| <The Saturday Review August 1, 1868>
| <Spoilt Women>
| <pb n="153">
| Like children and all soft things, women are soon spoilt if 
| subjected to unwholesome conditions.  Sometimes the 
| over-spoiling comes from over-harshness, sometimes from 
| indulgence; what we are speaking of to-day is the latter 
| condition ~~ the spoiling which comes from being petted 
| and given way to and indulged, till they think themselves 
| better than everybody else, and as if living under laws 
| made specially for them alone.  Men get spoilt too in the 
| same manner; but for the most part there is a tougher fibre 
| in them, which persists the flabby influences of flattery and 
| exaggerated attention better than can the morale of the 
| weaker sex; and, besides, even arbitrary men meet with 
| opposition in certain directions, and the most self-contented 
| social autocrat knows that his humblest adherents criticize 
| though they dare not oppose.  A man who has been spoilt 
| by success and a gratified ambition, so that he thinks 
| himself a small Alexander in his own way, and able to 
| conquer any obstacles which may present themselves, has a 
| certain highhanded activity of will about him that does not 
| interfere with his duties in life; he is not made fretful and 
| impatient and exigeant as a woman is ~~ as if he alone of 
| all mankind is to be exempt from misfortunes and 
| annoyances; as if his friends must never die, his
| <pb n="154">
| youth never fade, his circumstances run always smooth, 
| protected by the care of others from all untoward hitch; and 
| as if time and tide, which wait for <reg orig="no one"> 
| no-one </reg> else, are to be bound to him as humble servants 
| dutifully observant of his wishes.  The useful art of <p> 
| "finding his level," </p> which he learnt at school and in 
| his youth generally, keeps him from any very weak 
| manifestation of being spoilt; save, indeed, when he has 
| been spoilt by women at home, nursed up by an adoring 
| wife, and a large circle of wife's sisters almost as adoring, 
| to all of whom his smallest wishes are religious obligations, 
| and his faintest virtues godly graces, and who vie with each 
| other which of them shall wait upon him most servilely, 
| flatter him most outrageously, pet and coax and coddle him 
| most entirely, and so do him the largest amount of spiritual 
| damage, and unfit him most thoroughly for the worth and 
| work of masculine life.  A man subjected to this insidious 
| injury is simply ruined so far as any real manliness of 
| nature goes.  He is made into that sickening creature, <q> 
| </q>, as the women call him ~~ a woman's man, with 
| flowing hair and a turn for poetry, full of highflown 
| sentiment, and morbidly excited sympathies; a man almost 
| as much woman as man, who has no backbone of ambition 
| in him,, but who puts his whole life into love, just as 
| women do, and who becomes at last emphatically not worth 
| his salt.  Bad as it is for men to be kowtowed by men, it is 
| not so bad, because not so weakening, as the domestic 
| idolatry which sometimes goes on when one man is the 
| centre of a large family of women, and the only object upon 
| which the natural feminine instinct can expend itself.  No 
| greater damage can be done to a man than is done by this 
| kind of domestic idolatry.  But, in truth, the evil is too 
| pleasant to be resisted; and there is scarcely a man so far 
| master of himself as to withstand the subtle intoxication, 
| the sweet and penetrating poison, of woman's tender 
| flattery and loving submission.  To a certain extent it is so 
| entirely the right thing, because it is natural and instinctive, 
| that it is difficult to draw the line and map out exactly the 
| division between right and wrong, pleasantness and 
| harmfulness, and where loving submission ends and 
| debasing slavishness begins.
| Spoilt women are spoilt mainly from a like cause ~~ 
| over-attention from men.  A few certainly are to be found,
| as pampered daughters, with indulgent mammas and 
| subservient aunts given up wholly to ruining their young 
| charge with the utmost dispatch possible; but this is 
| comparatively a rare form of the disease, and one which a 
| little wholesome matrimonial discipline would soon cure.  
| For it is seldom that a petted daughter becomes a spoilt 
| wife, human affairs having that marvellous power of 
| compensation, that inevitable tendency to readjust the 
| balance, which prevents the continuance of a like excess 
| under different forms.  Besides, a spoilt daughter generally 
| makes such a supremely unpleasant wife that the husband 
| has no inducement to continue the mistake, and therefore 
| either lowers her tone by a judicious exhibition of 
| snubbing, or, if she is aggressive as well as unpleasant, 
| leaves her to fight with her shadows in the best way she 
| can, glad for his own part to escape the strife she will not 
| forego.  One characteristic of the spoilt woman is her 
| impatience of anything like rivalry.  She never has a female 
| friend ~~ certainly not one of her own degree, and not one 
| at all in the true sense of the word.  Friendship presupposes 
| equality, and a spoilt woman knows no equality.  She has 
| been so long accustomed to consider herself as the 
| lady-paramount that she cannot understand it if 
| <reg orig="any one"> anyone </reg> steps in 
| to share her honours and 
| divide her throne.  To praise the beauty of any other 
| woman, to find her charming, or to pay her the attention 
| due to a charming woman, is to insult our spoilt darling, 
| and to slight her past forgiveness.  If there is only one good 
| thing, it must be given to her ~~ the first seat, the softest 
| cushion, the most protected situation; and she looks for the 
| best of all things as if naturally consecrated from her birth 
| into the sunshine of life, and as if the <p> "cold shade"</p> 
| which may do for others were by no means the portion 
| allotted to her.  It is almost impossible to make the spoilt 
| understand the grace or the glory of sacrifice.  By rare good 
| fortune she may sometimes be found to possess an 
| indestructible germ of conscience which sorrow and 
| necessity can develop into active good; but only 
| sometimes.  The spoilt woman <hi rend="italic"> par 
| excellence </hi> understands only her own value, only her 
| own merits and the absolution of her own requirements; 
| and sacrifice, self-abnegation, and the whole class of 
| virtues belonging to unselfishness are as much unknown to 
| her as is the Decalogue in the original, or the squaring of 
| the circle.  The spoilt woman as the wife of an unsuccessful 
| husband or the mother of sickly children is a pitiable 
| spectacle.  If it comes to her to be obliged to sacrifice her 
| usual luxuries, to make an old gown serve when a new one 
| is desired, to sit up all night watching by the sick bed, to 
| witness the painful details of illness, perhaps of death, to 
| meet hardship face to face, and to bend her back to the 
| burden of sorrow, she is at the first absolutely lost.  Not the 
| thing to be done, but her own discomfort in doing it, is the 
| one master idea ~~ not others' needs, but her own pain in 
| supplying them, the great grief of the moment.  Many are 
| the hard lessons set us by life and fate, but the hardest of all 
| is that given to the spoilt woman when she is made to think 
| for others rather than for herself, and is forced by the 
| exigencies of circumstances to sacrifice her own ease for 
| the greater necessities of her kind.
| All that large part of the perfect woman's nature which 
| expresses itself in serving is an unknown function to the 
| spoilt woman.  She must be waited on, but she cannot in 
| her turn serve even the one or two she loves.  She is the 
| woman who calls her husband from one end of the room to 
| the other to put down her cup, rather than reach out her arm 
| and put it down for herself; who, however weary he may 
| be, will bid him get up and ring the bell, though it is close 
| to her own hand, and her longest walk during the day has 
| been from the dining-room to the drawing-room.  It is not 
| that she cannot do these small offices for herself, but that 
| she likes the feeling of being waited on and attended to; 
| and it is not for love, and the amiable if weak pleasure of 
| attracting the notice of the beloved ~~ it is just for the 
| vanity of being a little somebody for the moment, and of 
| playing off the small regality involved in the procedure.  
| She would not return the attention.  Unlike the Eastern 
| women, who wait on their lords hand and foot, and who 
| place their highest honour in their lowliest service, the 
| spoilt woman of Western life knows nothing of the natural 
| grace of womanly serving for love, for grace, or for 
| gratitude.  This kind of thing is peculiarly strong among the 
| <hi rend="italic"> demi-monde </hi> of the higher class, 
| and among women who are not of the <hi rend="italic"> 
| demi-monde </hi> by station, but by nature.  The respect 
| they cannot command by their virtues they demand in the 
| simulation of manner; and perhaps no women are more 
| tenacious of the outward forms of deference than those who 
| have lost their claim to the vital reality.  It is very striking 
| to see the difference between the women of this type, the 
| <"hi rend=italic"> <f> </f> </hi> who require the utmost 
| attention and almost servility from man, and the noble 
| dignity of service which the pure woman can afford to give 
| ~~ which she finds, indeed, that it belongs to the very 
| purity and nobleness of her womanhood to give.  It is the 
| old story of the ill-assured position which is afraid of its 
| own weakness, and the security which can afford to 
| descend ~~ the rule holding good for other things besides 
| mere social place.
| Another characteristic of the spoilt woman is the 
| changeableness and excitability of her temper.  All suavity 
| and gentleness and delightful gaiety and perfect manners 
| when everything goes right, she startles you by her outburst 
| of petulance when the first cross comes.  If no man is a 
| hero to his valet, neither is a spoilt woman a heroine to her 
| maid; and the lady who has just been the charm of the 
| drawing-room, upstairs in her boudoir makes her maid go 
| through spiritual exercises to which walking on burning 
| ploughshares is the only fit analogy.  A length of lace 
| unstarched, a ribbon unsewed, a flower set awry, anything 
| that crumples only one of the myriad rose-leaves on which 
| she lies, and the spoilt woman raves as much as if each 
| particular leaf had become suddenly beset with thorns.  If a 
| dove was to be transformed to a hawk the change would 
| not be more complete, more startling, than that which 
| occurs when the spoilt woman of well-bred company 
| manners puts off her mask to her maid, and shows her 
| temper over trifles.  Whoever else may suffer the 
| grievances of life, she cannot understand that she also must 
| be at times one of the suffers with the rest; and if by chance 
| the bad moment comes, the person accompanying it has a 
| hard time of it.  There the spoilt women also who also have 
| their peculiar exercises in thought and opinion, and who 
| cannot suffer that <reg orig="any one"> anyone </reg> 
| should think differently from themselves, or find those 
| things sacred which to them are accursed.  They will bear 
| nothing but what is in harmony with themselves, and they 
| take it as a personal insult when men, or women attempt to 
| reason with them, or even hold their own without flinching.  
| This kind is to be found specially among the more 
| intellectual of a family or a circle ~~ women who are 
| pronounced <p> "clever" </p> by their friends, and who 
| have been so long accustomed to think themselves clever 
| that they have become spoilt mentally as others are 
| personally, and fancy that minds and thought must follow 
| in their direction, just as eyes and hands must follow and 
| attend their sisters.  The spoilt woman of the mental kind is 
| a horrid nuisance generally.  She is greatly given to large 
| discourse; but discourse of a kind that leans all to one side, 
| and that denies the right of <reg orig="any one"> anyone 
| </reg> to criticize, doubt, or contradict, is an intellectual 
| Tower of Pisa under the shadow of which it is not pleasant 
| to live.
|