She shook her head.
“I know it must seem impossible to you, Jane, may I call you Jane? But it is so. I am an old woman now, nearly eighty, and in all my long life I have never seen a man save in old pictures and photographs. Drink your sherry, my dear. It will do you good.” She paused. “I’m afraid this upsets you.”
I obeyed, too bewildered for further comment at the moment, protesting inwardly, yet not altogether disbelieving, for certainly I had not seen one man, nor sign of any. She went on quietly, giving me time to collect my wits: “I can understand a little how you must feel. I haven’t had to learn all my history entirely from books, you see. When I was a girl, sixteen or seventeen, I used to listen to my grandmother. She was as old then as I am now, but her memory was still very good. I was able almost to see the places she talked about but they were part of such a different world that it was difficult for me to understand how she felt. When she spoke about the young man she had been engaged to, tears would roll down her cheeks, even then not just for him, of course, but for the whole world that she had known as a girl. I was sorry for her, although I could not really understand how she felt. How should I? But now that I am old, too, and have read so much, I am perhaps a little nearer to understanding her feelings, I think.” She looked at me curiously. And you, my dear. Perhaps you, too, were engaged to be married?”
“I was married for a little time,” I told her.
She contemplated that for some seconds, then: “It must be a very strange experience to be owned,” she remarked, reflectively.
“Owned?” I exclaimed, in astonishment.
“Ruled by a husband,” she explained, sympathetically.
I stared at her.
“But it, it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like that at all,” I protested. “It was” But there I broke off, with tears too close. To sheer her away I asked: “But what happened? What on earth happened to the men?”
“They all died,” she told me. “They fell sick. Nobody could do anything for them, so they died. In little more than a year they were all gone all but a very few.”
“But surely, surely everything would collapse?”
“Oh, yes. Very largely it did. It was very bad. There was a dreadful lot of starvation. The industrial parts were the worst hit, of course. In the more backward countries and in rural areas women were able to turn to the land and till it to keep themselves and their children alive, but almost all the large organisations broke down entirely. Transport ceased very soon: petrol ran out, and no coal was being mined. It was quite a dreadful state of affairs because although there were a great many women, and they had outnumbered the men, in fact, they had only really been important as consumers and spenders of money. So when the crisis came it turned out that scarcely any of them knew how to do any of the important things because they had nearly all been owned by men, and had to lead their lives as pets and parasites.”
I started to protest, but her frail hand waved me aside.
“It wasn’t their fault, not entirely,” she explained. “They were caught up in a process, and everything conspired against their escape. It was a long process, going right back to the eleventh century, in Southern France. The Romantic conception started there as an elegant and amusing fashion for the leisured classes. Gradually, as time went on, it permeated through most levels of society, but it was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that its commercial possibilities were intelligently perceived, and not until the twentieth that it was really exploited.
“At the beginning of the twentieth century women were starting to have their chance to lead useful, creative, interesting lives. But that did not suit commerce: it needed them much more as mass consumers than as producers except on the most routine levels. So Romance was adopted and developed as a weapon against their further progress and to promote consumption, and it was used intensively.
“Women must never for a moment be allowed to forget their sex, and compete as equals. Everything had to have a “feminine angle” which must be different from the masculine angle, and be dinned in without ceasing. It would have been unpopular for manufacturers actually to issue an order “back to the kitchen,” but there were other ways. A profession without a difference, called “housewife,” could be invented. The kitchen could be glorified and made more expensive; it could be made to seem desirable, and it could be shown that the way to realise this heart’s desire was through marriage. So the presses turned out, by the hundred thousand a week, journals which concentrated the attention of women ceaselessly and relentlessly upon selling themselves to some man in order that they might achieve some small, uneconomic unit of a home upon which money could be spent.
“Whole trades adopted the romantic approach and the glamour was spread thicker and thicker in the articles, the writeups, and most of all in the advertisements. Romance found a place in everything that women might buy from underclothes to motorcycles, from “health” foods to kitchen stoves, from deodorants to foreign travel, until soon they were too bemused to be amused any more.
“The air was filled with frustrated moanings. Women maundered in front of microscopes yearning only to “surrender,” and “give themselves,” to adore and to be adored. The cinema most of all maintained the propaganda, persuading the main and important part of their audience, which was female, that nothing in life was worth achieving but dewy-eyed passivity in the strong arms of Romance. The pressure became such that the majority of young women spent all their leisure time dreaming of Romance, and the means of securing it. They were brought to a state of honesty believing that to be owned by some man and set down in a little brick box to buy all the things that the manufacturers wanted them to buy would be the highest form of bliss that life could offer.”
“But” I began to protest again. The old lady was now well launched, however, and swept on without a check.
“All this could not help distorting society, of course. The divorce rate went up. Real life simply could not come near to providing the degree of romantic glamour which was being represented as every girl’s proper inheritance. There was probably, in the aggregate, more disappointment, disillusion, and dissatisfaction among women than there had ever been before. Yet, with this ridiculous and ornamented ideal grained in by unceasing propaganda, what could a conscientious idealist do but take steps to break up the short-weight marriage she had made, and seek elsewhere for the ideal which was hers, she understood, by right?
“It was a wretched state of affairs brought about by deliberately promoted dissatisfaction; a kind of rat-race with, somewhere safely out of reach, the glamorised romantic ideal always luring. Perhaps an exceptional few almost attained it, but, for all except those very few, it was a cruel, tantalising sham on which they spent themselves, and of course their money, in vain.”
This time I did get in my protest.
“But it wasn’t like that. Some of what you say may be true, but that’s all the superficial part. It didn’t feel a bit like the way you put it. I was in it. I know.”
She shook her head reprovingly.
“There is such a thing as being too close to make a proper evaluation. At a distance we are able to see more clearly. We can perceive it for what it was a gross and heartless exploitation of the weaker-willed majority. Some women of education and resolution were able to withstand it, of course, but at a cost. There must always be a painful price for resisting majority pressure even they could not always, altogether escape the feeling that they might be wrong, and that the rat-racers were having the better time of it.