Spoilt Women

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Title:     Spoilt Women
Author: E. Lynn Linton [More Titles by Linton]

Like children and all soft things, women are soon spoilt if subjected to unwholesome conditions. Sometimes the spoiling comes from over-harshness, sometimes from over-indulgence; what we are speaking of to-day is the latter condition--the spoiling which comes from being petted and given way to and indulged, till they think themselves better than everybody else, and as if living under laws made specially for them alone. Men get spoilt too in the same manner; but for the most part there is a tougher fibre in them, which resists the flabby influences of flattery and exaggerated attention better than can the morale of the weaker sex; and, besides, even arbitrary men meet with opposition in certain directions, and the most self-contented social autocrat knows that his humblest adherents criticise though they dare not oppose.

A man who has been spoilt by success and a gratified ambition, so that he thinks himself a small Alexander in his own way, and able to conquer any obstacles which may present themselves, has a certain high-handed activity of will about him that does not interfere with his duties in life; he is not made fretful and impatient and exigeant as a woman is--as if he alone of all mankind is to be exempt from misfortune and annoyances; as if his friends must never die, his youth never fade, his circumstances run always smoothly, protected by the care of others from all untoward hitch; and as if time and tide, which wait for no one else, are to be bound to him as humble servants dutifully observant of his wishes.

The useful art of "finding his level," which he learnt at school and in his youth generally, keeps him from any very weak manifestation of being spoilt; save, indeed, when he has been spoilt by women at home, nursed up by an adoring wife, and a large circle of wife's sisters almost as adoring, to all of whom his smallest wishes are religious obligations, and his faintest virtues godly graces, and who vie with each other which of them shall wait upon him most servilely, flatter him most outrageously, pet and coax and coddle him most entirely, and so do him the largest amount of spiritual damage, and unfit him most thoroughly for the worth and work of masculine life. A man subjected to this insidious injury is simply ruined so far as any real manliness of nature goes. He is made into that sickening creature, "a sweet being," as the women call him--a woman's man, with flowing hair and a turn for poetry, full of highflown sentiment, and morbidly excited sympathies; a man almost as much woman as man, who has no backbone of ambition in him, but who puts his whole life into love, just as women do, and who becomes at last emphatically not worth his salt.

Bad as it is for a man to be kowtowed by men, it is not so bad, because not so weakening, as the domestic idolatry which sometimes goes on when one man is the centre of a large family of women, and the only object upon which the natural feminine instinct can expend itself. No greater damage can be done to a man than is done by this kind of domestic idolatry. But, in truth, the evil is too pleasant to be resisted; and there is scarcely a man so far master of himself as to withstand the subtle intoxication, the sweet and penetrating poison, of woman's tender flattery and loving submission. To at certain extent it is so entirely the right thing, because it is natural and instinctive, that it is difficult to draw the line and map out exactly the division between right and wrong, pleasantness and harmfulness, and where loving submission ends and debasing slavishness begins.

Spoilt women are spoilt mainly from a like cause--over-attention from men. A few certainly are to be found, as pampered daughters, with indulgent mammas and subservient aunts given up wholly to ruining their young charge with the utmost despatch possible; but this is comparatively a rare form of the disease, and one which a little wholesome matrimonial discipline would soon cure. For it is seldom that a petted daughter becomes a spoilt wife, human affairs having that marvellous power of compensation, that inevitable tendency to readjust the balance, which prevents the continuance of a like excess under different forms.

Besides, a spoilt daughter generally makes such a supremely unpleasant wife that the husband has no inducement to continue the mistake, and therefore either lowers her tone by a judicious exhibition of snubbing, or, if she is aggressive as well as unpleasant, leaves her to fight with her shadows in the best way she can, glad for his own part to escape the strife she will not forego. One characteristic of the spoilt woman is her impatience of anything like rivalry. She never has a female friend--certainly not one of her own degree, and not one at all in the true sense of the word. Friendship presupposes equality, and a spoilt woman knows no equality. She has been so long accustomed to consider herself as the lady-paramount that she cannot understand it if any one steps in to share her honors and divide her throne.

To praise the beauty of any other woman, to find her charming, or to pay her the attention due to a charming woman, is to insult our spoilt darling, and to slight her past forgiveness. If there is only one good thing, it must be given to her--the first seat, the softest cushion, the most protected situation; and she looks for the best of all things as if naturally consecrated from her birth into the sunshine of life, and as if the "cold shade" which may do for others were by no means the portion allotted to her. It is almost impossible to make the spoilt woman understand the grace or the glory of sacrifice. By rare good fortune she may sometimes be found to possess an indestructible germ of conscience which sorrow and necessity can develop into active good; but only sometimes. The spoilt woman par excellence understands only her own value, only her own merits and the absolutism of her own requirements; and sacrifice, self-abnegation, and the whole class of virtues belonging to unselfishness are as much unknown to her as is the Decalogue in the original, or the squaring of the circle.

The spoilt woman as the wife of an unsuccessful husband or the mother of sickly children is a pitiable spectacle. If it comes to her to be obliged to sacrifice her usual luxuries, to make an old gown serve when a new one is desired, to sit up all night watching by the sick bed, to witness the painful details of illness, perhaps of death, to meet hardship face to face, and to bend her back to the burden of sorrow, she is at the first absolutely lost. Not the thing to be done, but her own discomfort in doing it, is the one master idea--not others' needs, but her own pain in supplying them, the great grief of the moment. Many are the hard lessons set us by life and fate, but the hardest of all is that given to the spoilt woman when she is made to think for others rather than for herself, and is forced by the exigencies of circumstances to sacrifice her own ease for the greater necessities of her kind.

All that large part of the perfect woman's nature which expresses itself in serving is an unknown function to the spoilt woman. She must be waited on, but she cannot in her turn serve even the one or two she loves. She is the woman who calls her husband from one end of the room to the other to put down her cup, rather than reach out her arm and put it down for herself; who, however weary he may be, will bid him get up and ring the bell, though it is close to her own hand, and her longest walk during the day has been from the dining-room to the drawing-room. It is not that she cannot do these small offices for herself, but that she likes the feeling of being waited on and attended to; and it is not for love--and the amiable if weak pleasure of attracting the notice of the beloved--it is just for the vanity of being a little somebody for the moment, and of playing off the small regality involved in the procedure. She would not return the attention.

Unlike the Eastern women, who wait on their lords, hand and foot, and who place their highest honor in their lowliest service, the spoilt woman of Western life knows nothing of the natural grace of womanly serving for love, for grace, or for gratitude. This kind of thing is peculiarly strong among the demi-monde of the higher class, and among women who are not of the demi-monde by station, but by nature. The respect they cannot command by their virtues they demand in the simulation of manner; and perhaps no women are more tenacious of the outward forms of deference than those who have lost their claim to the vital reality.

It is very striking to see the difference between the women of this type, the petites maîtresses who require the utmost attention and almost servility from man, and the noble dignity of service which the pure woman can afford to give--which she finds, indeed, that it belongs to the very purity and nobleness of her womanhood to give. It is the old story of the ill-assured position which is afraid of its own weakness, and the security which can afford to descend--the rule holding good for other things besides mere social place.

Another characteristic of the spoilt woman is the changeableness and excitability of her temper. All suavity and gentleness and delightful gaiety and perfect manners when everything goes right, she startles you by her outburst of petulance when the first cross comes. If no man is a hero to his valet, neither is a spoilt woman a heroine to her maid; and the lady who has just been the charm of the drawing-room, upstairs in her boudoir makes her maid go through spiritual exercises to which walking on burning ploughshares is the only fit analogy. A length of lace unstarched, a ribbon unsewed, a flower set awry, anything that crumples only one of the myriad rose-leaves on which she lies, and the spoilt woman raves as much as if each particular leaf had become suddenly beset with thorns.

If a dove was to be transformed to a hawk the change would not be more complete, more startling, than that which occurs when the spoilt woman of well-bred company manners puts off her mask to her maid, and shows her temper over trifles. Whoever else may suffer the grievances of life, she cannot understand that she also must be at times one of the sufferers with the rest; and if by chance the bad moment comes, the person accompanying it has a hard time of it. There are spoilt women also who have their peculiar exercises in thought and opinion, and who cannot suffer that any one should think differently from themselves, or find those things sacred which to them are accursed. They will hear nothing but what is in harmony with themselves, and they take it as a personal insult when men or women attempt to reason with them, or even hold their own without flinching.

This kind is to be found specially among the more intellectual of a family or a circle; women who are pronounced "clever" by their friends, and who have been so long accustomed to think themselves clever that they have become spoilt mentally as others are personally, and fancy that minds and thoughts must follow in their direction, just as eyes and hands must follow and attend their sisters. The spoilt woman of the mental kind is a horrid nuisance generally. She is greatly given to large discourse; but discourse of a kind that leans all to one side, and that denies the right of any one to criticise, doubt, or contradict, is an intellectual Tower of Pisa under the shadow of which it is not pleasant to live.

[The end]
E. Lynn Linton's essay: Spoilt Women

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