XXXV. Bah! Bah!

T

Black Sheep!

HE Girl Anarchist, leader of food-riots, fiery soap-box orator, has reformed—and written a book about it.

Her reformation is another tribute to the purifying and ennobling influence of the Great War. For it was in America's entrance into that idealistic conflict that she rediscovered her patriotism, found herself beautifully at one with the American people. Her book does not state that she became a Red Cross nurse; life does in some respects fall short of the perfect contours of popular fiction. No doubt she wanted to be one; but then her Young Man (for Love played a part in her conversion, too, just as according to the best-paid editorial standards, it should)—her very nice Young Man, who had all along regarded her anarchistic career with a pained expression as something not quite ladylike-this Hero himself falls short of the Saturday Evening Post standard, being unable by reason of bad eyesight to join the army; so perhaps that made it unnecessary for her to become a nurse. But I feel

cheated a little, I must confess-the last chapters should bring them together on the battlefield: I miss the accustomed climax.

I cannot help laughing. But the joke, as I see it, is not precisely on the Girl Anarchist. It is rather on the bourgeois society which, I gather, now nourishes her in its bosom. I can see those sweet Christian ladies crooning over the poor little thing, who is really, you know, a perfect darling!—or so I hear them telling each other after having motored her home from a fashionable tea. And how, I ask myself, would the Girl Anarchist ever have achieved those motor rides and those teas and the adulation of the Christian rich, except by the firebrand route? No, if she had been good, and believed in the American flag and the country for which it stands, etc., she would still be in the sweatshop, working her fingers to the bone, and looking with vain and futile longing at the Pollyanna underwear advertisements in a last month's magazine. It was certainly a lucky day for her when she first took to the soapbox! Pious respectability, like the Good Shepherd, is more concerned about the one lost sheep, especially the little black sheep that wilfully goes off and loses itself, than with the ninety-and-nine who are safe in the sweatshop. Yes, the Girl Anarchist certainly put something over!

But what of the effect of this confession upon the ninety-and-nine? When they learn that the re

pentant sinner is more rejoiced over than all the saints in heaven, will they not want to try the same road to glory? One trembles for the East Side.

It opens up a new career for ambitious young women. Consider the perfectly nice Young Man who is personally instrumental in converting the heroine of this book: would he have been so interested in her if she hadn't been so desperately in need of conversion? Didn't he have a thrill of pride at the idea that it took him to rescue this brand from the burning? And now I come to think of it, the thing might work the other way. Doubt

less there are Nice Young Women who would ask nothing better than to teach true Americanism and the proper use of oyster-forks to some not unpulchritudinous young dynamiter of the masculine gender! The vista grows wider.

1920

XXXVI. Where Do We

B

Go from Here, Girls?

ECAUSE a man begins his life as a child

his first consciousness of Woman is as The Boss. At times At times a delightful playmate, and again at times a superior and divine being, yet she is essentially the Boss of the Home. Father comes in and interferes, distributes rewards and punishments capriciously, and makes himself respected and envied. But Mother is always on the job. She tells our infant citizen what he can and can't do. She makes him wash behind the ears. She forbids him to go with the other boys to the ol' swimmin' hole. She won't allow him to use slang, and scrubs his mouth with soap when he attempts a manly swear-word. She tells him fighting is wicked. She won't let him play marbles for keeps. She teaches him "pretty manners." She makes him go to Sunday School. She wants him, in short, to be a Nice Boy.

He escapes with relief into a masculine world in which he can do as he pleases. When he marries, he comes under the feminine yoke again, but only

he thanks heaven-within the walls of his home. There is still the great rowdy, vulgar, exciting man's world outside.

Politics has always been a part of that man's world. He doesn't want it spoiled by the intrusion of women. But that isn't all. Politics is a small part of life for the ordinary man. What he is really afraid of is that women are going to spoil it all. They are going to run everything and everybody. Life generally is going to be nice and clean and pretty—and, O sorrowing Satan!-pure! No card-playing! No horse-racing! No boozing! No wenching! No naughty plays or books or pictures! No anything-except just work, and good manners and clean clothes and nice language, and saving your money, and being everlastingly good.

It might be asked by a disinterested observer from Mars where men got such an idea of women, and how they can reconcile it with their everyday observations of the sex. Why should they think women so frightfully better than themselves? The answer is that Mother was that way. She had all

the virtues and she enforced them. This original impression of womankind, one deeply cherished by every male, seems to be stronger than any subsequent impression. A particular woman may be devilish enough; but Woman is divine-she is a terrible and efficient angelic guardian of man—an Angel Boss.