“The kind of pride that you describe, Professor, as belonging to the real aristocratic Europeans, is fine—I’m all for it. And I want to see just that kind of pride in America. Maybe we’ve gone too fast to get it. But as I wander around Europe, I find a whale of a lot of Americans who are going slow and quiet, and who are thinking—and not all of ’em artists and professors, by a long shot, but retired businessmen. We are getting a tradition that—Good Lord! You said you’d been lecturing. I’m afraid I have, too!”
Kurt cried “To America!” and adumbrated “Yes, America is the hope of—And of course the paradise of women.”
Fran exploded:
“Oh, that is the one most idiotic fallacy about America—and it’s just as much believed in America as in Europe—and it’s just as much mouthed by women as by men—and deep down they don’t believe a word of it! It’s my profound conviction that there’s no woman living, no real normal woman, who doesn’t want a husband who can beat her, if she deserves it—no matter though she may be president of a college or an aviator. Mind you, I don’t say she wants to be beaten, but she wants a man who can beat her! He must be a man whom she respects! She must feel that his work, or his beautiful lack of work, is more important than she is.”
Sam looked at her in mild astonishment. If anything had been certain about their controversies, it had been that Fran ought to be more important to him than his work. He tried to remember just where she had got this admirable dissertation on feminism. Certain of the phrases he traced to Renée de Pénable.
“And that’s just what you do have in Europe, and what we don’t have in America. Mind you, I’m not speaking of Sam and myself—he’s awfully competent at beating me when I deserve it!”
Her jocular glance at Sam was admiringly observed by all assembled.
“I’m just speaking generally. Oh, the American wife of the prosperous classes—sometimes even among people who have no money visible to the naked eye—has privileges for which the European woman would envy her. She doesn’t have to beg her husband for money. She has a joint bank-account. If she wants to study singing or advocate anti-vivisection or open a tearoom or dance with nasty young men at hotels, it never occurs to him to object. And so she’s supposed to be free and happy. Happy! Do you know why the American husband gives his wife so much freedom? Because he doesn’t care what she does—because he isn’t sufficiently interested in her to care! To the American man—except darlings like Sam, here—a wife is only a convenience, like his motor, and if either one of them breaks down, he takes it to a garage and leaves it and goes off whistling!”
This time her glance at Sam told him what she need not have told him, but she went on with an admirable air of impersonality:
“Whereas the European husband, if I understand it, feels that his wife is a part of him—or at least of his family honor—and he would no more permit her this fake ‘freedom’ than he would permit one of his legs to go wandering off cheerfully without the other! He likes women! And another thing. Any real woman is quite willing, no matter how clever she is, to give up her own chances of fame for her husband, providing he is doing something she can admire. She can understand sacrificing herself for the kind of civilized aristocracy that Professor Braut speaks of; she can sacrifice for a great poet or soldier or scholar; but she isn’t willing to give up all her own capabilities for the ideal of industrial America—which is to manufacture more vacuum-cleaners this year than we did last!”
Sam caught her eye. He said, very slowly, “Or more motor cars?”
She laughed. … What a jolly, pioneering, affectionate American couple they were!
She said affectionately:
“Yes, or more motors, darling!”
“And you’re probably right, at that!” he said.
Everyone laughed.
“When people talk about the American wife and the American husband,” Fran went on, “they always make the mistake of trying to find out which sex is ‘to blame.’ One person will tell you with great impressiveness that the American husband is to blame, because he’s so absorbed in his business and his men friends that he never pays any real attention to his wife. Then the next will explain that it’s the wife’s fault—‘The trouble is that when the American husband comes home all tired out after the awful rush of our business competition, he naturally wants some attention, some love from his wife, but she expects him to hustle and change his clothes and take her out to the theater or a party, because she’s been bored all day with not enough to do.’ And they’re both wrong.
