| <The Saturday Review June 27, 1868>
| <Interference>
| <pb n="841">
| About the strongest propensity in human nature, apart from 
| the purely personal instincts, is the propensity to interfere.  
| Not tyranny, which is another matter ~~ tyranny being 
| active while interference is negative; the one standing as 
| the masculine, the other as the feminine, form of the same 
| principle.  Besides, tyranny has generally some personal 
| gain in view when it takes in hand to force people to do 
| what they do not like to do; while interference seeks no 
| good for itself at all, but simply prevents the exercise of 
| free will for the mere pleasure to be had out of such 
| prevention.  Again, the idea of tyranny is political rather 
| than domestic, but the curse of interference is seen most 
| distinctly within the four walls of home, where also it is felt 
| the most.  Very many people spend their lives interfering 
| with others ~~ perpetually putting spokes into wheels with 
| which they have really nothing to do, and thrusting their 
| fingers into pies about the baking of which they are not in 
| any way concerned; and of these people we are bound to 
| confess that women make up the larger number and are the 
| greater sinners.  To be sure there are some men ~~ small, 
| fussy, finnicking fellows, with whom nature has made the 
| irreparable blunder of sex ~~ who are as troublesome in 
| their endless interference as the narrowest-minded and 
| most meddling women of their acquaintance; but the 
| feminine characteristics of men are so exceptional that we 
| need not take them into serious calculation.  For the most 
| part, when men do interfere in any manly sense at all, it is 
| with such things as they think they have a right to control 
| ~~ say, with the wife's low dresses, or the daughter's too 
| patent flirtations.  They interfere and prevent because they 
| are jealous of the repute, perhaps of the beauty, of their 
| women-kind; and knowing what men say of such displays, 
| or fearing their effect, they stand between folly and slander 
| to the best of their ability.  But this kind of interference, 
| noble or ignoble as the cause may be, comes into another 
| class of motives altogether, and does not belong to the kind 
| of interference of which we are speaking.
| Women, then, are the great interferers at home, both with 
| each other and with men.  They do not tell us what we are 
| to do, beyond going to church and subscribing to their 
| favourite mission, so much as they tell us what we are not 
| to do; they do not command so much as they forbid; and, of 
| all women, wives and daughters are the most given to 
| handling these check-strings and putting on these 
| drag-chains.  Sisters, while young, are obliged to be less 
| interfering, under pain of a perpetual round of bickering; 
| for brothers are not apt to submit to the counsel of creatures 
| for the most part as loftily snubbed as sisters are; while 
| mothers are nine times out of ten laid aside for all but 
| sentimental purposes, so soon as the son has ceased to be a 
| boy and has learned to become a man.  The queenhood, 
| therefore, of personal and domestic interference lies with 
| wives, and they know how to use the prerogative they 
| assume.  Take an unlucky man who smokes under protest, 
| his wife not liking to forbid the pleasure entirely, but 
| always grudging it, and interfering with its exercise.  Each 
| cigar represents a battle, deepening in intensity according 
| to the number.  The first may have been had with only a 
| light skirmish perhaps, perhaps a mere threatening of an 
| attack that passed away without coming to actual 
| onslaught; the second brings up the artillery; while the third 
| or fourth lets all the forces loose, and sets the biggest guns 
| thundering.  She could understand a man smoking one cigar 
| in the day, she says, with a gracious condescension to 
| masculine weakness; but when it comes to more she feels 
| that she is called on to interfere, and to do her best towards 
| checking such a reprehensible excess.  It does not weaken 
| her position that she knows nothing of what she is talking 
| about.  She never smoked a cigar herself, and therefore 
| does not understand the uses or the abuses of tobacco; but 
| she holds herself pledged to interfere as soon as she gets 
| the chance, and she redeems the pledge with energy.  The 
| man too, who has the stomach of an ostrich and an appetite 
| to correspond, but about whom the home superstition is that 
| he has a feeble digestion and must take care of his diet, has 
| also to run the gauntlet of his wife's interfering forces.  He 
| never dines or sups jollily with his friends without being 
| plucked at and reminded that salmon always disagrees with 
| him; that champagne is sure to give him a headache 
| to-morrow; and <q> </q> or, <q> </q>  The wife has a 
| nervous organization which cannot bear stimulants; the 
| husband is a strong large-framed man who can drink deep 
| without feeling it; but to the excitable woman her feeble 
| limit is her husband's measure, and as soon as he has gone 
| beyond the range of her own short tether, she trots after him 
| remonstrating, and thinks herself justified in interfering 
| with his progress.  For women cannot be brought to 
| understand the capacities of a man's life; they cannot be 
| made to understand that what is bad for themselves may not 
| be bad for others, and that their weakness ought not to be 
| the gauge of a man's strength.  A pale chilly woman 
| afflicted with chronic bronchitis, who wears furs and 
| velvets in May and fears the east wind as much as an East 
| Indian fears a tiger, does her best to coddle her husband, 
| father, and sons in about the same ratio as she coddles 
| herself.  They must not go out without an overcoat; they 
| must be sure to take an umbrella if the day is at all cloudy; 
| they must not walk too far, nor ride too hard, and they must 
| be sure to be at home by a certain hour.  When such women 
| as these have to do with men just on he boundary-line 
| between the last days of vigour and the first of old age, they 
| put forward the time of old age by many years.  One sees 
| their men rapidly sink into the softness and incapacity of 
| senility, when a more bracing life would have kept them 
| good for half-a-dozen years longer.  But women do not care 
| for this.  They like men to be their own companions more 
| than they care for any manly comradeship among each 
| other; and most women ~~ but not all ~~ would rather have 
| their husbands manly in a womanly way than in a manly 
| one, as being more within the compass of their own 
| sympathies and understanding.  The same kind of 
| interference is very common where the husband is a man of 
| broad humour ~~ one who calls a spade a spade, with no 
| circumlocution about an agricultural implement.  The wife 
| of such a man is generally one of the ultra-refined kin, 
| according to the old law of compensation which regulates 
| so much of human action, and thinks herself obliged to 
| stand as the enduring censor of her husband's speech.  As 
| this is an example most frequently to be found in middle 
| life, and where there are children belonging to the 
| establishment, the word of warning is generally <p> 
| "papa!" </p> ~~ said with reproach or resentment, 
| according to circumstances ~~ which has, of course, the 
| effect of drawing the attention of the young people to the 
| paternal breadth of speech, and of fixing that special breach 
| of decorum on their memory.  Sometimes the wife has 
| sufficient self-restraint not to give the word of warning in 
| public, but, soon as they are alone, the miserable man has 
| to pass under the barrow, as only husbands with wives of a 
| chastising spirit can pass under it, and his life is made a 
| burden to him because of that unlucky anecdote told with 
| such verve a few hours ago, and received with such shouts 
| of pleasant laughter.  Perhaps the anecdote was just a trifle 
| doubtful; granted; but what does the wife take by her 
| remonstrance?  Most probably a quarrel; possibly a 
| good-natured <hi rend="italic">  peccavi </hi> for the sake
| of being let off the continuance of the sermon; perhaps a 
| yawn; most certainly not reform.  If the man is a man of 
| free speech and broad humour by nature and liking, he will 
| remain so to the end; and what the censorship of society 
| leaves untouched, the interference of a wife will not 
| control.
| Children come in for an enormous share of interference, 
| which is not direction, not discipline, but simple 
| interference for its own sake.  There are mothers who 
| meddle with every expression of individuality in their 
| young people, quite irrespective of moral tendency, or 
| whether the occasion is trivial or important.  In the fancies, 
| the pleasures, the minor details of dress in their children, 
| there is always that intruding maternal finger upsetting the 
| arrangements of the poor little pie as vigorously as if 
| thrones and altars depended on the result. Not a game of 
| croquet can be begun, nor a blue ribbon worn instead of a 
| pink one, without maternal interference; so that the bloom 
| is rubbed off every enjoyment, and life becomes reduced to 
| a kind of goose-step, with mama for the drill-sergeant 
| prescribing the inches to be marked.  Sisters, too, do a great 
| deal of this kind of thing among each other; as all those 
| who are intimate where there are large families of 
| unmarried girls
| <pb n="842">
| must have seen.  The nudges, the warning looks, the 
| deprecating <p> "Amy's!" </p> and <p> "Oh Lucy's!" </p> 
| and <p> "Hush Rose's!" </p> by which some seek to act as 
| household police over the other, are patent to all who use 
| their senses.  In some houses the younger sisters seem to 
| have been born chiefly as training grounds for the elders, 
| whereon they may exercise their powers of interference; 
| and a hard time they have of it.  If Emma goes to her 
| embroidery, Ellen tells her she ought to practise her 
| singing; if Jane is reading, Mary recommends sewing as a 
| more profitable use of precious time; if Amy is at her easel, 
| Ada wants to turn her round to the piano.  It is quite the 
| exception where four or five sisters leave each other free to 
| do as each likes, and do not take to drilling and interference 
| as part of the daily programme.  Something of the 
| reluctance to domestic service so painfully apparent among 
| the better class of working women is due to this spirit of 
| interference with women.  The lady who wrote about the 
| caps and gowns of servant-girls, and drew out a plan of 
| dress, down to the very material of their gloves, was an 
| instance of this spirit.  For, when we come to analyse it, 
| what does it really signify to us how our servants dress, so 
| long as they are clean and decent, and do not let their 
| garments damage our goods?  Fashion is almost always 
| ridiculous, and women as a rule care more for dress than 
| they care for anything else; and if the kitchen apes the 
| parlour, and Phyllis gives as much thought to her new 
| linsey as my lady gives to her new velvet, we cannot 
| wonder at it, nor need we hold up our hands in horror at the 
| depravity of the smaller person.  Does one flight of stairs 
| transpose morality?  If it does not, there is no real ethical 
| reason why my lady should interfere with poor Phyllis's 
| enjoyment in her ugly vanities, when she herself will not be 
| interfered with, though press and pulpit both try to turn her 
| out of her present path into one that all ages have thought 
| the best for her, and the one divinely appointed.  It is a 
| thing that will not bear reasoning on, being simply a form 
| of the old <q> </q>?  Who will direct the directress? and to 
| whose interference will the interferer submit?
| There are two causes for this excessive love of interference 
| among women.  The one is the narrowness of their lives 
| and objects, by which insignificant things gain a 
| disproportionate value in their eyes; the other, their belief 
| that they are the only saviours of society, and that without 
| them man would become hopelessly corrupt.  And to a 
| certain extent this belief is true, but surely with restrictions.  
| Because the clearer moral sense and greater physical 
| weakness of women restrain men's fiercer passions, and 
| force them to be gentle and considerate, women are not, 
| therefore, the sole arbiters of masculine life into whose 
| hands is given the paying out of just so much rope as they 
| think fit for the occasion.  They would do better to look to 
| their own tackle before settling so exactly the run of 
| others'; and if ever their desired time of equality is to come, 
| it must come through mutual independence, not through 
| womanly interference, and as much liberality and breadth 
| must be given as is demanded ~~ which, so far as humanity 
| has gone hitherto, has not been the feminine manner of 
| squaring accounts.  Grant that women are the salt of the 
| earth, and the great antiseptic element in society, still that 
| does not reduce everything else to the verge of corruption 
| which they alone prevent.  Yet by their lives they evidently 
| think that it is so, and that they are each and all the keepers 
| of keys which give them a special entrance to the temple of 
| morality, and by which they are able to exclude or admit 
| the grosser body of men.  Hence they interfere and restrict 
| and pay out just so much rope, and measure off just so 
| much gambolling ground, as they think fit; they think vile 
| man a horribly wicked invention when he takes things into 
| his own hand, and goes beyond their boundary-lines.  It is 
| all done in good if in a very narrow faith ~~ that we admit 
| willingly; but we would call their attention to the difference 
| there is between influence and interference, which is just 
| the difference between their ideal duty and their daily 
| practice ~~ between being the salt of the earth and the 
| blister of the home.  We think it only justice to put in a 
| word for those poor henpecked fellows of husbands at a 
| time when the whole cry is for Woman's Rights, which 
| seems to mean chiefly her right of making man knuckle 
| under on all occasions, and of making one will serve for 
| two lives.  We assure her that she would get her own way 
| in large matters much more easily if she would leave men 
| more liberty in small ones, and not teaze them by 
| interfering in things which do not concern her, and have 
| only reference to themselves.