Really, this article could run on forever. There’s that particularly manlike attitude of accusing women of slavishly following the fashions! Funny, isn’t it, when you think about it? Do you think a man would wear a striped tie with a morning coat when his haberdasher says others are wearing plain gray? Or a straw hat before the
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fifteenth of May? Have you ever watched the mental struggle between a dinner suit and evening clothes? Do you suppose that women, realizing that the costume they wore was the ugliest ever devised, would continue wearing it because everyone else did? And then look at men’s trousers and derby hats!
It is men who are the slaves, double chained, of fashion. The only comfortable innovation in men’s clothes made in a century was when some brave spirit originated the shirtwaist man. Women saw its comfort, adopted and retained the shirtwaist. But the leaders of male fashion dictated that comfort was bad form, and on went all the coats again. Irvin Cobb is undoubtedly going to say that it is just like a woman to wear no flannels in winter, and silk hose, and generally go about half clad. But men are as over-dressed in summer as women are under-dressed in winter.
But in spite of this slavish following of fashion, men are really more rational than women. They have the same mental processes. For that reason they understand each other. Like the village fool who found the lost horse by thinking where he would go if he were a horse, a man knows what another man will do by fancying himself in the same circumstances. And women are called designing because they have fathomed this fundamental simplicity of the male! A woman’s emotions and her sensations and her thoughts are all
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complexes. She doesn’t know herself what she is going to do, and is frequently more astounded than anyone else at what she does do. It’s a lot harder being a woman than a man.
So—women know men better than men know women, and are rather like the little boy’s definition of a friend: “A friend is a feller who knows all about you, and likes you anyhow.”
We do like them, dreadfully. Sometimes women have sighed and wondered what the house would be like without overcoats thrown
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