"My Son, if a maiden deny thee and scufflingly bid thee give o'er,
Yet lip meets with lip at the lastward--get out! She has been there
before.
They are pecked on the ear and the chin and the nose who are lacking
in lore.
"Pleasant the snaffle of Courtship, improving the manners and carriage;
But the colt who is wise will abstain from the terrible thornbit of
Marriage.
Blister we not for _bursati_? So when the heart is vext,
The pain of one maiden's refusal is drowned in the pain of the next."
There is a great deal of this sort of thing in Molière, in Thackeray, in
Casanova. The old idea of woman eluding and lying; of woman stigmatized
if she has "been there before", while man may brag of having "been there
before" as often as possible; of man lovelacing for his credit's sake
and woman adventuring at her peril.
8
I submit that each man and woman has two heredities: one the ordinary
heredity from two parents and their forbears, the other more complex and
purely mental--the tradition of sex. Heredity through sex may be defined
as the resultant of consecutive environments. I mean that a woman, for
instance, is considerably influenced by the ideas and attitudes of her
mother, grandmothers, and all female ascendants. They had a tradition,
and it is the basis of her outlook. Any boy born in a slum can, as he
grows educated, realize that the world lies before him; literature and
history soon show him that many as lowly as he have risen to fame, as
artists, scientists, statesmen; he may even dream of becoming a king,
like Bonaparte. To the boy nothing is impossible; if he is brave, there
is nothing he may not tear from the world. He knows it, and it
strengthens him; it gives him confidence. What his fathers did, he may
do; the male sexual heredity is a proud heritage, and only yesterday a
man said to me, "Thank God, I am a man." Contrast with this the
corresponding type of heredity in woman. Woman carries in her the slave
tradition of her maternal forbears, of people who never did anything
because they were never allowed to; who were told that they could do
nothing but please, until they at last believed it, until by believing
they lost the power of action; who were never taught, and because
uneducated were ashamed; who were never helped to understand the work of
the world, political, financial, scientific, and, therefore, grew to
believe that such realms were not for them. I need not labor the
comparison: obviously any woman, inspired by centuries of dependence,
instinctively feels that, while everything is open to man, very little
is open to her. She comes into the arena with a leaden sword; in most
cases she hardly has energy to struggle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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