The Pittsburgh Press (September 28, 1946)
Ruark: Girls vs. guys
By Robert C. Ruark
NEW YORK – Ever since the first caveman bounced a club off the skull of his ladylove, and the little girl retaliated with a well-aimed mammoth’s tusk, there has been a certain amount of conflict between the hes and the shes.
This elemental enmity, I am sorry to say, has not lessened of late, but seems to have increased fourfold since the war.
The girls have been a little edgy recently, prone to fly off the handle and hurl things. The boys haven’t been much better.
While the late Miss Louise Strittmater of Bloomfield, New Jersey, was advocating the mandatory killing of all males at birth, a Boston guy was seeking a police permit to beat up his bride.
Things are strained all around the neighborhood.
I have been interviewing the ardent feminist who lives in my house, and she says that ladies are just losing interest in putting a high sheen on a dirty dish, and in spending their evenings listening to the master tell everybody how wonderful he is.
She says the girls went to work and lived alone and didn’t mind it during the war, and there are better things than making beds and living in the kitchen.
Women starting to organize
It sounds ominous. You see where a hunter, in Logansport, Indiana, mistook a lady’s hat for a turtle and cracked down on it, killing the lady. That is a tough commentary on millinery, in keeping with the New York bus driver’s heaving a lady off the bus because he thought her bare midriff play suit immodest.
A sailor emits a low whistle in the direction of a couple of local chorines, and one of the gals bats him on the head with a handbag – which any man knows, is assault with a deadly weapon.
At approximately the same time, an unidentified gal takes a poke at a gent who falls right down and dies before they can get him to the hospital. Bystanders said the woman was a young blond, which reaffirms my faith in my old man’s advice about blonds.
Marriage with an ‘out’
In a recent divorce case, it was testified that the concert-planist wife of a millionaire tried to alienate her child against his father by referring to pop as “a bad daddy” and “a stupid man.” The wife countered with the charge that pop taught little Buster to tell mommie to “go to hell.”
Probably after reading charges that Edmund Wilson, the book critic, took a swing at his jewel, and observing the counter charges concerning Mrs. W.’s alleged kicking, bing, scratching and attempts at arson, a guy in Omaha applied for a marriage license with an “out” clause in it.
He included provisions allowing him a divorce after a year’s trial, if the bride didn’t pan out according to expectations. He also stipulated that, in such a case, divorce costs would be paid by the lady.
I don’t know what’s biting the dollars, but it scares me when I see a whole Life magazine layout showing how a girl of nine has so thoroughly mastered jiu-jitsu that she is now teaching classes in the fine art of subduing 200-pound bruisers. What are these dames plotting, a revolution?
Where it all will lead, I cannot say, but this I know. I find myself more and more often in the kitchen, wearing a neat dimity apron and a dishcloth as the badge of my dominance in the tepee.
Yes, Dear, I know it’s time for dinner, but I had a little accident with the potatoes. Yes, dear.