FOUR LITTLE DUOLOGUES ON FEMINISM

Anne O'Hagan

THIS was last Summer.

"Of course you arc a feminist?" Hester said.

I answered with the carelessness bred of a long-standing conviction: "Of course.

Was I not a veteran marcher in suffrage parades? Had I not watched with grim, silent, unavailing rage, the triumphal descent of the village ne'er-do-wells upon the polls, there to register their supreme wills in regard to the disposition of my taxes? A feminist? Rather!

But all this was last summer.

I. THE INCIDENT OF HESTER'S HAIR

"HAVE you been ill, dear?" I asked Hester, who is young and ardent, when we met after the summer's separation. Hester's once abundant locks were closely .shorn.

"Ill?" asked Hester coldly. "Certainly not."

"But-" pointing to her hair.

"Surely you can understand that in these days a woman has something else to do besides curling her hair for the allurement of some male or other."

"That boyish style is quite becoming to you," I admitted.

"Becoming? Bosh!" Hester had the grace to blush, though. "Why should I waste time and energy—yes, and money !—on hairpins and hair washes, curling irons and transformations, when there is so much useful work to do in the world? Think of the time that man gains just in that one respect! An hour a day for dressing our hair, an hour a week for shampooing, eight hours a week—four hundred and sixteen hours a year—working hours, mind you! Thirty-four working days a year—five weeks! A year in every ten. Think of the knowledge, the power, women could attain in a year. No wonder man has usurped the position of the dominant sex ! No wonder their wily poets have always gushed about woman's crowning glory! It's part of the masculine conspiracy to keep us down!" "I believe you're right!" I cried, fired by her zeal. "If we women could only acquire early baldness we should come to our own at last! And man would still need to shave. That's where we'd have him. It's a magnificent, strategic idea, and—" but Hester had walked contemptuously away.

II. WOMAN'S PLACE IS IN TIIE HOME

"YOU will join in memorializing the school board in regard to the right of married teachers to absence for the bearing of children?" Hester said to me six weeks later, as she waved a document before my eyes. "You care enough about the freedom of women to do that, don't you?"

"I do, indeed," I cried warmly, grasping a pen and affixing a dashing signature to the petition.

"I am so glad," she commended me. "Some women, who have the nerve to call themselves advanced, balk at the idea of motherteachers."

"I'm for good teachers," I added, "maids, wives or widows."

"You're hedging and trimming: reducing the question to one of individual merit and efficiency." she protested. "It's a matter of a big, general principle. Shall a woman be deprived of the opportunity to pursue her profession and to earn her living just because a set of old men declare that a mother's place is with her children ? It's enslaving the married woman—it's making a prison of the Home and jailers of the Family."

"Responsibilities are horridly apt to clip ones wings," I conceded.

"Nonsense!" she cried. "It isn't responsibility. It's man-made law and man-made tradition ! The Nursery and the Home—how sick one grows of having them rammed down one's throat!" She looked at me sternly. "Don't tell me you're for the Home as against—"

"Oh, come now!" I interrupted. "I am for the Home—to a certain extent. It's a pleasant place in which to spend occasional evenings between public meetings: it is—"

"Nonsense ! It is the jail in which men have penned women for ages, through the mere power of a sentimental idea ! It has always been the domain where every man, no matter how negligible he was in the great world, could spread himself and play Pasha; where, whatever sort of serf he himself was in industry, he could be slave-driver. Believe me. it's on the masculine taste for czarship that the home is founded, not on the sacredness of the family idea. I know that sacred old platitude, 'Woman's place is in the home.' Sacred fiddlesticks! Sacred cookstove, sacred scrubpail!"

She was fumbling in her bag, from which she produced another paper.

"I wish you'd sign this," she said. It was a petition entreating the legislature to grant pensions to widowed mothers so that they might be spared the necessity of leaving their children and going out from their homes to earn their livings.

"I'm blessed if I'll sign both of those petitions the same day," I declared. "In the name of consistency, keep one or the other back until to-morrow !"

III. MARRIAGE A LA MODE

"OF course she keeps her own name! Why should she be compelled to lose her individuality any more than he should lose his? No, she doesn't wear a wedding ring! Does he? Of course she hasn't tacked that absurd 'Mrs.' on to her name! Are men obliged to adopt a title to show their condition as soon as they marry? And her sister̬" Hester's voice rose to a note of triumph—"says she is thinking of not going through any ceremony at all. She says it is only by the courage of a few pioneers that we can ever hope to outgrow the anachronism of the marriage institution with all its gross injustice to women. It is horrible to her to think of going on with marriage, once love has ceased. Love is the only thing that gives dignity to marriage; and who can predict how long love will last? It comes unsought; it goes when it will."

"That certainly is the creed in which many men have taken their pleasure these centuries past," I admitted. She glowered at me.

"My friend will do it as a matter of principle, not for pleasure."

I sat rebuked and silent. But her active mind was off in a new region, and soon she said: "By the way, will you go with me on Friday night to the njeeting at which the Civic Purity League will expose conditions on the East Side? Oh, they've done wonderful work ! They've compelled some of those wretches to marry the girls whom they deceived and—what on earth are you laughing at?"

"Oh, nothing!" I answered cringingiy. "Nothing at all."

iv. THE INCIDENT OF DR. LOEB'S LADY FROG

HESTER came in, glowing with excitement.

"What do you think?" she cried. "What do you think? Oh, science is with us, nature is with us ! Do you know what Dr. Loeb's experiments have proved?"

"Who is Dr. Loeb?" I asked.

"Dr. Jacques Loeb, of course." She was impatient. "It is too wonderful! He has succeeded in producing a perfectly healthy little family of frogs without the intervention of the male principle at all. What do you think of that? Only the mother frog! Oh, it is splendid—the unnecessary sex—the male !" she laughed gleefully. "If in frogs, then in time in all the higher animals! The useless male—to be sloughed off as nature in her great economy sloughs off all useless things!"

"Magnificent! Magnificent!" I cried. And then the questioning spirit awoke within me. "The little frogs," I asked, "they have gone on. I suppose, developing more little frogs?"

"No-o-o." she answered reluctantly. "No, not yet. But—the beginning has been made. We can attend to that when the time is ripe. It's the first step that counts—and after all these centuries of our subordination !"

Then she crossed the room to the window, as though she found the confines of the room too small to hold the great vision. She stood looking out for a while, and then she frowned and stamped her feministic foot.

"Look at that brute," she commanded me. "Look at him, the husky, disgusting creature! Strolling along with his hands in his pockets and a silly cigarette in his mouth while his poor wife carries the valise, and the baby, too! The beast!"

"Perhaps he is only trying to educate her for the glorious future." 1 hazarded. "The future foretold to hopeful hearts in Dr. Loeb's family of little frogs. Give him the benefit of a charitable doubt."

I'M NOT so sure. I wait an authoritative definition. And meantime I cling to the old-fashioned cause, the cause of the true advancement of women, which sometimes seems, to anxious eyes, to be tying a bewildering, perhaps even a dangerously downdragging, number of tails to its kite.