Woman’s God.

Candidly, the responsibility of feeling myself answerable for all a woman does or does not do would weigh upon me.  There are men who are willing to take this burden upon themselves, and a large number of women are still anxious that they should continue to bear it.  I spoke quite seriously to a young lady not long ago on the subject of tight lacing; undoubtedly she was injuring her health.  She admitted it herself.

“I know all you can say,” she wailed; “I daresay a lot of it is true.  Those awful pictures where one sees—well, all the things one does not want to think about.  If they are correct, it must be bad, squeezing it all up together.”

“Then why continue to do so?” I argued.

“Oh, it’s easy enough to talk,” she explained; “a few old fogies like you”—I had been speaking very plainly to her, and she was cross with me—“may pretend you don’t like small waists, but the average man does.”

Poor girl!  She was quite prepared to injure herself for life, to damage her children’s future, to be uncomfortable for fifteen hours a day, all to oblige the average man.

It is a compliment to our sex.  What man would suffer injury and torture to please the average woman?  This frenzied desire of woman to conform to our ideals is touching.  A few daring spirits of late years have exhibited a tendency to seek for other gods—for ideals of their own.  We call them the unsexed women.  The womanly women lift up their hands in horror of such blasphemy.

When I was a boy no womanly woman rode a bicycle—tricycles were permitted.  On three wheels you could still be womanly, but on two you were “a creature”!  The womanly woman, seeing her approach, would draw down the parlour blind with a jerk, lest the children looking out might catch a glimpse of her, and their young souls be smirched for all eternity.

No womanly woman rode inside a hansom or outside a ’bus.  I remember the day my own dear mother climbed outside a ’bus for the first time in her life.  She was excited, and cried a little; but nobody—heaven be praised!—saw us—that is, nobody of importance.  And afterwards she confessed the air was pleasant.

“Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside,” is a safe rule for those who would always retain the good opinion of that all-powerful, but somewhat unintelligent, incubus, “the average person,” but the pioneer, the guide, is necessary.  That is, if the world is to move forward.

The freedom-loving girl of to-day, who can enjoy a walk by herself without losing her reputation, who can ride down the street on her “bike” without being hooted at, who can play a mixed double at tennis without being compelled by public opinion to marry her partner, who can, in short, lead a human creature’s life, and not that of a lap-dog led about at the end of a string, might pause to think what she owes to the “unsexed creatures” who fought her battle for her fifty years ago.