of his apprenticeship, he grows more immune and inhibitive of it when its proper
hour arrives, and perhaps becomes in soul a bachelor before his time. In this side
of his nature he is forever incommensurate with and unintelligible to woman, be
she even teacher, sister, or mother. Better some risk of gross thoughts and even
acts, to which phylogeny and recapitulation so strongly incline him, than this
subtle eviration. But if the boy is unduly repelled from the sphere of girls'
interests, the girl is in some danger of being unduly drawn to his, and, as we saw
above, of forgetting some of the ideals of her own sex. Riper in mind and body
than her male classmate, and often excelling him in the capacity of acquisition,
nearer the age of her full maturity than he to his, he seems a little too crude and
callow to fulfil the ideals of manhood normal to her age which point to older and
riper men. In all that makes sexual attraction best, a classmate of her own age is
too undeveloped, and so she often suffers mute disenchantment, and even if
engagement be dreamed of, it would be, on her part, with unconscious
reservations if not with some conscious renunciation of ideals. Thus the boy is
correct in feeling himself understood and seen through by his girl classmates to a
degree that is sometimes quite distasteful to him, while the girl finds herself
misunderstood by and disappointed in men. Boys arrive at the humanistic stage
of culture later than girls and pass it sooner; and to find them already there and
with their greater aptitude excelling him, is not an inviting situation, and so he is
tempted to abridge or cut it out and to hasten on and be mature and professional
before his time, for thus he gravitates toward his normal relation to her sex of
expert mastership on some bread- or fame-winning line. Of course, these
influences are not patent, demonstrable by experiment, or measurable by
statistics; but I have come to believe that, like many other facts and laws, they
have a reality and a dominance that is all-pervasive and inescapable, and that
they will ultimately prevail over economic motives and traditions.
To be a true woman means to be yet more mother than wife. The madonna
conception expresses man's highest comprehension of woman's real nature.
Sexual relations are brief, but love and care of offspring are long. The
elimination of maternity is one of the great calamities, if not diseases, of our age.
Marholm[4] points out at length how art again to-day gives woman a waspish
waist with no abdomen, as if to carefully score away every trace of her mission;
usually with no child in her arms or even in sight; a mere figurine, calculated
perhaps to entice, but not to bear; incidentally degrading the artist who depicts
her to a fashion-plate painter, perhaps with suggestions of the arts of toilet,
cosmetics, and coquetry, as if to promote decadent reaction to decadent stimuli.
As in the Munchausen tale, the wolf slowly ate the running nag from behind