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Cocksure
Women and Hensure Men
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It
seems to me there are two aspects to women. Their is the demure
and the dauntless. Men have loved to dwell, in fiction at least,
on the demure maiden whose inevitable reply is: Oh, yes, if you
please, killd sir! The demure maiden, the demure spouse, the
demure mother – this is is still the ideal. A few maidens,
mistresses and mothers are demure. A few pretend to be. But the
vast majority are not. And they don't pretend to be. We don't
expect a girl skilfuly driving her car to be demure, we expect her
to be daultless. What good would demure and maidenly Members of
Parliament be, inevitably responding: Oh, yes, if you please, kind
sir! - Though of course there are masculine members of that
kidney. - And a demure telephone girl? Or even a demure
stenographer? Demureness, to be sure, is outwardly becoming, it is
an outward mark of femininity, like bobbed hair. But it goes with
inward dauntlessness. The girl who has got to make her way in life
has got to be dauntless, and if she llas a pretty , demure manner
with it, the luck girl. She kills two birds with two stones.
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With the two kinds of femininity go two kinds of confidence: There are
the women who are cocksure, and the women who are hensure. A really
up-to-date woman is a cocksl1re woman. She doesn't have a doubt nor a
qualm. She is the modern type. Whereas the old-fashioned demure woman
was sure as a hen is sure, that is, without knowing anything about it.
She went quietly and busily clucking around, laying the eggs and
rnothering the chickens in a kind of anxious dream that still was full
of sureness. But not mental sureness. Her sureness was a physical
condition, very soothing, but a condition out of which she could easily
be startled or frightened.
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It
is quite amusing to see the two kinds of sureness in chickens. The
cockel"el is, naturally, cocksure. He crows because he is
certain it is day. Then the hen peeps out from under her wing. He
marches to the door of the henhouse and pokes out his head
assertively: Ah ha! daylight, of course,Just as I saId! - and he
majestically steps down the chicken ladder towards terra firma,
knowing that the hens will step cautiously after him, drawn by his
confidence. So after him, cautiously, step the hens. He crows
again: .Ha-ha! here we are!-It is indisputable, and the hens
accept it entirely. He marches towards the house. From the house a
person ought to appear, scattering corn. Why does the person' not
appear? The cock will see to it. He is cocksure. He gives a loud
crow in the doorway, and the person appears. The hens are suitably
impressed but immediately devote all their henny consciousness to
the scattered corn, pecking absorbedly, while the cock runs and
fusses, cocksure that he is responsible for it all.
So the day goes on. The cock finds a tit-bit, and loudly calls the
hens. They scuffle up in henny surety , and gobble the tit-bit.
But when they find a juicy morsel for themselves, they devour it
in silence, hensure. Unless, of course, there are little chicks,
when they most anxiously call the brood. But in her own dim
surety, the hen is really much surer than the cock, in a different
way. She marches off to lay her egg, she secures obstinately the
nest she wants, she lays her egg at las~t, then steps forth again
with prancing confidence, and gives that most assured of all
sounds, the hensure cackle of a bird who has laid her egg. The
cock, who is never so sure about anything as the hen is about the
egg she has laid, immediately starts to cackle like the female of
his species. He is pining to be hensure, for hensure is so much
surer than cocksure.Nevertheless, cocksure is boss. When the
chicken-hawk appears in the sky, loud are the cockerel's calls of
alarm. Then the hens scuffle under the verandah, the cock ruffles
his feathers on guard. The hens are numb with fear, they say:
Alas, there is no health in us! How wonderful to be a cock so
bold! - And they huddle, numbed.But ,their very numbness is
hensurety.
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Just
as the cock can cackle, however, as if he had laid the egg, so can
the hen bird crow. She can more or less assum his cocksureness.
And yet she is never so easy, cocksure, as she, used to be when
she was hensure. Cocksure, she Is cocksure, but uneasy. Hensure,
she trembles, but is easy.
It seems to me just the same in the vast human farmyard. Only
nowadays all the cocks are cackling and pretending to lay eggs,
and all the hens are crowiqg and pretending to call the sun out of
bed. If women today are cocksure, men are hensure. Men are timid,
tremulous, rather soft and submissive, easy in their very henlike
tremulousness. They only want to ,be spoken to gently. So the
women step forth with a good loud cock-a-doodle-do!
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The
targedy about cocksure women is that they are more cocky, in their
assurance,than the cock himself.They never realize that when the
cock gives his loud crow in the morning,he listens acutely
afterwards,to hear if some other wretch of a cock dare crow
defiance, challenge.To the cock,there is always
defiance,challenge,danger and death on the clear air;or the
possibility thereof.
But alas, when the hen crows, she listens for no defiance or
challenge. When she says cock-a-doodle-do! then it is
unanswerable. The cock listens for an answer, alert. But the hen
knows she is unanswerable. Cock-a-doodle-do! and there it is, take
it or leave it!
And it is this that makes the cocksureness of women so dangerous,
so devastating. It is really out of scheme, it is not in relation
to the rest of things. So we have the tragedy of cocksure women.They
find, so often, that instead of having laid an egg, they have laid
a vote,or an empty ink-bottle, or some other absolutely
unhatchable object, which means nothing to them.
It is the tragedy of the modern woman. She becomes cocksure, she
puts all her passion and energy and years of her life into some
effort or assertion, without ever listening for the denial which
she ought to take into count. She is cocksure, but she is a hen
all the time. Frightened of her own benny self, she rushes to mad
lengths about votes, or welfare, or sports, or business: she is
marvellous, out-manning the man. But alas, it is all fundamentally
disconnected. It is all an attitude, and one day the attitude will
become a weird cramp, a pain,' and then it will collapse. And when
it has corapseda. and she looks at the eggs she has laid, votes,or
miles of typewriting, years of business efficiency suddenly,
because she is a hen and not a cock, all she has done will turn
into pure nothingness to her . Suddenly it all falls out of
relation to her basic henny self, and she realizes she has lost
her life. The lovely henny surety, the hensureness which is the
real bliss of every female, has been denied her: she had never had
it. Having lived her life with such utmost strenuousness and
cocksureness, she has missed her life altogether. Nothingness! .
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