The Decay of Pretty Manners

With the last generation, we buried all of the old-fashioned women…

ON THE DECAY OF PRETTY MANNERS IN WOMEN

IS the decay of pretty manners in women nowadays, to put it plainly, to be found in the absence of prettiness in the women themselves? The streets are filled with fine, athletic girls, but the pretty little girl, with her smile, her blush, her little foot and hand, her gracious “ways,” her thanks for some small service rendered, where is she? She has vanished from the highways of the world, or it would seem that at her first fluttering essay into the open, she has been pounced on and hidden away by greedy man for his own secret joy and pride, himself a willing slave to those winning arts that so much more appeal to his heart than the mannish habits, the cool insolence of the over emancipated, over-athletic girls of today.

For the dismal fact remains that as the health and growth of the female race advances, beauty recedes, becomes almost a lost quantity, as you may easily ascertain by going on foot for several successive days through the West End of London, passing in review the thousands of women driving, motoring, cycling, and on foot. If during those days you see in all half a dozen faces that fulfill your idea of beauty in form, coloring and expression, you are fortunate, but the chances, one might almost say, the certainties are, that you will meet miles of tall, aggressive, striding lasses who contemptuously shoulder you out of their way, returning you cold glance for glance, or crowds of carefully made-up middle-aged women, whose attempts to attract your admiration are even more disagreeable than the total indifference to your good or bad opinion displayed by the “grenadiers” of the sex.

If you happen in a dewy-soft, modest, sweet little face, you may be pretty cure that it came straight from the country, and will shortly return there, for it is only in town that I affirm this rarity of beauty— the place where freedom of gait and thought is carried to such lengths that “I care for nobody. No, not I. And nobody cares for me,” may well appear to be the guiding motto of women.

Men complain that when they offer some such slight act of courtesy to women as grandpa and even father offered as a matter of course, they do not receive one word of thanks or acknowledgment, consequently the pretty-mannered women (and they are yet to be found) have to suffer for the rudeness of their sisters — and are tarred with the same brush of man's disgust. On the one hand you hear bitter complaints of decline in men’s manners; on the other, men talk contemptuously of the change for the worse in women’s, yet when all is said and done, it is the mistress or the daughter of the house who gives the tone to the manners of the men who live in or visit it.

Where the women are careless, immodest, illbred, mocking at all the gracious amenities and restraints of social and family life, there will be found men only too willing to let themselves go on in their company, gladly discarding those restraints that formerly hid their seamy side, as much from themselves as from others. Thus a moral support of incalculable value is withdrawn, for to leave off one’s manners, is equivalent to never changing one's clothes at the proper times, and just as a slovenly negligence of the person inevitably degrades and undermines it, so does a careless bearing tend to similar conduct, and rapid deterioration of character.

Briefly then, what is the reason of this falling off in good breeding in both women and men? There are three reasons— of which this is the first and most important, that there are not enough men to go round: thus a vast surplus of women have no chance of marriage and motherhood, which is the state for which they were born, nature having emphatically laid down the law that for every Jill there should be a Jack, and so a chance of happiness afforded her. 

Nothing tames and sweetens a woman like love; to be wooed, to be companioned, to know herself first with one human being is this supreme joy. and though the woman without a lover may not be actually conscious of this want, will even fiercely deny its existence, still it is there, embittering and hardening her, till at last her speech, and gait correspond with the defiant, starved heart within her.

Let the right man take the aggressive toward the most self-contained, self-willed, woman the of most them all, and teach her love, and she will soften hour by hour before his eyes; love gives humility, endows with charm, her manner, informed by her heart, becomes gentle, this is the type of woman who treats man as an enemy because she secretly wants him as a lover, whereas the born old maid remains neutral and tepid all her life long, neither to be sweetened nor soured by man, since he does not enter into her scheme of existence.

There is, of course, a certain minority of women who honestly do not wish to marry, and mistrust all men, but again the question arises, have men sufficiently tried to overcome their prejudices, and do they not unduly flat- ter themselves on their brain and will power to live happily in a celibate state? The woman who, looking back on a successful career that has had no love in it, counts herself happy, is not a woman at all, but a freak of nature, in which something warm and human has by accident been left out, rendering her frustrate and incomplete.

The second reason (and it is a very grave one) for the general discourtesy between the sexes, is the springing up in our midst of a class of women, always married, usually middle-aged, who refuse to grow old gracefully and decently, and whose manners may be described as carneying or fascinating. according to taste, but who will submit to any sort of treatment, brutality even, rather than let go of men who take them about, amuse them, pay for their menus, and give them generally what they call “a good time” – and at what a price!

Men are not good at classification, have not time to differentiate between women and women, thus the pure women are made to suffer for the fast, the flighty, the ridiculous, and can only withdraw into themselves, standing apart from those who enjoy the pleasures flung to them by man's contemptuous hand, having indeed no taste for a familiarity that strikes at the very root of their self-respect and womanliness.

I do not say that such women are met everywhere-there are vast tracts of English society into which they have never penetrated, but that they exist as a type is painfully well known to many a fresh young girl, who sees her bit of pleasure filched from her by those who, having eaten their cake, are determined to have it also.

It is a misfortune, I know, to feel young inside and be old out, but there are other ways of working off this vitality than by aping Ninon de l'Enclos' airs, and is not the antagonistic attitude of daughters to mothers nowadays, often due to the total lack of dignity with which these mothers behave?

There is something revolting in the sight of clean, fresh-faced boys dancing attendance on women whose sons are of the same age as themselves- youth to youth-age to age-dignity to the meridian of life, and the ripe charm that experience gives, thus should it be now, as it has in the past.

It is a hard saying, but it seems to me that with our own dear mothers of the last generation we buried all that are left of the old-fashioned pattern, and that until the present day women initiate a vast forward movement to a change in manner toward men so long will men fall in theirs toward, the other sex. The remedy lies in the women's own hands-where shall they make a beginning?

From time immemorial they have been the bulwark of the country, whose importance as rearers of sons and daughters is more vital, more important to the state than the statesmen themselves and without whom (should they become universally corrupt) England must go to pieces, inevitably destroyed like other great nations, from within.

For to keep the home together, to look properly after husband and children, fulfilling daily a thousand acts of duty that no one else can, that is the work for which woman was born, and in the main it is very strenuous work, engaging every faculty of heart and brain, and not all the successes of women who usurp men's places and professions will leave the mark on posterity that this one, by the bringing up of her sons, the molding of her husband, will.

There is a third reason for the decay in courtesy between men and women- and perhaps it is the saddest and most menacing to all our womanhood (being as it is almost a direct result of the two reasons I have given above). It is when a certain type of girl realizes that in addition to the scarcity of men her chances of marriage are still further reduced by the depredations of older women, and too often she becomes a freelance, picking up eagerly a bit of pleasure here and there and gradually cheapening herself to the restaurant or the theater, the smoke and the whisky-and-soda girl, who no more exacts fine manners from man than he expects them of her.

Probably there is no real vice in her, but knowing that there is no fun possible to her without a man to take her about, she drifts into a false position, and sometimes, very rarely, is married by a man whose reputation is as off-color as her own. For men worth having decline to marry the girls who place their good looks, their charm, their agreeable company at the disposal of chance comrades. 

As a rule a man marries because he wants some particular woman all to himself, but is it to be wondered at that between his disgust at grandmothers, who ape the manners of girls of 16, and contempt for the facile girls who will go anywhere, do anything he pleases, a man’s own manners and self-restraints, and he decides not to marry at all?

With the whole dessert laid on the table before him, he reckons that he would be a fool to sit down for the rest of his life with an especial fruit or diet, and, often disgusted with the profusion, he turns his back on the banquet and will have none of it. If a man of breeding (and though some female members of the aristocracy set the worst examples of all, their men who despise them, never show it) he will keep silence, and only by his avoidance of women show his contempt for them, but the harshest misogynist of them all may have all the harm light women who have done him undone by a single good one, and if he go sufficiently far afield, he can still find her.

For as surely as violets hide under their green leaves, and come back year by year to rejoice our hearts, so surely do good, pretty and charming girls lurk In this island of ours, only awaiting the resolute seeker, breathing that atmosphere of womaliness, of charm, natural to them as the perfume is to the violet, being the emanation of physical, moral and mental health. From them you will get the old fashioned, pretty manner that answered so much better with our mothers and grandmothers, that answered so much better (in the matter of lovers) than the rude, the carneying and the so-called fascinating one of to-day. 

Roughly, then, we may divide women into two classes nowadays, those who use violent, and meretricious means to attract men for mercenary purposes. and women who deliberately revolt men by their aggressively rude manners, claiming not only an equal status, but an actual superiority over them in physique, brains and position, so that one might suppose their aim to be a race of brainy Amazons, placing pigmy man behind them for protection and patronage.

That women must work is one of the sad conditions of their overpowering 1.umbers; it may also be taken as granted that no woman likes long and sustained effort, for which, as fashioned by nature, she is eminently unfitted; still she can do that work quietly if she pleases, and there is no need to antagonize by her attitude th by nature, she is eminently unfitted; still she can do that work quietly if she pleases, and there is no need to antagonize by her attitude the only legitimate worker in the open market that God and nature ever intended man.

As I said before, work she has enough at home, and to spare. Let her then, with her sisters, turn over a new leaf- the grandmothers discard their wigs and capering foolishnesses, the married women who cannot live without admiration turn to the cultivation of their homes, the girls who are contemptuously allowed to share men’s pleasures emigrate, and become honest wives of honest men; then, though there must still remain a vast amount of suffering, incomplete womanhood, we may look for a return of those pretty manners in women that men secretly cherish so deeply, and to meet which their homage, so long forgotten, will inevitably spring again. – By Helen Mathers in the San Francisco Call, 1904

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