Irvin S. Cobb and Mary Roberts Rinehart

“ As an institution, and as individuals, I am for women. They constitute, and deservedly too, the most popular sex we have. Since away back yonder I have been in favor of granting them suffrage. For years I have felt it as a profound conviction that the franchise should be expanded at one end and abridged at the other made larger to admit some of the women, made smaller to bar out some of the men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This woman is waging that battle against the mounting birthdays which nobody ever yet won. Her hair has been dyed in those rich autumnal tints which are so becoming to a tree in its Indian summer, but so unbecoming to a woman in hers. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ To the best of my knowledge and belief there is no record where a marriageable male patient on the road to recovery and in that impressionable mood which accompanies the convalescence of an ordinarily healthy man, failed to fall in love with his nurse. A competent, professional nurse who has the added advantage on her side of being comely and it is powerfully hard for her to avoid being comely in her spotless blue and starchy white stands more chances of getting the right sort of man for a husband than any billionaire's daughter alive. ”

“ A working woman who, through the working day, dresses in plain, neat frocks with no jangling bracelets upon her arms, no foolish furbelows at her wrists, no vain adornments about her throat, no exaggerated coiffure, is a delight to the eye and, better still, she fits the setting of her environment. ”

“ But, although we are discussing men, as all women know, there are really no men at all. There are grown-up boys, and middle-aged boys, and elderly boys, and even sometimes very old boys. But the essential difference is simply exterior. Your man is always a boy. He grows tidier, and he gathers up a mass of heterogeneous information, and in the strangest possible fashion as the years go on, boards have to be put into the dining-room table, and the shoe bill becomes something terrible, and during some of his peregrinations he feels rather like a comet with a tail. ”

“ Sometimes women have sighed and wondered what the house would be like without overcoats thrown about in the hall, and every closet full of beloved old ragged clothes and shoes, and cigar ashes over things, and wild cries for the ancient hat they gave the gardener last week to weed in. But quite recently the women of this country and a lot of other countries have found out what even temporary absence means. A house without a man in it is as nice and tidy and peaceful and attractive and cheerful as a grave in a cemetery. ”

“ This, I maintain, is the sole reason for alluding to them as the stronger and superior sex. They are stronger. They are superior. They are as strong as a trades union, only more so. They stand together against the rest of the world. Women do not. They have no impulse toward solidarity. They fight a sort of guerilla warfare, each sniping from behind her own tree. They are the greatest example of the weakness of unorganized force in the world.
But this male trades union is not due to affection. It is two-fold. It is a survival from the days when men united for defense. Women didn't unite. ”

“ But even when they are at apogee of sartorial ridiculousness I maintain that the garments of women, from the comfort standpoint, anyhow, are not any more foolish than the garments to which the average man is incurably addicted. If women are vassals to fashion men are slaves to convention, and fashion has the merit that it alters overnight, whereas convention is a slow moving thing that stands still a long time before it does move. ”

“ 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 ofen 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 ? ”

“ A woman wedded to a cause is divorced from all else. She resents the bare thought that in the press of matters and the clash of worlds, mankind should for one moment turn aside from her pet cause to concern itself with newer issues and wider motives. ”

“ Convention is the wooden Indian of civilization; but fashion is a merry-go-round.
In the Temperate zone in summertime, Everywoman looks to be cooler than Everyman and by the same token is cooler. In the winter she wears lighter garments than he would dream of wearing, and yet stays warmer than he does, can stand more exposure without outward evidence of suffering than he can stand, and is less succeptible than he to colds and grips and pneumonias. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is hard to imagine two women, similarly placed, behaving after the same common-sense standards. Each insists upon making a confidante of her partner. Their intimacy becomes a thing complicated with extraneous issues, with jointly shared secrets, with disclosures as to personal likes and dislikes, which should have no part in it if there is to be continued harmony, free from heartburnings or lacerated feelings, or fancied slights or blighted affections. Sooner or later, too, the personality of the stronger nature begins to overshadow the personality of the weaker. ”

“ Why, I know at least a hundred good stories about one man alone, and if I published them he would either grow suspicious and wonder who the man is, or, get sulky and resent bitterly being laughed at! Which is exactly like a man. Just little things, too, like always insisting he was extremely calm at his wedding, when the entire church saw him step off a platform and drop seven feet into tropical foliage.
You see, women quite frequently have less wit than men, but they don't take themselves quite so seriously; they view themselves with a certain somewhat ironical humor. ”

“ It's a lot harder being a woman than a man.
So women know men better than men know women, and are rather like the little boy's definition of a friend : "A friend is a feller who knows all about you, and likes you anyhow." ”

“ It likes love, but not all the time. And it likes to choose the people it consorts with. It is a predatory creature, also, and likes to be neat and tidy, while it sticks to its old trousers with a love that passeth understanding there, I've slipped up, but you know what I mean.
Now women are like dogs, really. They love like dogs, a little insistently. And they like to fetch and carry, and come back wistfully after hard words, and learn rather easily to carry a basket. ”

“ It is men who are the slaves, double chained, of fashion. The only comfortable innovation in men's clothes made in a century was when some brave spirit originated the shirtwaist man. Women saw its comfort, adopted and retained the shirtwaist. But the leaders of male fashion dictated that comfort was bad form, and on went all the coats again. Irvin Cobb is undoubtedly going to say that it is just like a woman to wear no flannels in winter, and silk hose, and generally go about half clad. But men are as over-dressed in sum- mer as women are under-dressed in winter. ”

“ 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 a bit, bless them ”

“ 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. ”

“ Men love a joke on the other fellow. But your really humorous woman loves a joke on herself. That's because women are less conventional, of course. I can still remember the face of the horrified gentleman I met one day on the street after luncheon, who had unconsciously tucked the corner of his luncheon napkin into his watch pocket along with his watch, and his burning shame when I observed that his new fashion was probably convenient but certainly novel. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If this season a woman's skirt is so scantily fashioned that as she hobbles along she has the appearance of being leg-shackled, like the lady called Salammbo, it is as sure as shooting that, come next season, she will have leapt to the other extreme and her draperies will be more than amply voluminous. If this winter her sleeves are like unto sausage casings for tightness, be prepared when spring arrives to see her wearing practically all the sleeves there are. About once in so often she is found wearing a mode which combines beauty with saneness but that often is not very often. ”

“ Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are
SHE emerges from the shop. She is any woman, and the shop from which she emerges is any shop in any town. She has been shopping. This does not imply that she has been buying anything or that she has contemplated buying anything, but merely that she has been shopping a very different pursuit from buying. Buying implies business for the shop; shopping merely implies business for the clerks. ”

“ Women do wear maniacal garments sometimes ; that there is no denying. But on the other hand styles for women change with such frequency that no quirk of fashion however foolish and disfiguring ever endures for long enough to work any permanent injury in the health of its temporarily deluded devotees. Nothing I can think of gets old-fashioned with such rapidity as a feminine fashion unless it is an egg. ”

“ From the time he is a small boy until he is in his dotage, a man swings off a car, facing in the direction in which the car is headed. Then, a premature turn of a wheel pitches him forward with a good chance to alight upon his feet, whereas the same thing happening when he was facing in the opposite direction would cause him to tumble over backward, with excellent prospects of cracking his skull. But in obedience to an immutable but inexplicable vagary of sex, a woman follows the patently wrong, the obviously dangerous, the plainly awkward system. ”