| <The Saturday Review, January 4, 1868>
| <repub: Modern Women and What is Said of Them>
| <New York 1868>
| <Man and His Master>
| <pb n="9">
| There are, it must be owned, few things on earth of less 
| interest at first sight than a girl in her teens.  She is a mere 
| bundle of pale colourless virtues, a little shy, slightly 
| studious, passively obedient, tamely religious.  Her tastes 
| are <p> "simple" </p> ~~ she has no particular preference, 
| that is, for anything; her aims incline mildly towards a 
| future of balls to come; her rule of life is an hourly 
| reference to <p> "mamma."  </p> She is without even the 
| charm of variety; she has been hot-pressed in the most 
| approved finishing establishments, and is turned out the 
| exact double of her sister or her cousin or her friend, with 
| the same
| <pb n="10">
| stereotyped manner, the same smattering of 
| accomplishments, the same contribution to society of her 
| little sum of superficial information.  We wonder how it is 
| that <reg orig="any one"> anyone </reg> 
| can take an interest in a creature of this sort, 
| just as we wonder how <reg orig="any one"> anyone </reg> 
| can take an interest in the 
| <hi rend="italic"> Court Circular. </hi>  And yet there are 
| few sentiments more pardonable, as there are none more 
| national, than our interest in that marvelous document.  A 
| people which chooses to be governed by kings and queens 
| has a right to realize the fact that kings and queens are 
| human beings, that they shoot, drive, take the air like the 
| subjects whom they govern.  And if in some coming day 
| we are to toss up our hats and shout ourselves hoarse for a 
| sovereign who is still in his cradle, it is wise as well as 
| natural that we should cultivate an interest in his babyhood, 
| that we should hang on the vicissitudes of his teeth and his 
| measles, that we should be curious as to the title of his 
| spelling-book, and the exact score of his last game at 
| cricket.  It is precisely the same interest which attaches us 
| to the loosely-tied bundle of virtues and accomplishments 
| which we call a girl.  We recognise in her our future ruler.  
| The shy, modest creature who has no thought but a dance, 
| and no will but mamma's, will in a few years be our master, 
| changing our habits, moulding our tastes, bending our 
| character to her own.  In the midst of our own drawing-room,
| in our pet easy-chair, we shall see that retiring figure 
| quietly establish, with downcast eyes, and hands busy with 
| their crochet-needles, what Knox called, in days before a 
| higher knowledge had dawned, <q> </q>.
| We are far from sharing the sentiments of the Scotch 
| Reformer, and if we attempt here to seize a few of the 
| characteristics of the rule against which he revolted, we 
| hope to avoid his bitterness as carefully as his prolixity.  
| What was a new thing in his day has become old in ours, 
| and man learns perhaps somewhat too easily to acquiesce 
| in <p> "established facts." </p> It is without a dream of revolt, 
| and simply in a philosophical spirit, that we approach the 
| subject.  Indeed it is a feeling of admiration rather than of 
| rebellion which seizes us when we begin to reflect on the 
| character of woman's sway, and on the simplicity of the 
| means by which she creates and establishes it.  A little love, 
| a little listening, a little patience, a little persistence, and the 
| game is won.  How charmingly natural and 
| unobjectionable, for instance, is the very first move in it ~~ 
| what we may venture to call, since we have to create the 
| very terminology of our subject, the isolation of Man.  
| When Brown meets us in the street and hopes that his 
| approaching marriage will make no difference in our 
| friendship, and that we shall see as much of one another as 
| before, we know that the phrases simply mean that our 
| intimacy is at an end.  There will be no more pleasant 
| lounges in the morning, no more strolls in the Park, no 
| more evenings at the Club.  Woman has succeeded in so 
| completely establishing this cessation of former friendships 
| as a condition of the new married life that 
| hardly <reg orig="any one"> anyone </reg> 
| dreams of thinking what an enormous sacrifice it is.  There 
| are very few men, after all, who are not dependent on their 
| little group of intimates for the general drift of their 
| opinions, the general temper of their mind and character of 
| their lives.  Their mutual advice, support, praise or 
| dispraise, enthusiasm, abhorrences, likings, dislikings, 
| constitute the atmosphere in which one lives.  A good deal 
| of real modesty lingers about an unmarried man he feels far 
| more confident in his own opinion if he knows it is Smith's 
| opinion too, and his conception of life acquires all its 
| definiteness from its being shared with half a dozen fairly 
| reasonable fellows.  It is no slight triumph that woman 
| should not only have succeeded in enforcing the dissolution 
| of this social tie as the first condition of married life, but 
| that she has invested that dissolution with the air of an 
| axiom which nobody dreams of disputing.  The triumph is, 
| as we said, won by the simplest agency ~~ by nothing, in 
| short, but a dexterous double appeal to human conceit.  She 
| is so weak, so frail, so helpless, so strange to this new 
| world into which she has plunged from the realms of 
| innocent girlhood, so utterly dependent on her husband, 
| that a man sees at once that he has not a moment left for 
| <reg orig="any one"> anyone </reg> else.  
| There is pleasure in the thought of all that 
| delicate weakness appealing to our strength, of that 
| innocent ignorance looking up to us for guidance through 
| the wildernesses of the world.  Of course it will soon be 
| over, and when the dear dependent has learnt to walk alone 
| a little we can go back to the old faces and take our cigar as 
| before.  But somehow the return never comes, or, if it does 
| come, the old faces have grown far less enchanting to us.  
| The truth is, we have tasted the second pleasure of married 
| life ~~ the pleasure of being an authority.  All that shy 
| appeal to us, all that confession of ignorance, has taught us 
| what wonderfully wise fellows we are.  We are far less 
| inclined to wait for Smith's approval, or to take our tone 
| from the group at the Club-window.  It is, to say the least, 
| far pleasanter to be an authority at home.  Gradually we 
| find ourselves becoming oracular, having opinions on every 
| subject that a leading article can give us one upon, 
| correcting Lord Stanley's policy towards the King of 
| Ashantee.  Life takes a new interest when we can put it so 
| volubly into words.  At the same time we feel that the 
| interest is hardly shared by the world.  Our old associates 
| apparently fail to appreciate the change in us, or to listen to 
| our disquisitions any more than they did of old.  It is a 
| comfort to feel that we have a home to retreat to, and that 
| there is one there who will.  To the subtle flattery, in short, 
| of weakness and of ignorance, woman has now added the 
| flattery of listening.  To say little, to contribute hardly more 
| than a cue now and then, but to be attentive, to be 
| interested, to brighten at the proper moment, to laugh at the 
| proper joke, to suggest the exact amount of difficulties 
| which you require to make your oratorical triumph 
| complete, and to join with an unreserved assent in its 
| conclusion, that is the simple secret of the power of 
| ninety-nine wives out of a hundred.  It is a power which is far 
| from being confined to the home.  The most brilliant salons 
| have always been created by dexterous listeners.  A 
| pleasant house is not a house where one is especially talked 
| to, but where one discovers that one talks more easily than 
| elsewhere.  The fact is certainly invaluable which enables a 
| woman to know the strong points of her guests, to lead up 
| to their subjects, to supply points for conversation, and then 
| to leave it quietly alone.  But it is only a display on the 
| grand scale of that particular faculty of silence which wins 
| its quiet triumphs on every hearth-rug.
| This faculty, however, has other triumphs to win besides 
| those in which it figures as a delicate administration of 
| flattery to the vanity of man.  It is the force which woman 
| holds in reserve for the hour of revolt.  For it must be 
| owned that, pleasant as the tyranny is, men sometimes 
| wake up to the fact that it is a tyranny, that in the most 
| seductive way in the world they are being wheedled out of 
| associations that are really dear to them, that their life is 
| being cramped and confined, that their aims are being 
| lowered.  Then the newly-found eloquence exhausts itself 
| in a declaration of revolt.  Things cannot go on in this way, 
| life cannot be ruined for caprices.  It is needless perhaps to 
| repeat the rhetoric of rebellion, and all the more needless 
| because it shares the fate of all rhetoric in producing not the 
| slightest impression on the mind to which it is addressed.  
| The wife simply listens as before, though the listening is 
| now far from encouraging to eloquence.  She is perfectly 
| patient, patient in her refusal to continue an irritating 
| discussion, patient in bearing your little spurts of vexation; 
| she listens quietly to-day, with the air of one who is 
| perfectly prepared to listen quietly to-morrow.  But even 
| rhetoric has its limits, and now that the cues have ceased, a 
| husband finds it a little difficult to keep up a discussion 
| where he has to supply both arguments and replies.  
| Moreover, the fact which managed in former days to place 
| him in a highly pleasant position by the confession of 
| weakness now, by the very same silent avowal, places him 
| in a decidedly unpleasant one.  If a woman's air simply says 
| at the end of it all, <p> "I can't answer you, but I know I am 
| right," </p> a man has a lurking sense that his copious 
| rhetoric has had a smack of the cowardly as well as of the 
| tyrannical about it.  And so, after a vigorous denunciation 
| of some particular thing which his wife has done, a 
| husband commonly finds himself no further than before; 
| and the very instant that, from sheer weariness, he ceases, 
| the wife usually steals out and does it again.  There is 
| something feline about this combination which the Jesuits 
| on a larger scale have turned into the characteristic of their 
| order.  It is especially remarkable when it breaks the bonds 
| of silence, and takes the form of what in vulgar language is 
| called <p> "nagging."  </p> No form of torture which has 
| as yet been invented, save perhaps the slow dropping of 
| water on some highly sensitive part of the frame, can afford 
| a parallel to this ingenious application of the principle of 
| persistence.  The absolute certainty that, when snub or 
| scolding or refusal have died into silence, the word will be 
| said again; the certainty that it will be said year after year, 
| month after month, week after week; the irritation of 
| expecting it again, tell on the firmest will in the world.  In 
| the long run the wife wins.  The son goes to Harrow, 
| though reason has proved a dozen times over that we can 
| only afford the expense of Marlborough; the family gets its 
| Alpine tour, though logic and unpaid bills imperatively 
| dictate the choice of a quiet watering-place.  You yield, and 
| you see that <reg orig="every one"> everyone </reg> 
| in the house knew that you would 
| yield.  There wasn't a servant who didn’t know every turn 
| of the domestic screw, or who took your resistance for 
| more than the usual routine of the operation.  <q> </q>, 
| said Philip of Spain, <q> </q>.  It is no wonder if, fighting 
| alone for prudence and economy, one is beaten by time and 
| one's wife.
| We have no wish to dispute the enormous benefits to man 
| of woman's supremacy, but we may fairly leave the 
| statement of them to the numerous troop of poets who 
| dispute with Mr. Tupper the theme of the affections.  For 
| ourselves, we may undertake perhaps the humbler task of 
| pointing out very briefly some of the disadvantages which, 
| as in all human things, counter-balance these benefits.  In 
| the first place, feminine rule is certainly not favourable to 
| anything like largeness of mind or breadth of view.  It 
| creates, as we have seen, an excessive self-conceit and 
| opinativeness, and then it directs these qualities to very 
| small ends indeed.  Woman lives from her childhood in a 
| world of petty details, of minute household and other cares, 
| of bargains where the price of every yard ends in some 
| fraction of a penny.  The habit of mind which is formed by 
| these and similar influences becomes the spirit of the 
| house, a spirit admirable no doubt in many ways, but 
| excessively small.  The quarrels of a woman's life, her 
| social warfare, her battles about precedence, her upward 
| progress from set to set, have all on them the same stamp of 
| Lilliput.  But it is to these small details, these little 
| pleasures and little anxieties and little disappointments and 
| little ambitions, that a wife generally manages to bend the 
| temper of her spouse.  He gets gradually to share her 
| indifference to large interests, to broad public questions.  
| He imbibes little by little the most fatal of all kinds of 
| selfishness, the selfishness of the home.
| <pb n="11">
| It would be difficult perhaps to say how much of the 
| patriotism of the Old World was owing to the inferior 
| position of woman; but it is certain that the influence of 
| woman tells fatally against any self-sacrificing devotion to 
| those larger public virtues of which patriotism is one of the 
| chief.  Whether from innate narrowness of mind, or from 
| defective training, or from the excessive development of 
| the affections, family interests far outweigh, in the feminine 
| estimation, any larger national or human considerations.  If 
| ever the suffrage is given to woman, it will be necessary to 
| punish bribery with the treadmill, for no <p> "person" </p> 
| will regard it as a crime to barter away her vote for a year's 
| schooling for Johnny or a new frock for Maud.  Nothing 
| tells more plainly the difference between the Old World 
| and the New than the constant returns home during war.  
| We can hardly conceive Pericles or even Alcibiades 
| applying for leave of absence on the ground of <p> "private 
| affairs." </p> But then Pericles and Alcibiades had no 
| home that they could set above the interests of the State.  
| Lastly, from this narrow view bounded strictly by the limits 
| and interests of the home comes, it may be feared, a vast 
| deal of social and political bitterness and intolerance.  Her 
| very nature, her <q> </q>, as Mr. Buckle puts it prettily for 
| her, make woman essentially a dogmatist.  She has none of 
| the larger intercourse with other minds and adverse 
| circumstances which often creates the form, if not the 
| spirit, of tolerance in the narrowest of men.  Her very 
| excellence and faith make her exactly what they made 
| Queen Mary ~~ a conscientious and therefore merciless 
| persecutor.  It is just this feminine narrowness, this 
| feminine conscientiousness, in the clergy which unfits them 
| for any position where justice or moderation is requisite.  
| Justice is a quality unknown to woman, and against which 
| she wages a fierce battle in the house and in the world.  
| There are few husbands who have been made more just, 
| more tolerant, more large-hearted and large-headed, by 
| their wives; for justice lives in a drier light than that of the 
| affections, and dry light is not a very popular mode of 
| illumination under <p> "the monstrous regimen of 
| women." </p>