own ego and more or less consciously to make it an end, aiming to possess and
realize herself fully rather than to transmit. Despairing of herself as a woman,
she asserts her lower rights in the place of her one great right to be loved. The
desire for love may be transmuted into the desire for knowledge, or outward
achievement become a substitute for inner content. Failing to respect herself as a
productive organism, she gives vent to personal solutions; seeks independence;
comes to know very plainly what she wants; perhaps becomes intellectually
emancipated, and substitutes science for religion, or the doctor for the priest,
with the all-sided impressionability characteristic of her sex which, when
cultivated, is so like an awakened child. She perhaps even affects mannish ways,
unconsciously copying from those not most manly, or comes to feel that she has
been robbed of something; competes with men, but sometimes where they are
most sordid, brutish, and strongest; always expecting, but never finding, she
turns successively to art, science, literature, and reforms; craves especially work
that she can not do; and seeks stimuli for feelings which have never found their
legitimate expression.
- Another type, truer to woman's nature, subordinates self; goes beyond
personal happiness; adopts the motto of self-immolation; enters a life of service,
denial, and perhaps mortification, like the Countess Schimmelmann; and perhaps
becomes a devotee, a saint, and, if need be, a martyr, but all with modesty,
humility, and with a shrinking from publicity.
In our civilization, I believe that bright girls of good environment of eighteen or
nineteen, or even seventeen, have already reached the above-mentioned peculiar
stage of first maturity, when they see the world at first hand, when the senses are
at their very best, their susceptibilities and their insights the keenest, tension at
its highest, plasticity and all-sided interests most developed, and their whole
psychic soil richest and rankest and sprouting everywhere with the tender shoots
of everything both good and bad. Some such—Stella Klive, Mary MacLane,
Hilma Strandberg, Marie Bashkirtseff—have been veritable epics upon woman's
nature; have revealed the characterlessness normal to the prenubile period in
which everything is kept tentative and plastic, and where life seems to have least
unity, aim, or purpose. By and by perhaps they will see in all their scrappy past,
if not order and coherence, a justification, and then alone will they realize that
life is governed by motives deeper than those which are conscious or even
personal. This is the age when, if ever, no girl should be compelled. It is the
experiences of this age, never entirely obliterated in women, that enable them to
take adolescent boys seriously, as men can rarely do, in whom these experiences