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NEW IDEALS FOR OLD
The strangest thing in this age of strange things is the new relationship that is growing up between the sexes. So many of the ideals that have ruled us for centuries have been scrapped and swept into the discard that the boy and girl babies of to-day are virtually born into a new world where few of the conventions that ruled their parents survive. Take the matter of financial independence, for instance. Since the caveman days it has been held that the proper attitude of woman was one of dependence on her lord and master. The woman bore the children and kept the house, and the husband provided the wherewithal to support the family. When a woman had property her husband took possession of it on the day they were married. Virtually every lucrative occupation was barred to women. When a man and a woman went to any place of amusement the man would have been highly insulted if she had offered to pay any part of the cost of the entertainment. Man was the purse bearer, and his lordly gesture indicated that he had the checking account of Mr. Rockefeller and that woman was a dear little sweetie who was not to bother her poor little foolish head over the cost of anything.
To-day the majority of women earn their living before they are married. Financial independence has become so necessary to their happiness that one of the potent sources of domestic discord is the inability of the woman who has had her own pay envelope to do without it and reconcile herself to taking whatever her husband gives her as recompense for her hard work as a poor man’s wife. Also husbands are coming more and more to begrudge spending money on their wives and are demanding oftener and oftener that the wage-earning girls they marry shall keep on with their jobs. Likewise, it is a common thing for the young women who go out with young men to places of amusement to pay their own way and go fifty-fifty on all expenses.
This may be fair enough. Certainly, when men and women work side by side and the woman gets the same salary as the man there is no more reason why he should feed her and buy her theater tickets than why she should buy his. Perhaps it is only logical that when woman fought for and won financial independence she should have to pay the price of her victory. But what I am trying to show is that man’s attitude toward woman as regards money has changed. She has shown that she can make her own living and he lets her do it. Even fathers have now no such sense of responsibility about providing for their daughters as they used to have. Men no longer adopt the gallant “I’ll-pay-your-way” pose. They treat women about money as they would treat another man. Of course, the occupation of wifehood and motherhood is a strenuous one and is all that any woman can be expected to do properly, but it is becoming more and more evident that men are less willing to support their families and that in the future women are going to have to continue to be wage-earners even after they are married.
Another curious shift of masculine thought is about feminine modesty. In the past, no matter what a man’s own life might have been, he demanded unsullied innocence in the woman he married. His ideal was the shrinking violet, the bud with the dew upon it. In these days there are few peaches with the down still left upon them. They have nearly all been manhandled. Girls display their bodies with an abandon that would have made the most hardened woman blush fifty years ago. Debutantes tell stories that would paralyze their grandmothers if they could hear them. Young women think no more of kissing every Tom, Dick and Harry who comes along and in indulging in petting parties and “necking,” than their mothers would have thought of shaking hands and holding a casual conversation. Girls excuse themselves for indulging in these dangerous and degrading practises by saying that unless they do they receive no attention from men. They speak the truth. Men may still theoretically admire what they call “the old-fashioned girl,” but they leave her to spend her evenings with her parents. Few men in these days can hope to marry a girl who has not been kissed and pawed over, and so it is obvious that men are changing their opinions about the desirability of modesty in women and establishing a single standard of conduct for both sexes. That is just, but it does not make for morality or the uplift of humanity.
Men and women both approach marriage in a different spirit. In the back of most young people’s heads as they march to the altar is the thought that if they don’t like it they won’t stick to it. It is an experiment, and they will try anything once, and if it doesn’t come up to what the novelists and poets have press-agented it to be they can always fly to the divorce court. That is one reason why marriage is so often a failure. Neither husband nor wife makes an honest effort to make a success of it. Of course, there are exceptions to all rules. There are husbands who gladly support their families; there are girls who have kept themselves unsullied and their lips virginal; there are men and women who still hold marriage a sacrament. But for the great majority of men and women there are new ideals and a new attitude toward each other. And whether these are better or worse than the old only time can tell.