'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' by Irvin S. Cobb (great books to read .txt) 📕

out of fear. You see, it is not only a trades union, it is a mutual benefit society. Its only constitution is the male Golden Rule—“You stick by me and I’ll stick by you.” “We men must stick together.”

I’ll confess that with a good many women it is, “You stick me and I’ll stick you.”

But that solidarity, primarily offensive and defensive, has also an element in it that women seldom understand, and almost always resent. Not very many years ago a play ran in New York without a woman in the cast or connected with the story. There is one running very successfully now in Paris. Both were written by men, naturally. Women cannot conceive of the drama of life without women in it. But men can.

The plain truth is that normal women need men all the time, but that normal men need women only a part of the time. They like to have them to go back to, but they do not need them in sight, or even within telephone call. There are some hours of every day when you could repeat a man’s wife’s name to him through a megaphone, and he would have to come a long ways back, from golf or pool or the ticker or the stock news, to remember who she is.

When a man gets up a golf foursome he wants [p17] four men. When a woman does it, she wants three.

It is this ability to be happy without her that a woman never understands. Her lack of understanding of it causes a good bit of unhappiness, too. Men are gregarious; they like to be together. But women gauge them by their own needs, and form dark surmises about these harmless meetings, which are as innocuous and often as interesting as the purely companionable huddlings of sheep in pasture.

Women play bridge together to fill in the time until the five-thirty is due. Men play bridge because they like to beat the other fellow.

Mind you, I am not saying there are not strong and fine affections among women. If it comes to that, there is often deeper devotion, perhaps, than among men. But I am saying that women do not care for women as a sex, as men care for men. Men will die to save other men. Women will sacrifice themselves ruthlessly for children, but not for other women. Queer, isn’t it?

Yet not so queer. Women want marriage and a home. They should. And there are more women than men. Even before the war there was, in Europe and America, an extra sixth woman for every five men, and the sixth woman brings competition. She bulls the market, and makes feminine sex solidarity impossible. And, of course, added to that is the woman who requires three or [p18] four men to make her happy, one to marry and support her, and one to take her to the theater and to luncheon at Delmonico’s, and generally fetch and carry for her, and one to remember her as she was at nineteen and remain a bachelor and have a selfish, delightful life, while blaming her. This makes masculine stock still higher, and as there are always buyers on a rising market, competition among women—purely unconscious competition—flourishes.

So men hang together, and women don’t. And men are the stronger sex because they are fewer!

Obviously the cure is the elimination of that sixth woman, preferably by euthanasia. (Look this up, Irvin. It’s a good one.) That sixth woman ought to go. She has made men sought and not seekers. She ruins dinner parties and is the vampire of the moving pictures. And after living a respectable life for years she either goes on living a respectable life, and stays with her sister’s children while the family goes on a motor tour, or takes to serving high-balls instead of afternoon tea, while wearing a teagown of some passionate shade.

It is just possible that suffrage will bring women together. It is just possible that male opposition has in it this subconscious fear, that their superiority is thus threatened. They don’t really want equality, you know. They love to patronize us [p19] a bit, bless them; and to tell us to run along and not bother our little heads about things that don’t concern us. And, of course, politics has been their own private maneuvering ground, and—I have made it clear, I think, that they don’t always want us—here we are, about to drill on it ourselves, perhaps drilling a mite better than they do in some formations, and standing right on their own field and telling them the mistakes they’ve made, and not to take themselves too hard and that the whole game is a lot easier than they have always pretended it was.

They don’t like it, really, a lot of them. Their solidarity is threatened. Their superiority, and another sanctuary, as closed to women as a monastery, or a club, is invaded. No place to go but home.

Yet I have a sneaking sympathy for them. They were so terribly happy running things, and fighting wars, and coming back at night to throw their conversational bones around the table. It is rather awful to think of them coming home now and having some little woman say:

“Certainly we are not going to the movies. Don’t you know there is a ward caucus to-night?”

There is a curious situation in the economic world, too. Business has been the man’s field ever since Cain and Abel went into the stock and farming combine, with one of them raising grain for [p20] the other’s cows, and taking beef in exchange. And the novelty is gone. But there’s a truism here: Men play harder than they work; women work harder than they play.

Women in business bring to it the freshness of novelty, and work at their maximum as a sex. Men, being always boys, work under their maximum. (Loud screams here. But think it over! How about shaking dice at the club after lunch, and wandering back to the office at three P.M. to sign the mail? How about golf? I’ll wager I work more hours a day than you, Irvin!)

The plain truth is that if more men put their whole hearts into business during business hours, there would be no question of competition. As I have said, they think straighter than women, although more slowly. They have more physical strength. They don’t have sick headaches—unless they deserve them. But they are vaguely resentful when some little woman, who has washed the children and sent them off to school and straightened her house and set out a cold lunch, comes into the office at nine o’clock and works in circles all around them.

But there is another angle to this “woman in the business world” idea that puzzles women. Not long ago a clever woman whose husband does not resent her working, since his home and children are well looked after, said to me:

[p21]
“I’ve always been interested in what he had to say of his day at the office, but he doesn’t seem to care at all about my day. He seems so awfully self-engrossed.”

The truth probably is that they are both self-engrossed, but women can dissemble and men cannot. It is another proof of their invincible boyishness, this total inability to pretend interest. Even the averagest man is no hypocrite. He tries it sometimes, and fails pitifully. The successful male dissembler is generally a crook. But the most honest woman in the world is often driven to pretense, although she may call it savoir faire. She pretends, because pretense is the oil that lubricates society. Have you ever seen a man when some neighbors who are unpopular drop in for an evening call? After they are gone, his wife says:

“I do wish you wouldn’t bite the Andersons when they come in, Joe!”

“Bite them! I was civil, wasn’t I?”

“Well, you can call it that.”

He is ready to examine the window locks, but he turns and surveys her, and he is honestly puzzled.

“What I can’t make out,” he says, “is how you can fall all over yourself to those people, when you know you detest them. Thank heavens, I’m no hypocrite.”

Then he locks the windows and stalks up-stairs, [p22] and the hypocrite of the family smiles a little to herself. Because she knows that without her there would be no society and no neighborhood calls, and that honesty can be a vice, and hypocrisy a virtue.

I know a vestryman of a church who sometimes plays bridge on Saturday nights for money. What he loses doesn’t matter, but what he wins his wife is supposed to put on the plate the next morning. One Saturday night he gave her a large bill, and the next morning she placed a neatly folded green-back on the collection plate as he held it out to her. He stood in the aisle and eyed the bill with suspicion. Then he deliberately unfolded it, and held out the plate to her again.

“Come over, Mazie,” he said.

And Mazie came over with the balance.

You know what a woman would have done. She would have marked the bill with her eye, and later on while waiting at the rear for the chair offertory to end, she would have investigated. Then on the way home she would have said:

“I had a good notion to stand right there, Charlie Smith, and show you up. I wish I had.” But the point is that she wouldn’t have.

There is no moral whatever to this brief tale.

But perhaps it is in love that men and women differ most vitally. Now Nature, being extremely wise, gives the man in love the wisdom of the serpent [p23] and the wile of the dove (which is a most alluring bird in its love-making). A man in love brings to it all his intelligence. And men like being in love.

Being in love is not so happy for a woman. She becomes emotional and difficult, is either on the heights or in the depths. And the reason for this is simple; love is a complex to a woman. She has to contend with natural and acquired inhibitions. She both desires love and fears it.

The primitive woman ran away from her lover, but like Lot’s wife, she looked back. I am inclined to think, however, that primitive woman looked back rather harder than she ran. Be that as it may, women to-day both desire love and fear it.

If men fear it, they successfully hide their cowardice.

It is in their methods of making love that men cease to be alike. Up to that point they are very similar; they all think that, having purchased an automobile, they must vindicate their judgment by insisting upon its virtues, and a great many of them will spend as much money fixing over last year’s car as would almost buy a new one; they always think they drive carefully, but that the fellow in the other car is either a road hog or a lunatic who shouldn’t have a license; they are mostly rather moody before breakfast, although there is an obnoxious type that sings in the cold [p24] shower; they are all rather given to the practice of bringing gifts to their wives when they have done something they shouldn’t; and they all have a tendency to excuse their occasional delinquencies by the argument that they never made anybody unhappy, and their weaknesses by the fact that God made them men.

But it is in love that they are at their best, from the point of view of the one woman most interested. And it is in their love methods that they show the greatest variations from type. Certain things of course they all do, buy new neckties, write letters which they read years later with