once gave his mother
directions as to his birthday present--he said he wanted "something
foolish" and therein he expressed a purely masculine wish.


A man's ideal at seventeen
Must be a sprite--
A dainty, fairy, elfish queen
Of pure delight;
But later on he sort of feels
He'd like a girl who could cook meals.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

Life is full of anomalies, and in the mating and pairing of men and
women there are many.

Why is the careless, easy-going, irresponsible way of the young girl so
attractive to men? It does not make for domestic happiness; and why,
Oh why, do some of our best men marry such odd little sticks of
pin-head women, with a brain similar in caliber to a second-rate
butterfly, while the most intelligent, unselfish, and womanly women are
left unmated? I am going to ask about this the first morning I am in
heaven, if so be we are allowed to ask about the things which troubled
us while on our mortal journey. I have never been able to find out
about it here.

Now this old belief that women are protected is of sturdy growth and
returns to life with great persistence. Theoretically women are
protected--on paper--traditionally--just like Belgium was, and with
just as disastrous results.

A member of the English Parliament declared with great emphasis that
the women now have everything the heart could desire--they reign like
queens and can have their smallest wish gratified. ("Smallest" is
right.) And we very readily grant that there are many women living in
idleness and luxury on the bounty of their male relatives, and we say
it with sorrow and shame that these are estimated the successful women
in the opinion of the world. But while some feast in idleness, many
others slave in poverty. The great army of women workers are ill-paid,
badly housed, and their work is not honored or respected or paid for.
What share have they in man's chivalry? Chivalry is like a line of
credit. You can get plenty of it when you do not need it. When you
are prospering financially and your bank account is growing and you are
rated A1, you can get plenty of credit--it is offered to you; but when
the dark days of financial depression overtake you, and the people you
are depending upon do not "come through," and you must have
credit--must have it!--the very people who once urged it upon you will
now tell you that "money is tight!"

[Dark Saint Alaick]

The young and pretty woman, well dressed and attractive, can get all
the chivalry she wants. She will have seats offered her on street
cars, men will hasten to carry her parcels, or open doors for her; but
the poor old woman, beaten in the battle of life, sick of life's
struggles, and grown gray and weather-beaten facing life's storms--what
chivalry is shown her? She can go her weary way uncomforted and
unattended. People who need it do not get it.

Anyway, chivalry is a poor substitute for justice, if one cannot have
both. Chivalry is something like the icing on the cake, sweet but not
nourishing. It is like the paper lace around the bonbon box--we could
get along without it.

There are countless thousands of truly chivalrous men, who have the
true chivalry whose foundation is justice--who would protect all women
from injury or insult or injustice, but who know that they cannot do
it--who know that in spite of all they can do, women are often
outraged, insulted, ill-treated. The truly chivalrous man, who does
reverence all womankind, realizing this, says: "Let us give women every
weapon whereby they can defend themselves; let us remove the stigma of
political nonentity under which women have been placed. Let us give
women a fair deal!"

This is the new chivalry--and on it we build our hope.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

HARDY PERENNIALS!



I hold it true--I will not change,
For changes are a dreadful bore--
That nothing must be done on earth
Unless it has been done before.
--'Anti-Suffrage Creed'.


If prejudices belonged to the vegetable world they would be described
under the general heading of: "Hardy Perennials; will grow in any soil,
and bloom without ceasing; requiring no cultivation; will do better
when left alone."

In regard to tenacity of life, no old yellow cat has anything on a
prejudice. You may kill it with your own hands, bury it deep, and sit
on the grave, and behold! the next day, it will walk in at the back
door, purring.

Take some of the prejudices regarding women that have been exploded and
blown to pieces many, many times and yet walk among us today in the
fulness of life and vigor. There is a belief that housekeeping is the
only occupation for women; that all women must be housekeepers, whether
they like it or not. Men may do as they like, and indulge their
individuality, but every true and womanly woman must take to the nutmeg
grater and the O-Cedar Mop. It is also believed that in the good old
days before woman suffrage was discussed, and when woman's clubs were
unheard of, that all women adored housework, and simply pined for
Monday morning to come to get at the weekly wash; that women cleaned
house with rapture and cooked joyously. Yet there is a story told of
one of the women of the old days, who arose at four o'clock in the
morning, and aroused all her family at an indecently early hour for
breakfast, her reason being that she wanted to get "one of these horrid
old meals over." This woman had never been at a suffrage meeting--so
where did she get the germ of discontent?

[Dark Saint Alaick]

At the present time there is much discontent among women, and many
people are seriously alarmed about it. They say women are no longer
contented with woman's sphere and woman's work--that the washboard has
lost its charm, and the days of the hair-wreath are ended. We may as
well admit that there is discontent among women. We cannot drive them
back to the spinning wheel and the mathook, for they will not go. But
there is really no cause for alarm, for discontent is not necessarily
wicked. There is such a thing as divine discontent just as there is
criminal contentment. Discontent may mean the stirring of ambition,
the desire to spread out, to improve and grow. Discontent is a sign of
life, corresponding to growing pains in a healthy child. The poor
woman who is making a brave struggle for existence is not saying much,
though she is thinking all the time. In the old days when a woman's
hours were from 5 A.M. to 5 A.M., we did not hear much of discontent
among women, because they had not time to even talk, and certainly
could not get together. The horse on the treadmill may be very
discontented, but he is not disposed to tell his troubles, for he
cannot stop to talk.

It is the women, who now have leisure, who are doing the talking. For
generations women have been thinking and thought without expression is
dynamic, and gathers volume by repression. Evolution when blocked and
suppressed becomes revolution. The introduction of machinery and the
factory-made articles has given women more leisure than they had
formerly, and now the question arises, what are they going to do with
it?

Custom and conventionality recommend many and varied occupations for
women, social functions intermixed with kindly deeds of charity,
embroidering altar cloths, making strong and durable garments for the
poor, visiting the sick, comforting the sad, all of which women have
faithfully done, but while they have been doing these things, they have
been wondering about the underlying causes of poverty, sadness and sin.
They notice that when the unemployed are fed on Christmas day, they are
just as hungry as ever on December the twenty-sixth, or at least on
December the twenty-seventh; they have been led to inquire into the
causes for little children being left in the care of the state, and
they find that in over half of the cases, the liquor traffic has
contributed to the poverty and unworthiness of the parents. The state
which licenses the traffic steps in and takes care, or tries to, of the
victims; the rich brewer whose business it is to encourage drinking, is
usually the largest giver to the work of the Children's Aid Society,
and is often extolled for his lavish generosity: and sometimes when
women think about these things they are struck by the absurdity of a
system which allows one man or a body of men to rob a child of his
father's love and care all year, and then gives him a stuffed dog and a
little red sleigh at Christmas and calls it charity!

[Dark Saint Alaick]

Women have always done their share of the charity work of the world.
The lady of the manor, in the old feudal days, made warm mittens and
woolen mufflers with her own white hands and carried them to the
cottages at Christmas, along with blankets and coals. And it was a
splendid arrangement all through, for it furnished the lady with mild
and pleasant occupation, and it helped to soothe the conscience of the
lord, and if the cottagers (who were often "low worthless fellows, much
given up to riotous thinking and disputing") were disposed to wonder
why they had to work all year and get nothing, while the lord of the
manor did nothing all year and got everything, the gift of blanket and
coals, the warm mufflers, and "a shawl for granny" showed them what
ungrateful souls they were.

Women have dispensed charity for many, many years, but gradually it has
dawned upon them that the most of our charity is very ineffectual, and
merely smoothes things over, without ever reaching the root. A great
deal of our charity is like the kindly deed of the benevolent old
gentleman, who found a sick dog by the wayside, lying in the full glare
of a scorching sun. The tender-hearted old man climbed down from his
carriage, and, lifting the dog tenderly in his arms, carried him around
into the small patch of shade cast by his carriage.

"Lie there, my poor fellow!" he said. "Lie there, in the cool shade,
where the sun's rays may not smite you!"

Then he got into his carriage and drove away.

Women have been led, through their charitable institutions and
philanthropic endeavors, to do some thinking about causes.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

Mrs. B. set out to be a "family friend" to the family of her washwoman.
Mrs. B. was a thoroughly charitable, kindly disposed woman, who had
never favored woman's suffrage and regarded the new movement among
women with suspicion. Her washwoman's family consisted of four
children, and a husband who blew in gaily once in a while when in need
of funds, or when recovering from a protracted spree, which made a few
days' nursing very welcome. His wife, a Polish woman, had the
old-world reverence for men, and obeyed him implicitly; she still felt
it was very sweet of him to come home at all. Mrs. B. had often
declared that Polly's devotion to her husband was a beautiful thing to
see. The two eldest boys had newspaper routes and turned in their
earnings regularly, and, although the husband did not contribute
anything but his occasional company, Polly was able to make the
payments on their little four-roomed cottage. In another year, it
would be all paid for.

But one day Polly's husband began to look into the law--as all men
should--and he saw that he had been living far below his privileges.
The cottage was his--not that he had ever paid a cent on it, of course,
but his wife had, and she was his; and the cottage was in his name.

So he sold it; naturally he did not consult Polly, for he was a quiet,
peaceful man, and not fond of scenes. So he sold it quietly, and with
equal quietness he withdrew from the Province, and took the money with
him. He did not even say good-by to Polly or the children, which was
rather ungrateful, for they had given him many a meal and night's
lodging. When Polly came crying one Monday morning and told her story,
Mrs. B. could not believe it, and assured Polly she must be mistaken,
but Polly declared that a man had come and asked her did she wish to
rent the house for he had bought it. Mrs. B. went at once to the
lawyers who had completed the deal. They were a reputable firm and
Mrs. B. knew one of the partners quite well. She was sure Polly's
husband could not sell the cottage. But the lawyers assured her it was
quite true. They were very gentle and patient with Mrs. B. and
listened courteously to her explanation, and did not dispute her word
at all when she explained that Polly and her two boys had paid every
cent on the house. It seemed that a trifling little thing like that
did not matter. It did not really matter who paid for the house; the
husband was the owner, for was he not the head of the house? and the
property was in his name.

Polly was graciously allowed to rent her own cottage for $12.50 a
month, with an option of buying, and the two little boys are still on a
morning route delivering one of the city dailies.