until he found himself in the harness, so in the disoriented woman the mistress,
virtuous and otherwise, is slowly supplanting the mother. Please she must, even
though she can not admire, and can so easily despise men who can not lead her,
although she become thereby lax and vapid.
The more exhausted men become, whether by overwork, unnatural city life,
alcohol, recrudescent polygamic inclinations, exclusive devotion to greed and
pelf; whether they become weak, stooping, blear-eyed, bald-headed, bow-
legged, thin-shanked, or gross, coarse, barbaric, and bestial, the more they lose
the power to lead woman or to arouse her nature, which is essentially passive.
Thus her perversions are his fault. Man, before he lost the soil and piety, was not
only her protector and provider, but her priest. He not only supported and
defended, but inspired the souls of women, so admirably calculated to receive
and elaborate suggestions, but not to originate them. In their inmost souls even
young girls often experience disenchantment, find men little and no heroes, and
so cease to revere and begin to think stupidly of them as they think coarsely of
her. Sometimes the girlish conceptions of men are too romantic and exalted;
often the intimacy of school and college wear off a charm, while man must not
forget that to-day he too often fails to realize the just and legitimate expectations
and ideals of women. If women confide themselves, body and soul, less to him
than he desires, it is not she, but he, who is often chiefly to blame. Indeed, in
some psychic respects, it seems as if in human society the processes of
subordinating the male to the female, carried so far in some of the animal
species, had already begun. If he is not worshiped as formerly, it is because he is
less worshipful or more effeminate, less vigorous and less able to excite and
retain the great love of true, not to say great, women. Where marriage and
maternity are of less supreme interest to an increasing number of women, there
are various results, the chief of which are as follows:
- Women grow dollish; sink more or less consciously to man's level; gratify his
desires and even his selfish caprices, but exact in return luxury and display,
growing vain as he grows sordid; thus, while submitting, conquering, and
tyrannizing over him, content with present worldly pleasure, unmindful of the
past, the future, or the above. This may react to intersexual antagonism until man
comes to hate woman as a witch, or, as in the days of celibacy, consider sex a
wile of the devil. Along these lines even the stage is beginning to represent the
tragedies of life. - The disappointed woman in whom something is dying comes to assert her