From a Girls Point of View | Page 4

awful thought has already pierced some people's brains--what if the
man under thirty-five does not dance?
Sometimes an untrained man under thirty-five will actually have the
audacity to say to me that he takes small pleasure in society because the
girls he meets are so silly, and he must use small-talk in order to meet
them on their own ground. I am aghast at his temerity, as he, too, will
be when he has heard our side of the subject. We girls never have
allowed ourselves the luxury of vindicating ourselves, or refuting this
charge. It is the clever girl who suffers most of all--not the brilliant,
meteoric girl--but just the ordinarily clever girl, as other girls know her.
It is this sort of a girl who drags upon my sympathies, because she
occupies an anomalous position.
Being a real woman, she likes to be liked. She wishes to please men.
We all do. But what kind of men are we to please? Untrained men
under thirty-five? Owing to the horrible prevalence of these men, some
girls become neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. They see their
silly, pink-cheeked sisters followed and admired. They know either

how shallow these girls are or how cleverly hypocritical. Clever girls
are also human. They love to go about and wear pretty clothes, and
dance, and be admired quite as much as anybody.
The result is that they adopt the only course left to them, and, bringing
themselves down to the level of the men, feign a frivolity and a levity
which occasionally call forth from a thinking man a criticism which is,
in a sense, totally undeserved. What will not the untrained man under
thirty-five have to answer for on the Day of Judgment!
It is of no use to argue about this state of things. Facts are facts. Men
make no secret of the kind of women they want us to be. We get
preached at from pulpits and lectured at from platforms and written
about by "The Saunterer" and "The Man About Town" and "The One
Who Knows It All," telling us how to be womanly, how to look to
please men, how to behave to please men, and how to save our souls to
please men, until, if we were not a sweet, amiable set, we would rebel
as a sex and declare that we thought we were lovely just the way we
were, and that we were not going to change for anybody.
You lords of creation ought to be very complaisant, or else very much
ashamed of yourselves. You send in an order: "The kind of girl that I
like is a Methodist without bangs." And some nice girl begins to look
up Methodist tenets and buys invisible hairpins and side combs. Or you
say, "Give me an athletic girl." And, presto! some girl who would much
rather read buys a wheel, and learns golf, and lets out the waists to her
gowns, and revels in tan and freckles. We do what you men want us to.
And, then, when you complain about our lack of brains, that we cannot
discuss current events, and that you have to give us society small-talk, I
feel like saying: "Well, whose fault is it? If you demand brains, we will
cultivate them. If you want good looks, we will try to scare up some. If
you want nobility, we will let you know how much we have concealed
about us."
Often it is not that we are not secretly much more of women, and better
and cleverer women, than you think us. But there is no call for such
wares, so we lay character and brain on the shelves to mildew, and fill
the show-windows with confectionery and illusion. We supply the
demand. We always have supplied it, and we always will.
Of course, some of us get very much disgusted with the débutantes. But,
aside from the great superiority they have over girls with thinking

powers (in regard to the number of men who admire them, for all men
admire cooing girls with dimples)--aside from this, I say, there is
something to be said on their behalf. Don't you believe, you dear,
unsuspicious men, who dote upon their pliability and the trustfulness of
their innocent, limpid blue or brown-eyed gaze, which meets your own
with such implied flattery to your superior strength and
intelligence--don't you believe for one moment that the simple little
dears do not know exactly the part they are playing. They are twice as
clever as the cleverest of you. They feel that they are needed just as
they are. The fashionable schools are turning them out every year
exactly as the untrained men under thirty-five would wish them to be.
They know this. Therefore they remain