| <Saturday Review, 1 May 1869, 576-8>
| <Eliza Lynn Linton>
| <APRON-STRINGS.>
| <etext downloaded from Project Gutenberg with thanks>
| Among other classifications, the world of men and women may be divided
| into those who wear aprons and those who are tied to the strings
| thereof ~~ those who determine the length of the tether and those who
| are bound to browse within its circuit ~~ those who hold the reins and
| those who go bitted. All men and women are fond of power, but there is
| a wide difference in the ways in which they use it. To men belong the
| grave political tyrannies at which nations revolt and history is
| outraged, to women the small conventional laws framed against
| individual liberty by Mrs. Grundy and society; men rule with rods of
| iron and drive with whips of steel, women shorten the tether and tie
| up close to apron-strings; men coerce, women forbid. In fact, the
| difference is just that which lies between action and negation,
| compulsion and restraint; between the masculine jealousy of equality
| and the feminine fear of excess. If men debar women from all entrance
| into their larger sphere, women try to dwarf men's lives to their own
| measure, and not a few hold themselves aggrieved when they fail. They
| think that everything which is impossible to them should be
| forbidden to others, and they maintain that to be a lamentable extreme
| which is simply in excess of their own powers. Not content with
| supremacy in the home which is their own undisputed domain, nor
| satisfied with binding on men the various rules distinguishing life in
| the drawing-room, the dining-room and the breakfast-parlour, they
| would, if they could, carry their code outside, and sweep into its
| narrow net the club-house and the mess-table, the billiard-room and
| the race-course, and wherever else men congregate together ~~ delivered
| from the bondage of feminine conventionalities.
| For almost all women have an uneasy feeling when their men are out of
| sight, enjoying themselves in their own way. They fear on all
| sides ~~ both bodily harm and moral evil; and regard men's rougher
| sports and freer thoughts as a hen regards her wilful ducklings when
| they take to the water in which she would be drowned, and leave her
| high and dry lamenting their danger and self-destruction. The man they
| love best for his manliness they would, in their loving cowardice, do
| their utmost to make effeminate; and, while adoring him for all that
| makes him bold and strong in thought as well as in frame, they would
| tie him up to their apron-strings, and keep him there till he became
| as soft and narrow as themselves. Not that they would wish to do so;
| if you asked them they would tell you quite the contrary. But this
| would be the result if they had their own way, their love being
| at all times more timid than confident.
| To home-staying women, a brilliant husband courted by the world and
| loving what courts him, is a painful cross to bear, however much he
| may be beloved ~~ the pain, in fact, being proportionate to the love.
| Perhaps no life exemplifies this so much as Moore's. 
| Poor <p> "Bessy" </p>
| suffered many things because of the looseness of the apron-string by
| which her roving husband was tied, and the length of the tether which
| he allowed himself. <hi> Farfallone amoroso </hi> as he was, 
| his incessant
| flutterings out of range and reach caused her many a sad hour; and in
| after years she was often heard to say that the happiest time of her
| life was when his mind had begun to fail, for then she had him all to
| herself and <reg orig=”no one”>no-one</reg> came in between them ~~ 
| no great world swept him away to be the idol of a <hi> salon </hi>, 
| and left her alone at home casting up her accounts with 
| life and love, and quaking at the result that came out.
| When the brilliancy and the idolatry came to an end, then her turn
| began; and she tied up her dulled and faltering idol close to her side
| for ever after, and was happier to have him there helpless,
| affectionate, dependent and imbecile than when he was at his 
| brightest ~~ and a rover.
| Many a wife has felt the same when sickness has broken down the strong
| man's power to a weakness below her own, and made her, so long the
| inferior, now the more powerful of the two, and the supreme. She
| gathers up the reins with that firm, tight hand peculiar to
| women, and ties her master to her apron-string so that he cannot
| escape. It is quite a matter of pride with her that she has got him
| into such good order. He obeys her so implicitly about his medicines,
| and going to bed early, and wrapping himself up, and avoidance of
| draughts and night-air, that she feels all the reflected glory of one
| who has conquered a hero. The Samson who used to defy the elements and
| break her careful strings like bands of tow, has at last laid his head
| in her lap and suffered himself to be covered by her apron. It is
| worth while to have had the anxiety and loss of his illness for the
| sake of the submission resulting; and she generally ends by gaining a
| hold over him which he can never shake off again.
| It is pitiful though, to see the stronger life thus dwarfed and bound.
| But women like it; and while the need for it lasts men must submit.
| The danger is lest the habit of the apron-string should become
| permanent; for it is so perilously pleasant to be petted and made much
| of by women, that few men can resist the temptation when it offers;
| and many have been ruined for the remainder of their days by an
| illness which gave them up into the keeping of 
| wife and sisters ~~ those
| fireside Armidas who will coddle all the real manliness out of their
| finest heroes, if they are let. If this kind of thing occurs at the
| break of life, the <hi> mezzo cammino </hi> between 
| maturity and age, it is
| doubly difficult to throw off; and many a man who had good years
| of vigour and strength, before him if he had been kept up to the mark,
| sinks all at once into senility because his womankind got frightened
| at that last small attack of his, and thought the best way to preserve
| him from another was to weaken him by over-care out of all wish for
| dangerous exposure.
| Perhaps the greatest misfortune that can befall a man is to have been
| an only son brought up by a timid widow mother. It is easy to see at a
| glance, among a crowd of boys, who has been educated under exclusively
| feminine influence. The long curled shining hair, the fantastic
| tunic ~~ generally a kind of hybrid between a tunic and a frock ~~ the
| lavish use of embroidery, the soft pretty-behaved manner, the clean
| unroughened hands, all mark the boy of whom his mother has so often
| wished that he had been a girl, and whom she has made as much like a
| girl as possible. His intellectual education has been as unboylike as
| his daily breeding. Mothers' boys are taught to play the piano, to
| amuse themselves with painting, or netting, or perhaps a little
| woolwork in the evenings ~~ anything to keep them quietly seated by the
| family table, without an outbreak of boyish restlessness or
| inconvenient energy; but they are never taught to ride, to hunt, to
| shoot, to swim, to play at cricket, football, nor billiards, unless a
| stalwart uncle happens to be about who takes the reins in his own hand
| at times, and insists on having a word to say to his nephew's
| education.
| There is danger in all, and evil in some, of these things; and
| women cannot bear that those they love should run the risk of either.
| Wherefore their boys are modest and virtuous truly, but they are not
| manly; and when they go out into the world, as they must sooner or
| later, they are either laughed at for their priggishness, or they go
| to the bad by the very force of reaction. The mother has allowed them
| to learn nothing that will be of solid use to them, and they enter the
| great arena wholly unprepared either to fight or to resist, to push
| their own way or to take their own part. They have been kept tied up
| to the apron-string to the last moment, and only when absolutely
| forced by the necessity of events will she cut the knot and let them
| go free. But she holds on to the last moment. Even when the time comes
| for college-life and learning, she often goes with her darling, and
| takes lodgings in the town, that she may be near at hand to watch over
| his health and morals, and continue her careful labours for his
| destruction.
| The chances are that a youth so brought up never becomes a real man,
| nor worth his salt anyhow. He is a prig if he is good, a debauchee of
| the worst kind if he kicks over the traces at all. He is more likely
| the first, carrying the mark of the apron-string round his wrist for
| life. Like a tame falcon used to the hood and the perch and the lure
| home, no matter what the temptation of the quarry afield, he is
| essentially a domestic man, at ease only in the society of women; a
| fussy man; a small-minded man; delicate in health; with a dread
| of strong measures, physical, political, or intellectual; a crotchety
| man given to passing quackeries; but not a man fit for man's society
| nor for man's work. When there are many boys, instead of only one, in
| a widow's family, the opposite of all this is the case. So soon as
| they have escaped from the nursery, they have escaped from all control
| whatsoever; and if one wants to realize a puerile pandemonium of dirt,
| discomfort, noise and general disorganization, the best place in the
| world is the household of a feeble-spirited mother of many sons where
| there is no controlling masculine influence.
| Daughters, who are naturally and necessarily tied up to the mother's
| apron-string, suffer occasionally from too tight a strain; though
| certainly it is not the fault of the present day that girls are too
| closely fettered, too home-staying or subdued. Still, every now and
| then one comes across a matron who has crushed all individuality out
| of her family, and whose grown-up daughters are still children to her
| in moral go-carts and intellectual leading-strings. They may be the
| least attractive of their sex, but a mother of this kind has one fixed
| delusion respecting them ~~ namely, that the world is full of wolves
| eager to devour her lambs, and that they are only safe when close to
| the maternal apron and browsing within an inch of the tether stake.
| These are the girls who become hopeless old maids. Men have an
| instinctive dread of the maternal apron-string. They do not want to
| marry a mother as well as a wife, and to live under a double
| dominion and a reduplicated opposition.
| It is all very well to say that a girl so brought up is broken in
| already, and therefore more likely to make a good wife than many
| others, seeing that it is only a transfer of obedience. That may do
| for slaves who cannot be other than slaves whoever is the master; but
| it does not do for women who, seeing their friends freer than
| themselves, reflect with grief and longing that, had fate so ordered
| it, they might have been free too. The chances here, as with the
| mothers' boys, are, that the girl kept too close to the apron-string
| during her spinsterhood goes all abroad so soon as she gets on the
| free ground of matrimony, and lets her liberty run into license. Or
| she keeps her old allegiance to her mother intact, and her husband is
| never more than the younger branch at best. Most likely he is a
| usurper, whom it is her duty to disobey in favour of the rightful
| ruler when they chance to come into collision.
| If women had their will, all national enterprise would be at an end.
| There would be no Arctic Expeditions, no Alpine Clubs, no dangerous
| experiments in science, no firearms at home, 
| no volunteering ~~ in their
| own family at least. All the danger would be done by the husbands and
| brothers and sons of other women, but each would guard her own. For
| women cannot go beyond the individual; and the loss of one of their
| own, by misadventure, weighs more with them than the necessity of
| keeping up the courage and hardihood of the nation. Nor do they
| see the difference between care and coddling, refinement and
| effeminacy; consequently, men are obliged to resist their influence,
| and many cut the apron-string altogether, because delicate fingers
| will tie the knots too tight. They do not remember that the influence
| to which men yield as a voluntary act of their own grace is a very
| different thing from obedience to the open denial, the undisguised
| interference and restraint, which some women like to show. Men respect
| the higher standard of morality kept up by women; they obey the major
| and the minor laws of refinement which are framed for home life and
| for society; and they confess that, without woman's influence, they
| would soon degenerate into mere savages and be no better than so many
| Choctaws before a generation was over; but they do not like being
| pulled up short, especially in public, and hounded into the safe
| sheepfold for all the world to see them run. And they resent the
| endeavour. And the world resents it too, and feels that something is
| wrong when a woman shows that she has the whip hand, and that she can
| treat her husband like a petted child or bully him like a refractory
| one; that she has him tied to her apron-strings and tethered to the
| stake of her will. But there is more of this kind of thing in families
| than the world at large always knows of; and many a fine, stalwart
| fellow who holds his own among men, who is looked up to at his
| club and respected in his office for his courage, decision and
| self-reliance, sinks into mere poodledom at home, where his wife has
| somehow managed to get hold of the leading-strings, and has taught him
| that the only way to peace is by submission and obedience.