Irvin S. Cobb

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 summer as women are under-dressed in winter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From a devotee she soon is transformed into a habitee. From being an earnest advocate she advances—or retrogrades—to the status of a plain bore. To be a common nuisance is bad enough; to be a common scold is worse, and presently she turns scold and goes about railing shrilly at a world that criminally persists in thinking of other topics than the one which lies closest to her heart and loosest on her tongue. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 heart-burnings 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. ”

“ Even though I am taking on the rôle of Devil’s Advocate in the struggle to keep woman from canonizing herself by main force I want to be as fair as I can, always reserving the privilege where things are about even, of giving my own side a shade the better of it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And women are called designing because they have fathomed this fundamental simplicity of the male! A woman’s emotions and her sensations and her thoughts are all [p31] complexes. She doesn’t know herself what she is going to do, and is frequently more astounded than anyone else at what she does do. 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.” ”

“ A woman, becoming thoroughly imbued with an idea, becomes, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a creature of one idea. Everything else on earth is subordinated to the thing—cabal, reform, propaganda, crusade, movement or what not—in which she is interested. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But in spite of this slavish following of fashion, men are really more rational than women. They have the same mental processes. For that reason they understand each other. Like the village fool who found the lost horse by thinking where he would go if he were a horse, a man knows what another man will do by fancying himself in the same circumstances. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The car proceeds upon its course. She sits in her seat, wearing that look of comfortable self-absorption [p12] which a woman invariably wears when she is among strangers, and when she feels herself to be well dressed and making a satisfactory public appearance. She comes out of her trance with a start on discovering that the car has passed her corner or is about to pass it. All flurried, she arises and signals the conductor that she is alighting here. ”

“ Women don’t really care how their men look. But they want to look up to them—which is a reason I haven’t given before for their sex superiority. It is really forced on them! And they want them kind and even a bit patronizing. Also they want them well, because a sick man can come the closest thing in the world to biting the hand that feeds him. ”

“ Seeing what a mess the members of my own sex so often make of the job of trying to run the country, [p15] I don’t anticipate that the Republic will go upon the shoals immediately after women begin voting and campaigning and running for office. At the helm of the ship of state we’ve put some pretty sad steersman from time to time. Better the hand that rocks the cradle than the hand that rocks the boat. We men have let slip nearly all of the personal liberties for which our fathers fought and bled—that is to say, fought the Britishers and bled the Injuns. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The best method, as every woman knows, is to give them to someone who is going on a long, long journey, else he will follow and bring them back in triumph. This fondness for what is old is a strange thing in men. ”

“ For the sake of comparing two horrible examples, let us take a woman esteemed to be over-dressed at all points and angles where she is not under-dressed, and, mentally, let us place alongside her a man who by the standards of his times and his contemporaries is conventionally garbed. ”

“ 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. 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. ”

“ 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 susceptible than he to colds and grips and pneumonias. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That is the reason women are natural monogamists. They know they have to be one-man women, because the one man is so always a boy, and has to have so much mothering and looking after. He has to be watched for fear his hair gets too long, and sent to the tailor’s now and then for clothes. And if someone didn’t turn his old pajamas into scrub rags and silver cloths, he would go on wearing their ragged skeletons long after the flesh had departed hence. (What comforting rags Irvin Cobb’s pajamas must make!) ”

“ If she likes the other woman she is cordial. But if she does not like her she is very, very cordial. A woman’s aversion for another woman moving in the same social stratum in which she herself moves may readily be appraised. ”