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Title: Common Sense about Women
Author: Higginson, Thomas Wentworth
Language: English
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COMMON SENSE ABOUT WOMEN
BY
THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
BOSTON
LEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK
CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM
1882
COPYRIGHT, 1881,
BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON.
_All rights reserved._
=To=
=My Little Daughter Margaret.=
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAGE
=Physiology= 5
I. TOO MUCH NATURAL HISTORY 7
II. DARWIN, HUXLEY, AND BUCKLE 11
III. WHICH IS THE STRONGER? 16
IV. THE SPIRIT OF SMALL TYRANNY 18
V. “THE NOBLE SEX” 21
VI. PHYSIOLOGICAL CROAKING 24
VII. THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR GRANDMOTHERS 28
VIII. THE PHYSIQUE OF AMERICAN WOMEN 33
IX. “VERY MUCH FATIGUED” 37
X. THE LIMITATIONS OF SEX 40
=Temperament= 43
XI. THE INVISIBLE LADY 45
XII. SACRED OBSCURITY 49
XIII. “OUR TRIALS” 52
XIV. VIRTUES IN COMMON 55
XV. INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 60
XVI. ANGELIC SUPERIORITY 63
XVII. VICARIOUS HONORS 66
XVIII. THE GOSPEL OF HUMILIATION 69
XIX. “CELERY AND CHERUBS” 73
XX. THE NEED OF CAVALRY 77
XXI. “THE REASON FIRM, THE TEMPERATE WILL” 80
XXII. “ALLURES TO BRIGHTER WORLDS, AND LEADS THE WAY” 83
=The Home= 87
XXIII. WANTED—HOMES 89
XXIV. THE ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION 93
XXV. THE LOW-WATER MARK 96
XXVI. “OBEY” 99
XXVII. WOMAN IN THE CHRYSALIS 103
XXVIII. TWO AND TWO 106
XXIX. A MODEL HOUSEHOLD 109
XXX. A SAFEGUARD FOR THE FAMILY 112
XXXI. WOMEN AS ECONOMISTS 116
XXXII. GREATER INCLUDES LESS 120
XXXIII. A CO-PARTNERSHIP 123
XXXIV. “ONE RESPONSIBLE HEAD” 127
XXXV. ASKING FOR MONEY 131
XXXVI. WOMANHOOD AND MOTHERHOOD 135
XXXVII. A GERMAN POINT OF VIEW 139
XXXVIII. CHILDLESS WOMEN 142
XXXIX. THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO MOTHERS 145
=Society= 149
XL. FOAM AND CURRENT 151
XLI. “IN SOCIETY” 155
XLII. THE BATTLE OF THE CARDS 159
XLIII. SOME WORKING-WOMEN 163
XLIV. THE EMPIRE OF MANNERS 167
XLV. “GIRLSTEROUSNESS” 171
XLVI. ARE WOMEN NATURAL ARISTOCRATS? 175
XLVII. MRS. BLANK’S DAUGHTERS 178
XLVIII. THE EUROPEAN PLAN 181
XLIX. “FEATHERSES” 185
L. SOME MAN-MILLINERY 189
LI. SUBLIME PRINCES IN DISTRESS 192
=Education= 197
LII. “EXPERIMENTS” 199
LIII. INTELLECTUAL CINDERELLAS 203
LIV. FOREIGN EDUCATION 207
LV. TEACHING THE TEACHERS 210
LVI. “CUPID-AND-PSYCHOLOGY” 213
LVII. MEDICAL SCIENCE FOR WOMEN 216
LVIII. SEWING IN SCHOOLS 219
LIX. CASH PREMIUMS FOR STUDY 223
LX. MENTAL HORTICULTURE 226
=Employment= 231
LXI. “SEXUAL DIFFERENCE OF EMPLOYMENT” 233
LXII. THE USE OF ONE’S FEET 237
LXIII. MISS INGELOW’S PROBLEM 240
LXIV. SELF-SUPPORT 245
LXV. SELF-SUPPORTING WIVES 248
LXVI. THE PROBLEM OF WAGES 251
LXVII. THOROUGH 255
LXVIII. LITERARY ASPIRANTS 259
LXIX. “THE CAREER OF LETTERS” 263
LXX. TALKING AND TAKING 266
LXXI. HOW TO SPEAK IN PUBLIC 269
=Principles of Government= 273
LXXII. WE THE PEOPLE 275
LXXIII. THE USE OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 278
LXXIV. THE TRADITIONS OF THE FATHERS 281
LXXV. SOME OLD-FASHIONED PRINCIPLES 285
LXXVI. FOUNDED ON A ROCK 288
LXXVII. “THE GOOD OF THE GOVERNED” 292
LXXVIII. RULING AT SECOND-HAND 296
LXXIX. “TOO MANY VOTERS ALREADY” 299
=Suffrage= 303
LXXX. DRAWING THE LINE 305
LXXXI. FOR SELF-PROTECTION 309
LXXXII. WOMANLY STATESMANSHIP 312
LXXXIII. TOO MUCH PREDICTION 316
LXXXIV. FIRST-CLASS CARRIAGES 320
LXXXV. EDUCATION VIA SUFFRAGE 324
LXXXVI. “OFF WITH HER HEAD!” 328
LXXXVII. FOLLOW YOUR LEADERS 331
LXXXVIII. HOW TO MAKE WOMEN UNDERSTAND POLITICS. 335
LXXXIX. “INFERIOR TO MAN, AND NEAR TO ANGELS” 339
=Objections to Suffrage= 343
XC. THE FACT OF SEX 345
XCI. HOW WILL IT RESULT? 349
XCII. “I HAVE ALL THE RIGHTS I WANT” 352
XCIII. “SENSE ENOUGH TO VOTE” 356
XCIV. AN INFELICITOUS EPITHET 359
XCV. THE ROB ROY THEORY 363
XCVI. THE VOTES OF NON-COMBATANTS 368
XCVII. “MANNERS REPEAL LAWS” 372
XCVIII. KILKENNY ARGUMENTS 375
XCIX. WOMEN AND PRIESTS 379
C. THE ROMAN CATHOLIC BUGBEAR 382
CI. DANGEROUS VOTERS 386
CII. HOW WOMEN WILL LEGISLATE 389
CIII. WARNED IN TIME 393
CIV. INDIVIDUALS VS. CLASSES 396
CV. DEFEATS BEFORE VICTORIES 400
PHYSIOLOGY.
“Allein, bevor und nachdem man Mutter ist, ist Man ein Mensch; die
mütterliche Bestimmung aber, oder gar die eheliche, kann nicht die
menschliche überwiegen oder ersetzen, sondern sie muss das Mittel, nicht
der Zweck derselben sein.”— J.P.F. RICHTER: _Levana_, § 89.
“But, before and after being a mother, one is a human being; and neither
the motherly nor the wifely destination can overbalance or replace the
human, but must become its means, not its end.”
COMMON SENSE ABOUT WOMEN.
I.
TOO MUCH NATURAL HISTORY.
Lord Melbourne, speaking of the fine ladies in London who were fond of
talking about their ailments, used to complain that they gave him too
much of their natural history. There are a good many writers—usually
men—who, with the best intentions, discuss woman as if she had merely a
physical organization, and as if she existed only for one object, the
production and rearing of children. Against this some protest may well
be made.
Doubtless there are few things more important to a community than the
health of its women. The Sandwich-Island proverb says:—
“If strong is the frame of the mother,
The son will give laws to the people.”
And, in nations where all men give laws, all men need mothers of strong
frames.
Moreover, there is no harm in admitting that all the rules of
organization are imperative; that soul and body, whether of man or
woman, are made in harmony, so that each part of our nature must accept
the limitations of the other. A man’s soul may yearn to the stars; but
so long as the body cannot jump so high, he must accept the body’s veto.
It is the same with any veto interposed in advance by the physical
structure of woman. Nobody objects to this general principle. It is only
when clerical gentlemen or physiological gentlemen undertake to go a
step farther, and put in that veto on their own responsibility, that it
is necessary to say, “Hands off, gentlemen! Precisely because women are
women, they, not you, are to settle that question.”
One or two points are clear. Every specialist is liable to overrate his
own specialty; and the man who thinks of woman only as a wife and mother
is apt to forget, that, before she was either of these, she was a human
being. “Women, as such,” says an able writer, “are constituted for
purposes of maternity and the continuation of mankind.” Undoubtedly, and
so were men, as such, constituted for paternity. But very much depends
on what relative importance we assign to the phrase, “as such.” Even an
essay so careful, so moderate, and so free from coarseness, as that here
quoted, suggests, after all, a slight one-sidedness,—perhaps a natural
re-action from the one-sidedness of those injudicious reformers who
allow themselves to speak slightingly of “the merely animal function of
child-bearing.” Higher than either—wiser than both put together—is that
noble statement with which Jean Paul begins his fine essay on the
education of girls in “Levana.” “Before being a wife or mother, one is a
human being; and neither motherly nor wifely destination can overbalance
or replace the human, but must become its means, not end. As above the
poet, the painter, or the hero, so above the mother, does the human
being rise pre-eminent.”
Here is sure anchorage. We can hold to this. And, fortunately, all the
analogies of nature sustain this position. Throughout nature the laws of
sex rule everywhere; but they rule a kingdom of their own, always
subordinate to the greater kingdom of the vital functions. Every
creature, male or female, finds in its sexual relations only a
subordinate part of its existence. The need of food, the need of
exercise, the joy of living, these come first, and absorb the bulk of
its life, whether the individual be male or female. This _Antiope_
butterfly, that flits at this moment past my window,—the first of the
season,—spends almost all its existence in a form where the distinction
of sex lies dormant: a few days, I might almost say a few hours,
comprise its whole sexual consciousness, and the majority of its race
die before reaching that epoch. The law of sex is written absolutely
through the whole insect world. Yet everywhere it is written as a
secondary and subordinate law. The life which is common to the sexes is
the principal life; the life which each sex leads, “as such,” is a minor
and subordinate thing.
The same rule pervades nature. Two riders pass down the street before my
window. One rides a horse, the other a mare. The animals were perhaps
foaled in the same stable, of the same progenitors. They have been
reared alike, fed alike, trained alike, ridden alike; they need the same
exercise, the same grooming; nine tenths of their existence are the
same, and only the other tenth is different. Their whole organization is
marked by the distinction of sex: but, though the marking is
ineffaceable, the distinction is not the first or most important fact.
If this be true of the lower animals, it is far more true of the higher.
The mental and moral laws of the universe touch us first and chiefly as
human beings. We eat our breakfasts as human beings, not as men and
women; and it is the same with nine tenths of our interests and duties
in life. In legislating or philosophizing for woman, we must neither
forget that she has an organization distinct from that of man, nor must
we exaggerate the fact. Not “first the womanly and then the human,” but
first the human and then the womanly, is to be the order of her
training.
II.
DARWIN, HUXLEY, AND BUCKLE.
When any woman, old or young, asks the question, Which among all modern
books ought I to read first? the answer is plain. She should read
Buckle’s lecture before the Royal Institution upon “The Influence of
Woman on the Progress of Knowledge.” It is one of two papers contained
in a thin volume called “Essays by Henry Thomas Buckle.” As a means
whereby a woman may become convinced that her sex has a place in the
intellectual universe, this little essay is almost indispensable.
Nothing else takes its place.
Darwin and Huxley seem to make woman simply a lesser man, weaker in body
and mind,—an affectionate and docile animal, of inferior grade. That
there is any aim in the distinction of the sexes, beyond the
perpetuation of the race, is nowhere recognized by them, so far as I
know. That there is any thing in the intellectual sphere to correspond
to the physical difference; that here also the sexes are equal yet
diverse, and the natural completion and complement of the other,—this
neither Huxley nor Darwin explicitly recognizes. And with the utmost
admiration for their great teachings in other ways, I must think that
here they are open to the suspicion of narrowness.
Huxley wrote in “The Reader,” in 1864, a short paper called
“Emancipation—Black and White,” in which, while taking generous ground
in behalf of the legal and political position of woman, he yet does it
pityingly, _de haut en bas_, as for a creature hopelessly inferior, and
so heavily weighted already by her sex, that she should be spared all
further trials. Speaking through an imaginary critic, who seems to
represent himself, he denies “even the natural equality of the sexes,”
and declares “that in every excellent character, whether mental or
physical, the average woman is inferior to the average man, in the sense
of having that character less in quantity and lower in quality.” Finally
he goes so far as “to defend the startling paradox that even in physical
beauty, man is the superior.” He admits that for a brief period of early
youth the case may be doubtful, but claims that after thirty the
superior beauty of man is unquestionable. Thus reasons Huxley; the whole
essay being included in his volume of “Lay Sermons, Addresses, and
Reviews.”[1]
Footnote 1:
Pp. 22, 23, Am. ed.
Darwin’s best statements on the subject may be found in his “Descent of
Man.”[2] He is, as usual, more moderate and guarded than Huxley. He
says, for instance: “It is generally admitted that with women the powers
of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more
strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are
characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower
state of civilization.” Then he passes to the usual assertion that man
has thus far attained to a higher eminence than woman. “If two lists
were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting,
sculpture, music,—comprising composition and performance,—history,
science, and philosophy, with half a dozen names under each subject, the
two lists would not bear comparison.” But the obvious answer, that
nearly every name on his list, upon the masculine side, would probably
be taken from periods when woman was excluded from any fair
competition,—this he does not seem to recognize at all. Darwin, of all
men, must admit that superior merit generally arrives later, not
earlier, on the scene; and the question for him to answer is, not
whether woman equalled man in the first stages of the intellectual
“struggle for life,” but whether she is not gaining on him now.@
Footnote 2:
II., 311, Am. Ed.
If, in spite of man’s enormous advantage in the start, woman has already
overtaken his very best performances in several of the highest
intellectual departments,—as, for instance, prose fiction and dramatic
representation,—then it is mere dogmatism in Mr. Darwin to deny that she
may yet do the same in other departments. We in this generation have
actually seen this success achieved by Rachel and Ristori in the one
art, by “George Sand” and “George Eliot” in the other. Woman is, then,
visibly gaining on man, in the sphere of intellect; and, if so, Mr.
Darwin, at least, must accept the inevitable inference.
But this is arguing the question on the superficial facts merely. Buckle
goes deeper, and looks to principles. That superior quickness of women,
which Darwin dismisses so lightly as something belonging to savage
epochs, is to Buckle the sign of a quality which he holds essential, not
only to literature and art, but to science itself. Go among ignorant
women, he says, and you will find them more quick and intelligent than
equally ignorant men. A woman will usually tell you the way in the
street more readily than a man can; a woman can always understand a
foreigner more easily; and Dr. Currie says in his letters, that when a
laborer and his wife came to consult him, he always got all the
information from the wife. Buckle illustrates this at some length, and
points out that a woman’s mind is by its nature deductive and quick; a
man’s mind, inductive and slow; that each has its value, and that
science profoundly needs both.
“I will endeavor,” he says, “to establish two propositions. First, that
women naturally prefer the deductive method to the inductive. Secondly,
that women, by encouraging in men deductive habits of thought, have
rendered an immense though unconscious service to the progress of
science, by preventing scientific investigators from being as
exclusively inductive as they would otherwise be.”
Then he shows that the most important scientific discoveries of modern
times—as of the law of gravitation by Newton, the law of the forms of
crystals by Haüy, and the metamorphosis of plants by Goethe—were all
essentially the results of that _a priori_ or deductive method, “which,
during the last two centuries, Englishmen have unwisely despised.” They
were all the work, in a manner, of the imagination,—of the intuitive or
womanly quality of mind. And nothing can be finer or truer than the
words in which Buckle predicts the benefits that are to come from the
intellectual union of the sexes for the work of the future. “In that
field which we and our posterity have yet to traverse, I firmly believe
that the imagination will effect quite as much as the understanding. Our
poetry will have to re-enforce our logic, and we must feel quite as much
as we must argue. Let us, then, hope that the imaginative and emotional
minds of one sex will continue to accelerate the great progress by
acting upon and improving the colder and harder minds of the other sex.
By this coalition, by this union of different faculties, different
tastes, and different methods, we shall go on our way with the greater
ease.”
III.
WHICH IS THE STRONGER?
What is strength,—the brute hardness of iron, or the more delicate
strength of steel? Which is the stronger,—the physical frame that can
strike the harder blow, or that which can endure the greater strain and
yet last longer? “Man can lift a heavier weight,” says a writer on
physiology, “but woman can watch more enduringly at the bedside of her
sick child.” The strain upon the system of all women who have borne and
reared children is as great in its way as that upon the system of the
carpenter or the woodchopper; and the power to endure it is as properly
to be called strength.
Again, which is the stronger in the domain of will,—the man who carries
his points by energy and command, or the woman who carries hers by
patience and persuasion? the man in the household who leads and decides,
or the woman who foresees, guards, manages? the mother of the family,
who puts the commas and semicolons in her children’s lives, as Jean Paul
Richter says, or the father who puts in the colons and periods? It may
be hard to say which type of strength is the more to be admired, but it
is clear that they are both genuine types.
One grows tired of hearing young men who can do nothing but row, or
swing dumb-bells, and are thrown wholly “off their training” by the loss
of a night’s sleep, speak contemptuously of the physical weakness of a
woman who can watch with a sick person half a dozen nights together. It
is absurd to hear a man who is prostrated by a single reverse in
business speak of being “encumbered” with a wife who can perhaps alter
the habits of a lifetime more easily than he can abandon his half-dollar
cigars. It is amusing to read the criticisms of languid and graceful
masculine essayists on the want of vigorous intellect in the sex that
wrote “Aurora Leigh” and “Middlemarch” and “Consuelo.”
It may be that a man’s strength is not a woman’s, or a woman’s strength
that of a man. I am arguing for equivalence, not identity. The greater
part played in the phenomena of woman’s strength by sensibility and
impulse and variations and tears—this does not affect the matter. What I
have never been able to see is, that woman as such is, in the long-run
and tried by all the tests, a weaker being than man. And it would seem
that any man, in proportion as he lives longer and sees more of life,
must have the conceit taken out of him by actual contact with some
woman—be she mother, sister, wife, daughter, or friend—who is not only
as strong as himself in all substantial regards, but it may be, on the
whole, a little stronger.
IV.
THE SPIRIT OF SMALL TYRANNY.
When Mr. John Smauker and the Bath footmen invited Sam Weller to their
“swarry,” consisting of a boiled leg of mutton, each guest had some
expression of contempt and wrath for the humble little greengrocer who
served them,—“in the true spirit,” Dickens says, “of the very smallest
tyranny.” The very fact that they were subject to being ordered about in
their own persons gave them a peculiar delight in issuing tyrannical
orders to others: just as sophomores in college torment freshmen because
other sophomores once teased the present tormentors themselves; and
Irishmen denounce the Chinese for underbidding them in the labor-market,
precisely as they were themselves denounced by native-born Americans
thirty years ago. So it has sometimes seemed to me that the men whose
own positions and claims are really least commanding are those who hold
most resolutely that women should be kept in their proper place of
subordination.
A friend of mine maintains the theory that men large and strong in
person are constitutionally inclined to do justice to women, as fearing
no competition from them in the way of bodily strength; but that small
and weak men are apt to be vehemently opposed to any thing like equality
in the sexes. He quotes in defence of his theory the big soldier in
London who justified himself for allowing his little wife to chastise
him, on the ground that it pleased her and did not hurt him; and on the
other hand cites the extreme domestic tyranny of the dwarf Quilp. He
declares that in any difficult excursion among woods and mountains, the
guides and the able-bodied men are often willing to have women join the
party, while it is sure to be opposed by those who doubt their own
strength or are reluctant to display their weakness. It is not necessary
to go so far as my friend goes; but many will remember some fact of this
kind, making such theories appear not quite so absurd as at first.
Thus it seems from the “Life and Letters” of Sydney Dobell, the English
poet, that he was opposed both to woman suffrage and woman authorship,
believing the movement for the former to be a “blundering on to the
perdition of womanhood.” It appears that against all authorship by women
his convictions yearly grew stronger, he regarding it as “an error and
an anomaly.” It seems quite in accordance with my friend’s theory to
hear, after this, that Sydney Dobell was slight in person and a
life-long invalid; nor is it surprising, on the same theory, that his
poetry took no deep root, and that it will not be likely to survive
long, except perhaps in his weird ballad of “Ravelston.” But he
represents a large class of masculine intellects, of secondary and
mediocre quality, whose opinions on this subject are not so much
opinions as instinctive prejudices against a competitor who may turn out
their superior. Whether they know it, or not, their aversion to the
authorship of women is very much like the conviction of a weak
pedestrian, that women are not naturally fitted to take long walks; or
the opinion of a man whose own accounts are in a muddle, that his wife
is constitutionally unfitted to understand business.
It is a pity to praise either sex at the expense of the other. The
social inequality of the sexes was not produced so much by the voluntary
tyranny of man, as by his great practical advantage at the outset; human
history necessarily beginning with a period when physical strength was
sole ruler. It is unnecessary, too, to consider in how many cases women
may have justified this distrust; and may have made themselves as
obnoxious as Horace Walpole’s maids of honor, whose coachman left his
savings to his son on condition that he should never marry a maid of
honor. But it is safe to say that on the whole the feeling of contempt
for women, and the love to exercise arbitrary power over them, is the
survival of a crude impulse which the world is outgrowing, and which is
in general least obvious in the manliest men. That clear and able
English writer, Walter Bagehot, well describes “the contempt for
physical weakness and for women which marks early society. The
non-combatant population is sure to fare ill during the ages of combat.
But these defects, too, are cured or lessened; women have now marvellous
means of winning their way in the world; and mind without muscle has far
greater force than muscle without mind.”[3]
Footnote 3:
Physics and Politics, p. 79.
V.
“THE NOBLE SEX.”
A highly educated American woman of my acquaintance once employed a
French tutor in Paris, to assist her in teaching Latin to her little
grandson. The Frenchman brought with him a Latin grammar, written in his
own language, with which my friend was quite pleased, until she came to
a passage relating to the masculine gender in nouns, and claiming
grammatical precedence for it on the ground that the male sex is the
noble sex,—”_le sexe noble_.” “Upon that,” she said, “I burst forth in
indignation, and the poor teacher soon retired. But I do not believe,”
she added, “that the Frenchman has the slightest conception, up to this
moment, of what I could find in that phrase to displease me.”
I do not suppose he could. From the time when the Salic Law set French
women aside from the royal succession, on the ground that the kingdom of
France was “too noble to be ruled by a woman,” the claim of nobility has
been all on one side. The State has strengthened the Church in this
theory, the Church has strengthened the State; and the result of all is,
that French grammarians follow both these high authorities. When even
the good Père Hyacinthe teaches, through the New York Independent, that
the husband is to direct the conscience of his wife, precisely as the
father directs that of his child, what higher philosophy can you expect
of any Frenchman than to maintain the claims of “_le sexe noble_”?
We see the consequence, even among the most heterodox Frenchmen.
Rejecting all other precedents and authorities, the poor Communists
still held to this. Consider, for instance, this translation of a
marriage-contract under the Commune, which lately came to light in a
trial reported in the “Gazette des Tribunaux:”—
FRENCH REPUBLIC.
The citizen Anet, son of Jean Louis Anet, and the _citoyenne_ Maria
Saint; she engaged to follow the said citizen everywhere and to love
him always.—ANET. MARIA SAINT.
Witnessed by the under-mentioned citizen and _citoyenne_.—FOURIER.
LAROCHE.
PARIS, April 22, 1871.
What a comfortable arrangement is this! Poor _citoyenne_ Maria Saint,
even when all human laws have suspended their action, still holds by her
grammar, still must annex herself to _le sexe noble_. She still must
follow citizen Anet as the feminine pronoun follows the masculine, or as
a verb agrees with its nominative case in number and in person. But with
what a lordly freedom from all obligation does citizen Anet,
representative of this nobility of sex, accept the allegiance! The
citizeness may “follow him,” certainly,—so long as she is not in the
way,—and she must “love him always;” but he is not bound. Why should he
be? It would be quite ungrammatical.
Yet, after all is said and done, there is a brutal honesty in this frank
subordination of the woman according to the grammar. It has the same
merit with the old Russian marriage-consecration: “Here, wolf, take thy
lamb,” which at least put the thing clearly, and made no nonsense about
it. I do not know that anywhere in France the wedding ritual is now so
severely simple as that, but I know that in some rural villages of that
country the bride is still married in a mourning-gown. I should think
she would be.
VI.
PHYSIOLOGICAL CROAKING.
A very old man once came to King Agis of Sparta, to lament over the
degeneracy of the times. The king replied, “What you say must be true;
for I remember that when I was a boy, I heard my father say that when he
was a boy, he heard my grandfather say the same thing.”
It is a sufficient answer to most of the croakers, that doubtless the
same things have been said in every generation since the beginning of
recorded time. Till within twenty years, for instance, it has been the
accepted theory, that civilized society lost in vigor what it gained in
refinement. This is now generally admitted to be a delusion growing out
of the fact that civilization keeps alive many who would have died under
barbarism. These feebler persons enter into the average, and keep down
the apparent health of the community; but it is the triumph of
civilization that they exist at all. I am inclined to think, that when
we come to compare the nineteenth century with the seventeenth, as
regards the health of women and the size of families, we shall find much
the same result.
We look around us, and see many invalid or childless women. We say the
Pilgrim mothers were not like these. We cheat ourselves by this
perpetual worship of the pioneer grandmother. How the young bachelors,
who write dashing articles in the newspapers, denounce their “nervous”
sisters, for instance, and belabor them with cruel memories of their
ancestors! “The great-grandmother of this helpless creature, very
likely, was a pioneer in the woods; reared a family of twelve or
thirteen children; spun, scrubbed, wove, and cooked; lived to
eighty-five, with iron muscles, a broad chest and keen, clear eyes.” But
no one can study the genealogies of our older New England families
without noticing how many of the aunts and sisters and daughters of this
imaginary Amazon died young. I think there may be the same difference
between the households of to-day and the Puritan households that there
is confessedly between the American families and the Irish: fewer
children are born, but more survive.
And is it so sure that the families are diminishing, even as respects
the number of children born? This is a simple question of arithmetic,
for which the materials are being rapidly accumulated by the students of
family history. Let each person take the lines of descent which are
nearest to himself, to begin with, and compare the number of children
born in successive generations. I have, for instance, two such tables at
hand, representing two of the oldest New England families, which meet in
the same family of children in this generation.
FIRST TABLE.
CHILDREN
First generation (emigrated 1629) 9
Second generation 7
Third generation 7
Fourth generation 8
Fifth generation 7
Sixth generation 10
——
Average 8
SECOND TABLE.
CHILDREN
First generation (emigrated 1636) 10
Second generation 7
Third generation 14
Fourth generation 7
Fifth generation 6
Sixth generation 4
Seventh generation 10
——
Average 8.29
It will be seen that the last generation exhibits the largest family in
the first line, and almost the largest—much beyond the average—in the
other.
Now, when we consider the great change in all the habits of living,
since the Puritan days, and all the vicissitudes to which a single line
is exposed,—a whole household being sometimes destroyed by a single
hereditary disease,—this is certainly a fair exhibit. These two
genealogies were taken at random, because they happened to be nearest at
hand. But I suspect any extended examination of genealogies, either of
the Puritan families of New England, or the Dutch families of New York,
would show much the same result. Some of the descendants of the old
Stuyvesant race, for instance, exhibit in this generation a physical
vigor which it is impossible that the doughty governor himself could
have surpassed.
There are undoubtedly many moral and physiological sins committed,
tending to shorten and weaken life; but the progress of knowledge more
than counterbalances them. No man of middle age can look at a class of
students from our older colleges without seeing them to be physically
superior to the same number of college boys taken twenty-five years ago.
The organization of girls being far more delicate and complicated, the
same reform reaches them more promptly, but it reaches them at last. The
little girls of the present day eat better food, wear more healthful
clothing, and breathe more fresh air, than their mothers did. The
introduction of india-rubber boots and waterproof cloaks alone has given
a fresh lease of life to multitudes of women, who otherwise would have
been kept housed whenever there was so much as a sprinkling of rain.
It is desirable, certainly, to venerate our grandmothers; but I am
inclined to think, on the whole, that their great-granddaughters will be
the best.
VII.
THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR GRANDMOTHERS.
Every young woman of the present generation, so soon as she ventures to
have a headache or a set of nerves, is immediately confronted by
indignant critics with her grandmother. If the grandmother is living,
the fact of her existence is appealed to: if there is only a departed
grandmother to remember, the maiden is confronted with a ghost. That
ghost is endowed with as many excellences as those with which Miss
Betsey Trotwood endowed the niece that never had been born; and, as
David Copperfield was reproached with the virtues of his unborn sister
who “would never have run away,” so that granddaughter with the headache
is reproached with the ghostly perfections of her grandmother, who never
had a headache—or, if she had, it is luckily forgotten. It is necessary
to ask, sometimes, what was really the truth about our grandmothers?
Were they such models of bodily perfection as is usually claimed?
If we look at the early colonial days, we are at once met by the fact,
that although families were then often larger than is now common, yet
this phenomenon was by no means universal, and was balanced by a good
many childless homes. Of this any one can satisfy himself by looking
over any family history; and he can also satisfy himself of the
fact,—first pointed out, I believe, by Mrs. Dall,—that third and fourth
marriages were then obviously and unquestionably more common than now.
The inference would seem to be, that there is a little illusion about
the health of those days, as there is about the health of savage races.
In both cases, it is not so much that the average health is greater
under less highly civilized conditions, but that these conditions kill
off the weak, and leave only the strong. Modern civilized society, on
the other hand, preserves the health of many men and women—and permits
them to marry, and become parents—who under, the severities of savage
life or of pioneer life would have died, and given way to others.
On this I will not dwell; because these good ladies were not strictly
our grandmothers, being farther removed. But of those who were our
grandmothers,—the women of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary
epochs,—we happen to have very definite physiological observations
recorded; not very flattering, it is true, but frank and searching. What
these good women are in the imagination of their descendants, we know.
Mrs. Stowe describes them as “the race of strong, hardy, cheerful girls
that used to grow up in country places, and made the bright, neat New
England kitchens of olden times;” and adds, “This race of women, pride
of olden time, is daily lessening; and in their stead come the fragile,
easily-fatigued, languid girls of a modern age, drilled in
book-learning, ignorant of common things.”
What, now, was the testimony of those who saw our grandmothers in the
flesh? As it happens, there were a good many foreigners, generally
Frenchmen, who came to visit the new Republic during the presidency of
Washington. Let us take, for instance, the testimony of the two
following.
The Abbé Robin was a chaplain in Rochambeau’s army during the
Revolution, and wrote thus in regard to the American ladies in his
“Nouveau Voyage dans l’Amérique Septentrionale,” published in 1782:—
“They are tall and well-proportioned; their features are generally
regular; their complexions are generally fair and without color....
At twenty years of age the women have no longer the freshness of
youth. At thirty-five or forty they are wrinkled and decrepit. The
men are almost as premature.”
Again: The Chevalier Louis Félix de Beaujour lived in the United States
from 1804 to 1814, as consul-general and _chargé d’affaires_; and wrote
a book, immediately after, which was translated into English under the
title, “A Sketch of the United States at the Commencement of the Present
Century.” In this he thus describes American women:—
“The women have more of that delicate beauty which belongs to their
sex, and in general have finer features and more expression in their
physiognomy. Their stature is usually tall, and nearly all are
possessed of a light and airy shape,—the breast high, a fine head,
and their color of a dazzling whiteness. Let us imagine, under this
brilliant form, the most modest demeanor, a chaste and virginal air,
accompanied by those single and unaffected graces which flow from
artless nature, and we may have an idea of their beauty; but this
beauty fades and passes in a moment. At the age of twenty-five their
form changes, and at thirty the whole of their charms have
disappeared.”
These statements bring out a class of facts, which, as it seems to me,
are singularly ignored by some of our physiologists. They indicate that
the modification of the American type began early, and was, as a rule,
due to causes antedating the fashions or studies of the present day.
Here are our grandmothers and great-grandmothers as they were actually
seen by the eyes of impartial or even flattering critics. These critics
were not Englishmen, accustomed to a robust and ruddy type of women, but
Frenchmen, used to a type more like the American. They were not mere
hasty travellers; for the one lived here ten years, and the other was
stationed for some time at Newport, R.I., in a healthy locality, noted
in those days for the beauty of its women. Yet we find it their verdict
upon these grandmothers of nearly a hundred years ago, that they showed
the same delicate beauty, the same slenderness, the same pallor, the
same fragility, the same early decline, with which their granddaughters
are now reproached.
In some respects, probably, the physical habits of the grandmothers were
better: but an examination of their portraits will satisfy any one that
they laced more tightly than their descendants, and wore their dresses
lower in the neck; and as for their diet, we have the testimony of
another French traveller, Volney, who was in America from 1795 to 1798,
that “if a premium were offered for a regimen most destructive to the
teeth, the stomach, and the health in general, none could be devised
more efficacious for these ends than that in use among this people.” And
he goes on to give particulars, showing a far worse condition in respect
to cookery and diet than now prevails in any decent American society.
We have therefore strong evidence that the essential change in the
American type was effected in the last century, not in this. Dr. E. H.
Clarke says, “A century does not afford a period long enough for the
production of great changes. That length of time could not transform the
sturdy German _fräulein_ and robust English damsel into the fragile
American miss.” And yet it is pretty clear that the first century and a
half of our colonial life had done just this for our grandmothers. And,
if so, our physiologists ought to conform their theories to the facts.
VIII.
THE PHYSIQUE OF AMERICAN WOMEN.
I was talking the other day with a New York physician, long retired from
practice, who after an absence of a dozen years in Europe has returned
within a year to this country. He volunteered the remark, that nothing
had so impressed him since his return as the improved health of
Americans. He said that his wife had been equally struck with it; and
that they had noticed it especially among the inhabitants of cities,
among the more cultivated classes, and in particular among women.
It so happened, that within twenty-four hours almost precisely the same
remark was made to me by another gentleman of unusually cosmopolitan
experience, and past middle age. He further fortified himself by a
similar assertion made him by Charles Dickens, in comparing his second
visit to this country with his first. In answer to an inquiry as to what
points of difference had most impressed him, Dickens said, “Your people,
especially the women, look better fed than formerly.”
It is possible that in all these cases the witnesses may have been led
to exaggerate the original evil, while absent from the country, and so
may have felt some undue re-action on their arrival. One of my
informants went so far as to say that he was confident that among his
circle of friends in Boston and in London a dinnerparty of half a dozen
Americans would outweigh an English party of the same number. Granting
this to be too bold a statement, and granting the unscientific nature of
all these assertions, they still indicate a probability of their own
truth until refuted by facts or balanced by similar impressions on the
other side. They are further corroborated by the surprise expressed by
Huxley and some other recent Englishmen at finding us a race more
substantial than they had supposed.
The truth seems to be, that Nature is endeavoring to take a new
departure in the American, and to produce a race more finely organized,
more sensitive, more pliable, and of more nervous energy, than the races
of Northern Europe; that this change of type involves some risk to
health in the process, but promises greater results whenever the new
type shall be established. I am confident that there has been within the
last twenty years a great improvement in the physical habits of the more
cultivated classes, at least, in this country,—better food, better air,
better habits as to bathing and exercise. The great increase of athletic
games; the greatly increased proportion of seaside and mountain life in
summer; the thicker shoes and boots of women and little girls,
permitting them to go out more freely in all weathers—these are among
the permanent gains. The increased habit of dining late, and of taking
only a lunch at noon, is of itself an enormous gain to the professional
and mercantile classes, because it secures time for eating and for
digestion. Even the furnaces in houses, which seemed at first so
destructive to the very breath of life, turn out to have given a new
lease to it; and open fires are being rapidly re-introduced as a
provision for enjoyment and health, when the main body of the house has
been tempered by the furnace. There has been, furthermore, a decided
improvement in the bread of the community, and a very general
introduction of other farinaceous food. All this has happened within my
own memory, and gives _a priori_ probability to the alleged improvement
in physical condition within twenty years.
And, if these reasonings are still insufficient on the one side, it must
be remembered that the facts of the census are almost equally inadequate
when quoted on the other. If, for instance, all the young people of a
New Hampshire village take a fancy to remove to Wisconsin, it does not
show that the race is dying out because their children swell the
birth-rate of Wisconsin instead of New Hampshire. If in a given city the
births among the foreign-born population are twice as many in proportion
as among the American, we have not the whole story until we learn
whether the deaths are not twice as many also. If so, the inference is,
that the same recklessness brought the children into the world, and sent
them out of it; and no physiological inference whatever can be drawn. It
was clearly established by the medical commission of the Boston Board of
Health, a few years ago, that “the general mortality of the foreign
element is much greater than that of the native element of our
population.” “This is found to be the case,” they add, “throughout the
United States as well as in Boston.”
So far as I can judge, all our physiological tendencies are favorable
rather than otherwise: and the transplantation of the English race seems
now likely to end in no deterioration, but in a type more finely
organized, and more comprehensive and cosmopolitan; and this without
loss of health, of longevity, or of physical size and weight. And, if
this is to hold true, it must be true not only of men, but of women.
IX.
“VERY MUCH FATIGUED.”
The newspapers say that the Wyoming ladies, after their first trial of
jury-duty, looked very much fatigued. Well, why not?
Is it not the privilege of their sex to be fatigued? Is it not commonly
said to be one of their most becoming traits? “The strength of womanhood
lies in its weakness,” and so on; and, if emancipation does not destroy
this lovely debility, it is not so bad, after all. If a graceful languor
is desirable, then the more of it the better. Instead of the women’s
coming out of the jury-box like Amazons, they simply came out so many
tired women. They were not spoiled into strength, but “very much
fatigued.”
In London or New York, now, this fatigue might have come from six hours
of piano-practice, from a day’s shopping, from a night’s “German.” Then
the fatigue would be held to be charming and womanly. But to aid in
deciding on the guilt or innocence of a fellow-creature, perhaps a
fellow-woman,—is that the only pursuit in which fatigue becomes
disreputable?
Consider at any rate that in Wyoming Territory these more genteel and
feminine forms of fatigue are as yet rare. Pianos are doubtless scarce;
in the shops whiskey is the only thing not scarce; “Germans” are
uncommon, except in the shape of wandering miners who are looking for
other shafts than those of Cupid. Thus cut off from city frivolities,
may not the Wyoming ladies be allowed for a while to tire themselves
with something useful? Let them have their court duties until good
society and “feminine” amusements arrive. Let them at least be
serviceable till they can be ornamental—as the English member of
Parliament declared that until a man knew which way his interest went,
he was justified in temporarily voting according to his conscience.
“Very much fatigued?” How does jury-duty affect men? Is there any thing
against which they so fight and struggle? It is recognized by the
universal masculine heart as the greatest bore known under civilization.
There is nothing which a man will not do in preference. He will go to
church twice on a Sunday, he will abjure tobacco for a week, he will
over-state his property to the assessor, he will speak respectfully of
Congress, he will go without a daily newspaper, he will do any
self-devoted and unmasculine thing—if you will only contrive in some way
to leave him off the jury-list. If these things are done in the dry
tree, what shall be done in the green? That which experienced men hate
with this consummation of all hatred, shall inexperienced women endure
without fatigue? It is wrong to claim for them such unspeakable
superiority.
Look at a jury of men when they re-appear in court after a long
detention on a difficult case. What a set of woe-begone wretches they
are! What weary eyes, what unkempt hair, what drooping and dilapidated
paper collars! Not all the tin wash-basins and soap, not all the
crackers and cheese, provided by the gentlemanly sheriff, enable them to
look any thing but “very much fatigued.” Shall women look more forlorn
than these men? No: so long as women are women, they will contrive
during the most arduous jury duties to “do up” their hair, they will
come provided with unseen relays of fresh cuffs and collars, and out of
the most unpromising court-room arrangements they will concoct their cup
of tea. Who has not noticed how much better a railway detention or a
prolonged trip on a steamboat is borne, in appearance at least, by the
women than the men? Fatigued! How did the jury-men look? Probably the
jury-women, when they bade his Honor the Judge good-morning, looked
incomparably fresher than their companions.
At any rate, when we think what things women endured that they might
nurse our sick soldiers, how they had to spend day and night where they
might possibly inhale tobacco, probably would hear swearing, and
certainly must brave dirt; when we think that they did these things, and
were only “very much fatigued,”—why should we fear to risk them in a
court-room? Where there is wrong to be righted, innocence to be
vindicated, and guilt to be wisely dealt with,—there make room for
woman, and she will not shrink from the fatigue. “For thee, fair
justice! welcome all,” as Sir William Blackstone remarked, when he
stopped being a poet and began to be a lawyer.
X.
THE LIMITATIONS OF SEX
Are there any inevitable limitations of sex?
Some reformers, apparently, think that there are not, and that the best
way to help woman is to deny the fact of limitations. But I think the
great majority of reformers would take a different ground, and would say
that the two sexes are mutually limited by nature. They would doubtless
add that this very fact is an argument for the enfranchisement of woman:
for, if woman is a mere duplicate of man, man can represent her; but if
she has traits of her own, absolutely distinct from his, then he cannot
represent her, and she must have a voice and a vote of her own.
To this last body of believers I belong. I think that all legal or
conventional obstacles should be removed, which debar woman from
determining for herself, as freely as man determines, what the real
limitations of sex are, and what the merely conventional restriction.
But, when all is said and done, there is no doubt that plenty of
limitations will remain on both sides.
That man has his limitations, is clear. No matter how finely organized a
man may be, how sympathetic, how tender, how loving, there is yet a
barrier, never to be passed, that separates the most precious part of
the woman’s kingdom from him. All the wondrous world of motherhood, with
its unspeakable delights, its holy of holies, remains forever unknown by
him; he may gaze, but never enter. That halo of pure devotion, which
makes a Madonna out of so many a poor and ignorant woman, can never
touch his brow. Many a man loves children more than many a woman: but,
after all, it is not he who has borne them; to that peculiar sacredness
of experience he can never arrive. But never mind whether the loss be a
great one or a small one: it is distinctly a limitation; and to every
loving mother it is a limitation so important that she would be unable
to weigh all the privileges and powers of manhood against this peculiar
possession of her child.
Now, if this be true, and if man be thus distinctly limited by the mere
fact of sex, can the woman complain that she also should have some
natural limitations? Grant that she should have no unnecessary
restrictions; and that the course of human progress is constantly
setting aside, as needless, point after point that was once held
essential. Still, if she finds—as she undoubtedly will find—that natural
barriers and hindrances remain at last, and that she can no more do
man’s whole work in the world than he can do hers, why should she
complain? If he can accept his limitations, she must be prepared also to
accept hers.
Some of our physiological reformers declare that a girl will be
perfectly healthy if she can only be sensibly dressed, and can “have
just as much out-door exercise as the boys, and of the same sort, if she
choose it.” But I have observed that matter a good deal, and have
watched the effect of boyish exercise on a good many girls; and I am
satisfied that so far from being safely turned loose, as boys can be,
they need, for physical health, the constant supervision of wise
mothers. Otherwise the very exposure that only hardens the boy may make
the girl an invalid for life. The danger comes from a greater
sensitiveness of structure,—not weakness, properly so called, since it
gives, in certain ways, more power of endurance,—a greater sensitiveness
which runs through all a woman’s career, and is the expensive price she
pays for the divine destiny of motherhood. It is another natural
limitation.
No wise person believes in any “reform against Nature,” or that we can
get beyond the laws of Nature. If I believed the limitations of sex to
be inconsistent with woman suffrage for instance, I should oppose this;
but I do not see why a woman cannot form political opinions by her
baby’s cradle, as well as her husband in his workshop, while her very
love for the child commits her to an interest in good government. Our
duty is to remove all the artificial restrictions we can. That done, it
will not be hard for man or woman to acquiesce in the natural
limitations.
TEMPERAMENT.
Ἀνδρὸς καὶ γυναικὸς ἡ αὐτὴ ἀρετή.—ANTISTHENES _in Diogenes Laertius_,
vi. 1, 5.
“Virtue in man and woman is the same.”
XI.
THE INVISIBLE LADY.
The Invisible Lady, as advertised in all our cities a good many years
ago, was a mysterious individual who remained unseen, and had apparently
no human organs except a brain and a tongue. You asked questions of her,
and she made intelligent answers; but where she was, you could no more
discover than you could find the man inside the Automaton Chess-Player.
Was she intended as a satire on womankind, or as a sincere
representation of what womankind should be? To many men, doubtless, she
would have seemed the ideal of her sex, could only her brain and tongue
have disappeared like the rest of her faculties. Such men would have
liked her almost as well as that other mysterious personage on the
London sign-board, labelled “The Good Woman,” and represented by a
female figure without a head.
It is not that any considerable portion of mankind actually wishes to
abolish woman from the universe. But the opinion dies hard that she is
best off when least visible. These appeals which still meet us for “the
sacred privacy of woman” are only the Invisible Lady on a larger scale.
In ancient Bœotia, brides were carried home in vehicles whose wheels
were burned at the door in token that they would never again be needed.
In ancient Rome, it was a queen’s epitaph, “She staid at home, and
spun,”—_Domum servavit, lanum fecit_. In Turkey, not even the officers
of justice can enter the apartments of a woman without her lord’s
consent. In Spain and Spanish America, the veil replaces the four walls
of the house, and is a portable seclusion. To be visible is at best a
sign of peasant blood and occupations; to be high-bred is to be
invisible.
In the Azores I found that each peasant family endeavored to secure for
one or more of its daughters the pride and glory of living unseen. The
other sisters, secure in innocence, tended cattle on lonely
mountain-sides, or toiled bare-legged up the steep ascents, their heads
crowned with orange-baskets. The chosen sister was taught to read, to
embroider, and to dwell indoors; if she went out it was only under
escort, and with her face buried in a hood of almost incredible size,
affording only a glimpse of the poor pale cheeks, so unlike the rosy
vigor of the damsels on the mountain-side. The girls, I was told, did
not covet this privilege of seclusion; but let us be genteel, or die.
Now all that is left of the Invisible Lady among ourselves is only the
remnant of this absurd tradition. In the seaside town where I write,
ladies usually go veiled in the streets, and so general is the practice
that little girls often veil their dolls. They all suppose it to be done
for complexion or for ornament; just as people still hang straps on the
backs of their carriages, not knowing that it is a relic of the days
when footmen stood there and held on. But the veil represents a
tradition of seclusion, whether we know it or not; and the dread of
hearing a woman speak in public, or of seeing a woman vote, represents
precisely the same tradition. It is entitled to no less respect, and no
more.
Like all traditions, it finds something in human nature to which to
attach itself. Early girlhood, like early boyhood, needs to be guarded
and sheltered, that it may mature unharmed. It is monstrous to make this
an excuse for keeping a woman, any more than a man, in a condition of
perpetual subordination and seclusion. The young lover wishes to lock up
his angel in a little world of her own, where none may intrude. The
harem and the seraglio are simply the embodiment of this desire. But the
maturer man, and the maturer race, have found that the beloved being
should be something more.
After this discovery is made, the theory of the Invisible Lady
disappears. It is less of a shock to an American to hear a woman speak
in public than it is to an Oriental to see her show her face in public
at all. Once open the door of the harem, and she has the freedom of the
house: the house includes the front door, and the street is but a
prolonged doorstep. With the freedom of the street comes inevitably a
free access to the platform, the tribunal, and the pulpit. You might as
well try to stop the air in its escape from a punctured balloon, as to
try, when woman is once out of the harem, to put her back there. Ceasing
to be an Invisible Lady, she must become a visible force: there is no
middle ground. There is no danger that she will not be anchored to the
cradle, when cradle there is; but it will be by an elastic cable, that
will leave her as free to think and vote as to pray. No woman is less a
mother because she cares for all the concerns of the world into which
her child is born. It was John Quincy Adams who said, defending the
political petitions of the women of Plymouth, that “women are not only
justified, but exhibit the most exalted virtue, when they do depart from
the domestic circle, and enter on the concerns of their country, of
humanity, and of their God.”
XII.
SACRED OBSCURITY.
In the preface to that ill-named but delightful book, the “Remains of
the late Mrs. Richard Trench,” there is a singular remark by the editor,
her son. He says that “the adage is certainly true in regard to the
British matron, _Bene vixit quæ bene latuit_,” the meaning of this adage
being, “She has lived well who has kept herself well out of sight.”
Applying this to his beloved mother, he further expresses a regret at
disturbing her “sacred obscurity.” Then he goes on to disturb it pretty
effectually by printing a thick octavo volume of her most private
letters.
It is a great source of strength and advantage to reformers, that there
are always men preserved to be living examples of this good old Oriental
doctrine of “sacred obscurity.” Just as Mr. Darwin needs for the
demonstration of his theory that the lower orders of creation should
still be present in visible form for purposes of comparison, so every
reformer needs to fortify his position by showing examples of the
original attitude from which society has been gradually emerging. If
there had been no Oriental seclusion, many things in the present
position of woman would be inexplicable. But when we point to that; when
we show that even in the more enlightened Eastern countries it is still
held indecorous to allude to the feminine members of a man’s family;
when we see among the Christian nations of Southern Europe many
lingering traits of this same habit of seclusion; and when we find an
archdeacon of the English Church still clinging to the theory, even
while exhibiting his mother’s family letters to the whole world,—we more
easily understand the course of development.
These re-assertions of the Oriental theory are simply reversions, as a
naturalist would say, to the original type. They are instances of
“atavism,” like the occasional appearance of six fingers on one hand in
a family where the great-great-grandfather happened to possess that
ornament. Such instances can always be found, when one takes the pains
to look for them. Thus a critic, discussing in the Atlantic Monthly Mr.
Mahaffy’s book on “Social Life in Greece,” is surprised that this writer
should quote, in proof of the degradation of woman in Athens, the remark
attributed to Pericles, “That woman is best who is least spoken of among
men, whether for good or for evil.” “In our opinion,” adds the reviewer,
“that remark was wise then, and is wise now.” The Oriental theory is not
then, it seems, extinct; and we are spared the pains of proving that it
ever existed.
If this theory be true, how falsely has the admiration of mankind been
given! If the most obscure woman is best, the most conspicuous must
undoubtedly be worst. Tried by this standard, how unworthy must have
been Elizabeth Barrett Browning, how reprehensible must be Dorothea Dix,
what a model of all that is discreditable is Rosa Bonheur, what a
crowning instance of human depravity is Florence Nightingale! Yet how
consoling the thought, that, while these disreputable persons were thus
wasting their substance in the riotous performance of what the world
weakly styled good deeds, there were always women who saw the folly of
such efforts, women who by steady devotion to eating, drinking, and
sleeping continued to keep themselves in sacred obscurity, and to prove
themselves the ornaments of their sex, inasmuch as no human being ever
had occasion to mention their names!
But alas for human inconsistency! As for this inverse-ratio theory,—this
theory of virtue so exalted that it has never been known or felt or
mentioned among men,—it is to be observed that those who hold it are the
first to desert it when stirred by an immediate occasion. Just as a
slaveholder, in the old times, after demonstrating to you that freedom
was a curse to the negro, would instantly turn round, and inflict this
greatest of all curses on some slave who had saved his life; so, I fear,
would one of these philosophers, if he were profoundly impressed with
any great action done by a woman, give the lie to all his theories, and
celebrate her fame. In spite of all his fine principles, if he happened
to be rescued from drowning by Grace Darling, he would put her name in
the newspaper; if he were tended in hospital by Clara Barton, he would
sound her praise; and, if his mother wrote as good letters as did Mrs.
Trench, he would probably print them to the extent of five hundred
pages, as the archdeacon did, and all his gospel of silence would exhale
itself in a single sigh of regret in the preface.
XIII.
“OUR TRIALS.”
A Providence (R.I.) newspaper remarked some time since that Mrs.
Livermore had just delivered in Newport her celebrated lecture, “What
shall we do with our Trials?” It was, I suppose, one of those felicitous
misprints, by which compositors build better than they know. The real
title of the lecture was, “What shall we do with our Girls?” Perhaps it
was the unconscious witticism of some poetic young typesetter, to whom
damsels were as yet only pleasing pains; or of some premature cynic of
the printing-office, who was in the habit of regarding himself as a
Blighted Being.
Yet to how many is this morose phrase “humanly adaptive,” as Mrs.
Browning abstrusely says! Anxious mothers, for instance, will accept it,
the mothers of the thousands of surplus maidens—or whatever the
statistics say—in Massachusetts. Frederica Bremer inserts in one of her
novels an “Extra Leaf on Daughter-full Houses;” an extra that should
have a large circulation in many towns of New England. The most heroic
and unflinching remedy for this class of trials, so far as my knowledge
goes, was that announced by a small relative of my own, aged three, who
sitting on the floor thus soliloquized to her doll: “If I had too many
daughters, I’d take ’em into the woods and lose ’em—I’d take ’em to the
sea and push ’em in: I wouldn’t have too many daughters!” She is now a
happy wife and mother; but Fate, warned in time by such exceeding
plainness of speech, has judiciously endowed her chiefly with sons.
Most of the serious assertion that women are trials comes from masculine
wisdom. One hears a good deal of it in summer, at the seaside, from the
marriageable youth of some of our chief cities. After a languid hour’s
chat upon tailors or boots or the proper appointments of a harness,—or
of the groom, so perfectly costumed that he seems but a part of the
harness,—how often they fall to lamenting the extravagance, the
exactions, the general unmarriageableness, of the young women of the
present day! Some wit once said that the Pilgrim Mothers had much more
to bear than the Pilgrim Fathers, since the Mothers had not only to
endure the cold and the hunger, but to endure the Fathers beside. In
hearing these remarks I have sometimes thought that these young ladies
must be extravagant indeed, if, in addition to their own expenses, they
take to themselves so very costly a luxury as a fashionable husband.
And I think that wiser critics than these youths are sometimes tempted
into treating these lovely and lovable “trials” in too severely hopeless
a way. There is folly enough on the surface, no doubt, and something of
it below the surface: yet who does not remember how, in time of need,
all these follies proved themselves, during our civil war, but
superficial things? The very maidens over whom we had shaken our anxious
heads were suddenly those who with pale cheeks bade their lovers leave
them, or who changed their gorgeous array for the plain garments of the
hospital. So far as I can judge, there is not a young girl within the
range of my knowledge who can confidently be insured against marrying a
poor artist or a poorer army officer to-morrow, should she once fall
thoroughly in love. And, once married, she will very probably develop a
power of self-denial, of economy, and of dressing herself and baby
gracefully out of the cast-off clothes of her genteel relations,—in a
way to put her critics to shame. I think we ought all patiently to
endure “trials” that turn to such blessings in the end.
For one, I can truly say, with charming Mrs. Trench in her letters
written in 1816, “I do believe the girls of the present day have not
lost the power of blushing; and, though I have no grown-up daughters, I
enjoy the friendship of some who might be my daughters, in whom the
greatest delicacy and modesty are united with perfect ease of manner,
and habitual intercourse with the world.” And if this is the case,—and I
think we shall all own it to be so,—we may as well have the
typographical error corrected, after all, and hereafter say—for “trials”
read “girls.”
XIV.
VIRTUES IN COMMON.
A young friend of mine, who was educated at one of the very best schools
for girls in New York City, told me that one day her teacher requested
the older girls to write out a list of virtues suitable to manly
character, which they did. A month or more later, when this occurrence
was well forgotten, the same teacher bade them write out a list of
womanly virtues, she making no reference to the other list. Then she
made each girl compare her lists; and they all found with surprise that
there was no substantial difference between them. The only variation, in
most cases, was, that they had put in a rather vague special virtue of
“manliness” in the one case, and “womanliness” in the other; a sort of
miscellaneous department or “odd drawer,” apparently, in which to group
all traits not easily analyzed.
The moral is, that, as tested by the common-sense of these young people,
duty is duty, and the difference between ethics for men and ethics for
women lies simply in practical applications, not in principles.
Who can deny that the philosopher Antisthenes was right when he said,
“The virtues of the man and the woman are the same”? Not the Christian,
certainly; for he accepts as his highest standard the being who in all
history best united the highest qualities of both sexes. Not the
metaphysician; for his analysis deals with the human mind as such, not
with the mind of either sex. Not the evolutionist; for he is accustomed
to trace back qualities to their source, and cannot deny that there is
in each sex at least a “survival” of every good and every bad trait. We
may say that these qualities are, or may be, or ought to be, distributed
unequally between the sexes; but we cannot reasonably deny that each sex
possesses a share of every quality, and that what is good in one sex is
also good in the other. Man may be the braver, and yet courage in a
woman may be nobler than cowardice. Woman may be the purer, and yet
purity may be noble in a man.
So clear is this, that some of the very coarsest writers in all
literature, and those who have been severest upon women, have yet been
obliged to acknowledge it. Take, for instance, Dean Swift, who writes:—
“I am ignorant of any one quality that is amiable in a woman, which
is not equally so in a man. I do not except even modesty and
gentleness of nature; nor do I know one vice or folly which is not
equally detestable in both.”
Mrs. Jameson, in her delightful “Commonplace Book,” illustrates this
admirably by one or two test cases. She takes, for instance, from one of
Humboldt’s letters a much-admired passage on manly character:—
“Masculine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first
requisite for the formation of a character of real manly worth. The
man who allows himself to be deceived and carried away by his own
weakness, may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot
be called a good man: such beings should not find favor in the eyes
of a woman, for a truly beautiful and purely feminine nature should
be attracted only by what is highest and noblest in the character of
man.”
“Take now this same bit of moral philosophy,” she says, “and apply it to
the feminine character, and it reads quite as well:—
“‘Feminine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first
requisite for the formation of a character of real feminine worth.
The woman who allows herself to be deceived and carried away by her
own weakness, may be a very amiable person in other respects, but
cannot be called a good woman; such beings should not find favor in
the eyes of a man, for a truly beautiful and purely manly nature
should be attracted only by what is highest and noblest in the
character of woman.’”
I have never been able to perceive that there was a quality or grace of
character which really belonged exclusively to either sex, or which
failed to win honor when wisely exercised by either. It is not thought
necessary to have separate editions of books on ethical science, the one
for man, the other for woman, like almanacs calculated for different
latitudes. The books that vary are not the scientific works, but little
manuals of practical application,—“Duties of Men,” “Duties of Women.”
These vary with times and places: where women do not know how to read,
no advice on reading will be found in the women’s manuals; where it is
held wrong for women to uncover the face, it will be laid down in these
manuals as a sin. But ethics are ethics: the great principles of morals,
as proclaimed either by science or by religion, do not fluctuate for
sex; their basis is in the very foundations of right itself.
This grows clearer when we remember that it is equally true in mental
science. There is not one logic for men, and another for women; a
separate syllogism, a separate induction: the moment we begin to state
intellectual principles, that moment we go beyond sex. We deal then with
absolute truth. If an observation is wrong, if a process of reasoning is
bad, it makes no difference who brings it forward. Any list of mental
processes, any inventory of the contents of the mind, would be
identical, so far as sex goes, whether compiled by a woman or a man.
These things, like the circulation of the blood or the digestion of
food, belong clearly to the ground held in common. The London Spectator
well said lately,—
“After all, knowledge is knowledge; and there is no more a
specifically feminine way of describing correctly the origin of the
Lollard movement, or the character of Spenser’s poetry, than there
is a specifically feminine way of solving a quadratic equation, or
of proving the forty-seventh problem of Euclid’s first book.”
All we can say in modification of this is, that there is, after all, a
foundation for the rather vague item of “manliness” and “womanliness” in
these schoolgirl lists of duties. There is a difference, after all is
said and done; but it is something that eludes analysis, like the
differing perfume of two flowers of the same genus and even of the same
species. The method of thought must be essentially the same in both
sexes; and yet an average woman will put more flavor of something we
call instinct into her mental action, and the average man something more
of what we call logic into his. Whipple tells us that not a man guessed
the plot of Dickens’s “Great Expectations,” while many women did; and
this certainly indicates some average difference of quality or method.
So the average opinions of a hundred women, on some question of ethics,
might very probably differ from the average of a hundred men, while yet
it remains true that “the virtues of the man and the woman are the
same.”
XV.
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES.
Blackburn, in his entertaining book, “Artists and Arabs,” draws a
contrast between Frith’s painting of the “Derby Day” and Rosa Bonheur’s
“Horse Fair,”—“the former pleasing the eye by its cleverness and
prettiness, the latter impressing the spectator by its power and its
truthful rendering of animal life. The difference between the two
painters is probably more one of education than of natural gifts. But,
whilst the style of the former is grafted on a fashion, the latter is
founded on a rock,—the result of a close study of nature, chastened by
classic feeling and a remembrance, it may be, of the friezes of the
Parthenon.”
Now, it is to be observed that this description runs precisely counter
to the popular impression as to the work of the two sexes. Novelists
like Charles Reade, for instance, who have apparently seen precisely one
woman in their lives, and hardly more than one man, and who keep on
sketching these two figures most felicitously and brilliantly
thenceforward, would be apt to assign these qualities of the artist very
differently. Their typical man would do the truthful and powerful work,
and everybody would say, “How manly!” Their woman would please by
cleverness and prettiness, and everybody would say, “How womanly!” Yet
Blackburn shows us that these qualities are individual, not sexual; that
they result from temperament, or, he thinks, still more from training.
If Rosa Bonheur does better work than Frith, it is not because she is a
woman, nor is it in spite of that; but because, setting sex aside, she
is a better artist.
This is not denying the distinctions of sex, but only asserting that
they are not so exclusive and all-absorbing as is supposed. It is easy
to name other grounds of difference which entirely ignore those of sex,
striking directly across them, and rendering a different classification
necessary. It is thus with distinctions of race or color, for instance.
An Indian man and woman are at many points more like to one another than
is either to a white person of the same sex. A black-haired man and
woman, or a fair-haired man and woman, are to be classified together in
these physiological aspects. So of differences of genius: a man and
woman of musical temperament and training have more in common than has
either with a person who is of the same sex, but who cannot tell one
note from another. So two persons of ardent or imaginative temperament
are thus far alike, though the gulf of sex divides them; and so are two
persons of cold or prosaic temperament. In a mixed school the teacher
cannot class together intellectually the boys as such, and the girls as
such: bright boys take hold of a lesson very much as bright girls do,
and slow girls like slow boys. Nature is too rich, too full, too varied,
to be content with a single basis of classification: she has a hundred
systems of grouping, according to sex, age, race, temperament, training,
and so on; and we get but a narrow view of life when we limit our
theories to one set of distinctions.
As a matter of social philosophy, this train of thought logically leads
to co-education, impartial suffrage, and free co-operation in all the
affairs of life. As a matter of individual duty, it teaches the old
moral to “act well your part.” No wise person will ever trouble himself
or herself much about the limitations of sex in intellectual labor. Rosa
Bonheur was not trying to work like a woman, or like a man, or unlike
either, but to do her work thoroughly and well. He or she who works in
this spirit works nobly, and gives an example which will pass beyond the
bounds of sex, and help all. The Abbé Liszt, the most gifted of living
pianists, told a friend of mine, his pupil, that he had learned more of
music from hearing Madame Malibran sing, than from any thing else
whatever.
XVI.
ANGELIC SUPERIORITY.
It is better not to base any plea for woman on the ground of her angelic
superiority. The argument proves too much. If she is already so perfect,
there is every inducement to let well alone. It suggests the expediency
of conforming man’s condition to hers, instead of conforming hers to
man’s. If she is a winged creature, and man can only crawl, it is his
condition that needs mending.
Besides, one may well be a little incredulous of these vast claims.
Granting some average advantage to woman, it is not of such completeness
as to base much argument upon it. The minister looking on his
congregation, rarely sees an unmixed angel, either at the head or at the
foot of any pew. The domestic servant rarely has the felicity of waiting
on an absolute saint at either end of the dinner-table. The lady’s-maid
has to compare her little observations of human infirmity with those of
the valet-de-chambre. The lover worships the beloved, whether man or
woman; but marriage bears rather hard on the ideal in either case. And
those who pray out of the same book, “Have mercy upon us, miserable
sinners,” are not supposed to be offering up petitions for each other
only.
We all know many women whose lives are made wretched by the sins and
follies of their husbands. There are also many men whose lives are
turned to long wretchedness by the selfishness, the worldliness, or the
bad temper of their wives. Domestic tyranny belongs to neither sex by
monopoly. If man tortures or depresses woman, she also has a fearful
power to corrupt and deprave man. On the other hand, to quote old
Antisthenes once more, “the virtues of the man and woman are the same.”
A refined man is more refined than a coarse woman. A child-loving man is
infinitely tenderer and sweeter toward children than a hard and
unsympathetic woman. The very qualities that are claimed as
distinctively feminine are possessed more abundantly by many men than by
many of what is called the softer sex.
Why is it necessary to say all this? Because there is always danger that
we who believe in the equality of the sexes should be led into
over-statements, which will re-act against ourselves. It is not safe to
say that the ballot-box would be reformed if intrusted to feminine votes
alone. Had the voters of the South been all women, it would have plunged
earlier into the gulf of secession, dived deeper, and come up even more
reluctantly. Were the women of Spain to rule its destinies unchecked,
the Pope would be its master, and the Inquisition might be
re-established. For all that we can see, the rule of women alone would
be as bad as the rule of men alone. It would be as unsafe to give woman
the absolute control of man as to make man the master of woman.
Let us be a shade more cautious in our reasonings. Woman needs equal
rights, not because she is man’s better half, but because she is his
other half. She needs them, not as an angel, but as a fraction of
humanity. Her political education will not merely help man, but it will
help herself. She will sometimes be right in her opinions, and sometimes
be altogether wrong; but she will learn, as man learns, by her own
blunders. The demand in her behalf is, that she shall have the
opportunity to make mistakes, since it is by that means she must become
wise.
In all our towns, there is a tendency toward “mixed schools.” We rarely
hear of the sexes being separated in a school after being once united;
but we constantly hear of their being brought together after separation.
This is commonly, but mistakenly, recommended as an advantage to the
boys alone. I once heard an accomplished teacher remonstrate against
this change, when thus urged. “Why should my girls be sacrificed,” she
said, “to improve your boys?” Six months after, she had learned by
experience. “Why,” she asked, “did you rest the argument on so narrow a
ground? Since my school consisted half of boys, I find with surprise
that the change has improved both sexes. My girls are more ambitious,
more obedient, and more ladylike. I shall never distrust the policy of
mixed schools again.”
What is true of the school is true of the family and of the state. It is
not good for man, or for woman, to be alone. Granting the woman to be,
on the whole, the more spiritually minded, it is still true that each
sex needs the other. When the rivet falls from a pair of scissors, we do
not have them mended because either half can claim angelic superiority
over the other half, but because it takes two halves to make a whole.
XVII.
VICARIOUS HONORS.
There is a story in circulation—possibly without authority—to the effect
that a certain young lady has ascended so many Alps that she would have
been chosen a member of the English Alpine Club, but for her misfortune
in respect to sex. As a matter of personal recognition, however, and, as
it were, of approximate courtesy, her dog, who has accompanied her in
all her trips, and is not debased by sex, has been elected into the
club. She has therefore an opportunity for exercising in behalf of her
dog that beautiful self-abnegation which is said to be a part of woman’s
nature, impelling her always to prefer that her laurels should be worn
by somebody else.
The dog probably made no objection to these vicarious honors; nor is any
objection made by the young gentlemen who reply eloquently to the toast,
“The Ladies” at public dinners, or who kindly consent to be educated at
masculine colleges on “scholarships” founded by women. At Harvard
University alone there are ten such scholarships,—their income amounting
annually to $2,340 in all. Those who receive the emoluments of these
funds must reflect within themselves, occasionally, how grand a thing is
this power of substitution given to women, and how pleasant are its
occasional results to the substitute. It is doubtless more blessed to
give than to receive, but to receive without giving has also its
pleasures. Very likely the holder of the scholarship, and the orator who
rises with his hand on his heart to “reply in behalf of the ladies,” may
do their appointed work well; and so did the Alpine dog. Yet, after all,
but for the work done by his mistress, he would have won no more honor
from the Alpine Club than if he had been a chamois.
Nothing since Artemus Ward and his wife’s relations has been finer than
the generous way in which fathers and brothers disclaim all desire for
profits or honors on the part of their feminine relatives. In a certain
system of schools once known to me, the boys had prizes of money on
certain occasions, but the successful girls at those times received
simply a testimonial of honor for each; “the committee being convinced,”
it was said, “that this was more consonant with the true delicacy and
generosity of woman’s nature.” So in the new arrangements for opening
the University of Copenhagen to young women, Karl Blind writes to the
New York Evening Post, that it is expressly provided that they shall not
“share in the academic benefices and stipends which have been set apart
for male students.” Half of these charities may, for aught that appears,
have been established originally by women, like the ten Harvard
scholarships already named. Women, however, can avail themselves of them
only by deputy, as the Alp-climbing young lady is represented by her
dog.
It is all a beautiful tribute to the disinterestedness of woman. The
only pity is that this virtue, so much admired, should not be
reciprocated by showing the like disinterestedness toward her. It does
not appear that the butchers and bakers of Copenhagen propose to reduce
in the case of women students “the benefices and stipends” which are to
be paid for daily food. Young ladies at the university are only
prohibited from receiving money, not from needing it. Nor will any of
the necessary fatigues of Alpine climbing be relaxed for any young lady
because she is a woman. The fatigues will remain in full force, though
the laurels be denied. The mountain-passes will make small account of
the “tenderness and delicacy of her sex.” When the toil is over she will
be regarded as too delicate to be thanked for it; but, by way of
compensation, the Alpine Club will allow her to be represented by her
dog.
XVIII.
THE GOSPEL OF HUMILIATION.
“The silliest man who ever lived,” wrote Fanny Fern once, “has always
known enough, when he says his prayers, to thank God he was not born a
woman.” President —— of —— College is not a silly man at all, and he is
devoting his life to the education of women; yet he seems to feel as
vividly conscious of his superior position as even Fanny Fern could
wish. If he had been born a Jew, he would have thanked God, in the
appointed ritual, for not having made him a woman. If he had been a
Mohammedan, he would have accepted the rule which forbids “a fool, a
madman, or a woman” to summon the faithful to prayer. Being a Christian
clergyman, with several hundred immortal souls, clothed in female
bodies, under his charge, he thinks it his duty, at proper intervals, to
notify his young ladies, that, though they may share with men the glory
of being sophomores, they still are in a position, as regards the other
sex, of hopeless subordination. This is the climax of his discourse,
which in its earlier portions contains many good and truthful things:—
“And, as the woman is different from the man, so is she relative to
him. This is true on the other side also. They are bound together by
mutual relationship so intimate and vital that the existence of
neither is absolutely complete except with reference to the other.
But there is this difference, that the relation of woman is,
characteristically, that of subordination and dependence. This does
not imply inferiority of character, of capacity, of value, in the
sight of God or man; and it has been the glory of woman to have
accepted the position of formal inferiority assigned her by the
Creator, with all its responsibilities, its trials, its possible
outward humiliations and sufferings, in the proud consciousness that
it is not incompatible with an essential superiority; that it does
not prevent her from occupying, if she will, an inward elevation of
character, from which she may look down with pitying and helpful
love on him she calls her lord. Jesus said, ‘Ye know that the
princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that
are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among
you; but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your
minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your
servant, even as the Son of man came, not to be ministered unto, but
to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.’ Surely woman
need not hesitate to estimate her status by a criterion of dignity
sustained by such authority. She need not shrink from a position
which was sought by the Son of God, and in whose trials and griefs
she will have his sympathy and companionship.”
There is a comforting aspect to this discourse, after all. It holds out
the hope, that a particularly noble woman may not be personally inferior
to a remarkably bad husband, but “may look down with pitying and helpful
love on him she calls her lord.” The drawback is not merely that it
insults woman by a reassertion of a merely historical inferiority, which
is steadily diminishing, but that it fortifies this by precisely the
same talk about the dignity of subordination which has been used to
buttress every oppression since the world began. Never yet was there a
pious slaveholder who did not quote to his slaves, on Sunday, precisely
the same texts with which President —— favors his meek young pupils.
Never yet was there a slaveholder who would not shoot through the head,
if he had courage enough, anybody who should attempt to place him in
that beautiful position of subjection whose spiritual merits he had been
proclaiming. When it came to that, he was like Thoreau, who believed
resignation to be a virtue, but preferred “not to practise it unless it
was quite necessary.”
Thus, when the Rev. Charles C. Jones of Savannah used to address the
slaves on their condition, he proclaimed the beauty of obedience in a
way to bring tears to their eyes. And this, he frankly assures the
masters, is the way to check insurrection and advance their own
“pecuniary interests.” He says of the slave, that under proper religious
instruction “his conscience is enlightened and his soul is awed; ... to
God he commits the ordering of his lot, and in his station renders to
all their dues, obedience to whom obedience, and honor to whom honor.
_He dares not wrest from God his own care and protection._ While he sees
a preference in the various conditions of men, he remembers the words of
the apostle: ‘Art thou called being a servant? Care not for it; but, if
thou mayst be free, use it rather. For he that is called in the Lord,
being a servant, is the Lord’s freeman; likewise, also, he that is
called being free, is Christ’s servant.’”[4]
Footnote 4:
Religious Instruction of the Negroes. Savannah, 1842, pp. 208–211.
I must say that the Rev. Mr. Jones’s preaching seems to me precisely as
good as Dr. ——’s, and that a sensible woman ought to be as much
influenced by the one as was Frederick Douglass by the other—that is,
not at all. Let the preacher try “subordination” himself, and see how he
likes it. The beauty of service, such as Jesus praised, lay in the
willingness of the service: a service that is serfdom loses all beauty,
whether rendered by man or by woman. My objection to separate schools
and colleges for women is, that they are too apt to end in such
instructions as this.
XIX.
“CELERY AND CHERUBS.”
There was once a real or imaginary old lady who had got the metaphor of
Scylla and Charybdis a little confused. Wishing to describe a perplexing
situation, this lady said,—
“You see, my dear, she was between Celery on one side and Cherubs on the
other! You know about Celery and Cherubs, don’t you? They was two rocks
somewhere; and if you didn’t hit one, you was pretty sure to run smack
on the other.”
This describes, as a clever writer in the New York Tribune declares, the
present condition of women who “agitate.” Their Celery and Cherubs are
tears and temper.
It is a good hit, and we may well make a note of it. It is the danger of
all reformers, that they will vibrate between discouragement and anger.
When things go wrong, what is it one’s impulse to do? To be cast down,
or to be stirred up; to wring one’s hands, or clench one’s fists,—in
short, tears or temper.
“Mother,” said a resolute little girl of my acquaintance, “if the dinner
was all spoiled, I wouldn’t sit down, and cry! I’d say, ‘Hang it!’” This
cherub preferred the alternative of temper, on days when the celery
turned out badly. Probably her mother was addicted to the other
practice, and exhibited the tears.
But as this alternative is found to exist for both sexes, and on all
occasions, why charge it especially on the woman-suffrage movement? Men
are certainly as much given to ill temper as women; and, if they are
less inclined to tears, they make it up in sulks, which are just as bad.
Nicholas Nickleby, when the pump was frozen, was advised by Mr. Squeers
to “content himself with a dry polish;” and so there is a kind of dry
despair into which men fall, which is quite as forlorn as any tears of
women. How many a man has doubtless wished at such times that the pump
of his lachrymal glands could only thaw out, and he could give his
emotions something more than a “dry polish”! The unspeakable comfort
some women feel in sitting for ten minutes with a handkerchief over
their eyes! The freshness, the heartiness, the new life visible in them,
when the crying is done, and the handkerchief comes down again!
And, indeed, this simple statement brings us to the real truth, which
should have been more clearly seen by the writer who tells this story.
She is wrong in saying, “It is urged that men and women stand on an
equality, are exactly alike.” Many of us urge the “equality:” very few
of us urge the “exactly alike.” An apple and an orange, a potato and a
tomato, a rose and a lily, the Episcopal and the Presbyterian churches,
Oxford and Cambridge, Yale and Harvard,—we may surely grant equality in
each case, without being so exceedingly foolish as to go on and say that
they are exactly alike.
And precisely here is the weak point of the whole case, as presented by
this writer. Women give way to tears more readily than men? Granted. Is
their sex any the weaker for it? Not a bit. It is simply a difference of
temperament: that is all. It involves no inferiority. If you think that
this habit necessarily means weakness, wait and see! Who has not seen
women break down in tears during some domestic calamity, while the
“stronger sex” were calm; and who has not seen those same women, that
temporary excitement being over, rise up and dry their eyes, and be
thenceforth the support and stay of their households, and perhaps bear
up the “stronger sex” as a stream bears up a ship? I said once to an
experienced physician, watching such a woman, “That woman is really
great.”—“Of course she is,” he answered: “did you ever see a woman who
was not great, when the emergency required?”
Now, will women carry this same quality of temperament into their public
career? Doubtless: otherwise they would cease to be women. Will it be
betraying confidence if I own that I have seen two of the very bravest
women of my acquaintance—women who have swayed great audiences—burst
into tears, during a committee-meeting, at a moment of unexpected
adversity for “the cause”? How pitiable! our critical observers would
have thought. In five minutes that April shower had passed, and those
women were as resolute and unconquerable as Queen Elizabeth: they were
again the natural leaders of those around them; and the cool and
tearless men who sat beside them were nothing—men were “a lost art,” as
some one says—compared with the inexhaustible moral vitality of those
two women.
No: the dangers of “Celery and Cherubs” are exaggerated. For temper,
women are as good as men, and no better. As for tears, long may they
flow! They are symbols of that mighty distinction of sex which is as
ineffaceable and as essential as the difference between land and sea.
XX.
THE NEED OF CAVALRY.
In the interesting Buddhist book, “The Wheel of the Law,” translated by
Henry Alabaster, there is an account of a certain priest who used to
bless a great king, saying, “May your majesty have the firmness of a
crow, the audacity of a woman, the endurance of a vulture, and the
strength of an ant.” The priest then told anecdotes illustrating all of
these qualities. Who has not known occasions wherein some daring woman
has been the Joan of Arc of a perfectly hopeless cause, taken it up
where men shrank, carried it through where they had failed, and
conquered by weapons which men would never have thought of using, and
would have lacked faith to employ even if put into their hands? The wit,
the resources, the audacity of women, have been the key to history and
the staple of novels, ever since that larger novel called history began
to be written.
How is it done? Who knows the secret of their success? All that any man
can say is, that the heart enters largely into the magic. Rogers asserts
in his “Table-Talk,” that often, when doubting how to act in matters of
importance, he had received more useful advice from women than from men.
“Women have the understanding of the heart,” he said, “which is better
than that of the head.” Then this instinct, that begins from the heart,
reaches the heart also, and through that controls the will. “Win
hearts,” said Lord Burleigh to Queen Elizabeth, “and you have hands and
purses;” and the greatest of English sovereigns, in spite of ugliness
and rouge, in spite of coarseness and cruelty and bad passions, was
adored by the nation that she first made great.
It seems to me that women are a sort of cavalry force in the army of
mankind. They are not always to be relied upon for that steady
“hammering away,” which was Grant’s one method; but there is a certain
Sheridan quality about them, light-armed, audacious, quick,
irresistible. They go before the main army; their swift wits go scouting
far in advance; they are the first to scent danger, or to spy out
chances of success. Their charge is like that of a Tartar horde, or the
wild sweep of the Apaches. They are upon you from some wholly unexpected
quarter; and this respectable, systematic, well-drilled masculine force
is caught and rolled over and over in the dust, before the man knows
what has hit him. But, even if repelled and beaten off, this formidable
cavalry is unconquered: routed and in confusion to-day, it comes back
upon you to-morrow—fresh, alert, with new devices, bringing new dangers.
In dealing with it, as the French complained of the Arabs in Algiers,
“Peace is not to be purchased by victory.” And, even if all seems lost,
with what a brilliant final charge it will cover a retreat!
Decidedly, we need cavalry. In older countries, where it has been a
merely undisciplined and irregular force, it has often done mischief;
and public men, from Demosthenes down, have been lamenting that measures
which the statesman has meditated a whole year, may be overturned in a
day by a woman. Under our American government we have foolishly
attempted to leave out this arm of the service altogether; and much of
the alleged dulness of our American history has come from this attempt.
Those who have been trained in the various reforms where woman has taken
an equal part—the anti-slavery reform especially—know well how much of
the energy, the dash, the daring, of those movements, have come from
her. A revolution with a woman in it is stronger than the established
order that omits her. It is not that she is superior to man, but she is
different from man; and we can no more spare her than we could spare the
cavalry from an army.
XXI.
“THE REASON FIRM, THE TEMPERATE WILL.”
It is a part of the necessary theory of republican government, that
every class and race shall be judged by its highest types, not its
lowest. The proposition of the French revolutionary statesman, to begin
the work of purifying the world by arresting all the cowards and knaves,
is liable to the objection that it would find victims in every circle.
Republican government begins at the other end, and assumes that the
community generally has good intentions at least, and some common sense,
however it may be with individuals. Take the very quality which the
newspapers so often deny to women,—the quality of steadiness. “In fact,
men’s great objection to the entrance of the female mind into politics
is drawn from a suspicion of its unsteadiness on matters in which the
feelings could by any possibility be enlisted.” Thus says the New York
Nation. Let us consider this implied charge against women, and consider
it not by generalizing from a single instance,—“just like a woman,” as
the editors would doubtless say, if a woman had done it,—but by
observing whole classes of that sex, taken together.
These classes need some care in selection, for the plain reason that
there are comparatively few circles in which women have yet been allowed
enough freedom of scope, or have acted sufficiently on the same plane
with men, to furnish a fair estimate of their probable action, were they
enfranchised. Still there occur to me three such classes,—the
anti-slavery women, the Quaker women, and the women who conduct
philanthropic operations in our large cities. If the alleged
unsteadiness of women is to be felt in public affairs, it would have
been felt in these organizations. Has it been so felt?
Of the anti-slavery movement I can personally testify,—and I have heard
the same point fully recognized among my elders, such as Garrison,
Phillips, and Quincy,—that the women contributed their full share, if
not more than their share, to the steadiness of that movement, even in
times when the feelings were most excited, as, for instance, in
fugitive-slave cases. Who that has seen mobs practically put down, and
mayors cowed into decency, by the silent dignity of those rows of women
who sat, with their knitting, more imperturbable than the men, can read
without a smile these doubts of the “steadiness” of that sex? Again,
among Quaker women, I have asked the opinion of prominent Friends, as of
John G. Whittier, whether it has been the experience of that body that
women were more flighty and unsteady than men in their official action;
and have been uniformly answered in the negative. And finally, as to
benevolent organizations, a good test is given in the fact,—first
pointed out, I believe, by that eminently practical philanthropist, Rev.
Augustus Woodbury of Providence,—that the whole tendency has been,
during the last twenty years, to put the management, even the financial
control, of our benevolent societies, more and more into the hands of
women, and that there has never been the slightest reason to reverse
this policy. Ask the secretaries of the various boards of State
Charities, or the officers of the Social Science Associations, if they
have found reason to complain of the want of steadfast qualities in the
“weaker sex.” Why is it that the legislation of Massachusetts has
assigned the class requiring the steadiest of all supervision—the
imprisoned convicts—to “five commissioners of prisons, two of whom shall
be women”? These are the points which it would be worthy of our journals
to consider, instead of hastily generalizing from single instances. Let
us appeal from the typical woman of the editorial picture,—fickle,
unsteady, foolish,—to the nobler conception of womanhood which the poet
Wordsworth found fulfilled in his own household:—
“A being breathing thoughtful breath,
A traveller betwixt life and death;
_The reason firm, the temperate will;
Endurance, foresight, strength and skill_;
A perfect woman, nobly planned
To warn, to comfort, to command,
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of an angel light.”
XXII.
“ALLURES TO BRIGHTER WORLDS, AND LEADS THE WAY.”
When the Massachusetts House of Representatives had “School Suffrage”
under consideration, the other day, the suggestion was made by one of
the pithiest and quaintest of the speakers, that men were always better
for the society of women, and therefore ought to vote in their company.
“If all of us,” he said, “would stay away from all places where we
cannot take our wives and daughters with us, we should keep better
company than we now do.” This expresses a feeling which grows more and
more common among the better class of men, and which is the key to much
progress in the condition of women. There can be no doubt that the
increased association of the sexes in society, in school, in literature,
tends to purify these several spheres of action. Yet, when we come to
philosophize on this, there occur some perplexities on the way.
For instance, the exclusion of woman from all these spheres was in
ancient Greece almost complete; yet the leading Greek poets, as Homer
and the tragedians, are exceedingly chaste in tone, and in this respect
beyond most of the great poets of modern nations. Again no European
nation has quite so far sequestered and subordinated women as has Spain;
and yet the whole tone of Spanish literature is conspicuously grave and
decorous. This plainly indicates that race has much to do with the
matter, and that the mere admission or exclusion of women is but one
among several factors. In short, it is easy to make out a case by a
rhetorical use of the facts on one side; but, if we look at all the
facts, the matter presents greater difficulties.
Again, it is to be noted that in several countries the first women who
have taken prominent part in literature have been as bad as the men; as,
for instance, Marguerite of Navarre and Mrs. Aphra Behn. This might
indeed be explained by supposing that they had to gain entrance into
literature by accepting the dissolute standards which they found
prevailing. But it would probably be more correct to say that these
standards themselves were variable, and that their variation affected,
at certain periods, women as well as men. Marguerite of Navarre wrote
religious books as well as merry stories; and we know from Lockhart’s
Life of Scott, that ladies of high character in Edinburgh used to read
Mrs. Behn’s tales and plays aloud, at one time, with delight,—although
one of the same ladies found, in her old age, that she could not read
them to herself without blushing. Shakspeare puts coarse repartees into
the mouths of women of stainless virtue. George Sand is not considered
an unexceptionable writer; but she tells us in her autobiography that
she found among her grandmother’s papers poems and satires so indecent
that she could not read them through, and yet they bore the names of
_abbés_ and gentlemen whom she remembered in her childhood as models of
dignity and honor. Voltaire inscribes to ladies of high rank, who
doubtless regarded it as a great compliment, verses such as not even a
poet of the English “fleshly school” would now print at all. In “Poems
by Eminent Ladies,”—published in 1755 and reprinted in 1774,—there are
one or two poems as gross and disgusting as any thing in Swift; yet
their authors were thought reputable women. Allan Ramsay’s “Tea-Table
Miscellany”—a collection of English and Scottish songs—was first
published in 1724; and in his preface to the sixteenth edition the
editor attributes its great success, especially among the ladies, to the
fact that he has carefully excluded all grossness, “that the modest
voice and ear of the fair singer might meet with no affront;” and adds,
“the chief bent of all my studies being to attain their good graces.”
There is no doubt of the great popularity enjoyed by the book in all
circles; yet it contains a few songs which the most licentious newspaper
would not now publish. The inference is irresistible, from this and many
other similar facts, that the whole tone of manners and decency has very
greatly improved among the European races within a century and a half.
I suspect the truth to be, that, besides the visible influence of race
and religion, there has been an insensible and almost unconscious
improvement in each sex, with respect to these matters, as time has
passed on; and that the mutual desire to please has enabled each sex to
help the other,—the sex which is naturally the more refined taking the
lead. But I should lay more stress on this mutual influence, and less on
mere feminine superiority, than would be laid by many. It is often
claimed by teachers that co-education helps not only boys, but also
girls, to develop greater propriety of manners. When the sexes are
wholly separate, or associate on terms of entire inequality, no such
good influence occurs: the more equal the association, the better for
both parties. After all, the Divine model is to be found in the family;
and the best ingenuity cannot improve much upon it.
THE HOME.
“In respect to the powers and rights of married women, the law is by no
means abreast of the spirit of the age. Here are seen the old fossil
footprints of feudalism. The law relating to woman tends to make every
family a barony or a monarchy or a despotism, of which the husband is
the baron, king, or despot, and the wife the dependent, serf, or slave.
That this is not always the fact, is not due to the law, but to the
enlarged humanity which spurns the narrow limits of its rules. The
progress of civilization has changed the family from a barony to a
republic; but the law has not kept pace with the advance of ideas,
manners, and customs.”—W. W. STORY’s _Treatise on Contracts not under
Seal_, § 84,—third edition, p. 89.
XXIII.
WANTED—HOMES.
We see advertisements, occasionally, of “Homes for Aged Women,” and more
rarely “Homes for Aged Men.” The question sometimes suggests itself,
whether it would not be better to begin the provision earlier, and see
that homes are also provided, in some form, for the middle-aged and even
the young. The trouble is, I suppose, that as it takes two to make a
bargain, so it takes at least two to make a home; and unluckily it takes
only one to spoil it.
Madame Roland once defined marriage as an institution where one person
undertakes to provide happiness for two; and many failures are accounted
for, no doubt, by this false basis. Sometimes it is the man, more often
the woman, of whom this extravagant demand is made. There are marriages
which have proved a wreck almost wholly through the fault of the wife.
Nor is this confined to wedded homes alone. I have known a son who lived
alone, patiently and uncomplainingly, with that saddest of all
conceivable companions, a drunken mother. I have known another young man
who supported in his own home a mother and sister, both habitual
drunkards. All these were American-born, and all of respectable social
position. A home shadowed by such misery is not a home, though it might
have been a home but for the sins of women. Such instances are, however,
rare and occasional compared with the cases where the same offence in
the husband makes ruin of the home.
Then there are the cases where indolence, or selfishness, or vanity, or
the love of social excitement, in the woman, unfits her for home life.
Here we come upon ground where perhaps woman is the greater sinner. It
must be remembered, however, that against this must be balanced the
neglect produced by club-life, or by the life of society-membership, in
a man. A brilliant young married belle in London once told me that she
was glad her husband was so fond of his club, for it amused him every
night while she went to balls. “Married men do not go much into society
here,” she said, “unless they are regular flirts,—which I do not think
my husband would ever be, for he is very fond of me,—so he goes every
night to his club, and gets home about the same time that I do. It is a
very nice arrangement.” It was apparently spoken in all the fearlessness
of innocence, but I believe that it has since ended in a “separation.”
It is common to denounce club-life in our large cities as destructive of
the home. The modern club is simply a more refined substitute for the
old-fashioned tavern, and is on the whole an advance in morals as well
as manners. In our large cities a man in a certain social coterie
belongs to a club, if he can afford it, as a means of contact with his
fellows, and to have various conveniences which he cannot so
economically obtain at home. A few haunt them constantly: the many use
them occasionally. More absorbing than clubs, perhaps, are the secret
societies which have so revived among us since the war, and which
consume time so fearfully. There was a case mentioned in the newspapers
lately of a man who belonged to some twenty of these associations; and
when he died, and each wished to conduct his funeral, great was the
strife! In the small city where I write, there are seventeen secret
societies down in the directory, and I suppose as many more not so
conspicuous. I meet men who assure me that they habitually attend a
societymeeting every evening of the week except Sunday, and a church
meeting then. These are rarely men of leisure: they are usually
mechanics or business men of some kind, who are hard at work all day,
and never see their families except at meal-times. Their case is far
worse, so far as absence from home is concerned, than that of the
“club-men” of large cities; for these are often men of leisure, who, if
married, at least make home one of their lounging-places, which the
secret-society men do not.
I honestly believe that this melancholy desertion of the home is largely
due to the traditional separation between the alleged spheres of the
sexes. The theory still prevails largely, that home is the peculiar
province of the woman, that she has almost no duties out of it; and
hence, naturally enough, that the husband has almost no duties in it. If
he is amused there, let him stay there; but, as it is not his recognized
sphere of duty, he is not actually violating any duty by absenting
himself. This theory even pervades our manuals of morals, of
metaphysics, and of popular science; and it is not every public teacher
who has the manliness, having once stated it, to modify his statement,
as did the venerable President Hopkins of Williams College, when
lecturing the other day to the young ladies of Vassar.
“I would,” he said, “at this point correct my teaching in ‘The Law of
Love’ to the effect that home is peculiarly the sphere of woman, and
civil government that of man. _I now regard the home as the joint sphere
of man and woman, and the sphere of civil government more of an open
question as between the two._ It is, however, to be lamented that the
present agitation concerning the rights of woman is so much a matter of
‘rights’ rather than of ‘duties,’ as the reform of the latter would
involve the former.”
If our instructors in moral philosophy will only base their theory of
ethics as broadly as this, we shall no longer need to advertise “Homes
Wanted;” for the joint efforts of men and women will soon provide them.
XXIV.
THE ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.
Nothing throws more light on the whole history of woman than the first
illustration in Sir John Lubbock’s “Origin of Civilization.” A young
girl, almost naked, is being dragged furiously along the ground by a
party of naked savages, armed literally to the teeth, while those of
another band grasp her by the arm, and almost tear her asunder in the
effort to hold her back. These last are her brothers and her friends;
the others are—her enemies? As you please to call them. They are her
future husband and his kinsmen, who have come to aid him in his wooing.
This was the primitive rite of marriage. Vestiges of it still remain
among savage nations. And all the romance and grace of the most refined
modern marriage—the orange-blossoms, the bridal veil, the church
service, the wedding-feast—these are only the “bright consummate flower”
reared by civilization from that rough seed. All the brutal encounter is
softened into this. Nothing remains of the barbarism except the one word
“obey,” and even that is going.
Now, to say that a thing is going, is to say that it will presently be
gone. To say that any thing is changed, is to say that it is to change
further. If it never has been altered, perhaps it will not be; but a
proved alteration of an inch in a year opens the way to an indefinite
modification. The study of the glaciers, for instance, began with the
discovery that they had moved; and from that moment no one doubted that
they were moving all the time. It is the same with the position of
woman. Once open your eyes to the fact that it has changed, and who is
to predict where the matter shall end? It is sheer folly to say, “Her
relative position will always be what it has been,” when one glance at
Sir John Lubbock’s picture shows that there is no fixed “has been,” but
that her original position was long since altered and revised. Those who
still use this argument are like those who laughed at the lines of
stakes which Agassiz planted across the Aar glacier in 1840. But the
stakes settled the question, and proved the motion. _Pero si muove_:
“But it moves.”
The motion once proved, the whole range of possible progress is before
us. The amazement of that formerly “heathen Chinee” in Boston, the other
day, when he saw a woman addressing a missionary meeting; the
astonishment of all English visitors when young ladies hear classes in
geometry and Latin, in our high schools; the surprise of foreigners at
seeing the rough throng in the Cooper Institute reading-room submit to
the sway of one young woman with a crochet-needle—all these simply
testify to the fact that the stakes have moved. That they have yet been
carried half way to the end, who knows? What a step from the horrible
nuptials of those savage days to the poetic marriage of Robert Browning
and Elizabeth Barrett—the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” on one side, the
“One Word More” on the other! But who can say that the whole relation
between man and woman reached its climax there, and that where the past
has brought changes so vast the future is to add nothing? Who knows
that, when “the world’s great bridals come,” people may not look back
with pity, even on this era of the Brownings? Probably even Elizabeth
Barrett promised to obey!
At any rate, it is safe to say that each step concedes the probability
of another. Even from the naked barbarian to the veiled Oriental, from
the savage hut to the carefully enshrined harem, is a step forward. It
is another step in the spiral line of progress to the unveiled face and
comparatively free movements of the modern English or American woman.
From the kitchen to the public lecture-room, from that to the
lecture-platform, and from that again to the ballot-box,—these are far
slighter steps than those which have already lifted the savage girl of
Sir John Lubbock’s picture into the possession of the alphabet and the
dignity of a home. So easy are these future changes beside those of the
past, that to doubt their possibility is as if Agassiz, after tracing
year by year the motion of his Alpine glacier, should deny its power to
move one inch farther into the sunny valley, and there to melt
harmlessly away.
XXV.
THE LOW-WATER MARK.
We constantly see it assumed, in arguments against any step in the
elevation of woman, that her position is a thing fixed permanently by
nature, so that there can be in it no great or essential change. Every
successive modification is resisted as “a reform against nature;” and
this argument from permanence is always that appealing most strongly to
conservative minds. Let us see how the facts confirm it.
A story is going the rounds of the newspapers in regard to a Russian
peasant and his wife. For some act of disobedience the peasant took the
law into his own hands; and his mode of discipline was to tie the poor
creature naked to a post in the street, and to call on every passer-by
to strike her a blow. Not satisfied with this, he placed her on the
ground, and tied heavy weights on her limbs until one arm was broken.
When finally released, she made a complaint against him in court. The
court discharged him on the ground that he had not exceeded the legal
authority of a husband. Encouraged by this, he caused her to be arrested
in return; and the same court sentenced her to another public whipping
for disobedience.
No authority was given for this story in the newspaper where I saw it;
but it certainly did not first appear in a woman-suffrage newspaper, and
cannot therefore be a manufactured “outrage.” I use it simply to
illustrate the low-water mark at which the position of woman may rest,
in the largest Christian nation of the world. All the refinements, all
the education, all the comparative justice, of modern society, have been
gradually upheaved from some such depth as this. When the gypsies
described by Leland treat even the ground trodden upon by a woman as
impure, they simply illustrate the low plane from which all the
elevation of woman has begun. All these things show that the position of
that sex in society, so far from being a thing in itself permanent, has
been in reality the most variable of all factors in the social problem.
And this inevitably suggests the question, Are we any more sure that her
present position is finally and absolutely fixed than were those who
observed it at any previous time in the world’s history? Granting that
her condition was once at low-water mark, who is authorized to say that
it has yet reached high-tide?
It is very possible that this Russian wife, once scourged back to
submission, ended her days in the conviction, and taught to her
daughters, that such was a woman’s rightful place. When an American
woman of to-day says, “I have all the rights I want,” is she on any
surer ground? Grant that the difference is vast between the two. How do
we know that even the later condition is final, or that any thing is
final but entire equality before the laws? It is not many years since
William Story—in a legal work inspired and revised by his father, the
greatest of American jurists—wrote this indignant protest against the
injustice of the old common law:—
“In respect to the powers and rights of married women, the law is by
no means abreast of the spirit of the age. Here are seen the old
fossil footprints of feudalism. The law relating to woman tends to
make every family a barony or a monarchy, or a despotism, of which
the husband is the baron, king, or despot, and the wife the
dependent, serf, or slave. That this is not always the fact, is not
due to the law, but to the enlarged humanity which spurns the narrow
limits of its rules. The progress of civilization has changed the
family from a barony to a republic; but the law has not kept pace
with the advance of ideas, manners, and customs. And, although
public opinion is a check to legal rules on the subject, the rules
are feudal and stern. Yet the position of woman throughout history
serves as the criterion of the freedom of the people or an age. When
man shall despise that right which is founded only on might, woman
will be free and stand on an equal level with him,—a friend and not
a dependent.”[5]
Footnote 5:
Story’s Treatise on the Law of Contracts not under Seal, p. 89, § 84.
We know that the law is greatly changed and ameliorated in many places
since Story wrote this statement; but we also know how almost every one
of these changes was resisted: and who is authorized to say that the
final and equitable fulfilment is yet reached?
XXVI.
“OBEY.”
After witnessing the marriage ceremony of the Episcopal Church, the
other day, I walked down the aisle with the young rector who had
officiated. It was natural to speak of the beauty of the Church service
on an occasion like that; but, after doing this, I felt compelled to
protest against the unrighteous pledge to obey. “I hope,” I said, “to
live to see that word expunged from the Episcopal service, as it has
been from that of the Methodists.”
“Why?” he asked. “Is it because you know that they will not obey,
whatever their promise?”
“Because they ought not,” I said.
“Well,” said he, after a few moments’ reflection, and looking up
frankly, “I do not think they ought!”
Here was a young clergyman of great earnestness and self-devotion, who
included it among the sacred duties of his life to impose upon ignorant
young girls a solemn obligation, which he yet thought they ought not to
incur, and did not believe that they would keep. There could hardly be a
better illustration of the confusion in the public mind, or the manner
in which “the subjection of woman” is being outgrown, or the subtile way
in which this subjection has been interwoven with sacred ties, and
baptized “duty.”
The advocates of woman suffrage are constantly reproved for using the
terms “subjection,” “oppression,” and “slavery,” as applied to woman.
They simply commit the same sin as that committed by the original
abolitionists. They are “as harsh as truth, as uncompromising as
justice.” Of course they talk about oppression and emancipation. It is
the word _obey_ that constitutes the one, and shows the need of the
other. Whoever is pledged to obey is technically and literally a slave,
no matter how many roses surround the chains. All the more so if the
slavery is self-imposed, and surrounded by all the prescriptions of
religion. Make the marriage-tie as close as Church or State can make it;
but let it be equal, impartial. That it may be so, the word _obey_ must
be abandoned or made reciprocal. Where invariable obedience is promised,
equality is gone.
That there may be no doubt about the meaning of this word in the
marriage-covenant, the usages of nations often add symbolic
explanations. These are generally simple and brutal enough to be
understood. The Hebrew ceremony, when the bridegroom took off his
slipper and struck the bride on the neck as she crossed his threshold,
was unmistakable. As my black sergeant said, when a white prisoner
questioned his authority, and he pointed to the _chevrons_ on his
sleeve, “Dat mean guv’ment.” All these forms mean simply government
also. The ceremony of the slipper has now no recognition, except when
people fling an old shoe after the bride, which is held by antiquarians
to be the same observance. But it is all preserved and concentrated into
a single word, when the bride promises to obey.
The deepest wretchedness that has ever been put into human language, or
that has exceeded it, has grown out of that pledge. There is no misery
on earth like that of a pure and refined woman who finds herself owned,
body and soul, by a drunken, licentious, brutal man. The very fact that
she is held to obedience by a spiritual tie makes it worse.
Chattel-slavery was not so bad; for, though the master might pervert
religion for his own satisfaction, he could not impose upon the slave.
Never yet did I see a negro slave who thought it a duty to obey his
master; and therefore there was always some dream of release. But who
has not heard of some delicate and refined woman, one day of whose
torture was equivalent to years of that possible to an obtuser
frame,—who had the door of escape ready at hand for years, and yet died
a lingering death rather than pass through it; and this because she had
promised to obey!
It is said of one of the most gifted women who ever trod American
soil,—she being of English birth,—that, before she obtained the divorce
which separated her from her profligate husband, she once went for
counsel to the wife of her pastor. She unrolled before her the long
catalogue of merciless outrages to which she had been subject,
endangering finally her health, her life, and that of her children born
and to be born. When she turned at last for advice to her confessor,
with the agonized inquiry, “What is it my duty to do?”—“Do?” said the
stern adviser: “Lie down on the floor, and let your husband trample on
you if he will. That is a woman’s duty.”
The woman who gave this advice was not naturally inhuman nor heartless:
she had simply been trained in the school of obedience. The Jesuit
doctrine, that a priest should be as a corpse, _perinde ac cadaver_, in
the hands of a superior priest, is not worse. Woman has no right to
delegate, nor man to assume, a responsibility so awful. Just in
proportion as it is consistently carried out, it trains men from boyhood
into self-indulgent tyrants; and, while some women are transformed by it
to saints, others are crushed into deceitful slaves. That this was the
result of chattel-slavery, this nation has at length learned. We learn
more slowly the profounder and more subtile moral evil that follows from
the unrighteous promise to obey.
XXVII.
WOMAN IN THE CHRYSALIS.
When the bride receives the ring upon her finger, and utters—if she
utters it—the unnatural promise to obey, she fancies a poetic beauty in
the rite. Turning of her own free will from her maiden liberty, she
voluntarily takes the yoke of service upon her. This is her view; but is
this the historic fact in regard to marriage? Not at all. The pledge of
obedience—the whole theory of inequality in marriage—is simply what is
left to us of a former state of society, in which every woman, old or
young, must obey somebody. The state of tutelage, implied in such a
marriage, is merely what is left of the old theory of the “Perpetual
Tutelage of Women,” under the Roman law.
Roman law, from which our civil law is derived, has its foundation
evidently in patriarchal tradition. It recognized at first the family
only, and that family was held together by parental power (_patria
potestas_). If the father died, his powers passed to the son or
grandson, as the possible head of a new family; but these powers never
could pass to a woman, and every woman, of whatever age, must be under
somebody’s legal control. Her father dying, she was still subject
through life to her nearest male relations, or to her father’s nominees,
as her guardians. She was under perpetual guardianship, both as to
person or property. No years, no experience, could make her any thing
but a child before the law.
In Oriental countries the system was still more complete. “A man,” says
the Gentoo Code of Laws, “must keep his wife so much in subjection that
she by no means be mistress of her own action. If the wife have her own
free will, notwithstanding she be of a superior caste, she will behave
amiss.” But this authority, which still exists in India, is not merely
conjugal. The husband exerts it simply as being the wife’s legal
guardian. If the woman be unmarried or a widow, she must be as
rigorously held under some other guardianship. It is no uncommon thing
for a woman in India to be the ward of her own son. Lucretia Mott or
Florence Nightingale would there be in personal subjection to somebody.
Any man of legal age would be recognized as a fit custodian for them,
but there must be a man.
With some variation of details at different periods, the same system
prevailed essentially at Rome, down to the time when Rome became
Christian. Those who wish for particulars will find them in an admirable
chapter (the fifth) of Maine’s “Ancient Law.” At one time the husband
was held to possess the _patria potestas_, or parental power, in its
full force. By law “the woman passed _in manum viri_, that is, she
became the daughter of her husband.” All she had became his, and after
his death she was retained in the same strict tutelage by any guardians
his will might appoint. Afterwards, to soften this rigid bond, the woman
was regarded in law as being temporarily deposited by her family with
her husband; the family appointed guardians over her: and thus, between
the two tyrannies, she won a sort of independence. Then came
Christianity, and swept away the parental authority for married women,
concentrating all upon the husband. Hence our legislation bears the mark
of a double origin, and woman is half recognized as an equal and half as
a slave.
It is necessary to remember, therefore, that all the relation of
subjection in marriage is merely the residue of an unnatural system, of
which all else is long since outgrown. It would have seemed to an
ancient Roman a matter of course that a woman should, all her life long,
obey the guardians set over her person. It still seems to many people a
matter of course that she should obey her husband. To others among us,
on the contrary, both these theories of obedience seem barbarous, and
the one is merely a relic of the other.
We cannot disregard the history of the Theory of Tutelage. If we could
believe that a chrysalis is always a chrysalis, and a butterfly always a
butterfly, we could easily leave each to its appropriate sphere; but
when we see the chrysalis open, and the butterfly come half out of it,
we know that sooner or later it must spread wings, and fly. The theory
of tutelage is the chrysalis. Woman is the butterfly. Sooner or later
she will be wholly out.
XXVIII.
TWO AND TWO.
A young man of very good brains was telling me, the other day, his
dreams of his future wife. Rattling on, more in joke than in earnest, he
said, “She must be perfectly ignorant, and a bigot: she must know
nothing, and believe every thing. I should wish to have her call to me
from the adjoining room, ‘My dear, what do two and two make?’”
It did not seem to me that his demand would be so very hard to fill,
since bigotry and ignorance are to be had almost anywhere for the
asking; and, as for two and two, I should say that it had always been
the habit of women to ask that question of some man, and to rest easily
satisfied with the answer. They have generally called, as my friend
wished, from some other room, saying, “My dear, what do two and two
make?” and the husband or father or brother has answered and said, “My
dear, they make four for a man, and three for a woman.”
At any given period in the history of woman, she has adopted man’s whim
as the measure of her rights; has claimed nothing; has sweetly accepted
any thing: the law of two-and-two itself should be at his discretion. At
any given moment, so well was his interpretation received, that it stood
for absolute right. In Rome a woman, married or single, could not
testify in court; in the middle ages, and down to quite modern times,
she could not hold real estate; ten years ago she could not, in New
England, obtain a collegiate education; even now she cannot vote.
The first principles of republican government are so rehearsed and
re-rehearsed, that one would think they must become “as plain as that
two and two make four.” But we find throughout, that, as Emerson said of
another class of reasoners, “Their two is not the real two; their four
is not the real four.” We find different numerals and diverse
arithmetical rules for the two sexes; as, in some Oriental countries,
men and women speak different dialects of the same language.
In novels the hero often begins by dreaming, like my friend, of an ideal
wife, who shall be ignorant of every thing, and have only brains enough
to be bigoted. Instead of sighing, like Falstaff, “Oh for a fine young
thief, of the age of two and twenty or thereabouts!” the hero sighs for
a fine young idiot of similar age. When the hero is successful in his
search and wooing, the novelist sometimes mercifully removes the young
woman early, like David Copperfield’s Dora, she bequeathing the bereaved
husband, on her death-bed, to a woman of sense. In real life these
convenient interruptions do not commonly occur, and the foolish youth
regrets through many years that he did not select an Agnes instead.
The acute observer Stendhal says,—
“In Paris, the highest praise for a marriageable girl is to say,
‘She has great sweetness of character and the disposition of a
lamb.’ Nothing produces more impression on fools who are looking out
for wives. I think I see the interesting couple, two years after,
breakfasting together on a dull day, with three tall lackeys waiting
upon them!”
And he adds, still speaking in the interest of men,—
“Most men have a period in their career when they might do something
great, a period when nothing seems impossible. The ignorance of
women spoils for the human race this magnificent opportunity; and
love, at the utmost, in these days, only inspires a young man to
learn to ride well, or to make a judicious selection of a
tailor.”[6]
Footnote 6:
De L’Amour, par de Stendhal (Henri Beyle). Paris, 1868 [written in
1822], pp. 182, 198.
Society, however, discovers by degrees that there are conveniences in
every woman’s knowing the four rules of arithmetic for herself. Two and
two come to the same amount on a butcher’s bill, whether the order be
given by a man or a woman; and it is the same in all affairs or
investments, financial or moral. We shall one day learn that with laws,
customs, and public affairs it is even so. Once get it rooted in a
woman’s mind, that, for her, two and two make three only, and sooner or
later the accounts of the whole human race fail to balance.
XXIX.
A MODEL HOUSEHOLD.
There is an African bird called the hornbill, whose habits are in some
respects a model. The female builds her nest in a hollow tree, lays her
eggs, and broods on them. So far, so good. Then the male feels that he
must also contribute some service; so he walls up the hole closely,
giving only room for the point of the female’s bill to protrude. Until
the eggs are hatched, she is thenceforth confined to her nest, and is in
the mean time fed assiduously by her mate, who devotes himself entirely
to this object. Dr. Livingstone has seen these nests in Africa, Layard
and others in Asia, and Wallace in Sumatra.
Personally I have never seen a hornbill’s nest. The nearest approach I
ever made to it was when in Fayal I used to pass near a gloomy mansion,
of which the front windows were walled up, and only one high window was
visible in the rear, beyond the reach of eyes from any neighboring
house. In this cheerful abode, I was assured, a Portuguese lady had been
for many years confined by her jealous husband. It was long since any
neighbor had caught a glimpse of her, but it was supposed that she was
alive. There is no reason to doubt that her husband fed her well. It was
simply a case of human hornbill, with the imprisonment made perpetual.
I have more than once asked lawyers whether, in communities where the
old common law prevailed, there was any thing to prevent such an
imprisonment of a married woman; and they have always answered, “Nothing
but public opinion.” Where the husband has the legal custody of the
wife’s person, no _habeas corpus_ can avail against him. The hornbill
household is based on a strict application of the old common law. A
Hindoo household was a hornbill household: “a woman, of whatsoever age,
should never be mistress of her own actions,” said the code of Menu. An
Athenian household was a hornbill’s nest, and great was the outcry when
some Aspasia broke out of it. When Mrs. Sherman petitions Congress
against the emancipation of woman, we seem to hear the twittering of the
hornbill mother, imploring to be left inside.
Under some forms, the hornbill theory becomes respectable. There are
many peaceful families, innocent though torpid, where the only dream of
existence is to have plenty of quiet, plenty of food, and plenty of
well-fed children. For them this African household is a sufficient
model. The wife is “a home body.” The husband is “a good provider.”
These are honest people, and have a right to speak. The hornbill theory
is only dishonest when it comes—as it often comes—from women who lead
the life, not of good stay-at-home fowls, but of paroquets and
humming-birds,—who sorrowfully bemoan the active habits of enlightened
women, while they themselves
“Bear about the mockery of woe
To midnight dances and the public show.”
It is from these women, in Washington, New York, and elsewhere, that the
loudest appeal for the hornbill standard of domesticity proceeds. Put
them to the test, and give them their chicken-salad and champagne
through a hole in the wall only, and see how they like it.
But even the most honest and peaceful conservatives will one day admit
that the hornbill is not the highest model. Plato thought that “the soul
of our grandame might haply inhabit the body of a bird;” but Nature has
kindly provided various types of bird-households to suit all varieties
of taste. The bright orioles, filling the summer boughs with color and
with song, are as truly domestic in the freedom of their airy nest as
the poor hornbills who ignorantly make home into a dungeon. And
certainly each new generation of orioles, spreading their free wings
from that pendent cradle, are a happier illustration of judicious
nurture than are the uncouth little offspring of the hornbills, whom
Wallace describes as “so flabby and semi-transparent as to resemble a
bladder of jelly, furnished with head, legs, and rudimentary wings, but
with not a sign of a feather, except a few lines of points indicating
where they would come.”
XXX.
A SAFEGUARD FOR THE FAMILY.
Many German-Americans are warm friends of woman suffrage; but the
editors of “Puck,” it seems, are not. In a late number of that comic
journal, it had an unfavorable cartoon on this reform; and in a
following number,—the number, by the way, which contains that amusing
illustration of the vast seaside hotels of the future, with the cheering
announcement, “Only one mile to the barber’s shop,” and “Take the cars
to the dining-room,”—a lady comes to the rescue, and bravely defends
woman suffrage. It seems that the original cartoon depicted in the
corner a pretty family scene, representing father, mother, and children
seated happily together, with the melancholy motto, “Nevermore,
nevermore!” And when the correspondent, Mrs. Blake, very naturally asks
what this touching picture has to do with woman suffrage, Puck says, “If
the husband in our ‘pretty family scene’ should propose to vote for the
candidate who was obnoxious to his wife, would this ‘pretty family
scene’ continue to be a domestic paradise, or would it remind the
spectator of the region in which Dante spent his ‘fortnight off’?”
It is beautiful to see how much anxiety there is to preserve the family.
Every step in the modification of the old common law, whereby the wife
was, in Baron Alderson’s phrase, “the servant of her husband,” was
resisted as tending to endanger the family. That the wife should control
her own earnings, so that her husband should not have the right to
collect them in order to pay his gambling-debts, was declared by English
advocates, in the celebrated case of the Hon. Mrs. Norton, the poetess,
to imperil all the future peace of British households. Even the
liberal-minded “Punch,” about the time Girton College was founded in
England, expressed grave doubts whether the harmony of wedded unions
would not receive a blow, from the time when wives should be liable to
know more Greek than their husbands. Yet the marriage relation has
withstood these innovations. It has not been impaired, either by
separate rights, private earnings, or independent Greek: can it be
possible that a little voting will overthrow it?
The very ground on which woman suffrage is opposed by its enemies might
assuage these fears. If, as we are told, women will not take the pains
to vote except upon the strongest inducements, who has so good an
opportunity as the husband to bring those inducements to bear? and, if
so, what is the separation? Or if, as we are told, women will merely
reflect their husbands’ political opinions, why should they dispute
about them? The mere suggestion of a difference deep enough to quarrel
for, implies a real difference of convictions or interests, and
indicates that there ought to be an independent representation of each;
unless we fall back, once for all, on the common-law tradition that man
and wife are one, and that one is the husband. Either the antagonisms
which occur in politics are comparatively superficial, in which case
they would do no harm; or else they touch matters of real interest and
principle, in which case every human being has a right to independent
expression, even at a good deal of risk. In either case, the objection
falls to the ground.
We have fortunately a means of testing, with some fairness of estimate,
the probable amount of this peril. It is generally admitted,—and
certainly no German-American will deny,—that the most fruitful sources
of hostility and war in all times have been religious, not political.
All merely political antagonism, certainly all which is possible in a
republic, fades into insignificance before this more powerful dividing
influence. Yet we leave all this great explosive force in unimpeded
operation,—at any moment it may be set in action, in any one of those
“pretty family scenes” which “Puck” depicts,—while we are solemnly
warned against admitting the comparatively mild peril of a political
difference! It is like cautioning a manufacturer of dynamite against the
danger of meddling with mere edge-tools. Even with all the intensity of
feeling on religious matters, few families are seriously divided by
them; and the influence of political differences would be still more
insignificant.
The simple fact is, that there is no better basis for union than mutual
respect for each other’s opinions; and this can never be obtained
without an intelligent independence. “I would rather have a thorn in my
side than an echo,” said Emerson of friendship; and the same is true of
married life. It is the echoes, the nonentities, of whom men grow tired;
it is the women with some flavor of individuality who keep the hearts of
their husbands. This is only applying in a higher sense what
Shakspeare’s Cleopatra saw. When her handmaidens are questioning how to
hold a lover, and one says,—
“Give way to him in all: cross him in nothing,”—
Cleopatra, from the depth of an unequalled experience, retorts,—
“Thou speakest like a fool: the way to lose him!”
And what “the serpent of old Nile” said, the wives of the future, who
are to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves, may well ponder. It
takes two things different to make a union; and part of that difference
may as well lie in matters political as anywhere else.
XXXI.
WOMEN AS ECONOMISTS.
An able lawyer of Boston, arguing the other day before a legislative
committee in favor of giving to the city council a check upon the
expenditures of the school committee, gave as one reason that this body
would probably include more women henceforward, and that women were
ordinarily more lavish than men in their use of money. The truth of this
assumption was questioned at the time: and, the more I think of it, the
more contrary it is to my whole experience. I should say that women,
from the very habit of their lives, are led to be more particular about
details, and more careful as to small economies. The very fact that they
handle less money tends to this. When they are told to spend money, as
they often are by loving or ambitious husbands, they no doubt do it
freely: they have naturally more taste than men, and quite as much love
of luxury. In some instances in this country they spend money recklessly
and wickedly, like the heroines of French novels; but as, even in
brilliant Paris, the women of the middle classes are notoriously better
managers than the men, so we often see, in our scheming America, the
same relative superiority. Often have I heard young men say, “I never
knew how to economize until after my marriage;” and who has not seen
multitudes of instances where women accustomed to luxury have accepted
poverty without a murmur for the sake of those whom they loved?
I remember a young girl, accustomed to the gayest society of New York,
who engaged herself to a young naval officer, against the advice of the
friends of both. One of her near relatives said to me, “Of all the young
girls I have ever known, she is the least fitted for a poor man’s wife.”
Yet from the very moment of her marriage she brought their joint
expenses within his scanty pay, and even saved a little money from it.
Everybody knows such instances. We hear men denounce the extravagance of
women, while those very men spend on wine and cigars, on clubs and
horses, twice what their wives spend on their toilet. If the wives are
economical, the husbands perhaps urge them on to greater lavishness.
“Why do you not dress like Mrs. So-and-so?”—“I can’t afford it.”—“But
_I_ can afford it;” and then, when the bills come in, the talk of
extravagance recommences. At one time in Newport that lady among the
summer visitors who was reported to be Worth’s best customer was also
well known to be quite indifferent to society, and to go into it mainly
to please her husband, whose social ambition was notorious.
It has often happened to me to serve in organizations where both sexes
were represented, and where expenditures were to be made for business or
pleasure. In these I have found, as a rule, that the women were more
careful, or perhaps I should say more timid, than the men, less willing
to risk any thing: the bolder financial experiments came from the men,
as one might expect. In talking the other day with the secretary of an
important educational enterprise, conducted by women, I was surprised to
find that it was cramped for money, though large subscriptions were said
to have been made to it. On inquiry it appeared that these ladies,
having pledged themselves for four years, had divided the amount
received into four parts, and were resolutely limiting themselves, for
the first year, to one quarter part of what had been subscribed. No
board of men would have done so. Any board of men would have allowed far
more than a quarter of the sum for the first year’s expenditures, justly
reasoning that if the enterprise began well it would command public
confidence, and bring in additional subscriptions as time went on. I
would appeal to any one whose experience has been in joint associations
of men and women, whether this is not a fair statement of the difference
between their ways of working. It does not prove that women are more
honest than men, but that their education or their nature makes them
more cautious in expenditure.
The habits of society make the dress of a fashionable woman far more
expensive than that of a man of fashion. Formerly it was not so; and, so
long as it was not so, the extravagance of men in this respect quite
equalled that of women. It now takes other forms, but the habit is the
same. There is not a club-house in Boston furnished with such absence of
luxury as the Women’s Club rooms on Park Street: the contrast was at
first so great as to seem almost absurd. The waiters at any fashionable
restaurant will tell you that what is a cheap dinner for a man would be
a dear dinner for a woman. Yet after all, the test is not in any
particular class of expenditures, but in the business-like habit. Men
are of course more business-like in large combinations, for they are
more used to them; but for the small details of daily economy women are
more watchful. The cases where women ruin their husbands by extravagance
are exceptional. As a rule, the men are the bread-winners; but the
careful saving and managing and contriving come from the women.
XXXII.
GREATER INCLUDES LESS.
I was once at a little musical party in New York, where several
accomplished amateur singers were present, and with them the eminent
professional, Miss Adelaide Phillips. The amateurs were first called on.
Each chose some difficult operatic passage, and sang her best. When it
came to the great opera-singer’s turn, instead of exhibiting her ability
to eclipse those rivals on her own ground, she simply seated herself at
the piano, and sang “Kathleen Mavourneen” with such thrilling sweetness,
that the young Irish girl who was setting the supper-table in the next
room forgot all her plates and teaspoons, threw herself into a chair,
put her apron over her face, and sobbed as if her heart would break. All
the training of Adelaide Phillips—her magnificent voice, her stage
experience, her skill in effects, her power of expression—went into the
performance of that simple song. The greater included the less. And thus
all the intellectual and practical training that any woman can have, all
her public action and her active career, will make her, if she be a true
woman, more admirable as a wife, a mother, and a friend. The greater
includes the less for her also.
Of course this is a statement of general facts and tendencies. There
must be among women, as among men, an endless variety of individual
temperaments. There will always be plenty whose career will illustrate
the infirmities of genius, and whom no training can convince that two
and two make four. But the general fact is sure. As no sensible man
would seriously prefer for a wife a Hindoo or Tahitian woman rather than
one bred in England or America, so every further advantage of education
or opportunity will only improve, not impair, the true womanly type.
Lucy Stone once said, “Woman’s nature was stamped and sealed by the
Almighty, and there is no danger of her unsexing herself while his eye
watches her.” Margaret Fuller said, “One hour of love will teach a woman
more of her true relations than all your philosophizing.” These were the
testimony of women who had studied Greek, and were only the more womanly
for the study. They are worth the opinions of a million half-developed
beings like the Duchess de Fontanges, who was described as being “as
beautiful as an angel and as silly as a goose.” The greater includes the
less. Your view from the mountain-side may be very pretty, but she who
has taken one step higher commands your view and her own also. It was no
dreamy recluse, but the accomplished and experienced Stendhal, who
wrote, “The joys of the gay world do not count for much with happy
women.”[7]
Footnote 7:
De l’Amour, par de Stendhal (Henri Beyle): “Les plaisirs du grand
monde n’en sont pas pour les femmes heureuses,” p. 189.
If a highly educated man is incapable and unpractical, we do not say
that he is educated too well, but not well enough. He ought to know what
he knows, and other things also. Never yet did I see a woman too well
educated to be a wife and a mother; but I know multitudes who deplore,
or have reason to deplore, every day of their lives, the untrained and
unfurnished minds that are so ill-prepared for these sacred duties.
Every step towards equalizing the opportunities of men and women meets
with resistance, of course; but every step, as it is accomplished,
leaves men still men, and women still women. And as we who heard
Adelaide Phillips felt that she had never had a better tribute to her
musical genius than that young Irish girl’s tears; so the true woman
will feel that all her college training for instance, if she has it, may
have been well invested, even for the sake of the baby on her knee. And
it is to be remembered, after all, that each human being lives to unfold
his or her own powers, and do his or her own duties first, and that
neither woman nor man has the right to accept a merely secondary and
subordinate life. A noble woman must be a noble human being; and the
most sacred special duties, as of wife or mother, are all included in
this, as the greater includes the less.
XXXIII.
A CO-PARTNERSHIP.
Marriage, considered merely in its financial and business relations, may
be regarded as a permanent co-partnership.
Now, in an ordinary co-partnership, there is very often a complete
division of labor among the partners. If they manufacture
locomotive-engines, for instance, one partner perhaps superintends the
works, another attends to mechanical inventions and improvements,
another travels for orders, another conducts the correspondence, another
receives and pays out the money. The latter is not necessarily the head
of the firm. Perhaps his place could be more easily filled than some of
the other posts. Nevertheless, more money passes through his hands than
through those of all the others put together. Now, should he, at the
year’s end, call together the inventor and the superintendent and the
traveller and the correspondent, and say to them, “I have earned all
this money this year, but I will generously give you some of it,”—he
would be considered simply impertinent, and would hardly have a chance
to repeat the offence, the year after.
Yet precisely what would be called folly in this business partnership is
constantly done by men in the co-partnership of marriage, and is there
called “common-sense” and “social science” and “political economy.”
For instance, a farmer works himself half to death in the hay-field, and
his wife meanwhile is working herself wholly to death in the dairy. The
neighbors come in to sympathize after her demise; and, during the few
months’ interval before his second marriage, they say approvingly, “He
was always a generous man to his folks! He was a good provider!” But
where was the room for generosity, any more than the member of any other
firm is to be called generous, when he keeps the books, receipts the
bills, and divides the money?
In case of the farming business, the share of the wife is so direct and
unmistakable that it can hardly be evaded. If any thing is earned by the
farm, she does her distinct and important share of the earning. But it
is not necessary that she should do even that, to make her, by all the
rules of justice, an equal partner, entitled to her full share of the
financial proceeds.
Let us suppose an ordinary case. Two young people are married, and begin
life together. Let us suppose them equally poor, equally capable,
equally conscientious, equally healthy. They have children. Those
children must be supported by the earning of money abroad, by attendance
and care at home. If it requires patience and labor to do the outside
work, no less is required inside. The duties of the household are as
hard as the duties of the shop or office. If the wife took her husband’s
work for a day, she would probably be glad to return to her own. So
would the husband if he undertook hers. Their duties are ordinarily as
distinct and as equal as those of two partners in any other
co-partnership. It so happens, that the out-door partner has the
handling of the money; but does that give him a right to claim it as his
exclusive earnings? No more than in any other business operation.
He earned the money for the children and the household. She disbursed it
for the children and the household. The very laws of nature, by giving
her the children to bear and rear, absolve her from the duty of their
support, so long as he is alive who was left free by nature for that
purpose. Her task on the average is as hard as his: nay, a portion of it
is so especially hard that it is distinguished from all others by the
name “labor.” If it does not earn money, it is because it is not to be
measured in money, while it exists—nor to be replaced by money, if lost.
If a business man loses his partner, he can obtain another: and a man,
no doubt, may take a second wife; but he cannot procure for his children
a second mother. Indeed, it is a palpable insult to the whole relation
of husband and wife when one compares it, even in a financial light, to
that of business partners. It is only because a constant effort is made
to degrade the practical position of woman below even this standard of
comparison, that it becomes her duty to claim for herself at least as
much as this.
There was a tradition in a town where I once lived, that a certain
Quaker, who had married a fortune, was once heard to repel his wife, who
had asked him for money in a public place, with the response, “Rachel,
where is that ninepence I gave thee yesterday?” When I read in
Scribner’s Monthly an article deriding the right to representation of
the Massachusetts women who pay two millions of tax on one hundred and
thirty-two million dollars of property,—asserting that they produced
nothing of it; that it was only “men who produced this wealth, and
bestowed it upon these women;” that it was “all drawn from land and sea
by the hands of men whose largess testifies alike of their love and
their munificence,”—I must say that I am reminded of Rachel’s ninepence.
XXXIV.
“ONE RESPONSIBLE HEAD.”
When we look through any business directory, there seem to be almost as
many co-partnerships as single dealers; and three-quarters of these
co-partnerships appear to consist of precisely two persons, no more, no
less. These partners are, in the eye of the law, equal. It is not found
necessary under the law, to make a general provision that in each case
one partner should be supreme and the other subordinate. In many cases,
by the terms of the co-partnership there are limitations on one side and
special privileges on the other,—marriage settlements, as it were; but
the general law of co-partnership is based on the presumption of
equality. It would be considered infinitely absurd to require, that, as
the general rule, one party or the other should be in a state of
_coverture_, during which the very being and existence of the one should
be suspended, or entirely merged and incorporated into that of the
other.
And yet this requirement, which would be an admitted absurdity in the
case of two business partners, is precisely that which the English
common law still lays down in case of husband and wife. The words which
I employed to describe it, in the preceding sentence, are the very
phrases in which Blackstone describes the legal position of women. And
though the English common law has been, in this respect, greatly
modified and superseded by statute law; yet, when it comes to an
argument on woman suffrage, it is constantly this same tradition to
which men and even women habitually appeal,—the necessity of a single
head to the domestic partnership, and the necessity that the husband
should be that head. This is especially true of English men and women;
but it is true of Americans as well. Nobody has stated it more tersely
than Fitzjames Stephen, in his “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” (p.
216), when arguing against Mr. Mill’s view of the equality of the sexes.
“Marriage is a contract, one of the principal objects in which is
the government of a family.
“This government must be vested, either by law or by contract, in
the hands of one of the two married persons.”
[Then follow some collateral points, not bearing on the present
question.]
“Therefore if marriage is to be permanent, the government of the
family must be put by law and by morals into the hands of the
husband, for no one proposes to give it to the wife.”
This argument he calls “as clear as that of a proposition in Euclid.” He
thinks that the business of life can be carried on by no other method.
How is it, then, that when we come to what is called technically and
especially the “business” of every day, this whole finespun theory is
disregarded, and men come together in partnership on the basis of
equality?
Nobody is farther than I from regarding marriage as a mere business
partnership. But it is to be observed that the points wherein it differs
from a merely mercantile connection are points that should make equality
more easy, not more difficult. The tie between two ordinary business
partners is merely one of interest: it is based on no sentiments, sealed
by no solemn pledge, enriched by no home associations, cemented by no
new generation of young life. If a relation like this is found to work
well on terms of equality,—so well that a large part of the business of
the world is done by it,—is it not absurd to suppose that the same equal
relation cannot exist in the married partnership of husband and wife?
And if law, custom, society, all recognize this fact of equality in the
one case, why, in the name of common-sense, should they not equally
recognize it in the other?
And, again, it must be far easier to assign a sphere to each partner in
marriage than in business; and therefore the double headship of a family
will involve less need of collision. In nine cases out of ten, the
external support of the family can devolve upon the husband,
unquestioned by the wife; and its internal economy upon the wife,
unquestioned by the husband. No voluntary distribution of powers and
duties between business partners can work so naturally, on the whole, as
this simple and easy demarcation, with which the claim of suffrage makes
no necessary interference. It may require angry discussion to decide
which of two business partners shall buy, and which shall sell; which
shall keep the books, and which do the active work, and so on; but all
this is usually settled in married life by the natural order of things.
Even in regard to the management of children, where collision is likely
to come, if anywhere, it can commonly be settled by that happy formula
of Jean Paul’s, that the mother usually supplies the commas and the
semicolons in the child’s book of life, and the father the colons and
periods. And as to matters in general, the simple and practical rule,
that each question that arises should be decided by that partner who has
personally most at stake in it, will, in ninety-nine times out of a
hundred, carry the domestic partnership through without shipwreck. Those
who cannot meet the hundredth case by mutual forbearance are in a
condition of shipwreck already.
XXXV.
ASKING FOR MONEY.
One of the very best wives and mothers I have ever known once said to
me, that, whenever her daughters should be married, she should stipulate
in their behalf with their husbands for a regular sum of money to be
paid them, at certain intervals, for their personal expenditures.
Whether this sum was to be larger or smaller, was a matter of secondary
importance,—that must depend on the income, and the style of living; but
the essential thing was, that it should come to the wife regularly, so
that she should no more have to make a special request for it than her
husband would have to ask her for a dinner. This lady’s own husband was,
as I happened to know, of a most generous disposition, was devotedly
attached to her, and denied her nothing. She herself was a most accurate
and careful manager. There was every thing in the household to make the
financial arrangements flow smoothly. Yet she said to me, “I suppose no
man can possibly understand how a sensitive woman shrinks from _asking_
for money. If I can prevent it, my daughters shall never have to ask for
it. If they do their duty as wives and mothers they have a right to
their share of the joint income, within reasonable limits; for certainly
no money could buy the services they render. Moreover, they have a right
to a share in determining what those reasonable limits are.”
Now, it so happened that I had myself gone through an experience which
enabled me perfectly to comprehend this feeling. In early life I was for
a time in the employ of one of my relatives, who paid me a fair salary
but at no definite periods: I was at liberty to ask him for money up to
a certain amount whenever I needed it. This seemed to me, in advance, a
most agreeable arrangement; but I found it quite otherwise. It proved to
be very disagreeable to ask for money: it made every dollar seem a
special favor; it brought up all kinds of misgivings, as to whether he
could spare it without inconvenience, whether he really thought my
services worth it, and so on. My employer was a thoroughly upright and
noble man, and I was much attached to him. I do not know that he ever
refused or demurred when I asked for money. The annoyance was simply in
the process of asking; and this became so great, that I often underwent
serious inconvenience rather than ask. Finally, at the year’s end, I
surprised my relative very much by saying that I would accept, if
necessary, a lower salary, on condition that it should be paid on
regular days, and as a matter of business. The wish was at once granted,
without the reduction; and he probably never knew what a relief it was
to me.
Now, if a young man is liable to feel this pride and reluctance toward
an employer, even if a kinsman, it is easy to understand how many women
may feel the same, even in regard to a husband. And I fancy that those
who feel it most are often the most conscientious and high-minded women.
It is unreasonable to say of such persons, “Too sensitive! Too
fastidious!” For it is just this quality of finer sensitiveness which
men affect to prize in a woman, and wish to protect at all hazards. The
very fact that a husband is generous; the very fact that his income is
limited,—these may bring in conscience and gratitude to increase the
restraining influence of pride, and make the wife less willing to ask
money of such a husband than if he were a rich man or a mean one. The
only dignified position in which a man can place his wife is to treat
her at least as well as he would treat a housekeeper, and give her the
comfort of a perfectly clear and definite arrangement as to money
matters. She will not then be under the necessity of nerving herself to
solicit from him as a favor what she really needs and has a right to
spend. Nor will she be torturing herself, on the other side, with the
secret fear lest she has asked too much and more than they can really
spare. She will, in short, be in the position of a woman and a wife, not
of a child or a toy.
I have carefully avoided using the word “allowance” in what has been
said, because that word seems to imply the untrue and mean assumption
that the money is all the husband’s to give or withhold as he will. Yet
I have heard this sort of phrase from men who were living on a wife’s
property or a wife’s earnings; from men who nominally kept
boarding-houses, working a little, while their wives worked hard,—or
from farmers, who worked hard, and made their wives work harder. Even in
cases where the wife has no direct part in the money-making, the
indirect part she performs, if she takes faithful charge of her
household, is so essential, so beyond all compensation in money, that it
is an utter shame and impertinence in the husband when he speaks of
“giving” money to his wife as if it were an act of favor. It is no more
an act of favor than when the business manager of a firm pays out money
to the unseen partner who directs the indoor business or runs the
machinery. Be the joint income more or less, the wife has a claim to her
honorable share, and that as a matter of right, without the daily
ignominy of sending in a petition for it.
XXXVI.
WOMANHOOD AND MOTHERHOOD.
I always groan in spirit when any advocate of woman suffrage, carried
away by zeal, says any thing disrespectful about the nursery. It is
contrary to the general tone of feeling among us, I am sure, to speak of
this priceless institution as a trivial or degrading sphere, unworthy
the emancipated woman. It is rarely that anybody speaks in this way; but
a single such utterance hurts us more than any arguments of the enemy.
For every thoughtful person sees that the cares of motherhood, though
not the whole duty of woman, are an essential part of that duty,
wherever they occur; and that no theory of womanly life is good for any
thing which undertakes to leave out the cradle. Even her
school-education is based on this fact, were it only on Stendhal’s
theory that the sons of a woman who reads Gibbon and Schiller will be
more likely to show talent than those of one who only tells her beads
and reads Mme. de Genlis. And so clearly is this understood among us,
that, when we ask for suffrage for woman, it is almost always claimed
that she needs it for the sake of her children. To secure her in her
right to them; to give her a voice in their education; to give her a
vote in the government beneath which they are to live,—these points are
seldom omitted in our statement of her claims. Any thing else would be
an error.
But there is an error at the other extreme, which is still greater. A
woman should no more merge herself in her child than in her husband. Yet
we often hear that she should do just this. What is all the public
sphere of woman, it is said,—what good can she do by all her speaking,
and writing, and action,—compared with that she does by properly
training the soul of one child? It is not easy to see the logic of this
claim.
For of what service is that child to be in the universe, except that he,
too, may write and speak and act for that which is good and true? And if
the mother foregoes all this that the child, in growing up, may simply
do what the mother has left undone, the world gains nothing. In
sacrificing her own work to her child’s, moreover, she exchanges a
present good for a prospective and merely possible one. If she does this
through overwhelming love, we can hardly blame her; but she cannot
justify it before reason and truth. Her child may die, and the service
to mankind be done by neither. Her child may grow up with talents unlike
hers, or with none at all; as the son of Howard was selfish, the son of
Chesterfield a boor, and the son of Wordsworth in the last degree
prosaic.
Or the special occasion when she might have done great good may have
passed before her boy or girl grows up to do it. If Mrs. Child had
refused to write “An Appeal for that Class of Americans called
Africans,” or Mrs. Stowe had laid aside “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” or Florence
Nightingale had declined to go to the Crimea, on the ground that a
woman’s true work was through the nursery, and they must all wait for
that, the consequence would be that these things would have remained
undone. The brave acts of the world must be done when occasion offers,
by the first brave soul who feels moved to do them, man or woman. If all
the children in all the nurseries are thereby helped to do other brave
deeds when their turn comes, so much the better. But when a great
opportunity offers for direct aid to the world, we have no right to
transfer that work to other hands—not even to the hands of our own
children. We must do the work, and train the children besides.
I am willing to admit, therefore, that the work of education, in any
form, is as great as any other work; but I fail to see why it should be
greater. Usefulness is usefulness: there is no reason why it should be
postponed from generation to generation, or why it is better to rear a
serviceable human being than to be one in person. Carry the theory
consistently out: each mother must simply rear her daughter that she in
turn may rear somebody else; from each generation the work will devolve
upon a succeeding generation, so that it will be only the last woman who
will personally do any service, except that of motherhood; and when her
time comes it will be too late for any service at all.
If it be said, “But some of these children will be men, who are
necessarily of more use than women,” I deny the necessity. If it be
said, “The children may be many, and the mother, who is but one, may
well be sacrificed,” it might be replied, that as one great act may be
worth many smaller ones, so all the numerous children and grandchildren
of a woman like Lucretia Mott may not collectively equal the usefulness
of herself alone. If she, like many women, had held it her duty to
renounce all other duties and interests from the time her motherhood
began, I think that the world, and even her children, would have lost
more than ever could have been gained by her more complete absorption in
the nursery.
The true theory seems a very simple one. The very fact that during
one-half the years of a woman’s average life she is made incapable of
child-bearing, shows that there are, even for the most prolific and
devoted mothers, duties other than the maternal. Even during the most
absorbing years of motherhood, the wisest women still try to keep up
their interest in society, in literature, in the world’s affairs—were it
only for their children’s sake. Multitudes of women will never be
mothers; and those more fortunate may find even the usefulness of their
motherhood surpassed by what they do in other ways. If maternal duties
interfere in some degree with all other functions, the same is true,
though in a far less degree, of those of a father. But there are those
who combine both spheres. The German poet Wieland claimed to be the
parent of fourteen children and forty books; and who knows by which
parentage he served the world the best?
XXXVII.
A GERMAN POINT OF VIEW.
Many Americans will remember the favorable impression made by Professor
Christlieb of Germany, when he attended the meeting of the Evangelical
Alliance in New York some four or five years ago. His writings, like his
presence, show a most liberal spirit; and perhaps no man has ever
presented the more advanced evangelical theology of Germany in so
attractive a light. Yet I heard a story of him the other day, which
either showed him in an aspect quite undesirable, or else gave a
disagreeable view of the social position of women in Germany.
The story was to the effect, that a young American student recently
called on Professor Christlieb with a letter of introduction. The
professor received him cordially, and soon entered into conversation
about the United States. He praised the natural features of the country,
and the enterprising spirit of our citizens, but expressed much
solicitude about the future of the nation. On being asked his reasons,
he frankly expressed his opinion that “the Spirit of Christ” was not
here. Being still further pressed to illustrate his meaning, he gave, as
instances of this deficiency, not the Crédit Mobilier or the Tweed
scandal, but such alarming facts as the following. He seriously
declared, that, on more than one occasion, he had heard an American
married woman say to her husband, “Dear, will you bring me my shawl?”
and the husband had brought it. He further had seen a husband return
home at evening, and enter the parlor where his wife was
sitting,—perhaps in the very best chair in the room,—and the wife not
only did not go and get his dressing-gown and slippers, but she even
remained seated, and left him to find a chair as he could. These things,
as Professor Christlieb pointed out, suggested a serious deficiency of
the Spirit of Christ in the community.
With our American habits and interpretations, it is hard to see this
matter just as the professor sees it. One would suppose, that, if there
is any meaning in the command, “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so
fulfil the law of Christ,” a little of such fulfilling might sometimes
be good for the husband, as for the wife. And though it would
undoubtedly be more pleasing to see every wife so eager to receive her
husband that she would naturally spring from her chair and run to kiss
him in the doorway, yet, where such devotion was wanting, it would be
but fair to inquire which of the two had had the more fatiguing day’s
work, and to whom the easy-chair justly belonged. The truth is, I
suppose, that the good professor’s remark indicated simply a “survival”
in his mind, or in his social circle, of a barbarous tradition, under
which the wife of a Mexican herdsman cannot eat at the table with her
“lord and master,” and the wife of a German professor must vacate the
best arm-chair at his approach.
If so, it is not to be regretted that we in this country have outgrown a
relation so unequal. Nor am I at all afraid that the great Teacher, who,
pointing to the multitude for whom he was soon to die, said of them,
“This is my brother and my sister and my mother,” would have objected to
any mutual and equal service between man and woman. If we assume that
two human beings have immortal souls, there can be no want of dignity to
either in serving the other. The greater equality of woman in America
seems to be, on this reasoning, a proof of the presence, not the
absence, of the spirit of Christ; nor does Dr. Christlieb seem to me
quite worthy of the beautiful name he bears, if he feels otherwise.
But, if it is really true that a German professor has to cross the
Atlantic to witness a phenomenon so very simple as that of a lover-like
husband bringing a shawl for his wife, I should say, Let the immigration
from Germany be encouraged as much as possible, in order that even the
most learned immigrants may discover something new.
XXXVIII.
CHILDLESS WOMEN.
It has not always been regarded as a thing creditable to woman, that she
was the mother of the human race. On the contrary, the fact was often
mentioned, in the Middle Ages, as a distinct proof of inferiority. The
question was discussed in the mediæval Council of Maçon, and the
position taken that woman was no more entitled to rank as human, because
she brought forth men, than the garden-earth could take rank with the
fruit and flowers it bore. The same view was revived by a Latin writer
of 1595, on the thesis “_Mulieres non homines esse_,” a French
translation of which essay was printed under the title of “_Paradoxe sur
les femmes_,” in 1766. Napoleon Bonaparte used the same image, carrying
it almost as far:—
“Woman is given to man that she may bear children. Woman is our
property; we are not hers: because she produces children for us; we do
not yield any to her: she is therefore our possession, as the fruit-tree
is that of the gardener.”
Even the fact of parentage, therefore, has been adroitly converted into
a ground of inferiority for women; and this is ostensibly the reason why
lineage has been reckoned, almost everywhere, through the male line
only, ignoring the female; just as, in tracing the seed of some rare
fruit, the gardener takes no genealogical account of the garden where it
grew. The view is now seldom expressed in full force: the remnant of it
is to be found in the lingering impression, that, at any rate, a woman
who is not a mother is of no account; as worthless as a fruitless garden
or a barren fruit-tree. Created only for a certain object, she is of
course valueless unless that object be fulfilled.
But the race must have fathers as well as mothers; and, if we look for
evidence of public service in great men, it certainly does not always
lie in leaving children to the republic. On the contrary, the rule has
rather seemed to be, that the most eminent men have left their bequest
of service in any form rather than in that of a great family. Recent
inquiries into the matter have brought out some remarkable facts in this
regard.
As a rule, there exist no living descendants in the male line from the
great authors, artists, statesmen, soldiers, of England. It is stated
that there is not one such descendant of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser,
Butler, Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Goldsmith, Scott, Byron, or Moore; not one
of Drake, Cromwell, Monk, Marlborough, Peterborough, or Nelson; not one
of Strafford, Ormond, or Clarendon; not one of Addison, Swift, or
Johnson; not one of Walpole, Bolingbroke, Chatham, Pitt, Fox, Burke,
Grattan, or Canning; not one of Bacon, Locke, Newton, or Davy; not one
of Hume, Gibbon, or Macaulay; not one of Hogarth or Reynolds; not one of
Garrick, John Kemble, or Edmund Kean. It would be easy to make a similar
American list, beginning with Washington, of whom it was said that
“Providence made him childless that his country might call him Father.”
Now, however we may regret that these great men have left little or no
posterity, it does not occur to any one as affording any serious
drawback upon their service to their nation. Certainly it does not occur
to us that they would have been more useful had they left children to
the world, but rendered it no other service. Lord Bacon says that “he
that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are
impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit to the public, have
proceeded from unmarried or childless men; which, both in affection and
means, have married and endowed the public.” And this is the view
generally accepted,—that the public is in such cases rather the gainer
than the loser, and has no right to complain.
Since, therefore, every child must have a father and a mother both, and
neither will alone suffice, why should we thus heap gratitude on men who
from preference or from necessity have remained childless, and yet
habitually treat women as if they could render no service to their
country except by giving it children? If it be folly and shame, as I
think, to belittle and decry the dignity and worth of motherhood, as
some are said to do, it is no less folly, and shame quite as great, to
deny the grand and patriotic service of many women who have died and
left no children among their mourners. Plato puts into the mouth of a
woman,—the eloquent Diotima, in the “Banquet,”—that, after all, we are
more grateful to Homer and Hesiod for the children of their brain than
if they had left human offspring.
XXXIX.
THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO MOTHERS.
From the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals we have now
advanced to a similar society for the benefit of children. When shall we
have a movement for the prevention of cruelty to mothers?
A Rhode Island lady, who had never taken any interest in the woman
suffrage movement, came to me in great indignation the other day, asking
if it was true that under Rhode Island laws a husband might, by his last
will, bequeath his child away from its mother, so that she might, if the
guardian chose, never see it again. I said that it was undoubtedly true,
and that such were still the laws in many States of the Union.
“But,” she said, “it is an outrage. The husband may have been one of the
weakest or worst men in the world; he may have persecuted his wife and
children; he may have made the will in a moment of anger, and have
neglected to alter it. At any rate, he is dead, and the mother is
living. The guardian whom he appoints may turn out a very malicious man,
and may take pleasure in torturing the mother; or he may bring up the
children in a way their mother thinks ruinous for them. Why do not all
the mothers cry out against such a law?”
“I wish they would,” I said. “I have been trying a good many years to
make them even understand what the law is; but they do not. People who
do not vote pay no attention to the laws, until they suffer from them.”
She went away protesting that she, at least, would not hold her tongue
on the subject, and I hope she will not. The actual text of the law is
as follows:—
“Every person authorized by law to make a will, except married
women, shall have a right to appoint by his will a guardian or
guardians for his children during their minority.”[8]
Footnote 8:
Gen. Statutes R. I., chap. 154, sect. 1.
There is not associated with this, in the statute, the slightest clause
in favor of the mother; nor any thing which could limit the power of the
guardian by requiring deference to her wishes, although he could, in
case of gross neglect or abuse, be removed by the court, and another
guardian appointed. There is not a line of positive law to protect the
mother. Now, in a case of absolute wrong, a single sentence of law is
worth all the chivalrous courtesy this side of the Middle Ages.
It is idle to say that such laws are not executed. They are executed. I
have had letters, too agonizing to print, expressing the sufferings of
mothers under laws like these. There lies before me a letter,—not from
Rhode Island,—written by a widowed mother who suffers daily tortures,
even while in possession of her child, at the knowledge that it is not
legally hers, but held only by the temporary permission of the guardian
appointed under her husband’s will. “I beg you,” she says, “to take this
will to the hill-top, and urge law-makers in our next Legislature to
free the State record from the shameful story that no mother can control
her child unless it is born out of wedlock.”
“From the moment,” she says, “when the will was read to me, I have made
no effort to set it aside. I wait till God reveals his plans, so far as
my own condition is concerned. But out of my keen comprehension of this
great wrong, notwithstanding my submission for myself, my whole soul is
stirred,—for my child, who is a little woman; for all women, that the
laws may be changed which subject a true woman, a devoted wife, a
faithful mother, to such mental agonies as I have endured, and shall
endure till I die.”
In a later letter she says, “I now have his [the guardian’s] solemn
promise that he will not remove her from my control. To some extent my
sufferings are allayed; and yet never, till she arrives at the age of
twenty-one, shall I fully trust.” I wish that mothers who dwell in
sheltered and happy homes would try to bring to their minds the
condition of a mother whose possession of her only child rests upon the
“promise” of a comparative stranger. We should get beyond the
meaningless cry, “I have all the rights I want,” if mothers could only
remember that among these rights, in most States of the Union, the right
of a widowed mother to her child is not included.
By strenuous effort, the law on this point has in Massachusetts been
gradually amended, till it now stands thus: The father is authorized to
appoint a guardian by will; but the powers of this guardian do not
entitle him to take the child from the mother.
“The guardian of a minor ... shall have the custody and tuition of
his ward; and the care and management of all his estate, except that
the father of the minor, if living, and in case of his death the
mother, they being respectively competent to transact their own
business, shall be entitled to the custody of the person of the
minor and the care of his education.”[9]
Footnote 9:
Public Statutes, chap. 139, sect. 4.
Down to 1870 the cruel words “while she remains unmarried” followed the
word “mother” in the above law. Until that time, the mother if remarried
had no claim to the custody of her child, in case the guardian wished
otherwise; and a very painful scene once took place in a Boston
court-room, where children were forced away from their mother by the
officers, under this statute; in spite of her tears and theirs; and this
when no sort of personal charge had been made against her. This could
not now happen in Massachusetts, but it might still happen in some other
States. It is true that men are almost always better than their laws;
but, while a bad law remains on the statute-book, it gives to any
unscrupulous man the power to be as bad as the law.
SOCIETY.
“Place the sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and a severe
morality gives that essential charm to woman which educates all that is
delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing, breeds courtesy and learning,
conversation and wit, in her rough mate; so that I have thought a
sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good
women.”—EMERSON: _Society and Solitude_, p. 21.
XL.
FOAM AND CURRENT.
Sometimes, on the beach at Newport, I look at the gayly dressed ladies
in their phaëtons, and then at the foam which trembles on the breaking
wave, or lies palpitating in creamy masses on the beach. It is as pretty
as they, as light, as fresh, as delicate, as changing; and no doubt the
graceful foam, if it thinks at all, fancies that it is the chief
consummate product of the ocean, and that the main end of the vast
currents of the mighty deep is to yield a few glittering bubbles like
those. At least, this seems to me what many of the fair ladies think.
Here is a nation in which the most momentous social and political
experiment ever tried by man is being worked out, day by day. There is
something oceanlike in the way in which the great currents of life,
race, religion, temperament, are here chafing with each other, safe from
the storms through which all monarchical countries may yet have to pass.
As these great currents heave, there are tossed up in every
watering-place and every city in America, as on an ocean-beach, certain
pretty bubbles of foam; and each spot, we may suppose, counts its own
bubbles brighter than those of its neighbors, and christens them
“society.”
It is an unceasing wonder to a thoughtful person, at any such resort, to
see the unconscious way in which fashionable society accepts the foam,
and ignores the currents. You hear people talk of “a position in
society,” “the influential circles in society,” as if the position they
mean were not liable to be shifted in a day; as if the essential
influences in America were not mainly to be sought outside the world of
fashion. In other countries it is very different. The circle of social
caste, whose centre you touch in London, radiates to the shores of the
island; the upper class controls, not merely fashion, but government; it
rules in country as well as city; genius and wealth are but its
tributaries. Wherever it is not so, it is because England is so far
Americanized. But in America the social prestige of the cities is
nothing in the country; it is a matter of the pavement, of a three-mile
radius.
Go to the farthest borders of England: there are still the “county
families,” and you meet servants in livery. On the other hand, in a
little village in Northern New Hampshire, my friend was visited in the
evening by the landlady, who said that several of their “most
fashionable ladies” had happened in, and she would like to exhibit to
them her guest’s bonnet. Then the different cities ignore each other:
the rulers of select circles in New York find themselves nobodies in
Washington, while a Washington social passport counts for as little in
New York. Boston and Philadelphia affect to ignore both; and St. Louis
and San Francisco have their own standards. The utmost social prestige
in America is local, provincial, a matter of the square inch: it is as
if the foam of each particular beach along the seacoast were to call
itself “society.”
There is something pathetic, therefore, in the unwearied pains taken by
ambitious women to establish a place in some little, local, transitory
domain, to “bring out” their daughters for exhibition on a given
evening, to form a circle for them, to marry them well. A dozen years
hence the millionnaires whose notice they seek may be paupers, or these
ladies may be dwelling in some other city, where the visiting cards will
bear wholly different names. How idle to attempt to transport into
American life the social traditions and delusions which require monarchy
and primogeniture, and a standing army, to keep them up—and which cannot
hold their own in England, even with the aid of these!
Every woman, like every man, has a natural desire for influence; and if
this instinct yearns, as it often should yearn, to take in more than her
own family, she must seek it somewhere outside. I know women who bring
to bear on the building-up of a frivolous social circle—frivolous,
because it is not really brilliant, but only showy; not really gay, but
only bored—talent and energy enough to influence the mind and thought of
the nation, if only employed in some effective way. Who are the women of
real influence in America? They are the school-teachers, through whose
hands each successive American generation has to pass; they are those
wives of public men who share their husbands’ labor, and help mould
their work; they are those women, who, through their personal eloquence
or through the press, are distinctly influencing the American people in
its growth. The influence of such women is felt for good or for evil in
every page they print, every newspaper-column they fill: the individual
women may be unworthy their posts, but it is they who have got hold of
the lever, and gone the right way to work. As American society is
constituted, the largest “social success” that can be attained here is
trivial and local; and you have to “make believe very hard,” like that
other imaginary Marchioness, to find in it any career worth mentioning.
That is the foam, but these other women are dealing with the main
currents.
XLI.
“IN SOCIETY.”
One sometimes hears from some lady the remark that very few people “in
society” believe in any movement to enlarge the rights or duties of
women. In a community of more marked social gradations than our own,
this assertion, if true, might be very important; and even here it is
worth considering, because it leads the way to a little social
philosophy. Let us, for the sake of argument, begin by accepting the
assumption that there is an inner circle, at least in our large cities,
which claims to be “society,” _par excellence_. What relation has this
favored circle, if favored it be, to any movement relating to women?
It has, to begin with, the same relation that “society” has to every
movement of reform. The proportion of smiles and frowns offered from
this quarter to the woman-suffrage movement, for instance, is about that
offered to the anti-slavery agitation: I see no great difference. In
Boston, for example, the names contributed by “society” to the
woman-suffrage festivals are about as numerous as those formerly
contributed to the anti-slavery bazaars; no more, no less. Indeed, they
are very often the same names; and it has been curious to see, for
nearly fifty years, how radical tendencies have predominated in some of
the wellknown Boston families, and conservative tendencies in others.
The traits of blood seem to outlast successive series of special
reforms. Be this as it may, it is safe to assume, that, as the
anti-slavery movement prevailed with only a moderate amount of sanction
from “our best society,” the woman-suffrage movement, which has at least
an equal amount, has no reason to be discouraged.
But on looking farther, we find that not reforms alone, but often most
important and established institutions, exist and flourish with only
incidental aid from those “in society.” Take, for instance, the whole
public-school system of our larger cities. Grant that out of twenty
ladies “in society,” taken at random, not more than one would personally
approve of women’s voting: it is doubtful whether even that proportion
of them would personally favor the public-school system so far as to
submit their children, or at least their girls, to it. Yet the public
schools flourish, and give a better training than most private schools,
in spite of this inert practical resistance from those “in society.” The
natural inference would seem to be, that if an institution so well
established as the public schools, and so generally recognized, can
afford to be ignored by “society,” then certainly a wholly new reform
must expect no better fate.
As a matter of fact, I apprehend that what is called “society,” in the
sense of the more fastidious or exclusive social circle in any
community, exists for one sole object,—the preservation of good manners
and social refinements. For this purpose it is put very largely under
the sway of women, who have, all the world over, a better instinct for
these important things. It is true that “society” is apt to do even this
duty very imperfectly, and often tolerates, and sometimes even
cultivates, just the rudeness and discourtesy that it is set to cure.
Nevertheless, this is its mission; but so soon as it steps beyond this,
and attempts to claim any special weight outside the sphere of good
manners, it shows its weakness, and must yield to stronger forces.
One of these stronger forces is religion, which should train men and
women to a far higher standard than “society” alone can teach. This
standard should be embodied, theoretically, in the Christian Church; but
unhappily “society” is too often stronger than this embodiment, and
turns the church itself into a mere temple of fashion. Other opposing
forces are known as science and common-sense, which is only science
written in short-hand. On some of these various forces all reforms are
based, the woman-suffrage reform among them. If it could really be shown
that some limited social circle was opposed to this, then the moral
would seem to be, “So much the worse for the social circle.” It used to
be thought in anti-slavery days that one of the most blessed results of
that agitation was the education it gave to young men and women who
would otherwise have merely grown up “in society,” but were happily
taken in hand by a stronger influence. It is Goethe who suggests, when
discussing Hamlet in “Wilhelm Meister,” that, if an oak be planted in a
flower-pot, it will be worse in the end for the flower-pot than for the
tree. And to those who watch, year after year, the young human seedlings
planted “in society,” the main point of interest lies in the discovery
which of these are likely to grow into oaks.
But the truth is, that the very use of the word “society” in this sense
is narrow and misleading. We Americans are fortunate enough to live in a
larger society, where no conventional position or family traditions
exert an influence that is to be in the least degree compared with the
influence secured by education, energy, and character. No matter how
fastidious the social circle, one is constantly struck with the
limitations of its influence, and with the little power exerted by its
members as compared with that which may easily be wielded by tongue and
pen. No merely fashionable woman in New York, for instance, has a
position sufficiently important to be called influential compared with
that of a woman who can speak in public so as to command hearers, or can
write so as to secure readers. To be at the head of a normal school, or
to be a professor in a college where co-education prevails, is to have a
sway over the destinies of America which reduces all mere “social
position” to a matter of cards and compliments and page’s buttons.
XLII.
THE BATTLE OF THE CARDS.
The great winter’s contest of the visiting-cards recommences at the end
of every autumn. Suspended during the summer, or only renewed at Newport
and such thoroughbred and thoroughly sophisticated haunts, it will set
in with fury in the habitable regions of our cities once more. Now will
the atmosphere around Fifth Avenue in New York be darkened—or
whitened—at the appointed hour by the shower of pasteboard transmitted
from dainty kid-gloved hands to the cotton-gloved hands of “John,”
through him to reach the possibly gloveless hands of some other John,
who stands obsequious in the doorway. Now will every lady, after John
has slammed the door, drive happily on to some other door, re-arranging,
as she goes, her display of cards, laid as if for a game on the opposite
seat of her carriage, and dealt perhaps in four suits,—her own cards,
her daughters’, her husband’s, her “Mr. and Mrs.” cards, and who knows
how many more? With all this ammunition, what a very _mitrailleuse_ of
good society she becomes; what an accumulation of polite attentions she
may discharge at any door! That one well-appointed woman, as she sits in
her carriage, represents the total visiting power of self, husband,
daughters, and possibly a son or two beside. She has all their
counterfeit presentments in her hands. How happy she is! and how happy
will the others be on her return, to think that dear mamma has disposed
of so many dear, beloved, tiresome, social foes that morning! It will be
three months at least, they think, before the A’s and the B’s and the
C’s will have to be “done” again.
Ah! but who knows how soon these fatiguing letters of the alphabet,
rallying to the defence, will come, pasteboard in hand, to return the
onset? In this contest, fair ladies, “there are blows to take, as well
as blows to give,” in the words of the immortal Webster. Some day, on
returning, you will find a half-dozen cards on your own table that will
undo all this morning’s work, and send you forth on the war-path again.
Is it not like a campaign? It is from this subtle military analogy,
doubtless, that when gentlemen happen to quarrel, in the very best
society, they exchange cards as preliminary to a duel; and that, when
French journalists fight, all other French journalists show their
sympathy for the survivor by sending him their cards. When we see,
therefore, these heroic ladies riding forth in the social battle’s
magnificently stern array, our hearts render them the homage due to the
brave. When we consider how complex their military equipment has grown,
we fancy each of these self-devoted mothers to be an Arnold Winkelried,
receiving in her martyr-breast the points of a dozen different cards,
and shouting, “Make way for liberty!” For is it not securing liberty to
have cleared off a dozen calls from your list, and found nobody at home?
If this sort of thing goes on, who can tell where the paper warfare
shall end? If ladies may leave cards for their husbands, who are never
seen out of Wall Street, except when they are seen at their clubs; or
for their sons, who never forsake their billiards or their books,—why
can they not also leave them for their ancestors, or for their remotest
posterity? Who knows but people may yet drop cards in the names of the
grandchildren whom they only wish for, or may reconcile hereditary feuds
by interchanging pasteboard in behalf of two hostile grandparents who
died half a century ago?
And there is another social observance in which the introduction of the
card system may yet be destined to save much labor,—the attendance on
fashionable churches. Already, it is said, a family may sometimes
reconcile devout observance with a late breakfast, by stationing the
family carriage near the church-door—empty. Really, it would not be a
much emptier observance to send the cards alone by the footman; and
doubtless, in the progress of civilization, we shall yet reach that
point. It will have many advantages. The _effete_ of society, as some
cruel satirist has called them, may then send their orisons on
pasteboard to as many different shrines as they approve; thus insuring
their souls, as it were, at several different offices. Church
architecture may be simplified, for it will require nothing but a
card-basket. The clergyman will celebrate his solemn ritual, and will
then look in that convenient receptacle for the names of his fellow
worshippers, as a fine lady, after her “reception,” looks over the cards
her footman hands her, to know which of her dear friends she has been
welcoming. Religion as well as social proprieties will glide smoothly
over a surface of glazed pasteboard; and it will be only very humble
Christians indeed who will do their worshipping in person, and will hold
to the worn-out and obsolete practice of “No Cards.”
XLIII.
SOME WORKING-WOMEN.
It is almost a stereotyped remark, that the women of the more
fashionable and worldly class, in America, are indolent, idle,
incapable, and live feeble and lazy lives. It has always seemed to me
that, on the contrary, they are compelled, by the very circumstances of
their situation, to lead very laborious lives, requiring great strength
and energy. Whether many of their pursuits are frivolous, is a different
question; but that they are arduous, I do not see how any one can doubt.
I think it can be easily shown that the common charges against American
fashionable women do not hold against the class I describe.
There is, for instance, the charge of evading the cares of housekeeping,
and of preferring a boarding-house or hotel. But no woman with high aims
in the world of fashion can afford to relieve herself from household
cares in this way, except as an exceptional or occasional thing. She
must keep house in order to have entertainments, to form a circle, to
secure a position. The law of give and take is as absolute in society as
in business; and the very first essential to social position in our
larger cities is a household and a hospitality of one’s own. It is far
more practicable for a family of high rank in England to live
temporarily in lodgings in London, than for any family with social
aspirations to do the same in New York. The married woman who seeks a
position in the world of society, must, therefore, keep house.
And, with housekeeping, there comes at once to the American woman a
world of care far beyond that of her European sisters. Abroad, every
thing in domestic life is systematized; and services of any grade, up to
that of housekeeper or steward, can be secured for money, and for a
moderate amount of that. The mere amount of money might not trouble the
American woman; but where to get the service? Such a thing as a trained
housekeeper, who can undertake, at any salary, to take the work off the
shoulders of the lady of the house,—such a thing America hardly affords.
Without this, the multiplication of servants only increaseth sorrow; the
servants themselves are commonly an undisciplined mob, and the lady of
the house is like a general attempting to drill his whole command
personally, without the aid of a staff-officer or so much as a sergeant.
For an occasional grand entertainment, she can, perhaps, import a
special force; some fashionable sexton can arrange her invitations, and
some genteel caterer her supper. But for the daily routine of the
household—guests, children, door-bell, equipage—there is one vast,
constant toil every day; and the woman who would have these things done
well must give her own orders, and discipline her own retinue. The
husband may have no “business,” his wealth may supersede the necessity
of all toil beyond daily billiards; but for the wife wealth means
business, and, the more complete the social triumph, the more
overwhelming the daily toil.
For instance, I know a fair woman in an Atlantic city who is at the head
of a household including six children and nine servants. The whole
domestic management is placed absolutely in her hands: she engages or
dismisses every person employed, incurs every expense, makes every
purchase, and keeps all the accounts; her husband only ordering the
fuel, directing the affairs of the stable, and drawing checks for the
bills. Every hour of her morning is systematically appropriated to these
things. Among other things, she has to provide for nine meals a day; in
dining-room, kitchen, and nursery, three each. Then she has to plan her
social duties, and to drive out, exquisitely dressed, to make her calls.
Then there are constantly dinner-parties and evening entertainments; she
reads a little, and takes lessons in one or two languages. Meanwhile her
husband has for daily occupation his books, his club, and the
above-mentioned light and easy share in the cares of the household. Many
men in his position do not even keep an account of personal
expenditures.
There is nothing exceptional in this lady’s case, except that the work
may be better done than usual: the husband could not well contribute
more than his present share without hurting domestic discipline; nor
does the wife do all this from pleasure, but in a manner from necessity.
It is the condition of her social position: to change it, she must
withdraw herself from her social world. A few improvements, such as
“family hotels,” are doing something to relieve this class to whom
luxury means labor. The great under-current which is sweeping us all
toward some form of associated life is as obvious in this new
improvement in housekeeping, as in co-operative stores or trades-unions;
but it will nevertheless be long before the “women of society” in
America can be any thing but a hard-working class.
The question is not whether such a life as I have described is the ideal
life. My point is that it is, at any rate, a life demanding far more of
energy and toil, at least in America, than the men of the same class are
called upon to exhibit. There is growing up a class of men of leisure in
America; but there are no women of leisure in the same circle. They hold
their social position on condition of “an establishment,” and an
establishment makes them working-women. One result is the constant
exodus of this class to Europe, where domestic life is just now easier.
Another consequence is, that you hear woman suffrage denounced by women
of this class, not on the ground that it involves any harder work than
they already do, but on the ground that they have work enough already,
and will not bear the suggestion of any more.
XLIV.
THE EMPIRE OF MANNERS.
I was present at a lively discourse, administered by a young lady just
from Europe to a veteran politician. “It is of very little consequence,”
she said, “what kind of men you send out as foreign ministers. The thing
of real importance is that they should have the right kind of wives. Any
man can sign a treaty, I suppose, if you tell him what kind of treaty it
must be. But all his social relations with the nations to which you send
him will depend on his wife.” There was some truth, certainly, in this
audacious conclusion. It reminded me of the saying of a modern thinker,
“The only empire freely conceded to women is that of manners—but it is
worth all the rest put together.”
Every one instinctively feels that the graces and amenities of life must
be largely under the direction of women. The fact that this feeling has
been carried too far, and has led to the dwarfing of women’s intellect,
must not lead to a rejection of this important social sphere. It is too
strong a power to be ignored. George Eliot says well that “the commonest
man, who has his ounce of sense and feeling, is conscious of the
difference between a lovely, delicate woman, and a coarse one. Even a
dog feels a difference in their presence.” At a summer resort, for
instance, one sees women who may be intellectually very ignorant and
narrow, yet whose mere manners give them a social power which the
highest intellects might envy. To lend joy and grace to all one’s little
world of friendship; to make one’s house a place which every guest
enters with eagerness, and leaves with reluctance; to lend encouragement
to the timid, and ease to the awkward; to repress violence, restrain
egotism, and make even controversy courteous,—these belong to the empire
of woman. It is a sphere so important and so beautiful, that even
courage and self-devotion seem not quite enough, without the addition of
this supremest charm.
This courtesy is so far from implying falsehood, that its very best
basis is perfect simplicity. Given a naturally sensitive organization, a
loving spirit, and the early influence of a refined home, and the
foundation of fine manners is secured. A person so favored may be reared
in a log-hut, and may pass easily into a palace; the few needful
conventionalities are so readily acquired. But I think it is a mistake
to tell children, as we sometimes do, that simplicity and a kind heart
are absolutely all that are needful in the way of manners. There are
persons in whom simplicity and kindness are inborn, and who yet never
attain to good manners for want of refined perceptions. And it is
astonishing how much refinement alone can do, even if it is not very
genuine or very full of heart, to smooth the paths and make social life
attractive.
All the acute observers have recognized the difference between the
highest standard, which is nature’s, and that next to the highest, which
is art’s. George Eliot speaks of that fine polish which is “the
expensive substitute for simplicity,” and Tennyson says of manners,—
“Kind nature’s are the best: those next to best
That fit us like a nature second-hand;
Which are indeed the manners of the great.”
In our own national history, we have learned to recognize that the
personal demeanor of women may be a social and political force. The
slave-power owed much of its prolonged control at Washington, and the
larger part of its favor in Europe, to the fact that the manners of
Southern women had been more sedulously trained than those of Northern
women. Even at this moment, one may see at any watering-place that the
relative social influence of different cities does not depend upon the
intellectual training of their women, so much as on the manners. And,
even if this is very unreasonable, the remedy would seem to be, not to
go about lecturing on the intrinsic superiority of the Muses to the
Graces, but to pay due homage at all the shrines.
It is a great deal to ask of reformers, especially, that they should be
ornamental as well as useful; and I would by no means indorse the views
of a lady who once told me that she was ready to adopt the most radical
views of the women-reformers if she could see one well-dressed woman who
accepted them. The place where we should draw the line between
independence and deference, between essentials and non-essentials,
between great ideas and little courtesies, will probably never be
determined—except by actual examples. Yet it is safe to fall back on
Miss Edgeworth’s maxim in “Helen,” that “Every one who makes goodness
disagreeable commits high treason against virtue.” And it is not a
pleasant result of our good deeds, that others should be immediately
driven into bad deeds by the burning desire to be unlike us.
XLV.
“GIRLSTEROUSNESS.”
They tell the story of a little boy, a young scion of the house of
Beecher, that, on being rebuked for some noisy proceeding, in which his
little sister had also shared, he claimed that she also should be
included in the indictment. “If a boy makes too much noise,” he said,
“you tell him he mustn’t be boisterous. Well, then, when a girl makes
just as much noise, you ought to tell her not to be _girlsterous_.”
I think that we should accept, with a sense of gratitude, this addition
to the language. It supplies a name for a special phase of feminine
demeanor, inevitably brought out of modern womanhood. Any transitional
state of society develops some evil with the good. Good results are
unquestionably proceeding from the greater freedom now allowed to women.
The drawback is, that we are developing, here and now, more of
“girlsterousness” than is apt to be seen in less-enlightened countries.
The more complete the subjection of woman, the more “subdued” in every
sense she is. The typical woman of savage life is, at least in youth,
gentle, shy, retiring, timid. A Bedouin woman is modest and humble; an
Indian girl has a voice “gentle and low.” The utmost stretch of the
imagination cannot picture either of them as “girlsterous.” That
perilous quality can only come as woman is educated, self-respecting,
emancipated. “Girlsterousness” is the excess attendant on that virtue,
the shadow which accompanies that light. It is more visible in England
than in France, in America than in England.
It is to be observed, that, if a girl wishes to be noisy, she can be as
noisy as anybody. Her noise, if less clamorous, is more shrill and
penetrating. The shrieks of schoolgirls, playing in the yard at
recess-time, seem to drown the voices of the boys. As you enter an
evening party, it is the women’s tones you hear most conspicuously.
There is no defect in the organ, but at least an adequate vigor. In
travelling by rail, when sitting near some rather under-bred party of
youths and damsels, I have commonly noticed that the girls were the
noisiest. The young men appeared more regardful of public opinion, and
looked round with solicitude, lest they should attract too much
attention. It is “girlsterousness” that dashes straight on, regardless
of all observers.
Of course reformers exhibit their full share of this undesirable
quality. Where the emancipation of women is much discussed in any
circle, some young girls will put it in practice gracefully and with
dignity, others rudely. Yet even the rudeness may be but a temporary
phase, and at last end well. When women were being first trained as
physicians, years ago, I remember a young girl who came from a Southern
State to a Northern city, and attended the medical lectures. Having
secured her lecture-tickets, she also bought season-tickets to the
theatre and to the pistol-gallery, laid in a box of cigars, and began
her professional training. If she meant it as a satire on the pursuits
of the young gentlemen around her, it was not without point. But it was,
I suppose, a clear case of “girlsterousness;” and I dare say that she
sowed her wild oats much more innocently than many of her male
contemporaries, and that she has long since become a sedate matron. But
I certainly cannot commend her as a model.
Yet I must resolutely deny that any sort of hoydenishness or indecorum
is an especial characteristic of radicals, or even “provincials,” as a
class. Some of the fine ladies who would be most horrified at the
“girlsterousness” of this young maiden would themselves smoke their
cigarettes in much worse company, morally speaking, than she ever
tolerated. And, so far as manners are concerned, I am bound to say that
the worst cases of rudeness and ill-breeding that have ever come to my
knowledge have not occurred in the “rural districts,” or among the lower
ten thousand, but in those circles of America where the whole aim in
life might seem to be the cultivation of its elegances.
And what confirms me in the fear that the most profound and serious
types of this disease are not to be found in the wildcat regions is the
fact that so much of is transplanted to Europe, among those who have the
money to travel. It is there described broadly as “Americanism;” and, so
surely as any peculiarly shrill group is heard coming through a European
picture-gallery, it is straightway classed by all observers as belonging
to the great Republic. If the observers are enamoured at sight with the
beauty of the young ladies of the party, they excuse the voices;
“Strange or wild, or madly gay,
They call it only pretty Fanny’s way.”
But other observers are more apt to call it only Columbia’s way; and if
they had ever heard the word “girlsterousness,” they would use that too.
Emerson says, “A gentleman makes no noise; a lady is serene.” If we
Americans often violate this perfect maxim of good manners, it is
something that America has, at least, furnished the maxim. And, between
Emerson and “girlsterousness,” our courteous philosopher will yet carry
the day.
XLVI.
ARE WOMEN NATURAL ARISTOCRATS?
A clergyman’s wife in England has lately set on foot a reform movement
in respect to dress; and, like many English reformers, she aims chiefly
to elevate the morals and manners of the lower classes, without much
reference to her own social equals. She proposes that “no servant, under
pain of dismissal, shall wear flowers, feathers, brooches, buckles or
clasps, ear-rings, lockets, neck-ribbons, velvets, kid gloves, parasols,
sashes, jackets, or trimming of any kind on dresses, and, above all, no
crinoline; no pads to be worn, or frisettes, or _chignons_, or
hair-ribbons. The dress is to be gored and made just to touch the
ground, and the hair to be drawn closely to the head, under a round
white cap, without trimming of any kind. The same system of dress is
recommended for Sunday-school girls, school-mistresses, church-singers,
and the lower orders generally.”
The remark is obvious, that in this country such a course of discipline
would involve the mistress, not the maid, in the “pain of dismissal.”
The American clergyman and clergyman’s wife who should even “recommend”
such a costume to a school-mistress, church-singer, or Sunday-school
girl,—to say nothing of the rest of the “lower orders,”—would soon find
themselves without teachers, without pupils, without a choir, and
probably without a parish. It is a comfort to think that even in older
countries there is less and less of this impertinent interference: the
costume of different ranks is being more and more assimilated; and the
incidental episode of a few liveries in our cities is not enough to
interfere with the general current. Never yet, to my knowledge, have I
seen even a livery worn by a white native American; and to restrain the
Sunday bonnets of her handmaidens, what lady has attempted?
This is as it should be. The Sunday bonnet of the Irish damsel is only
the symbol of a very proper effort to obtain her share of all social
advantages. Long may those ribbons wave! Meanwhile I think the fact that
it is easier for the gentleman of the house to control the dress of his
groom than for the lady to dictate that of her waiting-maid,—this must
count against the theory that it is women who are the natural
aristocrats.
Women are no doubt more sensitive than men upon matters of taste and
breeding. This is partly from a greater average fineness of natural
perception, and partly because their more secluded lives give them less
of miscellaneous contact with the world. If Maud Müller and her husband
had gone to board at the same boarding-house with the Judge and his
wife, that lady might have held aloof from the rustic bride, simply from
inexperience in life, and not knowing just how to approach her. But the
Judge, who might have been talking politics or real estate with the
young farmer on the doorsteps that morning, would certainly find it
easier to deal with him as a man and a brother at the dinner-table. From
these different causes women get the credit or discredit of being more
aristocratic than men are; so that in England the Tory supporters of
female suffrage base it on the ground that these new voters at least
will be conservative.
But, on the other hand, it is women, even more than men, who are
attracted by those strong qualities of personal character which are
always the antidote to aristocracy. No bold revolutionist ever defied
the established conventionalisms of his times without drawing his
strongest support from women. Poet and novelist love to depict the
princess as won by the outlaw, the gypsy, the peasant. Women have a way
of turning from the insipidities and proprieties of life to the wooer
who has the stronger hand; from the silken Darnley to the rude Bothwell.
This impulse is the natural corrective to the aristocratic instincts of
womanhood; and though men feel it less, it is still, even among them,
one of the supports of republican institutions. We need to keep always
balanced between the two influences of refined culture and of native
force. The patrician class, wherever there is one, is pretty sure to be
the more refined; the plebeian class, the more energetic. That woman is
able to appreciate both elements, is proof that she is quite capable of
doing her share in social and political life. This English clergyman’s
wife, who devotes her soul to the trimmings and gored skirts of the
lower orders, is no more entitled to represent her sex than are those
ladies who give their whole attention to the “novel and intricate
bonnets” advertised this season on Broadway.
XLVII.
MRS. BLANK’S DAUGHTERS.
Mrs. Blank, of Far West—let us not draw her from the “sacred privacy of
woman” by giving the name or place too precisely—has an insurmountable
objection to woman’s voting. So the newspapers say; and this objection
is, that she does not wish her daughters to encounter disreputable
characters at the polls.
It is a laudable desire, to keep one’s daughters from the slightest
contact with such persons. But how does Mrs. Blank precisely mean to
accomplish this? Will she shut up the maidens in a harem? When they go
out, will she send messengers through the streets to bid people hide
their faces, as when an Oriental queen is passing? Will she send them
travelling on camels, veiled by _yashmaks_? Will she prohibit them from
being so much as seen by a man, except when a physician must be called
for their ailments, and Miss Blank puts her arm through a curtain, in
order that he may feel her pulse and know no more?
Who is Mrs. Blank, and how does she bring up her daughters? Does she
send them to the post-office? If so, they may wait a half-hour at a time
for the mail to open, and be elbowed by the most disreputable
characters, waiting at their side. If it does the young ladies no harm
to encounter this for the sake of getting their letters out, will it
harm them to do it in order to get their ballots in? If they go to hear
Gough lecture, they may be kept half an hour at the door, elbowed by
saint and sinner indiscriminately. If it is worth going through this to
hear about temperance, why not to vote about it? If they go to
Washington to the President’s inauguration, they may stand two hours
with Mary Magdalen on one side of them and Judas Iscariot on the other.
If this contact is rendered harmless by the fact that they are receiving
political information, will it hurt them to stay five minutes longer in
order to act upon the knowledge they have received?
This is on the supposition that the household of Blank are plain,
practical women, unversed in the vanities of the world. If they belong
to fashionable circles, how much harder to keep them wholly clear of
disreputable contact! Should they, for instance, visit Newport, they may
possibly be seen at the Casino, looking very happy as they revolve
rapidly in the arms of some very disreputable characters; they will be
seen in the surf, attired in the most scanty and clinging drapery, and
kindly aided to preserve their balance by the devoted attentions of the
same companions. Mrs. Blank, meanwhile, will look complacently on, with
the other matrons: they are not supposed to know the current reputation
of those whom their daughters meet “in society;” and, so long as there
is no actual harm done, why should they care? Very well; but why, then,
should they care if they encounter those same disreputable characters
when they go to drop a ballot in the ballot-box? It will be a more
guarded and distant meeting. It is not usual to dance round-dances at
the ward-room, so far as I know, or to bathe in clinging drapery at that
rather dry and dusty resort. If such very close intimacies are all right
under the gas-light or at the beach, why should there be poison in
merely passing a disreputable character at the City Hall?
On the whole, the prospects of Mrs. Blank are not encouraging. Should
she consult a physician for her daughters, he may be secretly or openly
disreputable; should she call in a clergyman, he may, though a bishop,
have carnal rather than spiritual eyes. If Miss Blank be caught in a
shower, she may take refuge under the umbrella of an undesirable
acquaintance; should she fall on the ice, the woman who helps to raise
her may have sinned. There is not a spot in any known land where a woman
can live in absolute seclusion from all contact with evil. Should the
Misses Blank even turn Roman Catholics, and take to a convent, their
very confessor may be secretly a scoundrel; and they may be glad to flee
for refuge to the busy, buying, selling, dancing, voting world outside.
No: Mrs. Blank’s prayers for absolute protection will never be answered,
in respect to her daughters. Why not, then, find a better model for
prayer in that made by Jesus for his disciples: “I pray Thee, not that
Thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldst keep
them from the evil.” A woman was made for something nobler in the world,
Mrs. Blank, than to be a fragile toy, to be put behind a glass case, and
protected from contact. It is not her mission to be hidden away from all
life’s evil, but bravely to work that the world may be reformed.
XLVIII.
THE EUROPEAN PLAN.
Every mishap among American women brings out renewed suggestions of what
maybe called the “European plan” in the training of young girls,—the
plan, that is, of extreme seclusion and helplessness. It is usually
forgotten, in these suggestions, that not much protection is really
given anywhere to this particular class as a whole. Everywhere in
Europe, the restrictions are of caste, not of sex. Even in Turkey,
travellers tell us, women of the humbler vocations are not much
secluded. It is not the object of the “European plan,” in any form, to
protect the virtue of young women, as such, but only of young ladies;
and the protection is pretty effectually limited to that order. Among
the Portuguese, in the island of Fayal, I found it to be the ambition of
each humble family to bring up one daughter in a sort of ladylike
seclusion: she never went into the street alone, or without a hood which
was equivalent to a veil; she was taught indoor industries only; she was
constantly under the eye of her mother. But, in order that one daughter
might be thus protected, all the other daughters were allowed to go
alone, day or evening, bare-headed or bare-footed, by the loneliest
mountain-paths, to bring oranges or firewood or whatever their work may
be—heedless of protection. The safeguard was for a class: the average
exposure of young womanhood was far greater than with us. So in London,
while you rarely see a young lady alone in the streets, the housemaid is
sent on errands at any hour of the evening with a freedom at which our
city domestics would quite rebel; and one has to stay but a short time
in Paris to see how entirely limited to a class is the alleged restraint
under which young French girls are said to be kept.
Again, it is to be remembered that the whole “European plan,” so far as
it is applied on the Continent of Europe, is a plan based upon utter
distrust and suspicion, not only as to chastity, but as to all other
virtues. It is applied among the higher classes almost as consistently
to boys as to girls. In every school under church auspices, it is the
French theory that boys are never to be left unwatched for a moment; and
it is as steadily assumed that girls will be untruthful if left to
themselves, as that they will do every other wrong. This to the
Anglo-Saxon race seems very demoralizing. “Suspicion,” said Sir Philip
Sidney, “is the way to lose that which we fear to lose.” Readers of the
Brontë novels will remember the disgust of the English pupils and
teachers in French schools at the constant espionage around them; and I
have more than once heard young girls who had been trained at such
institutions say that it was a wonder if they had any truthfulness left,
so invariable was the assumption that it was the nature of young girls
to lie. I cannot imagine any thing less likely to create upright and
noble character, in man or woman, than the systematic application of the
“European plan.”
And that it produces just the results that might be feared, the whole
tone of European literature proves. Foreigners, no doubt, do habitual
injustice to the morality of French households; but it is impossible
that fiction can utterly misrepresent the community which produces and
reads it. When one thinks of the utter lightness of tone with which
breaches, both of truth and chastity, are treated even, in the better
class of French novels and plays, it seems absurd to deny the
correctness of the picture. Besides, it is not merely a question of
plays and novels. Consider, for instance, the contempt with which Taine
treats Thackeray for representing the mother of Pendennis as suffering
agonies when she thinks that her son has seduced a young girl, his
social inferior. Thackeray is not really considered a model of elevated
tone, as to such matters, among English writers; but the Frenchman is
simply amazed that the Englishman should describe even the saintliest of
mothers as attaching so much weight to such a small affair.
An able newspaper writer, quoted with apparent approval by the Boston
Daily Advertiser, praises the supposed foreign method for the “habit of
dependence and deference” that it produces; and because it gives to a
young man a wife whose “habit of deference is established.” But it must
be remembered, that, where this theory is established, the habit of
deference is logically carried much farther than mere conjugal
convenience would take it. Its natural outcome is the authority of the
priest, not of the husband. That domination of the women of France by
the priesthood which forms to-day the chief peril of the republic,—which
is the strength of legitimism and imperialism and all other conspiracies
against the liberty of the French people,—is only the visible and
inevitable result of this dangerous docility.
One thing is certain, that the best preparation for freedom is freedom;
and that no young girls are so poorly prepared for American life as
those whose early years are passed in Europe. The worst imprudences, the
most unmaidenly and offensive actions, that I have ever heard of in
decent society, have been on the part of young women educated in Europe,
who have been launched into American life without its early
training,—have been treated as children until they suddenly awakened to
the freedom of women. On the other hand, I remember with pleasure, that
a cultivated French mother, whose daughter’s fine qualities were the
best seal of her motherhood, once told me that the models she had chosen
in her daughter’s training were certain families of American young
ladies, of whom she had, through peculiar circumstances, seen much in
Paris.
XLIX.
“FEATHERSES.”
One of the most amusing letters ever quoted in any book is that given in
Curzon’s “Monasteries of the Levant,” as the production of a Turkish
sultana who had just learned English. It is as follows:—
NOTE FROM ADILE SULTANA, THE BETROTHED OF ABBAS PASHA, TO HER
ARMENIAN COMMISSIONER.
CONSTANTINOPLE, 1844.
_My Noble Friend_:—Here are the featherses sent my soul, my noble
friend, are there no other featherses leaved in the shop beside
these featherses? and these featherses remains, and these featherses
are ukly. They are very dear, who buyses dheses? And my noble
friend, we want a noat from yorself; those you brought last tim,
those you sees were very beautiful; we had searched; my soul, I want
featherses again, of those featherses. In Kalada there is plenty of
feather. Whatever bees, I only want beautiful featherses; I want
featherses of every desolation to-morrow.
(Signed)
YOU KNOW WHO.
The first steps in culture do not, then, it seems, remove from the
feminine soul the love of finery. Nor do the later steps wholly
extinguish it; for did not Grace Greenwood hear the learned Mary
Somerville conferring with the wise Harriet Martineau as to whether a
certain dress should be dyed to match a certain shawl? Well! why not?
Because women learn the use of the quill, are they to ignore
“featherses”? Because they learn science, must they unlearn the arts,
and above all the art of being beautiful? If men have lost it, they have
reason to regret the loss. Let women hold to it, while yet within their
reach.
Mrs. Rachel Howland of New Bedford, much prized and trusted as a public
speaker among Friends, and a model of taste and quiet beauty in costume,
delighted the young girls at a Newport Yearly Meeting, a few years
since, by boldly declaring that she thought God meant women to make the
world beautiful, as much as flowers and butterflies, and that there was
no sin in tasteful dress, but only in devoting to it too much money or
too much time. It is a blessed doctrine. The utmost extremes of dress,
the love of colors, of fabrics, of jewels, of “featherses,” are, after
all, but an effort after the beautiful. The reason why the beautiful is
not always the result is because so many women are ignorant or merely
imitative. They have no sense of fitness: the short wear what belongs to
the tall, and brunettes sacrifice their natural beauty to look like
blondes. Or they have no adaptation; and even an emancipated woman may
show a disregard for appropriateness, as where a fine lady sweeps the
streets, or a fair orator the platform, with a silken or velvet train
which accords only with a carpet as luxurious as itself. What is
inappropriate is never beautiful. What is merely in the fashion is never
beautiful. But who does not know some woman whose taste and training are
so perfect that fashion becomes to her a means of grace instead of a
despot, and the worst excrescence that can be prescribed—a _chignon_, a
hoop, a panier—is softened into something so becoming that even the
Parisian bondage seems but a chain of roses?
In such hands, even “featherses” become a fine art, not a matter of
vanity. Are women so much more vain than men? No doubt they talk more
about their dress, for there is much more to talk about; yet did you
never hear the men of fashion discuss boots and hats and the liveries of
grooms? A good friend of mine, a shoemaker, who supplies very high heels
for a great many pretty feet on Fifth Avenue in New York, declares that
women are not so vain of their feet as men. “A man who thinks he has a
handsome foot,” quoth our fashionable Crispin, “is apt to give us more
trouble than any lady among our customers. I have noticed this for
twenty years.” The testimony is consoling—to women.
And this naturally suggests the question, What is to be the future of
masculine costume? Is the present formlessness and gracelessness and
monotony of hue to last forever, as suited to the rough needs of a
work-a-day world? It is to be remembered that the difference in this
respect between the dress of the sexes is a very recent thing. Till
within a century or so men dressed as picturesquely as women, and paid
as minute attention to their costume. Even the fashions in armor varied
as extensively as the fashions in gowns. One of Henry III.’s courtiers,
Sir J. Arundel, had fifty-two complete suits of cloth of gold. No satin,
no velvet, was too elegant for those who sat to Copley for their
pictures. In Puritan days the laws could hardly be made severe enough to
prevent men from wearing silver-lace and “broad bone-lace,” and
shoulder-bands of undue width, and double ruffs and “immoderate great
breeches.” What seemed to the Cavaliers the extreme of stupid sobriety
in dress, would pass now for the most fantastic array. Fancy Samuel
Pepys going to a wedding of to-day in his “new colored silk suit and
coat trimmed with gold buttons, and gold broad lace round his hands,
very rich and fine.” It would give to the ceremony the aspect of a fancy
ball; yet how much prettier a sight is a fancy ball than the ordinary
entertainment of the period!
Within the last few years the rigor of masculine costume is a little
relaxed; velvets are resuming their picturesque sway: and, instead of
the customary suit of solemn black, gentlemen are appearing in blue and
gold editions at evening parties. Let us hope that good sense and taste
may yet meet each other, for both sexes; that men may borrow for their
dress some womanly taste, women some masculine sense; and society may
again witness a graceful and appropriate costume, without being too much
absorbed in “featherses.”
L.
SOME MAN-MILLINERY.
We may breathe more freely. The religious prospects of America brighten.
Our dealers have received the “Catalogue of Clerical Vestments and
Improved Church Ornaments manufactured by Simon Jeune, 34 Rue de Cléry,
Paris.”
Why are we not a nation of saints? Plainly, because the church-apparatus
has hitherto been so very deficient. Religion has been, so to speak,
naked. The dry-goods stores, supplying only the laity, have left the
clergy unclothed. In what ready-made-clothing store can you find any
thing like a proper alb? Ask your tailor, if you dare, for a chasuble.
At Stewart’s shop New Yorkers boast that you can buy any thing; but
fancy a respectable citizen entering those marble portals, and demanding
a cope or a dalmatic! As for an ombrellino, or an antependium, you might
as well attempt to go buffalo-hunting in Broadway. In that case you
would at least find the dried skin of the animal; but we doubt if there
is to be found on sale any thing nearer an ombrellino than a lady’s
parasol. They order this thing otherwise in France.
Mr. Simon Jeune provides every one of these simple luxuries. Not a
device by which a rich man may enter the kingdom of heaven, but he has
it at his fingers’ ends. None of your cheap salvations mar the dignity
of 34 Rue de Cléry. “We do not manufacture these articles at a low
price,” he calmly announces. There is no limit in the other direction.
You can lead souls to heaven in a robe worth twenty-five guineas; but,
if you insist on parsimony in your piety, you must patronize some other
establishment.
Yet who that reads this catalogue, and revels for a half-hour amid its
gold and jewels, would care to be parsimonious? What is money worth,
except as a means of putting one’s favorite minister into a chasuble “in
gold cloth with glazed friz ground, double superior quality”? Since the
Christian must at any rate bear his cross, is it not a satisfaction to
have it “on a gold ground, richly worked in gold and silver”? If there
is no true religion without a cope, is it not well that its “hood and
orfraies” should be “surrounded with glazed gold-columned galloon”? And,
as death must come at any rate, is it not something that your pall may
bear “a handsome design of silver tears in emboss in the centre of the
cross,” price only six guineas?
Time would fail to tell of the banners and the dais, the altar-cloths
and frontals, the pastoral stoles and benediction-scarfs, the pyxes and
chalices, and, in short, all dear delights of consecrated souls. This
saintly upholsterer makes as many “fresh sacrifices,” it would appear,
as any other retailer; but, as this does not prevent him from pricing a
dais as high as four hundred pounds sterling, there is no danger of the
purchasers finding any thing cheap enough to be really discreditable.
And the goods are all warranted to be as indestructible as the lowly
virtues they symbolize.
M. Jeune positively announces that he “supplies every article connected
with the Roman Catholic Church.” Perhaps he reserves the faith, hope,
and charity for the next catalogue, as they do not appear largely in
this. In other respects, reading this catalogue is as good as a seat in
the most fashionable church, and leaves much the same impression. It is
especially useful for summer-time, when one may wander in the country,
to the peril of one’s soul, and may consider the lilies a great deal too
much, and may come to thinking religion a thing obtainable on cheap
terms, after all. This would not do for M. Jeune’s business: let us
return to the realities of time and eternity, and consider this
“embroidered glory of spangles and prul,”—whatever prul may be.
But can it, after all, be possible that these gorgeous garments are to
be worn by men only, and that those same men will sometimes treat it as
a reproach to women that they are fond of dress?
LI.
SUBLIME PRINCES IN DISTRESS.
In looking over some miscellaneous papers which came, the other day,
into my hands, I found among them a newspaper scrap, expressing certain
criticisms familiar to the inquiring mind. It stated the predominant
attribute of women to be frivolity; an inordinate love of show, display,
rank, title, dress; a habit of absorption in the petty details of these
follies, to the exclusion of all serious thought and purpose. In reading
this lucubration, one was led to suppose that the whole aim of all women
was to meet in little circles where they could wear costly attire, call
themselves by fine names, and, in the concise Italian phrase, “peacock
themselves” generally.
But there happened to be among the same papers another class of
documents which tended to unsettle the mind a little on these topics.
These documents were in print, and were not marked as private, or
addressed to any particular name, so that there can be no harm in
reprinting one of them, suppressing, however, all reference to
particular persons or places, lest I should be innocently betraying some
awful secret. The paper affording most information was as follows, the
dashes of omission (——) being mine, but all the rest being given
_verbatim_:—
“Lux e tenebris.”
—— CONSISTORY.
{Non nobis }
{Domine non}
S. P. R. S. {nobis, sed} 32°
{nomini tuo}
{da gloriam}
Sublime Prince:
A stated rendezvous of —— Consistory, A. A. S. Rite, will be held on
the 15th day of the month Adar, A. H. 5640, in —— Hall, under the c.
c. of the 3, near the B. B. at Five o’clock P.M.
Per order of
____ ____
Ill. Com. in Chief.
—— ——
Ill. Grand Secretary.
The object of this meeting is thus stated: “Work: the grade of Knight
Kadosh, the 30th, will be worked in full at this Rendezvous.” And it
appears that this work must have something of a military character; for
it seems from another circular, which I will not quote in full, that the
purpose of the rendezvous can be much better carried out if the members
will provide themselves with a costly uniform, including a sword and
other equipments. Yet it would also appear that the expenses of this
organization, apart from the uniform, are so great as to call forth the
following notice:—
“DELINQUENTS.—The Finance Committee recommend the discharge from
Membership of the following Sublime Princes, for non-payment of
dues, they having failed to make any satisfactory reply to repealed
notices of their indebtedness.” [Then follows a list of names and
amounts varying from $17 to $23.]
One of the most brilliant of recent French novels, Daudet’s “Les Rois en
Exil,” lays its whole plot among the forlorn class of dethroned
sovereigns in Paris; but really their sorrows do not touch an American
heart so deeply as this black-list. Here are nearly twenty Princes on
our own soil who are publicly exposed in a single circular as refusing,
after “repeated notices of their indebtedness,” even to reply
satisfactorily. What pleasure can there be in the most attractive
“rendezvous,” what joy in the most absorbing “work,” when one thinks of
all these fallen Sublime Princes wandering, like Milton’s angels, into
outer darkness? I almost blush to own that I recognize among the names
of these outcasts one or two acquaintances of my own, who certainly
passed for honest men before they became princes.
But the most interesting question for women to consider is this: Who
conducts this picturesque consistory, with its rites, its titles, and
its uniforms? Which sex is it that makes up this society, and twenty
other societies so absorbing in their “work” that some worthy persons
have a “society” for almost every evening in the week? Is it the sex
which is alleged to be frivolous, dressy, and eager for rank and title?
Or is it the grave sex, the serious and hard-working sex, the “noble
sex,” _le sexe noble_, as some of the French grammars call it? No doubt
there is under all this display and formality, in this “consistory,” as
in most similar organizations, a great deal of mutual help and
friendliness. But so there is under even the seeming frivolities of
women: the majority of fashionable women have good hearts, and do good.
If substantial and practical men like to cover even their benevolent
organizations with something of show and display, and to “peacock
themselves” a little, why should not women be permitted the same
privilege? Surely Sublime Princes should stand by their order, and not
look with disdain on those who would like to be Sublime Princesses if
they only could.
EDUCATION.
“Movet me ingens scientiarum admiratio, seu legis communis æquitas,
ut in nostro sexu, rarum non esse feram, id quod omnium votis
dignissimum est. Nam cum sapientia tantum generis humani ornamentum
sit, ut ad omnes et singulos (quoad quidem per sortem cujusque
liceat) extendi jure debeat, non vidi, cur virgini, in qua excolendi
sese ornandique sedulitatem admittimus, non conveniat mundus hic
omnium longè pulcherrimus.”—ANNÆ MARIÆ À SCHURMAN EPISTOLÆ. (1638.)
“A great reverence for knowledge and the natural sense of justice urge
me to encourage in my own sex that which is most worthy the aspirations
of all. For, since wisdom is so great an ornament of the human race that
it should of right be extended (so far as practicable) to each and every
one, I did not see why this fairest of ornaments should not be
appropriate for the maiden, to whom we permit all diligence in the
decoration and adornment of herself.”
LII.
“EXPERIMENTS.”
Why is it, that, whenever any thing is done for women in the way of
education, it is called “an experiment,”—something that is to be long
considered, stoutly opposed, grudgingly yielded, and dubiously
watched,—while, if the same thing is done for men, its desirableness is
assumed as a matter of course, and the thing is done? Thus, when Harvard
College was founded, it was not regarded as an experiment, but as an
institution. The “General Court,” in 1636, “agreed to give 400_l._
towards a schoale or colledge,” and the affair was settled. Every
subsequent step in the expanding of educational opportunities for young
men has gone in the same way. But when there seems a chance of
extending, however irregularly, some of the same collegiate advantages
to women, I observe that the Boston Daily Advertiser and the Atlantic
Monthly, in all good faith, speak of the measure as an “experiment.”
It seems to me no more of an “experiment” than when a boy who has
hitherto eaten up his whole apple becomes a little touched with a sense
of justice, and finally decides to offer his sister the smaller half. If
he has ever regarded that offer as an experiment, the first actual trial
will put the result into the list of certainties; and it will become an
axiom in his mind that girls like apples. Whatever may be said about the
position of women in law and society, it is clear that their educational
disadvantages have been a prolonged disgrace to the other sex, and one
for which women themselves are in no way accountable. When Françoise de
Saintonges, in the sixteenth century, wished to establish girls’ schools
in France, she was hooted in the streets, and her father called together
four doctors of law to decide whether she was possessed of a devil in
planning to teach women,—”_pour s’assurer qu’instruire des femmes
n’était pas un œuvre du démon_.” From that day to this, we have seen
women almost always more ready to be taught than was any one else to
teach them. Talk as you please about their wishing or not wishing to
vote: they have certainly wished for instruction, and have had it doled
out to them almost as grudgingly as if it were the ballot itself.
Consider the educational history of Massachusetts, for instance. The
wife of President John Adams was born in 1744; and she says of her youth
that “female education, in the best families, went no farther than
writing and arithmetic.” Barry tells us in his History of Massachusetts,
that the public education was first provided for boys only; “but light
soon broke in, and girls were allowed to attend the public schools two
hours a day.”[10] It appears from President Quincy’s “Municipal History
of Boston,”[11] that from 1790 girls were there admitted to such
schools, but during the summer months only, when there were not boys
enough to fill them,—from April 20 to Oct. 20 of each year. This lasted
until 1822, when Boston became a city. Four years after, an attempt was
made to establish a high school for girls, which was not, however, to
teach Latin and Greek. It had, in the words of the school committee of
1854, “an alarming success;” and the school was abolished after eighteen
months’ trial, because the girls crowded into it; and as Mr. Quincy,
with exquisite simplicity, records, “not one voluntarily quitted it, and
there was no reason to suppose that any one admitted to the school would
voluntarily quit for the whole three years, except in case of marriage!”
Footnote 10:
III., 323.
Footnote 11:
p. 21.
How amusing seems it now to read of such an “experiment” as this,
abandoned only because of its overwhelming success! How absurd now seem
the discussions of a few years ago!—the doubts whether young women
really desired higher education, whether they were capable of it,
whether their health would bear it, whether their parents would permit
it. The address I gave before the Social Science Association on this
subject, at Boston, May 14, 1873, now seems to me such a collection of
platitudes that I hardly see how I dared come before an intelligent
audience with such needless reasonings. It is as if I had soberly
labored to prove that two and two make four, or that ginger is “hot i’
the mouth.” Yet the subsequent discussion in that meeting showed that
around even these harmless and commonplace propositions the battle of
debate could rage hot; and it really seemed as if even to teach women
the alphabet ought still to be mentioned as “a promising experiment.”
Now, with the successes before us of Vassar and Wellesley and Smith
Colleges, of Michigan and Cornell and Boston Universities; with the
spectacle at Cambridge of young women actually reading Plato “at sight”
with Professor Goodwin,—it surely seems as if the higher education of
women might be considered quite beyond the stage of experiment, and
might henceforth be provided for in the same common-sense and
matter-of-course way which we provide for the education of young men.
And, if this point is already reached in education, how long before it
will also be reached in political life, and women’s voting be viewed as
a matter of course, and a thing no longer experimental?
LIII.
INTELLECTUAL CINDERELLAS.
When, some thirty years ago, the extraordinary young mathematician,
Truman Henry Safford, first attracted the attention of New England by
his rare powers, I well remember the pains that were taken to place him
under instruction by the ablest Harvard professors: the greater his
abilities, the more needful that he should have careful and symmetrical
training. The men of science did not say, “Stand off! let him alone! let
him strive patiently until he has achieved something positively
valuable, and he may be sure of prompt and generous recognition—when he
is fifty years old.” If such a course would have been mistaken and
ungenerous if applied to Professor Safford, why is it not something to
be regretted that it was applied to Mrs. Somerville? In her case, the
mischief was done: she was, happily, strong enough to bear it; but, as
the English critics say, we never shall know what science has lost by
it. We can do nothing for her now; but we could do something for future
women like her, by pointing this obvious moral for their benefit,
instead of being content with a mere tardy recognition of success, after
a woman has expended half a century in struggle.
It is commonly considered to be a step forward in civilization, that
whereas ancient and barbarous nations exposed children to special
hardships, in order to kill off the weak and toughen the strong, modern
nations aim to rear all alike carefully, without either sacrificing or
enfeebling. If we apply this to muscle, why not to mind? and, if to
men’s minds, why not to women’s? Why use for men’s intellects, which are
claimed to be stronger, the forcing process,—offering, for instance,
many thousand dollars a year in gratuities at Harvard College, that
young men may be induced to come and learn,—and only withhold assistance
from the weaker minds of women? A little schoolgirl once told me that
she did not object to her teacher’s showing partiality, but thought she
“ought to show partiality to all alike.” If all our university systems
are wrong, and the proper diet for mathematical genius consists of fifty
years’ snubbing, let us employ it, by all means; but let it be applied
to both sexes.
That it is the duty of women, even under disadvantageous circumstances,
to prove their purpose by labor, to “verify their credentials,” is true
enough; but this moral is only part of the moral of Mrs. Somerville’s
book, and is cruelly incomplete without the other half. What a garden of
roses was Mrs. Somerville’s life, according to some comfortable critics!
“All that for which too many women nowadays are content to sit and
whine, or fitfully and carelessly struggle, came naturally and quietly
to Mrs. Somerville. And the reason was, that she never asked for any
thing until she had earned it; or, rather, she never asked at all, but
was content to earn.” Naturally and quietly! You might as well say that
Garrison fought slavery “quietly,” or that Frederick Douglass’s escape
came to him “naturally.” Turn to the book itself, and see with what
strong, though never bitter, feeling, the author looks back upon her
hard struggle.
“I was intensely ambitious to excel in something; for I felt in my
own breast that women were capable of taking a higher place in
creation than that assigned them in my early days, which was very
low” (p. 60). “Nor ... should I have had courage to ask any of them
a question, for I should have been laughed at. I was often very sad
and forlorn; not a hand held out to help me” (p. 47). “My father
came home for a short time, and, somehow or other finding out what I
was about, said to my mother, ‘Peg, we must put a stop to this, or
we shall have Mary in a strait-jacket one of these days’” (p. 54).
“I continued my mathematical and other pursuits, but under great
disadvantages; for, although my husband did not prevent me from
studying, I met with no sympathy whatever from him, as he had a very
low opinion of the capacity of my sex, and had neither knowledge of
nor interest in science of any kind” (p. 57). “I was considered
eccentric and foolish; and my conduct was highly disapproved of by
many, especially by some members of my own family” (p. 80). “A man
can always command his time under the plea of business: a woman is
not allowed any such excuse” (p. 164). And so on.
At last in 1831—Mrs. Somerville being then fifty-one—her work on “The
Mechanism of the Heavens” appeared. Then came universal recognition,
generous if not prompt, a tardy acknowledgment. “Our relations,” she
says, “and others who had so severely criticised and ridiculed me,
astonished at my success, were now loud in my praise.”[12] No doubt. So
were, probably, Cinderella’s sisters loud in her praise, when the prince
at last took her from the chimney-corner, and married her. They had kept
for themselves, to be sure, as long as they could, the delights and
opportunities of life; while she had taken the place assigned her in her
early days,—“which was very low,” as Mrs. Somerville says. But, for all
that, they were very kind to her in the days of her prosperity; and no
doubt packed their little trunks, and came to visit their dear sister at
the palace, as often as she could wish. And, doubtless, the Fairyland
Monthly of that day, when it came to review Cinderella’s “Personal
Recollections,” pointed out, that, as soon as that distinguished lady
had “achieved something positively valuable,” she received “prompt and
generous recognition.”
Footnote 12:
p. 176.
LIV.
FOREIGN EDUCATION.
There is a fashionable phrase which always awakens my inward
protest,—“the advantages of foreign education.” Every summer brings
within my view a large class of people who have perhaps spent their
youth in Europe, and then have taken Europe for their wedding-tour; and
then, after a year or two at home, have found it an excellent reason for
going abroad again “to give the children the advantage of foreign
education, you know.” And, as it is in regard to girls that this
advantage is especially claimed, it is in respect to them that I wish to
speak.
In some ways, undoubtedly, the early foreign training offers an
advantage. It is a thing of very great convenience to have the easy
colloquial command of one or two languages beside one’s own; and this
can no doubt be obtained far more readily by a few years of early life
abroad than by any method employed in later years at home. There are
also some unquestionable advantages in respect to music, art, and
European geography and history. The trouble is, that, when we have
enumerated these advantages, we have mentioned all.
And, as a further trouble, it comes about that these things, being all
that are better learned in Europe, are easily assumed, by what may be
called our Europeanized classes, to be all that are worth learning,
especially for girls. When, in such circles, you hear of a young lady as
“splendidly educated,” it commonly turns out that she speaks several
languages admirably, and plays well on the piano, or sketches well. It
is not needful for such an indorsement that she should have the
slightest knowledge of mathematics, of logic, of rhetoric, of
metaphysics, of political economy, of physiology, of any branch of
natural science, or of any language, or literature, or history, except
those of modern Europe. All these missing branches she would have been
far more likely to study, if she had never been abroad: all these, or a
sufficient number of them, she would have been pretty sure to study at a
first-class American “academy” or high school. But all these she is
almost sure to have missed in Europe,—missed them so thoroughly, indeed,
that she is likely to regard with suspicion any one who knows any thing
about them, as being “awfully learned.”
Yet it needs no argument to show that the studies thus omitted by girls
taught in Europe are the studies which train the intellect. That a girl
should know her own powers of body and mind, should know how to observe,
how to combine, how to think; that she should know the history and
literature of the world at large, and in particular of the country in
which she is to live,—this is certainly more important than that she
should be able to speak two or three languages as well as a European
courier, and should have nothing to say in any of them.
A very few persons I have known who contrived, while living abroad, to
keep a home atmosphere round their children, and who, by great personal
effort, succeeded in giving to their girls that solid early training
which is to be had in every high school in this country, but is only to
be obtained by personal effort, and under great disadvantages, in
Europe. Wiser still, in my judgment, were those who trusted America for
the main training, but contrived early to secure for their children the
needful year or two of foreign life, for the learning of languages
alone. Perhaps we exaggerate, too, the absolute necessity of foreign
study, even for modern languages. The Russians, who are the best
linguists in Europe, are not in the habit of expatriating themselves for
that purpose; and perhaps we have something to learn from them in this
direction, as well as in the line of Professor Runkle’s machine-shops.
LV.
TEACHING THE TEACHERS.
Cotton Mather says of his father, Increase Mather, that, when he became
president of Harvard College, it was from the desire to teach those who
were to teach others, or, as he expresses it, not to shape the building
but the builders,—_non lapides dolare sed architectos_. It is curious to
see that women are admitted more readily to this higher work than to the
lower. Thus I know a lady who teaches elocution professionally, and has
clerical pupils among others. One of these assures me that he finds his
power and influence in the pulpit much increased through her
instruction. Yet there is scarcely a denomination which would admit her
into the pulpit: she can direct the builders, but can take no share in
the building.
It sometimes occurred to me, when a member of the legislature of
Massachusetts, that the little I knew of political economy was mainly
due to the assiduous reading, in childhood, of Miss Martineau’s stories
founded on that science. Yet it would have been thought something very
astounding, were some such woman to have a seat in that legislature. So
I have seen classes of young men and maidens, in a high school, reciting
political economy out of Mrs. Fawcett’s excellent textbook,—and
sometimes reciting it to a woman; and yet, should any one of these boys
ever become a member of “the Great and General Court,” as the
legislature is called in Massachusetts, he could not even invite this
teacher, or Mrs. Fawcett herself, to sit beside him and aid him with her
advice. Can any one help seeing that this distinction is a merely
traditional thing, and one that cannot last?
At the last teachers’ convention which I attended, I heard a lady, Mrs.
Knox, give an address on the best way of teaching English composition.
There was assembled a great body of teachers, some five or six hundred;
the church was crowded; and yet this lady faced the audience for some
three-quarters of an hour,—she being armed only with a piece of chalk
and a blackboard,—and held it in close attention. Without perceptible
effort, and without a word or an attitude that was otherwise than
womanly and graceful, she taught the teachers, men and women alike. I do
not see how it is possible that the alleged supremacy of man can long
withstand such influences.
It seems very appropriate to read from town after town, in reference to
the late school elections, “The first lady to deposit her ballot was
Miss ——, a teacher in the high school.” Who else should be first? I do
not think that men generally comprehend how absurd it is to an
experienced teacher, who has for years been putting into the brains of
dull boys all the activity they possess, to see those boys grow up to be
men and voters, and decide what to do with the money she pays in taxes,
while she is set aside as “only a woman.” Her pupils cannot make a
speech in town-meeting, they cannot present a report on any subject,
they cannot show any capacity of leadership, without exhibiting the
influence she has had over them. Yet they are now as entirely beyond her
direct reach as if she were a hen who had hatched ducklings, and had
lived to see them swimming away. But the teachers are worse off than the
hens; because they have actually taught their ducklings to swim, and
could swim themselves if permitted. After all, Horace Mann builded
better than he knew. Every step in the training of women as teachers
implies a farther step.
LVI.
“CUPID-AND-PSYCHOLOGY.”
The learned Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, England, is frequently
facetious; and his jokes are quoted with the deference due to the chief
officer of the chief college of that great university. Now, it is known
that the Cambridge colleges, and Trinity College in particular, are
doing a great deal for the instruction of women. The young women of
Girton College and Newnham College,—both of these being institutions for
women, in or near Cambridge,—not only enjoy the instruction of the
university, but they share it under a guaranty that it shall be of the
best quality; because they attend, in many cases, the very same lectures
with the young men. Where this is not done, they sometimes use the
vacant lecture-rooms of the college; and it was in connection with an
application for this privilege that the Master of Trinity College made
his last joke,—the last, at any rate, that has crossed the Atlantic.
When told that the lecture-room was needed for a class of young women in
psychology, he said, “Psychology? What kind of psychology?
Cupid-and-Psychology, I suppose.”
Cupid-and-Psychology is, after all, not so bad a department of
instruction. It may be taken as a good enough symbol of that mingling of
head and heart which is the best result of all training. One of the
worst evils of the separate education of the sexes has been the easy
assumption that men were to be made all head, and women all heart. It
was to correct the evils of this, that Ben Jonson proposed for his ideal
woman
“a learned and a manly soul.”
It was an implied recognition of it from the other side when the great
masculine intellect, Goethe, held up as a guiding force in his Faust
“the eternal womanly” (_das ewige weibliche_). After all, each sex must
teach the other, and impart to the other. It will never do to have all
the brains poured into one human being, and christened “man;” and all
the affections decanted into another, and labelled “woman.” Nature
herself rejects this theory. Darwin himself, the interpreter of nature,
shows that there is a perpetual effort going on, by unseen forces, to
equalize the sexes, since sons often inherit from the mother, and
daughters from the father. And we all take pleasure in discovering in
the noblest of each sex something of the qualities of the other,—the
tender affections in great men, the imperial intellect in great women.
On the whole, there is no harm, but rather good, in the new science of
Cupid-and-Psychology. There are combinations for which no single word
can suffice. The phrase belongs to the same class with Lowell’s witty
denunciation of a certain tiresome letter-writer, as being, not his
incubus, but his “pen-and-inkubus.” It is as well to admit it first as
last: Cupid-and-Psychology will be taught wherever young men and women
study together. Not in the direct and simple form of mutual love-making,
perhaps; for they tell the visitor, at universities which admit both
sexes, that the young men and maidens do not fall in love with each
other, but are apt to seek their mates elsewhere. The new science has a
wider bearing, and suggests that the brain is incomplete, after all,
without the affections; and so are the affections without the brain. The
very professorship at Harvard University which Rev. Dr. Peabody is just
leaving, and which Rev. Phillips Brooks has been invited to fill, was
founded by a woman, Miss Plummer; and the name proposed by her for it
was “a professorship of the heart,” though they after all called it only
a professorship of “Christian morals.” We need the heart in our
colleges, it seems, even if we only get it under the ingenious title of
Cupid-and-Psychology.
LVII.
MEDICAL SCIENCE FOR WOMEN.
In reading, the other day, a speech on the Medical Education of Women,
it struck me that the most important reason for this education was one
which the speaker had not mentioned,—the fact that the medical
profession stands for science; and that women peculiarly need science,
since their natural bent is supposed to be a little the other way. The
other professions represent tradition very generally: the lawyer must be
bound by precedents; the clergyman generally admits that he must go back
to his texts. But the physician claims, at least, to be a man of
science, and stands for that before the world. Hence the sacredness with
which his position has always been surrounded. The Florida Indians,
according to the early voyagers, not only took the physician’s medicine,
but they took the physician himself internally, after his death. All
other men were buried; but the body of the physician was burned, and his
ashes mixed with water, by way of a permanent prescription.
At any rate, the physician himself popularly stands for science; and, in
this point of view, his position is very noble. I have known physicians
whose professed materialism was more elevated than most of what the
world calls religion. To trace that wondrous power called life, which
takes these particles of matter, and makes them think with thought, or
glow with passion, or put forth an activity so intense as to be the
parent of new life from generation to generation,—this study is
something sublime. He who reverently ponders on this may call himself
theist or atheist, he is yet worthy to be revered: if he can teach us,
he blesses us. “I touch heaven,” said Novalis, “when I lay my hand on a
human body;” and the popularity among physicians of that fine engraving
of Vesalius standing ready for his first dissection, shows that they
take a higher view of their vocation than the world sometimes admits.
It seems to me peculiarly important that women should have a share in
these studies. They often have time enough. It takes more time for a
woman to make herself charming than to make herself learned, Sydney
Smith says; and he thinks it a pity that she should often hang up her
brains on the wall in poor pictures, or waft them into the air in poor
music, when they might be better employed. Yet a great physician, Dr.
Currie, says in his letters that he always preferred to have an ignorant
patient bring his wife with him, because he could always get more
careful observation and quicker suggestions from the woman. This point
lies directly in the line of medical education.
The study lies also directly in their path as prospective wives and
mothers, and this alone would furnish a sufficient reason for it. A
woman of superior gifts, who had studied medicine, but never adopted it
as a profession, told me that the mere domestic use of her knowledge had
more than repaid her for all the trouble it had cost. For a man who
should thus abandon the pursuit, it would be of comparatively little
service, apart from the general training; but for a woman, if she
fulfills the commoner duties of a woman’s life, this early knowledge
will always be a source of direct strength. This applies in a degree to
surgery also; and I have always wondered, in view of the old proverb
that a surgeon should have “a lion’s heart and a lady’s hand,” why our
professors do not oftener aim at developing this heart, if need be, in
those who have the hand without training.
LVIII.
SEWING IN SCHOOLS.
Mr. N. T. Allen, of West Newton, Mass., who has had much experience and
success as a teacher of both sexes, has been visiting the German public
schools. He has lately given an interesting report of his observations
to the Middlesex County Teachers’ Association. The reporter says (the
Italics being my own),—
“Mr. Allen paid particular attention to the Dorf Schule of the
cities, and the Bürger Schule of the country, both being of the
lower grades; and contended that the educational system of Germany
was far from being perfect, and was inferior in certain respects to
that adopted in some of our own States, and carried into successful
operation in several towns and communities. It was compulsory and
autocratic, in that parents were not allowed any choice in the
education of their children; _it was unjust toward girls, in
establishing and perpetuating the idea of their great mental
inferiority to the boys_; it was undemocratic, in having different
schools for different castes and classes of society; and it was
extremely sectarian and bigoted in the religious dogmatic
instruction prescribed and forced upon all.”
It is well known that in the German schools a certain number of hours
are given by the girls to sewing, and that their course of study, as
compared with that of the boys, is narrowed to make room for this. It is
for this reason that I, for one, dread to see sewing brought into our
public schools. So strong is still the disposition in many minds to put
off girls with less schooling than boys, that it seems unsafe to provide
so good an excuse for this inequality.
The whole theory of industrial schools is liable to a similar
danger,—that of introducing class distinctions into our education. It
tends toward that other evil of the German system, described by Mr.
Allen, “having different schools for different castes in society.” I
hold to the old theory of providing all boys and girls, whatever their
parentage or probable pursuit, with a good basis of common-school
education, and then trusting the intellectual faculties, thus sharpened,
to help them in the struggle for life. Just as it was found in the army
that a well-educated young man who had never handled a musket soon
overtook and passed a comrade of inferior brains who had been in the
militia from boyhood, so is it found to be with those whose minds have
been well taught in our public schools. But whether this criticism
holds, or not, against industrial schools, as such, it certainly holds
when we further make an industrial discrimination against all girls.
This we do, if we take an hour of their time for sewing, when the boys
give that hour to study.
But it will be said, Ought not girls to be taught to sew? Undoubtedly.
All boys ought to be taught the use of hammer and plane and
screw-driver, and, for that matter, plain sewing also. Girls need sewing
no doubt; and they should be taught it at home, or at school, or
wherever they can find a teacher. But, for all this, to assign to sewing
any thing like the same relative importance that belonged to it a
hundred years ago, or even twenty years ago, is to overlook the changed
conditions of modern society. Let us consider this a moment.
The Old-World theory was that all imaginable hard work was to be done by
human hands. But the New-World theory is—for it is a New World wherever
the theory is recognized—that all this work should be done, as far as
possible, by human brains. Napoleon defined it as his ultimate intention
for the French people, “to convert all trades into arts,” the head doing
the work of the hands. This applies to woman’s work as much as any
other. The epoch of private spinning and weaving was an epoch of
barbarism; the vast mills of Lowell and Fall River now do that toil. The
sewing-machine does a day’s work in an hour. But all this machinery came
out of somebody’s brain, and is adapted to a race of women with brains.
The treasurer of half a dozen manufacturing corporations told me last
week, that, though the mills were filled with French and Irish, the
superiority of American “help” was just as manifest as ever, and the
manufacturers would gladly keep them if they could: they could almost
always tend more looms, for instance. Those who have tried to teach the
use of the sewing-machine to the Southern negroes or poor whites know
how hard it is. A sewing-machine is a step in civilization: its presence
in a house, like that of a piano, proves a certain stage of advancement.
Its course runs parallel with that of the common-school; and an agent
for this machine, like those who sell improved agricultural implements,
would instinctively avoid those regions where there are no schoolhouses.
I do not undervalue the use of the hands, or the need of physical
training for both boys and girls. But, after all, the hands must be kept
subordinate to the head. If industrial training is to be the first
thing, then every Irish parent who takes his ten-year-old girl from
school, and sends her to the factory, is in the path of virtue. If, on
the other hand, it be found that some time can be advantageously taken
from books, and given to some handiwork, without loss of intellectual
progress, that is a different thing. That is only an intellectual
eight-hour bill or five-hour bill; and, for one, I should gladly favor
that. But let it be done as securing the best education for all; not as
a class-education, or as merely utilitarian: and let it be done as
rigidly for boys as for girls. Let us not set out with the theory that a
boy may avail himself of all the divisions of labor in modern society,
but that every girl must still spin her own cloth, and sew her own seam.
LIX.
CASH PREMIUMS FOR STUDY.
On looking over the Harvard College catalogue, I am struck with the
great pecuniary inducements which are held out to tempt young gentlemen
to study. There are, to begin with, one hundred and seventeen
“scholarships;” yielding incomes ranging from $40 to $350 annually, but
averaging $225. The total income of these is $19,635. Then there are
“loan” and “beneficiary” funds, amounting to $4,700 annually, and given
or lent in sums from $25 to $75. Then there are “monitorships,” yielding
$700 per annum; and various money prizes, amounting to some $1,200. The
whole amount that is or may be paid in cash to undergraduates every year
is more than $25,000, which may perhaps reach a hundred and fifty young
men. No wonder that the catalogue asserts that “The experience of the
past warrants the statement that good scholars of high character, but
slender means, are seldom or never obliged to leave college for want of
money.”
Probably one-sixth of the eight hundred undergraduates of Harvard
College receive direct pecuniary aid in studying there; and, as
scholarship is an essential in securing most of this pecuniary aid, it
is probable that half the high scholars in every class are thus directly
helped. Observe that this is in addition to the general value of the
college endowments to all students, over and above what they pay for
tuition,—an amount lately estimated by the academical authorities at one
thousand dollars, at least, for every graduate. Apart from all this, I
was told many years ago, by that very acute observer, the late President
James Walker of Harvard University, that in his opinion one-quarter of
the undergraduates were maintained in college through the personal
self-denial and sacrifices of mothers and sisters.
But what a tremendous protective tariff, what an irresistible
“discriminating duty,” is this! While boys are thus bribed largely, year
by year, to come to Cambridge, and study,—so that the influence of all
this promise of pecuniary aid is felt through every academy and high
school in the land,—we find, on the other hand, that every girl who
wishes to pursue similar studies is expected to pay at the full market
rates for all she gets, and even then cannot enter Harvard College. In
some of our normal schools her board may be paid, I believe, on
condition that she becomes a teacher; but I know of no place where she
herself is paid, as young men are paid, merely to come and study.
Ex-Gov. Bullock founded one scholarship at Amherst, of which the income
is to be given by preference to a woman—when a woman is admitted! But
unfortunately that time has not come. And yet those who sit by the banks
of this golden stream, and monopolize all its benefits, have a tone of
sublime contempt for those who are not permitted to approach it, and
never can quite forgive the impecunious condition of these outcasts!
“Your scholarship is not to be compared to ours,” they say to women.
“Certainly not,” the women may fairly reply: “we were never paid
salaries that we might become scholars.”
The thing that perpetually neutralizes all claims of chivalry, all
professions of justice, all talk of fairness, as between the sexes, is
this class of facts. Woman is systematically excluded from training, and
then told she must not compete; if admitted to compete, she is so
weighted by artificial disadvantages, that it is hard for her to win. If
her brain is inferior, she should be helped; if her natural obstacles
are greater, all other hinderances should be the more generously swept
away. Give girls a chance at a high school, they use it, and they there
equal boys in scholarship; in our academies, in our normal schools,
there is no deficiency on their part. Even in our colleges they ask, as
yet, only admittance, not cash premiums. Only admit them, and see if
they do not hold their own unpaid, with the young men to whom you pay,
collectively, twenty-five thousand dollars a year to stay there. Only a
seat in a recitation-room, to be paid for at the full price,—is this so
very much for a young girl to ask? Do be at least as generous as that
school committee in a Massachusetts town which shall be nameless, who
said seriously in their report, speaking of a certain appointment, “As
this place offers neither honor nor profit, we do not see why it should
not be filled by a woman”!
LX.
MENTAL HORTICULTURE.
There was once a public meeting held, at the request of some excellent
ladies, to consider the question whether it might be possible for roses
and lilies to grow together in the same garden. Many of the ladies were
quite used to gardening, and had opinions of their own; but, as it was
not proper for them to open their lips before people, they of course
could not testify. So several respectable gentlemen—clergymen and
professors—were invited to tell them all about it. Some of these
gentlemen had seen a rose, and some had seen a lily, but it turned out
that very few of them had ever happened to see a garden. Still, as they
were learned men, they could give very valuable suggestions. One of them
explained, that, as roses and lilies assimilated very different juices
from the soil, they could not possibly grow in the same soil. Another
pointed out, that, as they needed different proportions of sun and of
air, they should have very different exposures, and therefore must be
kept apart. Another, more daring, suggested, that, as God had put the
two species into the same world, it was quite possible that they might
grow in the same enclosure for a time, perhaps for about fourteen years,
but that, if they were left longer together, they would certainly blight
and destroy each other. All this seemed very conclusive; and the meeting
was about to vote that roses and lilies should never be allowed to exist
in the same garden, unless with a brick wall twenty feet high between.
But it so happened that a sensible gardener from a distant State was
present, and got up to say a word before the debate closed. “Bless your
souls, my good people, what are you talking about?” said he. “Roses and
lilies are already growing together by the thousand, all over the
country, and you may as well close your discussion.” Upon which the
meeting broke up in some confusion: the brick wall was never built; but
the clergyman went back to his study, the professor to his lecture-room,
the physician to his patients, and all remained in the conviction that
the gardener was a good sort of man, but strangely ignorant of
scientific horticulture.
“Which things are an allegory.” The writer has been reading the report,
in the Boston Daily Advertiser, of a recent debate on female education.
I suppose that those born and bred in New England can never quite
abandon the feeling that this region should still lead the nation, as it
once led, in all educational matters. For one, I cannot help a slight
sense of mortification, when, in an assemblage of Boston professors,
undertaking to discuss a simple practical matter, everybody begins in
the clouds, ignoring the facts before everybody’s eyes, and discussing
as a question of theory only, what has long since become a matter of
common practice. The mortification is not diminished when the
common-sense has to be at last imported from beyond the borders of New
England, in the shape of a college president from Central New York. To
him alone it seems to have occurred to remind these dwellers in the
clouds that what they persisted in treating as theory had been a matter
of daily experience in half the large towns in New England for the last
quarter of a century.
What is the question at issue? Simply this: New England is full of
normal schools, high schools, and endowed academies. In the majority of
these, pupils of both sexes, from fourteen to twenty-five or
thereabouts, study together and recite together, living either at home
or in boarding-houses, or in academic dormitories, as the case may be.
This has gone on for many years, without cavil or scandal. As a general
rule, teachers have testified that they prefer to teach these mixed
schools; at any rate, the fact is certain, that the sexes, once united
in schools of this grade, are very seldom separated again; while we
often hear of the separate schools as being abandoned, and the sexes
brought together. Certainly the experiment of joint education has been
very extensively tried in all parts of New England; indeed, for schools
of this kind, in most regions, the association of the sexes is the rule,
their separation the exception. Now, the only remaining question is:
This being the case, will it make any essential difference if you widen
the course of instruction a little, and call the institution a college?
This is really the only problem left to be solved; and yet on this
question, thus limited, not a speaker at the above—except President
White of Cornell University—had apparently a word to say. Every other
speaker appeared to approach the general theme in as profound and
blissful an ignorance as if he had lived all his life in Turkey or in
France, or in some other country where no young man had ever recited
algebra in the same room with a young woman since the world began.
EMPLOYMENT.
“The non-combatant population is sure to fare ill during the ages of
combat. But these defects, too, are cured or lessened; women have now
marvellous ways of winning their way in the world; and mind without
muscle has far greater force than muscle without mind.”—BAGEHOT’S
_Physics and Politics_, c. ii., § 3.
LXI.
“SEXUAL DIFFERENCE OF EMPLOYMENT.”
I am at a loss to understand an assertion made by Rev. Dr. Hedge, at an
educational meeting in Boston, that “the course of civilization hitherto
has tended to develop and confirm sexual difference of employment.” He
adds, according to the report in the Daily Advertiser, that, “the more
civilized the country, the more the vocations of men and women divide:
the more savage the nation, the more they blend and coincide.”
With due respect for Dr. Hedge on many grounds, and especially as having
been the first man to demand publicly in presence of the Harvard alumni
the admission of women to the university, I must yet express great
surprise at his taking what seems to me so utterly untenable a position.
To me it seems, on the contrary, that it is the savage period which is
remarkable for the industrial separation of the sexes; and that every
epoch of advancing civilization—as the present—blends them more and
more. The fact would have seemed to me so plain as hardly to need more
than simply to state it, but for the authority of Dr. Hedge upon the
other side.
As we trace society back to savage life, what are the prevailing
employments of the male sex? More and more exclusively, war and the
chase. From these two vocations, monopolizing literally the whole active
life of the savage man, the savage woman is almost absolutely excluded.
Precisely at the point where the man’s sphere leaves off, in each of
these pursuits, the woman’s sphere begins. Among American Indians, the
man takes the captive, the woman tortures him. The man kills the deer,
carries it till within sight of his own village, and then throws it
down, that the squaw may go out and drag it in. Much that seems cruel
and selfish in Indian life is the result, as Mrs. Jameson long since
pointed out, of this complete separation of functions. The reason why
the Indian woman carries the lodgepoles and the provisions on the march
is that the man’s limbs may be left free and agile for the far severer
labors of war and of the chase, from which she is excluded. The reason
why she finally brings the deer to the camp is because he has had the
more exhausting labor of hunting and killing it.
Contrast now this absolute “sexual difference of employment” with the
greater and greater blending of civilized society,—a blending, observe,
which proceeds from both sides, and not from woman only. It is hard to
say which is more remarkable, within the last half-century,—the way in
which women have encroached on men’s work, or the way in which men have
encroached on women’s.
In many mechanical and commercial pursuits,—as printing and
bookkeeping,—once almost monopolized by men, you now find a very large
number of women. In some pursuits, as in education, the women have come
to outnumber the men enormously, at least in America; in others, as
telegraphy, they seem likely to do the same. We constantly hear of new
channels opening. A friend of mine, the other day, just before
addressing an audience on woman suffrage, stepped into a barber’s shop,
and to his great amazement was shaved by a woman. On inquiry, he learned
for the first time, that a good many of that sex, mostly Germans,
pursued this occupation in New York and elsewhere. Thus do the vocations
of men and women now “blend and coincide.” On the other hand, the
leading dressmaker of the world is a man; our bonnetshops are largely
conducted by men; the eminent hotel cooks, whose salaries exceed any
paid by Harvard University, are men; and the lady who goes to rest in a
sleeping-car on our railroads has her pillow smoothed and her curtains
drawn, not by a chambermaid, but by a chamberman.
These are the facts which seem to me, I must say, quite fatal to Dr.
Hedge’s theory. And there is one thing worth noticing in the very
different criticisms passed on men and on women as to these invasions of
each other’s province. If you call attention to the way in which men are
everywhere taking part in women’s work, people say approvingly, “To be
sure! greater energy, greater skill! they do even women’s work better
than women themselves can.” But if you point out, that, on the other
hand, women are also doing men’s work, and in some cases—as in
literature and lecturing—are actually obtaining higher prices than most
men can obtain, the same people shake their heads disapprovingly, and
say, “Unsexed; out of their sphere!” Now, if we lived in an age of
chivalrous protection of women, it would be a different thing; but, as
we live in an age of political economy, there is no reason why men alone
should have the benefit of its laws. If practical life is to be regarded
as a game of puss-in-the-corner, I should recommend to each ejected puss
to make for the best corner she finds open, without much deference to
the theories of the sages.
LXII.
THE USE OF ONE’S FEET.
Is it better to stand on one’s own feet, or to depend on those of other
people? We need clear views on that matter, certainly; and there is not
much doubt which theory will ultimately prevail.
For one, I believe the whole theory of a leisure-class, whether for man
or woman, to be a snare and a delusion. It seems to me that there is one
great drawback that a young American may encounter,—namely, the
possession of an independent property; and that there is one great piece
of good fortune,—to be thrown on one’s self for support. Of all
influences for development or usefulness, I know of none so great as
“the wholesome stimulus of pecuniary necessity.” Of all forms of social
organization, that seems to me the most favorable which opens to all
most freely the opportunity of early education, and then calls upon each
to exert himself for his own support.
To be sure, it is hardly possible to overrate the value of cultivated
companionship and refined association. In other countries it may be
worth while, for the sake of these, to be born to wealth: it is so hard
to get them without wealth. But the happiest and best American
households are apt to be found among such as Miss Alcott, for instance,
habitually describes, where there is plenty of refinement and very
little money; where perhaps there has been wealth in times past, but it
has been lost just in time for the good of the children. All that money
can bring—all books, all travel, all art—are not worth so much as the
power to stand on one’s own feet. It is an essential to the character,
and it is certainly the greatest of delights. To have earned, for a
single year, one’s own support, gives one, in a manner, the freedom of
the universe. Till that is done, we are children: after that we are
mature human beings.
In England, where the whole social atmosphere is so different, there are
many instances of much service done to art and philanthropy by persons
born to leisure. And yet, even in England, if the admissions of English
people may be trusted, these instances are bought by a frightful
disproportion of wasted lives; and the best work is, after all, done by
those who have learned to stand on their own feet. This last fact is
certainly true of France, Germany, and America. So far as my own
observation goes, for one American born to leisure who makes a good use
of it, there are a dozen who lead empty or vicious lives. And even that
exceptional one, with all his advantages, is often distanced in the race
by the men who have early had to stand on their own feet. The man of
leisure is usually so limited, either by the absence of stimulus or by
the tiresome narrowness of a petty circle, or by missing the wholesome
attrition of other minds, that he dwindles and grows feeble. If such a
man attains by the aid of wealth what the man of the next inferior grade
attains without it, we are all glad, and say it is “an honorable
instance.” Not that the rich are worse than other men. It is no calamity
to earn wealth, or even to inherit it after we have learned the lesson
of self-reliance. It is the children of wealth who are to be pitied.
Now, all women who are born outside of actual poverty in America are as
badly off as if they had been born to wealth. They are systematically
discouraged from the delightful tonic of self-support. But when it is
said that they never even feel the desire to support themselves, I must
dissent. For twenty years I have been encountering young women who so
longed for the sense of an independent position that even the happiest
paternal home could not satisfy them unless it gave them so much to do
that they might honestly feel that they earned their living. Otherwise
the most luxurious arm-chairs in their own houses would not satisfy
them, they so longed to learn the use of their own feet. I have known
girls to rejoice in their father’s loss of property, because it would
release them to enjoy the happiness of self-reliance; and, for one, had
I the good fortune to have a dozen daughters, I should wish them all to
be of this way of thinking. Any other theory would give us a world of
mere amateurs and dilettantes, and very little work would be done. We
are getting over the theory that it is undignified for a man to stand
upon his own feet; and we shall one day get over it in regard to women.
LXIII.
MISS INGELOW’S PROBLEM.
In a certain New England town I lived opposite the house of a thriving
mechanic. His wife, a young and pretty woman, soon attracted the
attention of my household by the grace and vivacity of her bearing, and
the peculiar tastefulness of her own and her little boy’s costume. On
further acquaintance, we found that she did every atom of her housework,
washing and all; that she cut and made every garment for herself and her
child; and that, finding her energies still unsatisfied, she took in
sewing-work from a tailor’s shop, and thus earned most of the money for
their wardrobe. It may be well to add, to complete this story of New
England social life, that her husband was one of the very earliest
volunteers for the war of the Rebellion; that he went in captain, came
out brigadier-general, and now holds an important government office.
There is nothing isolated or unexampled about this instance. My pretty
and ladylike neighbor was only energetic, ready, capable, and ambitious,
or, to sum it all up in the New England vernacular, “smart.” Whatever
she saw in society or life that was desirable for herself or her husband
or her child, that she aimed at, and generally obtained.
She “hadn’t a lazy bone in her body;” and she never will have, though
she may wear that body out prematurely by nervous tension. Wherever she
goes, she will carry the same restless, tireless energy; and, should her
husband ever go to Congress or to the Court of St. James, she will carry
herself with perfect fearlessness and ease. And in all this she
represents one great type of New England women.
When you ask of such a woman if she shrinks from work, it is as if you
asked, Does a deer shrink from running, or a swallow from flying? She
loves the work: indeed she loves it, in my opinion, far too much, and
sets a dangerous example. All theories of the natural indolence of
man—or woman—fall defeated before the New England temperament,
traditions, training, climate; before that “whip of the sky,” as a poet
has sung, that urges us on. If, therefore, “household work is thought
degrading,”—and Miss Ingelow asserts too hastily that “nowhere is this
so much the case as in America,”—it certainly is not merely because it
is work.
For myself, I doubt the fact, and demand the evidence. So far as the
free States of the Union are concerned, it seems to me that household
labor is thought less degrading than in England, and that the proportion
of well-taught and ladylike women who contentedly do their own work is
far greater in America, and keeps pace with the greater spread of
average education. There is not a city in the land, I suppose,—certainly
not a village,—where the housework in a large majority of the
American-born families is not done by Americans; for the large majority
are always mechanics and laborers, among whom, as a rule, the work is
done by the wives and sisters and daughters. The wages of domestics are
so much higher in America than in England,—being almost double,—that it
is here a more serious expenditure to employ such aid.
I think, therefore, that we must be very cautious before we say that
housework, as such, is held degrading in the free States. No doubt,
American women feel, as their husbands and brothers feel, that all work
should be done by machinery, as far as possible, and that the
washing-machine and the carpet-sweeper are as legitimate as the patent
reaper or mower. They would be foolish if they did not. They also feel,
as American men feel, that, in this great assemblage of all nations, the
place for the American is rather in posts of command than in the ranks.
In our ships you find men of all nations in the forecastle, but
Americans in the cabin. In the regular army it is the officers,
commissioned or non-commissioned, who are Americans. Go as far west as
you please, you are surprised to find that the railway officials,
superintendents, conductors, baggage-masters, are not merely
American-born but often New-England-born. The better average education
tells. It is in the fitness of things that the under-work of household
life also should be done by the under-class of foreign elements, and
that it should be Americans who do the direction and guidance. Some such
instinct as this is the explanation of much that Miss Ingelow takes for
a contempt of household labor. An American woman does not despise such
labor, properly speaking, any more than an American man despises
mechanical labor. Both aim, if they can, to rise to occupations more
lucrative and more intellectual.
It is not the labor, it is not even the household labor, to which
objection is made. When you come to household labor for other people,
done in a capacity recognized as menial,—ay, there’s the rub! There is a
widespread feeling that domestic service in other people’s families is
menial.
For one I have publicly remonstrated against the excess of this feeling,
and think it is carried too far. Women will never compete equally with
men, until they are willing, like men, to do any honest work without
sense of degradation. This is one point where enfranchisement will help
them. So long as a man bears in his hand the ballot, that symbol of
substantial equality, his self-respect is not easily impaired by the
humblest position. “A man’s a man for a’ that,” he knows, before the
law. But a woman, not having this, has only the usages of society to
guide her; and, so long as society talks about “master” and “servant,” I
do not blame the American girl for refusing to accept such a
position,—just as I do not blame, but applaud, the American man for
refusing to wear livery. I only condemn them, in either case, when the
alternative is starvation or sin. Then pride should yield.
But this is the conclusive proof that it is not the housework which is
held degrading: the fact that there is no difficulty in securing any
number of American girls in our large country hotels, where they
associate with their employers as equals, and call no man master. The
fact that the proprietors of such hotels invariably prefer American
“help” to Irish, shows that the philosophy of the whole question lies in
a different direction from that indicated by our good friend Miss
Ingelow. The evil of which she speaks does not properly exist: the real
difficulty lies in a different direction, and cannot be settled till we
see farther into the social organization that is to come.
LXIV.
SELF-SUPPORT.
It is the English theory, that society needs a leisure class, not
self-supporting, from whom public services and works of science and art
may proceed. Even Darwin recognizes this theory. But how little is
England doing for science and art, compared to Germany! and the German
work of that kind is not done by a leisure class, but by poor men. I
believe that the necessity of self-support, at least in the earlier
years of life, is the best training for manhood; and it does not seem
desirable that women should be wholly set free from it.
A clever writer, on the other hand, maintains in the New York
Independent that women should never support themselves if it be possible
honorably to avoid it. “Pecuniary dependence, degrading to men, is not
only not undignified, but is the only thoroughly dignified condition,
for women. In a renovated and millennial society all women will be
supported by men,—will have no more to do with bringing in money than
the lilies of the field.” This statement is delightfully uncompromising,
and it is a great thing to hear an extreme position so clearly and
unequivocally put. Especially on a question so difficult as the labor
and wages of women, it is particularly desirable to have each extreme
worked out to its logical results.
It is certainly the normal condition of woman to be a wife and a mother.
It is equally certain that this condition withdraws woman from the
labor-market, during the prime of her life. The very years during which
a man attains his highest skill, and earns his highest wages,—say, from
twenty-five to forty,—are lost to woman, in this normal condition, so
far as earning money is concerned. This is the main fact, as I judge,
which keeps down the standard of both work and pay among women, as a
class. If men, as a class, were thus heavily weighted, the result would
be as clearly seen. Where one sex brings into the market the full vigor
of its life, and the other has only crude labor, or occasional labor, or
broken labor, to offer, the result cannot be doubtful. Yet this is
precisely the state of the competition between man and woman.
I believe, therefore, with this writer, that woman was not intended to
be the equal competitor of man in business pursuits—or, indeed, to be
self-supporting at all—during her career of motherhood. It is generally
recognized as a calamity, when she is obliged to support herself at that
time. Most people believe with Miss Mitford that “women were not meant
to earn the bread of a family,” and that men are. But to earn the bread
of a family is not self-support: it is much more than self-support. And
when this writer takes a step beyond, and says, “I think the necessity
of earning her own living is always a woman’s misfortune,” then she
seems to theorize beyond good sense, and to confuse things very
different. Self-support is one thing: supporting seven small children is
quite another thing.
That which should never be left out of sight is the essential dignity of
labor. Woman during the period of maternity is rightly excused from
earning money; but it is because she is better occupied. She is not
exempted in the character of lily of the field, but in the capacity of
mother of a family. It is an important distinction. For labor in the
lower sense, she substitutes what, in a higher and more sacred sense, we
still call “labor.” She is not supported because she is a woman, but
because, in her capacity as woman, she happens to have home-duties. If
she had no such duties, there seems no reason why she should be
supported any more than if she were a man. To be a wife and mother is a
vocation, and one which usually for a time precludes all others. Merely
to be a woman is not a vocation; and, so long as one can make no better
claim on the world than that, the world has a right to demand something
more. The Irishwoman who locks her little children into her one room,
that she may go out to earn their bread, seems to me in a position no
falser than that of the over-worked father who breaks himself down with
toil that his daughters may live like the lilies of the field.
LXV.
SELF-SUPPORTING WIVES.
For one, I have never been fascinated by the style of domestic paradise
that English novels depict,—half a dozen unmarried daughters round the
family hearth, all assiduously doing worsted-work and petting their
papa. I believe a sufficiency of employment to be the only normal and
healthy condition for a human being; and where there is not work enough
to employ the full energies of all, at home, it seems as proper for
young women as for young birds to leave the parental nest. If this
additional work is done for money, very well. It is the conscious
dignity of self-support that removes the traditional curse from labor,
and woman has a right to claim her share in that dignified position.
Yet I cannot agree, on the other hand, with Celia Burleigh when she says
that her “True Woman” should be self-supporting, even in marriage.
Women’s part of the family task—the care of home and children—is just as
essential to building up the family fortunes as the very different toil
of the out-door partner. For young married women to undertake any more
direct aid to the family income is in most cases utterly undesirable,
and is asking of themselves a great deal too much. And this is not
because they are to be encouraged in indolence, but because they
already, in a normal condition of things, have their hands full. As, on
this point, I may differ from some of my readers, let me explain
precisely what I mean.
As I write, there are at work, in another part of the house, two
paper-hangers, a man and his wife, each forty-five or fifty years of
age. Their children are grown up, and some of them married: they have a
daughter at home, who is old enough to do the housework, and leave the
mother free. There is no way of organizing the labors of this household
better than this: the married pair toil together during the day, and go
home together to their evening rest. A happier couple I never saw; it is
a delight to see them cheerily at work together, cutting, pasting,
hanging: their life seems like a prolonged industrial picnic; and, if I
had the ill-luck to own as many palaces as an English duke, I should
keep them permanently occupied in putting fresh papers on the walls.
But the merit of this employment for the woman is, that it interferes
with no other duty. Were she a young mother with little children, and
obliged by her paper-hanging to neglect them, or to leave them at a
“day-nursery,” or to overwork herself by combining too many cares, then
the sight of her would be very sad. So sacred a thing does motherhood
seem to me, so paramount and absorbing the duty of a mother to her
child, that in a true state of society I think she should be utterly
free from all other duties,—even, if possible, from the ordinary cares
of housekeeping. If she has spare health and strength to do these other
things as pleasures, very well; but she should be relieved from them as
duties. And, as to the need of self-support, I can hardly conceive of an
instance where it can be to the mother of young children any thing but a
disaster. As we all know, this calamity often occurs; I have seen it
among the factory-operatives at the North, and among the negro-women in
the cotton-fields at the South: in both cases it is a tragedy, and the
bodies and brains of mother and children alike suffer. That the mother
should bear and tend and nurture, while the father supports and
protects,—this is the true division.
Does this bear in any way upon suffrage? Not at all. The mother can
inform herself upon public questions in the intervals of her cares, as
the father among his; and the baby in the cradle is a perpetual appeal
to her, as to him, that the institutions under which that baby dwells
may be kept pure. One of the most devoted young mothers I ever knew—the
younger sister of Margaret Fuller Ossoli—made it a rule, no matter how
much her children absorbed her, to read books or newspapers for an hour
every day; in order, she said, that their mother should be more than a
mere source of physical nurture, and that her mind should be kept fresh
and alive for them. But to demand in addition that such a mother should
earn money for them, is to ask too much; and there is many a tombstone
in New England, which, if it told the truth, would tell what comes of
such an effort.
LXVI.
THE PROBLEM OF WAGES.
Talking, the other day, with one of the leading dressmakers of a New
England town, I asked her why it was, that, when women suffered so much
from scanty employments and low pay, there should yet be so few good
dressmakers. “You are all overrun and worn out with work,” I said, “all
the year round; every lady in town complains that there are so few of
you; and it is the same in every town where I ever lived.” She answered,
as such witnesses always answer, “Women do not engage in occupations, as
men do, for a lifetime. They expect only to continue in them for a year
or two, until they shall be married. I employ twelve girls, and not one
of them expects to be a dressmaker for life. They work their ten hours a
day, under my direction, and that is all.”
Here lies the point of difference between the work of women and that of
men, as a class: I mean, in their industrial pursuits, the work that
earns money. Until we reach this point, or get a social philosophy that
explains this, we are yet upon the surface only. The enfranchisement of
woman will help us towards this, but will not, of itself, solve the
problem of wages; because that depends on other than political
considerations.
Why do the mass of men work? Not from taste, or for love of the work,
but from conscious need. If they do not work, they and their families
will starve. It is a necessity, and a permanent necessity. It will last
all their lives, except in the case of a few who will “come into their
property” by and by, like Mr. Toots—and their work is usually worth
about as much as his. We see this every day in the sons of rich men.
Their fathers may bring them up to work, yet the mere fact that they are
to be relieved from this compulsion within a dozen years is apt to
paralyze their active faculties. They study law or medicine, or dabble
in “business;” but they only play at the practice of their pursuits,
because there is no conscious necessity behind them. There are
exceptions, but the exceptions are remarkable men.
Now, theorize as we may, the fact at present is, that what thus
paralyzes the energies of a few young men brings the same paralysis to
many young women. Those whose parents are wealthy do not learn any
regular occupation at all. Those whose parents are poor are obliged by
necessity to learn one: yet they do not learn it as men in general learn
theirs, but only as rich young men do, as if it were something to be
followed for a time only,—till they “come into their property.” To the
rich young man the property is a landed estate or some bank-stock. To
the poor girl the prospective property is a husband. She expects to be
married; and after that her money-making occupation is gone, and a new
avocation—that of housekeeping and maternity—begins. It is no less
arduous, no less honorable; but it is different. In it her previous
special training goes for nothing; and the thought of this must diminish
her interest in the previous special training. It is only a temporary
thing, like the few years’ labor of a rich young man. There are
exceptions, but they are extraordinary.
One reason why women’s work is not at present so well paid as that of
men is because it is not ordinarily so well done, especially in the more
difficult parts. All employers, male and female, tell you this; and one
great reason why it is not so well done is because women have not, as
men have, a spring of permanent necessity to urge them on. How shall we
supply the spring? This is the question we need to answer. As yet I do
not think we have reached it. It does not seem to me to be, like the
suffrage question, one easily settled. The reader will find very
important facts and testimonies bearing upon it in Virginia Penny’s
“Cyclopædia of Female Employments.”[13]
Footnote 13:
Especially on pp. 110, 146, 235, 238, 243, 245, 247, 300, 318, 322,
367, 380.
I confess myself unable, even after a good many years of study, to solve
it fully; but a few propositions, I think, are sure, and may be taken as
axioms to begin with. The general wages of women will always depend
greatly on the amount of skill acquired by the mass of them. The mass of
women will always look forward to being married, and, when married, to
being necessarily withdrawn from the labor-market. Those who look
forward to this withdrawal will not, as a rule, concentrate themselves
upon learning their vocation as if it were for life; and, at any rate,
when they leave it, they will take their skill with them, and so lower
the average skill of the whole.
The problem, therefore, is, how to equalize wages between a sex which
works continually throughout life, driven by conscious necessity, and a
sex which habitually works with temporary expectations, looking forward
to a withdrawal from the labor-market in a few years, and which, when so
withdrawn, carries its acquired skill with it, leaving only inexperience
in its place. We all wish to solve the problem: every man would like to
have his daughters as well paid for their labor as his sons. The ballot
will help to elucidate it, no doubt, by putting woman’s political
protection, at least, into her own hands: but wholly to solve the
problem will take the wisdom of several generations; nor will it be
done, perhaps, until the greater problem of association _vs._
competition is also understood. It certainly never will be solved by
slighting the marriage-relation, or by advocating either “free love” or
celibacy for women or for men.
LXVII.
THOROUGH.
“The hopeless defect of women in all practical matters,” said a shrewd
merchant the other day, “is, that it is impossible to make them
thorough.” It was a shallow remark, and so I told him. Women are
thorough in the things which they have accepted as their sphere,—in
their housekeeping and their dress and their social observances. There
is nothing more thorough on earth than the way housework is done in a
genuine New England household. There is an exquisite thoroughness in the
way a milliner’s or a dressmaker’s work is done,—a work such as clumsy
man cannot rival, and can hardly estimate. No general plans his
campaigns or marshals his armies better than some women of society
manage the circles of which they are the centre. Day and night, winter
and summer, at city or watering-place, year in and year out, such a
woman keeps open house for her gay world. She has a perpetual series of
guests who must be fed luxuriously, and amused profusely; she talks to
them in four or five languages; at her entertainments, she notes who is
present and who absent, as carefully as Napoleon watched his soldiers;
her interchange of cards, alone, is a thing as complex as the army
muster-rolls: thus she plans, organizes, conquers, and governs. People
speak of her existence as that of a doll or a toy, when she is the most
untiring of campaigners. Grant that her aim is, after all, unworthy, and
that you pity the worn face which has to force so many smiles. No
matter: the smiles are there, and so is the success. I often wish that
the reformers would do their work as thoroughly as the women of society
do theirs.
No, there is no constitutional want of thoroughness in women. The
trouble is, that into the new work upon which they are just entering,
they have not yet brought their thoroughness to bear. They suffer and
are defrauded and are reproached, simply because they have not yet
nerved themselves to do well the things which they have asserted their
right to do. A distinguished woman, who earns perhaps the largest income
ever honestly earned by any woman off the stage, told me the other day
that she left all her business affairs to the management of others, and
did not even know how to draw a check on a bank. What a melancholy
self-exhibition was that of a clever American woman, the author of half
a dozen successful books, refusing to look her own accounts in the face
until they had got into such a tangle that not even her own referees
could disentangle them to suit her! These things show, not that women
are constitutionally wanting in thoroughness, but that it is hard to
make them carry this quality into new fields.
I wish I could possibly convey to the young women who write for advice
on literary projects something of the meaning of this word “thorough” as
applied to literary work. Scarcely any of them seem to have a conception
of it. Dash, cleverness, recklessness, impatience of revision or of
patient investigation, these are the common traits. To a person of
experience, no stupidity is so discouraging as a brilliancy that has no
roots. It brings nothing to pass; whereas a slow stupidity, if it takes
time enough, may conquer the world. Consider that for more than twenty
years the path of literature has been quite as fully open for women as
for men, in America,—the payment the same, the honor the same, the
obstacles no greater. Collegiate education has until very lately been
denied them, but how many men succeed as writers without that advantage!
Yet how little, how very little, of really good literary work has yet
been done by American women! Young girls appear one after another: each
writes a single clever story or a single sweet poem, and then disappears
forever. Look at Griswold’s “Female Poets of America,” and you are
disposed to turn back to the title-page, and see if these utterly
forgotten names do not really represent the “female poets” of some other
nation. They are forgotten, as most of the more numerous “female prose
writers” are forgotten, because they had no root. Nobody doubts that
women have cleverness enough, and enough of power of expression. If you
could open the mails, and take out the women’s letters, as somebody
says, they would prove far more graphic and entertaining than those of
the men. They would be written, too, in what Macaulay calls—speaking of
Madame d’Arblay’s early style—“true woman’s English, clear, natural, and
lively.” What they need, in order to convert this epistolary brilliancy
into literature, is to be thorough.
You cannot separate woman’s rights and her responsibilities. In all ages
of the world she has had a certain limited work to do, and has done that
well. All that is needed, when new spheres are open, is that she should
carry the same fidelity into those. If she will work as hard to shape
the children of her brain as to rear her bodily offspring, will do
intellectual work as well as she does housework, and will meet her moral
responsibilities as she meets her social engagements, then opposition
will soon disappear. The habit of thoroughness is the key to all high
success. Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well. Only those who are
faithful in a few things will rightfully be made rulers over many.
LXVIII.
LITERARY ASPIRANTS.
The brilliant Lady Ashburton used to say of herself that she had never
written a book, and knew nobody whose book she would like to have
written. This does not seem to be the ordinary state of mind among those
who write letters of inquiry to authors. If I may judge from these
letters, the yearning for a literary career is just now greater among
women than among men. Perhaps it is because of some literary successes
lately achieved by women. Perhaps it is because they have fewer outlets
for their energies. Perhaps they find more obstacles in literature than
young men find, and have, therefore, more need to write letters of
inquiry about it. It is certain that they write such letters quite
often; and ask questions that test severely the supposed omniscience of
the author’s brain,—questions bearing on logic, rhetoric, grammar, and
orthography; how to find a publisher, and how to obtain a
well-disciplined mind.
These letters may sometimes be too long or come too often for
convenience, nor is the consoling postage-stamp always remembered. But
they are of great value as giving real glimpses of American social life,
and of the present tendencies of American women. They sometimes reveal
such intellectual ardor and imagination, such modesty, and such patience
under difficulties, as to do good to the reader, whatever they may do to
the writer. They certainly suggest a few thoughts, which may as well be
expressed, once for all, in print.
Behind almost all these letters there lies a laudable desire to achieve
success. “Would you have the goodness to tell us how success can be
obtained?” How can this be answered, my dear young lady, when you leave
it to the reader to guess what your definition of success may be? For
instance, here is Mr. Mansfield Tracy Walworth, who was murdered the
other day in New York. He was at once mentioned in the newspapers as a
“celebrated author.” Never in my life having heard of him, I looked in
Hart’s “Manual of American Literature,” and there found that Mr.
Walworth’s novel of “Warwick” had a sale of seventy-five thousand
copies, and his “Delaplaine” of forty-five thousand. Is it a success to
have secured a sale like that for your books, and then to die, and have
your brother penmen ask, “Who was he?” Yet, certainly, a sale of
seventy-five thousand copies is not to be despised; and I fear I know
many youths and maidens who would willingly write novels much poorer
than “Warwick” for the sake of a circulation like that. I do not think
that Hawthorne, however, would have accepted these conditions; and he
certainly did not have this style of success.
Nor do I think he had any right to expect it. He had made his choice,
and had reason to be satisfied. The very first essential for literary
success is to decide what success means. If a young girl pines after the
success of Marion Harland and Mrs. Southworth, let her seek it. It is
possible that she may obtain it, or surpass it; and, though she might do
better, she might do far worse. It is, at any rate, a laudable aim to be
popular: popularity may be a very creditable thing, unless you pay too
high a price for it. It is a pleasant thing, and has many contingent
advantages,—balanced by this great danger, that one is apt to mistake it
for success.
“Learning hath made the most,” said old Fuller, “by those books on which
the booksellers have lost.” If this be true of learning, it is quite as
true of genius and originality. A book may be immediately popular and
also immortal, but the chances are the other way. It is more often the
case, that a great writer gradually creates the taste by which he is
enjoyed. Wordsworth in the last generation and Emerson in the present
have been striking instances of this; and authors of far less fame have
yet the same choice which they had. You can take the standard which the
book-market offers, and train yourself for that. This will, in the
present age, be sure to educate certain qualities in you,—directness,
vividness, animation, dash,—even if it leaves other qualities untrained.
Or you can make a standard of your own, and aim at that, taking your
chance of seeing the public agree with you. Very likely you may fail;
perhaps you may be wrong in your fancy, after all, and the public may be
right: if you fail, you may find it hard to bear; but, on the other
hand, you may have the inward “glory and joy” which nothing but fidelity
to an ideal standard can give. All this applies to all forms of work,
but it applies conspicuously to literature.
Instead, therefore, of offering to young writers the usual comforting
assurance, that, if they produce any thing of real merit, it will be
sure to succeed, I should caution them first to make their own
definition of success, and then act accordingly. Hawthorne succeeded in
his way, and Mr. M. T. Walworth in his way; and each of these would have
been very unreasonable if he had expected to succeed in both ways. There
is always an opening for careful and conscientious literary work; and,
by such work, many persons obtain a modest support. There are also some
great prizes to be won; but these are commonly, though not always, won
by work of a more temporary and sensational kind. Make your choice; and,
when you have got precisely what you asked for, do not complain because
you have missed what you would not take.
LXIX.
“THE CAREER OF LETTERS.”
A young girl of some talent once told me that she had devoted herself to
“the career of letters.” I found, on inquiry, that she had obtained a
situation as writer of “society” gossip for a New York newspaper. I can
hardly imagine any life that leads more directly away from any really
literary career, or any life about which it is harder to give counsel.
The work of a newspaper-correspondent, especially in the “society”
direction, is so full of trials and temptations, for one of either sex,
in our dear, inquisitive, gossiping America, that one cannot help
watching with especial solicitude all women who enter it. Their special
gifts as women are a source of danger: they are keener of observation
from the very fact of their sex, more active in curiosity, more skilful
in achieving their ends; in a world of gossip they are the queens, and
men but their subjects, hence their greater danger.
In Newport, New York, Washington, it is the same thing. The unbounded
appetite for private information about public or semi-public people
creates its own purveyors; and these, again, learn to believe with
unflinching heartiness in the work they do. I have rarely encountered a
successful correspondent of this description who had not become
thoroughly convinced that the highest desire of every human being is to
see his name in print, no matter how. Unhappily there is a great deal to
encourage this belief: I have known men to express great indignation at
an unexpected newspaper-puff, and then to send ten dollars privately to
the author. This is just the calamity of the profession, that it brings
one in contact with this class of social hypocrites; and the “personal”
correspondent gradually loses faith that there is any other class to be
found. Then there is the perilous temptation to pay off grudges in this
way, to revenge slights, by the use of a power with which few people are
safely to be trusted. In many cases, such a correspondent is simply a
child playing with poisoned arrows: he poisons others; and it is no
satisfaction to know that in time he will also poison himself, and
paralyze his own power for mischief.
There lies before me a letter written some years ago to a young lady
anxious to enter on this particular “career of letters,”—a letter from
an experienced New York journalist. He has employed, he says, hundreds
of lady correspondents, for little or no compensation; and one of his
few successful writers he thus describes: “She succeeds by pushing her
way into society, and extracting information from fashionable people and
officials and their wives.... She flatters the vain, and overawes the
weak, and gets by sheer impudence what other writers cannot.... I would
not wish you to be like her, or reduced to the necessity of doing what
she does, for any success journalism can possibly give.” And who can
help echoing this opinion? If this is one of the successful laborers,
where shall we place the unsuccessful; or, rather, is success, or
failure, the greater honor?
Personal journalism has a prominence in this country with which nothing
in any other country can be compared. What is called publicity in
England or France means the most peaceful seclusion, compared with the
glare of notoriety which an enterprising correspondent can flash out at
any time—as if by opening the bull’s-eye of a dark lantern—upon the
quietest of his contemporaries. It is essentially an American
institution, and not one of those in which we have reason to feel most
pride. It is to be observed, however, that foreigners, if in office,
take to it very readily; and it is said that no people cultivate the
reporters at Washington more assiduously than the diplomatic corps, who
like to send home the personal notices of themselves, in order to prove
to their governments that they are highly esteemed in the land to which
they are appointed. But, however it may be with them, it is certain that
many people still like to keep their public and private lives apart, and
shrink from even the inevitable eminence of fame. One of the very most
popular of American authors has said that he never, to this day, has
overcome a slight feeling of repugnance on seeing his own name in print.
LXX.
TALKING AND TAKING.
Every time a woman does any thing original or remarkable,—inventing a
rat-trap, let us say, or carving thirty-six heads on a walnut-shell,—all
observers shout applause. “There’s a woman for you, indeed! Instead of
talking about her rights, she takes them. That’s the way to do it. What
a lesson to these declaimers upon the platform!”
It does not seem to occur to these wise people that the right to talk is
itself one of the chief rights in America, and the way to reach all the
others. To talk, is to make a beginning, at any rate. To catch people
with your ideas, is more than to contrive a rat-trap; and Isotta
Nogarola, carving thirty-six empty heads, was not working in so
practical a fashion as Mary Livermore when she instructs thirty-six
hundred full ones.
It shows the good sense of the woman suffrage agitators, that they have
decided to begin with talk. In the first place, talking is the most
lucrative of all professions in America; and therefore it is the duty of
American women to secure their share of it. Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble
used to say that she read Shakspeare in public “for her bread;” and
when, after melting all hearts by a course of farewell readings, she
decided to begin reading again, she said she was doing it “for her
butter.” So long as women are often obliged to support themselves and
their children, and perhaps their husbands, by their own labor, they
have no right to work cheaply, unless driven to it. Anna Dickinson has
no right to make fifteen dollars a week by sewing, if, by stepping out
of the ranks of needle-women into the ranks of the talkers, she can make
a hundred dollars a day. Theorize as we may, the fact is, that there is
no kind of work in America which brings such sure profits as public
speaking. If women are unfitted for it, or if they “know the value of
peace and quietness,” as the hand-organ-man says, and can afford to hold
their tongues, let them do so. But if they have tongues, and like to use
them, they certainly ought to make some money by the performance.
This is the utilitarian view. And when we bring in higher objects, it is
plain that the way to get any thing in America is to talk about it.
Silence is golden, no doubt, and like other gold remains in the
bank-vaults, and does not just now circulate very freely as currency.
Even literature in America is utterly second to oratory as a means of
immediate influence. Of all sway, that of the orator is the most potent
and most perishable; and the student and the artist are apt to hold
themselves aloof from it, for this reason. But it is the one means in
America to accomplish immediate results, and women who would take their
rights must take them through talking. It is the appointed way.
Under a good old-fashioned monarchy, if a woman wished to secure any
thing for her sex, she must cajole a court, or become the mistress of a
monarch. That epoch ended with the French Revolution. When Bonaparte
wished to silence Madame de Staël, he said, “What does that woman want?
Does she want the money the government owes to her father?” When Madame
de Staël heard of it, she said, “The question is not what I want, but
what I think.” Henceforth women, like men, are to say what they think.
For all that flattery and seduction and sin, we have substituted the
simple weapon of talk. If women wish education, they must talk; if
better laws, they must talk. The one chief argument against woman
suffrage, with men, is that so few women even talk about it.
As long as talk can effect any thing, it is the duty of women to talk;
and in America, where it effects every thing, they should talk all the
time. When they have obtained, as a class, absolute equality of rights
with men, their talk on this subject may be silent, and they may accept,
if they please, that naughty masculine definition of a happy
marriage,—the union of a deaf man with a dumb woman.
LXXI.
HOW TO SPEAK IN PUBLIC.
There are other things that women wish to do, it seems, beside studying
and voting. There are a good many—if I may judge from letters that
occasionally come to me—who are taking, or wish to take, their first
lessons in public speaking. Not necessarily very much in public, or
before mixed audiences, but perhaps merely to say to a room-full of
ladies, or before the committee of a Christian Union, what they desire
to say. “How shall I make myself heard? How shall I learn to express
myself? How shall I keep my head clear? Is there any school for debate?”
And so on. My dear young lady, it does not take much wisdom, but only a
little experience, to answer some of these questions. So I am not afraid
to try.
The best school for debate is debating. So far as mere confidence and
comfort are concerned, the great thing is to gain the habit of speech,
even if one speaks badly. And the practice of an ordinary debating
society has also this advantage, that it teaches you to talk sense (lest
you be laughed at), to speak with some animation (lest your hearers go
to sleep), to think out some good arguments (because you are trying to
convince somebody), and to guard against weak reasoning or unfounded
assertion (lest your opponent trip you up). Speaking in a debating
society thus gives you the same advantage that a lawyer derives from the
presence of an opposing counsel: you learn to guard yourself at all
points. It is the absence of this check which is the great intellectual
disadvantage of the pulpit. When a lawyer says a foolish thing in an
argument, he is pretty sure to find it out; but a clergyman may go on
repeating his foolish thing for fifty years without finding it out, for
want of an opponent.
For the art of making your voice heard, I must refer you to an
elocutionist. Yet one thing at least you might acquire for yourself,—a
thing that lies at the foundation of all good speaking,—the complete and
thorough enunciation of every syllable. So great is the delight, to my
ear at least, of a perfectly distinct and clear-cut utterance, that I
fear I should rather listen for an hour to the merest nonsense, so
uttered, than to the very wisdom of angels if given in a confused or
nasal or slovenly way. If you wish to know what I mean by a clear and
satisfactory utterance, go to the next woman suffrage convention, and
hear Miss Eastman.
As to your employment of language, the great aim is to be simple, and,
in a measure, conversational, and then let eloquence come of itself. If
most people talked as well in public as in private, public meetings
would be more interesting. To acquire a conversational tone, there is
good sense in Edward Hale’s suggestion, that every person who is called
on to speak,—let us say, at a public dinner,—instead of standing up and
talking about his surprise at being called on, should simply make his
last remark to his neighbor at the table the starting-point for what he
says to the whole company. He will thus make sure of a perfectly natural
key, to begin with; and can go on from this quiet “As I was just saying
to Mr. Smith,” to discuss the gravest question of Church or State. It
breaks the ice for him, like the remark upon the weather by which we
open our interview with the person whom we have longed for years to
meet. Beginning in this way at the level of the earth’s surface, we can
join hands and rise to the clouds. Begin in the clouds,—as some of my
most esteemed friends are wont to do,—and you have to sit down before
reaching the earth.
And, to come last to what is first in importance, I am taking it for
granted that you have something to say, and a strong desire to say it.
Perhaps you can say it better for writing it out in full beforehand.
But, whether you do this or not, remember that the more simple and
consecutive your thought, the easier it will be both to keep it in mind
and to utter it. The more orderly your plan, the less likely you will be
to “get bewildered,” or to “lose the thread.” Think it out so clearly
that the successive parts lead to one another, and then there will be
little strain upon your memory. For each point you make, provide at
least one good argument and one good illustration, and you can, after a
little practice, safely leave the rest to the suggestion of the moment.
But so much as this you must have, to be secure. Methods of preparation
of course vary extremely; yet I suppose the secret of the composure of
an experienced speaker to lie usually in this, that he has made sure
beforehand of a sufficient number of good points to carry him through,
even if nothing good should occur to him on the spot. Thus wise people,
in going on a fishing-excursion, take with them not merely their
fishing-tackle, but a few fish; and then, if they are not sure of their
luck, they will be sure of their chowder.
These are some of the simple hints that might be given, in answer to
inquiring friends. I can remember when they would have saved me some
anguish of spirit; and they may be of some use to others now. I write,
then, not to induce any one to talk for the sake of talking,—Heaven
forbid!—but that those who are longing to say something should not fancy
the obstacles insurmountable, when they are really slight.
PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT.
“That liberty, or freedom, consists in having an actual share in the
appointment of those who frame the laws, and who are to be the guardians
of every man’s life, property, and peace; for the all of one man is as
dear to him as the all of another, and the poor man has an equal right,
but more need, to have representatives in the legislature than the rich
one. That they who have no voice nor vote in the electing of
representatives do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved to
those who have votes, and to their representatives; for to be enslaved
is to have governors whom other men have set over us, and be subject to
laws made by the representatives of others, without having had
representatives of our own to give consent in our behalf.”—BENJAMIN
FRANKLIN, _in Sparks’s Franklin_, ii. 372.
LXXII.
WE THE PEOPLE.
I remember, that, when I went to school, I used to look with wonder on
the title of a newspaper of those days which was often in the hands of
one of the older scholars. I remember nothing else about the newspaper,
or about the boy, except that the title of the sheet he used to unfold
was “We the People;” and that he derived from it his school nickname, by
a characteristic boyish parody, and was usually mentioned as “Us the
Folks.”
Probably all that was taught in that school, in regard to American
history, was not of so much value as the permanent fixing of this phrase
in our memories. It seemed very natural, in later years, to come upon my
old friend “Us the Folks,” reproduced in almost every charter of our
national government, as thus:—
“WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, in order to form a more
perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity,
provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and
secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do
ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of
America.”—_United States Constitution, Preamble._
“WE THE PEOPLE of Maine do agree,” etc.—_Constitution of Maine._
“All government of right originates from THE PEOPLE, is founded in
their consent, and instituted for the general good.”—_Constitution
of New Hampshire._
“The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of
individuals; it is a social compact, by which THE WHOLE PEOPLE
covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people,
that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common
good.”—_Constitution of Massachusetts._
“WE THE PEOPLE of the State of Rhode Island and Providence
Plantations ... do ordain and establish this constitution of
government.”—_Constitution of Rhode Island._
“THE PEOPLE of Connecticut do, in order more effectually to
define, secure, and perpetuate the liberties, rights, and
privileges which they have derived from their ancestors, hereby
ordain and establish the following constitution and form of civil
government.”—_Constitution of Connecticut._
And so on through the constitutions of almost every State in the Union.
Our government is, as Lincoln said, “a government of the people, by the
people, and for the people.” There is no escaping it. To question this
is to deny the foundations of the American government. Granted that
those who framed these provisions may not have understood the full
extent of the principles they announced. No matter: they gave us those
principles; and, having them, we must apply them.
Now, women may be voters or not, citizens or not; but that they are a
part of the people, no one has denied in Christendom—however it may be
in Japan, where, as Mrs. Leonowens tells us, the census of population
takes in only men, and the women and children are left to be inferred.
“WE THE PEOPLE,” then, includes women. Be the superstructure what it
may, the foundation of the government clearly provides a place for them:
it is impossible to state the national theory in such a way that it
shall not include them. It is impossible to deny the natural right of
women to vote, except on grounds which exclude all natural right. Dr.
Bushnell, in annihilating, as he thinks, the claims of women to the
ballot, annihilates the rights of the community as a whole, male or
female. He may not be consistent enough to allow this, but Mr. Wasson
is. That keen destructive strikes at the foundation of the building, and
aims to demolish “We the people” altogether.
The fundamental charters are on our side. There are certain statute
limitations which may prove greater or less. But these are temporary and
trivial things, always to be interpreted, often to be modified, by
reference to the principles of the Constitution. For instance, when a
constitutional convention is to be held, or new conditions of suffrage
to be created, the whole people should vote upon the matter, including
those not hitherto enfranchised. This is the view insisted on, a few
years since, by that eminent jurist, William Beach Lawrence. He
maintained, in a letter to Charles Sumner and in opposition to his own
party, that if the question of “negro suffrage” in the Southern States
of the Union were put to vote, the colored people themselves had a
natural right to vote on the question. The same is true of women. It
should never be forgotten by advocates of woman suffrage, that, the
deeper their reasonings go, the stronger foundation they find; and that
we have always a solid fulcrum for our lever in that phrase of our
charters, “We the people.”
LXXIII.
THE USE OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.
When young people begin to study geometry, they expect to begin with
hard reasoning on the very first page. To their surprise, they find that
the first few pages are not occupied by reasoning, but by a few simple,
easy, and rather commonplace sentences, called “axioms,” which are
really a set of pegs on which all the reasoning is hung. Pupils are not
expected to go back in every demonstration, and prove the axioms. If
Almira Jones happens to be doing a problem at the blackboard on
examination-day, at the high school, and remarks in the course of her
demonstration that “things which are equal to the same thing are equal
to one another,” and if a sharp questioner jumps up, and says, “How do
you know it?” she simply lays down her bit of chalk, and says
fearlessly, “That is an axiom,” and the teacher sustains her. Some
things must be taken for granted.
The same service rendered by axioms in the geometry is supplied, in
regard to government, by the simple principles of the Declaration of
Independence. Right or wrong, they are taken for granted. Inasmuch as
all the legislation of the country is supposed to be based in them,—they
stating the theory of our government, while the Constitution itself only
puts into organic shape the application,—we must all begin with them. It
is a great convenience, and saves great trouble in all reforms. To the
Abolitionists, for instance, what an inestimable labor-saving machine
was the Declaration of Independence! Let them have that, and they asked
no more. Even the brilliant lawyer Rufus Choate, when confronted with
its plain provisions, could only sneer at them as “glittering
generalities,” which was equivalent to throwing down his brief, and
throwing up his case. It was an admission, that, if you were so foolish
as to insist on applying the first principles of the government, it was
all over with him.
Now, the whole doctrine of woman suffrage follows so directly from these
same political axioms, that they are especially convenient for women to
have in the house. When the Declaration of Independence enumerates as
among “self-evident” truths the fact of governments “deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed,” then that point may be
considered as settled. In this school-examination of maturer life, in
this grown-up geometry-class, the student is not to be called upon by
the committee to prove that. She may rightfully lay down her
demonstrating chalk, and say, “That is an axiom. You admit that
yourselves.”
It is a great convenience. We cannot always be going back, like a Hindoo
history, to the foundations of the world. Some things may be taken for
granted. How this simple axiom sweeps away, for instance, the cobweb
speculations as to whether voting is a natural right, or a privilege
delegated by society! No matter which. Take it which way you please.
That is an abstract question; but the practical question is a very
simple one. “Governments owe their just powers to the consent of the
governed.” Either that axiom is false, or, whenever women as a class
refuse their consent to the present exclusively masculine government, it
can no longer claim just powers. The remedy then may be rightly
demanded, which the Declaration of Independence goes on to state:
“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it
is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a
new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing
its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect
their safety and happiness.”
This is the use of the Declaration of Independence. Women, as a class,
may not be quite ready to use it. It is the business of this book to
help make them ready. But, so far as they are ready, these plain
provisions are the axioms of their political faith. If the axioms mean
any thing for men, they mean something for women. If men deride the
axioms, it is a concession, like that of Rufus Choate, that these
fundamental principles are very much in their way. But, so long as the
sentences stand in that document, they can be made useful. If men try to
get away from the arguments of women by saying, “But suppose we have
nothing in our theory of government which requires us to grant your
demand?” then women can answer, as the straightforward Traddles answered
Uriah Heep, “But you have, you know: therefore, if you please, we won’t
suppose any such thing.”
LXXIV.
THE TRADITIONS OF THE FATHERS.
It is fortunate for reformers that our fathers were clear-headed men. If
they did not foresee all the applications of their own principles,—and
who does?—they at least stated those principles very distinctly. This is
a great convenience to us who preach, in season and out of season, on
the texts they gave. Thus we are constantly told, “You are mistaken in
thinking that the fathers of the Republic, when they proclaimed
‘taxation without representation,’ referred to individual rights. They
were speaking only of national rights. They fought for national
independence, not for personal rights at all.”
It is in order to refute this sort of reasoning that women very often
need to read American history afresh. They will soon be satisfied that
such reasoning may be met with a plain, distinct denial. It is contrary
to the facts. The plain truth is, that our fathers not only did not make
national independence their exclusive aim, but they did not make it an
aim at all until the war had actually begun. “I verily believe,” wrote
the brave Dr. Warren, “that the night preceding the barbarous outrages
committed by the soldiery at Lexington, Concord, etc., there were not
fifty people in the whole colony that ever expected any blood would be
shed in the contest between us and Great Britain.”
What was it, then, that had kept the colonists in a turmoil for years?
Let us see.
On Monday, the 6th of March, 1775, the “freeholders and other
inhabitants of Boston” met in town-meeting at Faneuil Hall, Samuel Adams
being moderator. The committee appointed, the year before, to appoint an
orator “to perpetuate the memory of the horrid massacre perpetrated on
the evening of the 5th of March, 1770, by a party of soldiers,” reported
that they had selected Joseph Warren, Esq. The meeting confirmed this,
and adjourned to meet at the Old South at half-past eleven, Faneuil Hall
being too small. At the appointed hour, the church was crowded. The
pulpit was draped in black. Forty British officers, in uniform, sat in
the front pews or on the gallery-stairs. So great was the crowd, that
Warren, in his orator’s robe, entered the pulpit by a ladder through the
window. He stood there before the representatives of royalty, and in
defiance of the “Regulating Act,” one of whose objects was to suppress
meetings for any such purpose. What doctrines did he stand there to
proclaim?
Richard Frothingham in his admirable “Life of Warren”[14] states the
following as the fundamental proposition of this celebrated address:—
Footnote 14:
p. 430.
“That personal freedom is the right of every man, and that property,
or an exclusive right to dispose of what he has honestly acquired by
his own labor, necessarily arises therefrom, are truths which
common-sense has placed beyond the reach of contradiction; and no
man or body of men can, without being guilty of flagrant injustice,
claim a right to dispose of the persons or acquisitions of any other
man, or body of men, unless it can be proved that such a right had
arisen from some compact between the parties in which it has been
explicitly and freely granted.”
“The orator then traced,” says Frothingham, “the rise and progress of
the aggressions on the natural right of the colonists to enjoy personal
freedom and representative government.” Not a word in behalf of national
independence: on the contrary, he said, “An independence on Great
Britain is not our aim. No: our wish is that Britain and the colonies
may, like the oak and ivy, grow and increase together.” What he
protested against was the taking of individual property without granting
the owner a voice in it, personally or through some authorized
representative. And—observe!—this authorization must not be a merely
negative or vaguely understood thing: it must be attested by “some
compact between the parties in which it has been explicitly and freely
granted.” Any thing short of this was “a wicked policy,” under whose
influence the American had begun to behold the Briton as a ruffian,
ready “first to take his property, and next, what is dearer to every
virtuous man, the liberty of his country.” The loss of the country’s
liberty was thus staked as a result, a deduction, a corollary; the
original offence lay in the violation of the natural right of each to
control his own personal freedom and personal property, or else, if
these must be subordinated to the public good, to have at least a voice
in the matter. This, and nothing else than this, was the principle of
those who fought the Revolution, according to the statement of their
first eminent martyr.
And it was for announcing these great doctrines, and for sealing them,
three months later, with his blood, that it was said of him, on the
fifth of March following, “We will erect a monument to thee in each of
our grateful hearts, and to the latest ages will teach our tender
infants to lisp the name of Warren with veneration and applause.” That
the opinions he expressed were the opinions current among the people, is
proved by the general use of the cry “ Liberty and Property” among all
classes, at the time of the Stamp Act; a cry which puzzles the young
student, until he sees that the Revolution really began with personal
rights, and only slowly reached the demand for national independence.
“Liberty and Property” was just as distinctly the claim of Joseph Warren
as it is the claim of those women who now refuse to pay taxes because
they believe in the principles of the American Revolution.
LXXV.
SOME OLD-FASHIONED PRINCIPLES.
There has been an effort, lately, to show that when our fathers said,
“Taxation without representation is tyranny,” they referred not to
personal liberties, but to the freedom of a state from foreign power. It
is fortunate that this criticism has been made, for it has led to a more
careful examination of passages; and this has made it clear, beyond
dispute, that the Revolutionary patriots carried their statements more
into detail than is generally supposed, and affirmed their principles
for individuals, not merely for the state as a whole.
In that celebrated pamphlet by James Otis, for instance, published as
early as 1764, “The Rights of the Colonies Vindicated,” he thus clearly
lays down the rights of the individual as to taxation:—
“The very act of taxing, exercised over those who are not
represented, appears to me to be depriving them of one of their most
essential rights as freemen; and, if continued, seems to be, in
effect, an entire disfranchisement of every civil right. For what
one civil right is worth a rush, after a man’s property is subject
to be taken from him at pleasure, without his consent? If a man is
not his own assessor, in person or by deputy, his liberty is gone,
or he is entirely at the mercy of others.”[15]
Footnote 15:
Otis: Rights of the Colonies, p. 58.
This fine statement has already done duty for liberty, in another
contest; for it was quoted by Mr. Sumner in his speech of March 7, 1866,
with this commentary:—
“Stronger words for universal suffrage could not be employed. His
argument is, that, if men are taxed without being represented, they
are deprived of essential rights; and the continuance of this
deprivation despoils them of every civil right, thus making the
latter depend upon the right of suffrage, which by a neologism of
our day is known as a political right instead of a civil right.
Then, to give point to this argument, the patriot insists that in
determining taxation, ‘every man must be his own assessor, in person
or by deputy,’ without which his liberty is entirely at the mercy of
others. Here, again, in a different form, is the original
thunderbolt, ‘Taxation without representation is tyranny;’ and the
claim is made not merely for communities, but for ‘every man.’”
In a similar way wrote Benjamin Franklin, some six years after, in that
remarkable sheet found among his papers, and called “Declaration of
those Rights of the Commonalty of Great Britain, without which they
cannot be free.” The leading propositions were these three:—
“That every man of the commonalty (excepting infants, insane
persons, and criminals) is of common right and by the laws of God a
freeman, and entitled to the free enjoyment of liberty. That
liberty, or freedom, consists in having an actual share in the
appointment of those who frame the laws, and who are to be the
guardians of every man’s life, property, and peace; for the all of
one man is as dear to him as the all of another; and the poor man
has an equal right, but more need, to have representatives in the
legislature than the rich one. That they who have no voice nor vote
in the electing of representatives do not enjoy liberty, but are
absolutely enslaved to those who have votes, and to their
representatives; for to be enslaved is to have governors whom other
men have set over us, and be subject to laws made by the
representatives of others, without having had representatives of our
own to give consent in our behalf.”[16]
Footnote 16:
Sparks’s Franklin, ii. 372.
In quoting these words of Dr. Franklin, his latest biographer feels
moved to add, “These principles, so familiar to us now and so obviously
just, were startling and incredible novelties in 1770, abhorrent to
nearly all Englishmen, and to great numbers of Americans.” Their fair
application is still abhorrent to a great many; or else, not willing
quite to deny the theory, they limit the application by some such device
as “virtual representation.” Here, again, James Otis is ready for them;
and Charles Sumner is ready to quote Otis, as thus:—
“No such phrase as virtual representation was ever known in law or
constitution. It is altogether a subtlety and illusion, wholly
unfounded and absurd. We must not be cheated by any such phantom, or
any other fiction of law or politics, or any monkish trick of deceit
or blasphemy.”
These are the sharp words used by the patriot Otis, speaking of those
who were trying to convince American citizens that they were virtually
represented in Parliament. Sumner applied the same principle to the
freedmen: it is now applied to women. “Taxation without representation
is tyranny.” “Virtual representation is altogether a subtlety and
illusion, wholly unfounded and absurd.” No ingenuity, no evasion, can
give any escape from these plain principles. Either you must revoke the
maxims of the American Revolution, or you must enfranchise woman. Stuart
Mill well says in his autobiography, “The interest of woman is included
in that of man exactly as much (and no more) as that of subjects in that
of kings.”
LXXVI.
FOUNDED ON A ROCK.
Gov. Long’s letter on woman suffrage is of peculiar value, as recalling
us to the simple principles of “right,” on which alone the agitation can
be solidly founded. The ground once taken by many, that women as women
would be sure to act on a far higher political plane than men as men, is
now urged less than formerly: the very mistakes and excesses of the
agitation itself have partially disproved it. No cause can safely
sustain itself on the hypothesis that all its advocates are saints and
sages; but a cause that is based on a principle rests on a rock.
If there is any one who is recognized as a fair exponent of our national
principles, it is our martyr-president Abraham Lincoln; whom Lowell
calls, in his noble Commemoration Ode at Cambridge,—
“New birth of our new soil, the first American.”
What President Lincoln’s political principle was, we know. On his
journey to Washington for his first inauguration, he said, “I have never
had a feeling that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the
Declaration of Independence.” To find out what was his view of those
sentiments, we must go back several years earlier, and consider that
remarkable letter of his to the Boston Republicans who had invited him
to join them in celebrating Jefferson’s birthday, in April, 1859. It was
well called by Charles Sumner “a gem in political literature;” and it
seems to me almost as admirable, in its way, as the Gettysburg address.
“The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free
society. And yet they are denied and evaded with no small show of
success. One dashingly calls them ‘glittering generalities.’ Another
bluntly styles them ‘self-evident lies.’ And others insidiously
argue that they apply only to ‘superior races.’”
“These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and
effect,—the subverting the principles of free government, and
restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would
delight a convocation of crowned heads plotting against the people.
They are the vanguard, the sappers and miners of returning
despotism. We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.”
“All honor to Jefferson!—the man who, in the concrete pressure of a
struggle for national independence by a single people, had the
coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely
revolutionary document _an abstract truth applicable to all men and
all times_, and so to embalm it there that to-day and in all coming
days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the harbingers of
re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”
The special “abstract truth” to which President Lincoln thus attaches a
value so great, and which he pronounces “applicable to all men and all
times,” is evidently the assertion of the Declaration that governments
derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, following the
assertion that all men are born free and equal; that is, as some one has
interpreted it, equally men. I do not see how any person but a dreamy
recluse can deny that the strength of our republic rests on these
principles; which are so thoroughly embedded in the average American
mind that they take in it, to some extent, the place occupied in the
average English mind by the emotion of personal loyalty to a certain
reigning family. But it is impossible to defend these principles
logically, as Senator Hoar has well pointed out, without recognizing
that they are as applicable to women as to men. If this is the case, the
claim of women rests on a right,—indeed, upon the same right which is
the foundation of all our institutions.
The encouraging fact in the present condition of the whole matter is,
not that we get more votes here or there for this or that form of woman
suffrage—for experience has shown that there are great ups and downs in
that respect; and States that at one time seemed nearest to woman
suffrage, as Maine and Kansas, now seem quite apathetic. But the real
encouragement is, that the logical ground is more and more conceded; and
the point now usually made is, not that the Jeffersonian maxim excludes
women, but that “the consent of the governed” is substantially given by
the general consent of women. That this argument has a certain
plausibility, may be conceded; but it is equally clear that the minority
of women, those who do wish to vote, includes on the whole the natural
leaders,—those who are foremost in activity of mind, in literature, in
art, in good works of charity. It is, therefore, pretty sure that they
only predict the opinions of the rest, who will follow them in time.
And, even while waiting, it is a fair question whether the “governed”
have not the right to give their votes when they wish, even if the
majority of them prefer to stay away from the polls. We do not repeal
our naturalization laws, although only the minority of our foreign-born
inhabitants as yet take the pains to become naturalized.
LXXVII.
“THE GOOD OF THE GOVERNED.”
In Paris, some years ago, I was for a time a resident in a cultivated
French family, where the father was non-committal in politics, the
mother and son were republicans, and the daughter was a Bonapartist.
Asking the mother why the young lady thus held to a different creed from
the rest, I was told that she had made up her mind that the streets of
Paris were kept cleaner under the empire than since its disappearance:
hence her imperialism.
I have heard American men advocate the French empire at home and abroad,
without offering reasons so good as those of the lively French maiden.
But I always think of her remark when the question is seriously asked,
as Mr. Parkman, for instance, gravely puts it in his late rejoinder in
“The North American Review,”—“The real issue is this: Is the object of
government the good of the governed, or is it not?” Taken in a general
sense, there is probably no disposition to discuss this conundrum, for
the simple reason that nobody dissents from it. But the important point
is: What does “the good of the governed” mean? Does it merely mean
better street-cleaning, or something more essential?
There is nothing new in the distinction. Ever since De Tocqueville wrote
his “Democracy in America,” forty years ago, this precise point has been
under active discussion. That acute writer himself recurs to it again
and again. Every government, he points out, nominally seeks the good of
the people, and rests on their will at last. But there is this
difference: A monarchy organizes better, does its work better, cleans
the streets better. Nevertheless De Tocqueville, a monarchist, sees this
advantage in a republic, that when all this is done by the people for
themselves, although the work done may be less perfect, yet the people
themselves are more enlightened, better satisfied, and, in the end,
their good is better served. Thus in one place he quotes a “a writer of
talent” who complains of the want of administrative perfection in the
United States, and says, “We are indebted to centralization, that
admirable invention of a great man, for the uniform order and method
which prevails alike in all the municipal budgets (of France) from the
largest town to the humblest commune.” But, says De Tocqueville,—
“Whatever may be my admiration of this result, when I see the
communes (municipalities) of France, with their excellent system of
accounts, plunged in the grossest ignorance of their true interests,
and abandoned to so incorrigible an apathy that they seem to
vegetate rather than to live; when, on the other hand, I observe the
activity, the information, and the spirit of enterprise which keeps
society in perpetual labor, in these American townships, whose
budgets are drawn up with small method and with still less
uniformity,—I am struck by the spectacle; _for, to my mind, the end
of a good government is to insure the welfare of a people_, and not
to establish order and regularity in the midst of its misery and its
distress.”[17]
Footnote 17:
Reeves’s translation, London, 1838, vol. i. p. 97, note.
The Italics are my own; but it will be seen that he uses a phrase almost
identical with Mr. Parkman’s, and that he uses it to show that there is
something to be looked at beyond good laws,—namely, the beneficial
effect of self-government. In another place he comes back to the subject
again:—
“It is incontestable that the people frequently conducts public
business very ill; but it is impossible that the lower order should
take a part in public business without extending the circle of their
ideas, and without quitting the ordinary routine of their mental
acquirements; the humblest individual who is called upon to
co-operate in the government of society acquires a certain degree of
self-respect; and, as he possesses authority, he can command the
services of minds much more enlightened than his own. He is
canvassed by a multitude of applicants, who seek to deceive him in a
thousand different ways, but who instruct him by their deceit....
Democracy does not confer the most skilful kind of government upon
the people; but it produces that which the most skilful governments
are frequently unable to awaken, namely, an all-pervading and
restless activity, a superabundant force, and an energy which is
inseparable from it, and which may, under favorable circumstances,
beget the most amazing benefits. These are the true advantages of
democracy.”[18]
Footnote 18:
Ibid., vol. ii. pp. 74, 75.
These passages and others like them are worth careful study. They
clearly point out the two different standards by which we may criticise
all political systems. One class of thinkers, of whom Froude is the most
conspicuous, holds that the “good of the people” means good laws and
good administration, and that, if these are only provided, it makes no
sort of difference whether they themselves make the laws, or whether
some Cæsar or Louis Napoleon provides them. All the traditions of the
early and later Federalists point this way. But it has always seemed to
me a theory of government essentially incompatible with American
institutions. If we could once get our people saturated with it, they
would soon be at the mercy of some Louis Napoleon of their own.
When President Lincoln claimed, following Theodore Parker, that ours was
not merely a government for the people, but of the people and by the
people as well, he recognized the other side of the matter,—that it is
not only important what laws we have, but who makes the laws; and that
“the end of a good government is to insure the welfare of a people,” in
this far wider sense. That advantage which the French writer admits in
democracy, that it develops force, energy, and self-respect, is as
essentially a part of “the good of the governed,” as is any perfection
in the details of government. And it is precisely these advantages which
we expect that women, sooner or later, are to share. For them, as for
men, “the good of the governed” is not genuine unless it is that kind of
good which belongs to the self-governed.
LXXVIII.
RULING AT SECOND-HAND.
“Women ruled all; and ministers of state
Were at the doors of women forced to wait,—
Women, who’ve oft as sovereigns graced the land,
But never governed well at second-hand.”
So wrote in the last century the bitter satirist Charles Churchill, and
this verse will do something to keep alive his name. He touches the very
kernel of the matter, and all history is on his side. The Salic Law
excluded women from the throne of France,—“the kingdom of France being
too noble to be governed by a woman,” as it said. Accordingly the
history of France shows one long line of royal mistresses ruling in
secret for mischief; while more liberal England points to the reigns of
Elizabeth and Anne and Victoria, to show how usefully a woman may sit
upon a throne.
It was one of the merits of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, that she always
pointed out this distinction. “Any woman can have influence,” she said,
“in some way. She need only to be a good cook or a good scold, to secure
that. Woman should not merely have a share in the power of man,—for of
that omnipotent Nature will not suffer her to be defrauded,—but it
should be a _chartered_ power, too fully recognized to be abused.” We
have got to meet, at any rate, this fact of feminine influence in the
world. Demosthenes said that the measures which a statesman had
meditated for a year might be overturned in a day by a woman. How
infinitely more sensible, then, to train the woman herself in
statesmanship, and give her open responsibility as well as concealed
power!
The same principle of demoralizing subordination runs through the whole
position of women. Many a husband makes of his wife a doll, dresses her
in fine clothes, gives or withholds money according to his whims, and
laughs or frowns if she asks any questions about his business. If only a
petted slave, she naturally develops the vices of a slave; and when she
wants more money for more fine clothes, and finds her husband out of
humor, she coaxes, cheats, and lies. Many a woman half ruins her husband
by her extravagance, simply because he has never told her frankly what
his income is, or treated her, in money matters, like a rational being.
Bankruptcy, perhaps, brings both to their senses; and thenceforward the
husband discovers that his wife is a woman, not a child. But, for want
of this, whole families and generations of women are trained to
deception. I knew an instance where a fashionable dressmaker in New York
urged an economical young girl, about to be married, to buy of her a
costly _trousseau_ or wedding outfit. “But I have not the money,” said
the maiden. “No matter,” said the complaisant tempter: “I will wait four
years, and send in the bill to your husband by degrees. Many ladies do
it.” Fancy the position of a pure young girl, wishing innocently to make
herself beautiful in the eyes of her husband, and persuaded to go into
his house with a trick like this upon her conscience! Yet it grows
directly out of the whole theory of life which is preached to many
women,—that all they seek must be won by indirect manœuvres, and not by
straightforward living.
It is a mistaken system. Once recognize woman as born to be the equal,
not inferior, of man, and she accepts as a right her share of the family
income, of political power, and of all else that is capable of
distribution. As it is, we are in danger of forgetting that woman, in
mind as in body, was born to be upright. The women of Charles
Reade—never by any possibility moving in a straight line where it is
possible to find a crooked one—are distorted women; and Nature is no
more responsible for them than for the figures produced by tight lacing
and by high-heeled boots. These physical deformities acquire a charm,
when the taste adjusts itself to them; and so do those pretty tricks and
those interminable lies. But after all, to make a noble woman, you must
give a noble training.
LXXIX.
“TOO MANY VOTERS ALREADY.”
Curiously enough, the commonest argument against woman suffrage does not
now take the form of an attack on women, but on men. Formerly we were
told that women, as women, were incapable of voting; that they had not,
as old Theophilus Parsons wrote in 1780, “a sufficient acquired
discretion;” or that they had not physical strength enough; or that they
were too delicate and angelic to vote. Now these remarks are waived, and
the argument is: Women are certainly unfit for suffrage, since even men
are unfit. It is something to have women at last recognized as
politically equal to men, even if it be only in the fact of unfitness.
A spasm of re-action is just now passing over the minds of many men,
especially among educated Americans, against universal suffrage.
Possibly it is a re-action from that too great confidence in mere
numbers which at one time prevailed. All human governments are as yet
very imperfect; and, unless we view them reasonably, they are all
worthless. We try them by unjust or whimsical tests. I do not see that
anybody who objects to universal suffrage has any working theory to
suggest as a substitute: the only plan he even implies is usually that
he himself and his friends, and those whom he thinks worthy, should make
the laws, or decide who should make them. From this I should utterly
dissent: I should far rather be governed by the community, as a whole,
than by my ablest friend and his ablest friends; for, if the whole
community governs, I know it will not govern very much, and that the
tendency will be towards personal freedom by common consent. But if my
particular friend once begins to govern me, or I him, the love of power
would be in danger of growing very much. It may be that he could be
safely trusted with such authority, but I am very sure that I could not.
We shall never get much beyond that pithy question of Jefferson’s, “It
is said that man cannot govern himself: how, then, can he govern
another?” There is absolutely no test by which we can determine, on any
large scale, who are fit to exercise suffrage, and who are not. John
Brown would exclude John Smith; and John Smith would wish to keep out
John Brown, especially if he had inconvenient views, like him of
Harper’s Ferry. The safeguard of scientific legislation may be in the
heads of a cultivated few, but the safeguard of personal freedom is
commonly in the hands of the uncultivated many. The most moderate
republican thinker might find himself under the supervision of
Bismarck’s police at any moment, should he visit Berlin; and how easily
he might himself fall into the Bismarck way of thinking, is apparent
when we consider that the excellent Dr. Joseph P. Thompson, writing from
Germany, is understood gravely to recommend the exclusion of German
communists from the ports of the United States. When we consider how
easily the first principles of liberty might thus be sacrificed by the
wise few, let us be grateful that we are protected by the presence of
the multitude.
Whenever the vote goes against us, we are apt to think that there must
be something wrong in the moral nature of the voters. It would be better
to see if their votes cannot teach us something,—if the fact of our
defeat does not show that we left out something, or failed to see some
fact which our opponents saw. There could not be a plainer case of this
than in recent Massachusetts elections. Many good men regarded it as a
hopeless proof of ignorance or depravity in the masses, that more than a
hundred thousand voters sustained General Butler for governor. For one,
I regard that candidate as a demagogue, no doubt; but can anybody in
Massachusetts now help seeing that the instinct which led that large
mass of men to his support was in great measure a true one? Every act of
the Republican legislatures since assembled has been influenced by that
vague protest in behalf of State reform and economy which General Butler
represented. He complicated it with other issues, very likely, and
swelled the number of his supporters by unscrupulous means. It may have
been very fortunate that he did not succeed; but it is fortunate that he
tried, and that he found supporters. In this remarkable instance we see
how the very dangers and excesses of popular suffrage work for good.
For myself, I do not see how we can have too many voters. I am very
sure, that, in the long-run, voting tends to educate and enlighten men,
to make them more accessible to able leadership, to give them a feeling
of personal self-respect and independence. This is true not merely of
Americans and Protestants, but of the foreign-born and the Roman
Catholic; since experience shows that the political control and
interference of the priesthood are exceedingly over-rated. I believe
that the poor and the ignorant eminently need the ballot, first for
self-respect, and then for self-protection; and, if so, why do not women
need it for precisely the same reasons?
SUFFRAGE.
“No such phrase as virtual representation was ever known in law or
constitution. It is altogether a subtlety and illusion, wholly unfounded
and absurd. We must not be cheated by any such phantom or any other
trick of law and politics.”—JAMES OTIS, _quoted by_ CHARLES SUMNER _in
speech March_ 7, 1866.
LXXX.
DRAWING THE LINE.
When in Dickens’s “Nicholas Nickleby” the coal-heaver calls at the
fashionable barber’s to be shaved, the barber declines that service. The
coal-heaver pleads that he saw a baker being shaved there the day
before. But the barber points out to him that it is necessary to draw
the line somewhere, and he draws it at bakers.
It is, doubtless, an inconvenience, in respect to woman suffrage, that
so many people have their own theories as to drawing the line, and
deciding who shall vote. Each has his hobby; and as the opportunity for
applying it to men has passed by, each wishes to catch at the last
remaining chance, and apply it to women. One believes in drawing an
educational line; another, in a property qualification; another, in new
restrictions on naturalization; another, in distinctions of race; and
each wishes to keep women, for a time, as the only remaining victims for
his experiment.
Fortunately the answer to all these objections, on behalf of woman
suffrage, is very brief and simple. It is no more the business of its
advocates to decide upon the best abstract basis for suffrage, than it
is to decide upon the best system of education, or of labor, or of
marriage. Its business is to equalize, in all these directions; nothing
more. When that is done, there will be plenty still left to do, without
doubt; but it will not involve the rights of women, as such. Simply to
strike out the word “male” from the statute,—that is our present work.
“What is sauce for the goose”—but the proverb is somewhat musty. These
educational and property restrictions may be of value; but, wherever
they are already removed from the men, they must be removed from women
also. Enfranchise them equally, and then begin afresh, if you please, to
legislate for the whole human race. What we protest against is that you
should have let down the bars for one sex, and should at once become
conscientiously convinced that they should be put up again for the
other.
When it was, proposed to apply an educational qualification at the South
after the war, the Southern white loyalists all objected to it. If you
make it universal, they said, it cuts off many of the whites. If you
apply it to the blacks alone, it is manifestly unjust. The case is the
same with women in regard to men. As woman needs the ballot primarily to
protect herself, it is manifestly unjust to restrict the suffrage for
her, when man has it without restriction. If she needs protection, then
she needs it all the more from being poor, or ignorant, or Irish, or
black. If we do not see this, the freedwomen of the South did. There is
nothing like personal wrong to teach people logic.
We hear a great deal said in dismay, and sometimes even by old
abolitionists, about “increasing the number of ignorant voters.” In
Massachusetts, there is an educational restriction for men, such as it
is; in Rhode Island, a property qualification is required for voting on
certain questions. Personally, I believe with “Warrington,” that, if
ignorant voting be bad, ignorant nonvoting is worse; and that the
enfranchised “masses,” which have a legitimate outlet for their
political opinions, are far less dangerous than disfranchised masses,
which must rely on mobs and strikes. I will go farther, and say that I
believe our Republic is, on the whole, in less danger from its poor men,
who have got to stay in it and bring up their children, than from its
rich men, who have always Paris and Dresden to fall back upon. As to a
property qualification, there is no dispute that Rhode Island—the only
New England State which has one—is the only State where votes are
publicly bought and sold on any large scale. I do not see that even a
poll-tax or registry-tax is of any use as a safeguard; for, if men are
to be bought, the tax merely offers a more indirect and palatable form
in which to pay the price. Many a man consents to have his poll-tax paid
by his party or his candidate, when he would reject the direct offer of
a dollar-bill.
But this is all private speculation, and has nothing to do with the
woman suffrage movement. All that we can ask, as advocates of this
reform, is, that the inclusion or the exclusion should be the same for
both sexes. We cannot put off the equality of woman till that time, a
few centuries hence, when the Social Science Association shall
have-succeeded in agreeing on the true basis of “scientific
legislation.” It is as if we urged that wives should share their
husbands’ dinners, and were told that the physicians had not decided
whether beefsteak were wholesome. The answer is, “Beefsteak or tripe,
yeast or saleratus, which you please. But, meanwhile, what is good
enough for the wife is good enough for the husband.”
LXXXI.
FOR SELF-PROTECTION.
I remember to have read, many years ago, the life of Sir Samuel Romilly,
the English philanthropist. He was the author of more beneficent legal
reforms than any man of his day, and there was in this book a long list
of the changes he still meant to bring about. It struck me very much,
that, among these proposed reforms, not one of any importance referred
to the laws about women.
It shows—what all experience has shown—that no class or race or sex can
safely trust its protection in any hands but its own. The laws of
England in regard to woman were then so bad that Lord Brougham
afterwards said they needed total reconstruction, if they were to be
touched at all. And yet it is only since woman suffrage began to be
talked about, that the work of law-reform has really taken firm hold. In
many cases in America the beneficent measures are directly to be traced
to some appeal from feminine advocates. Even in Canada, as stated the
other day by Dr. Cameron, formerly of Toronto, the bill protecting the
property of married women was passed under the immediate pressure of
Lucy Stone’s eloquence. And, even where this direct agency could not be
traced, the general fact that the atmosphere was full of the agitation
had much to do with all the reforms that took place. Legislatures,
unwilling to give woman the ballot, were shamed into giving her
something. The chairman of the judiciary committee in Rhode Island told
me, that, until he heard women address the committee, he had not
reflected upon their legal disabilities, or thought how unjust these
were. While the matter was left to the other sex only, even men like Sir
Samuel Romilly forgot the wrongs of woman. When she began to advocate
her own cause men also waked up.
But now that they are awake, they ask, is not this sufficient? Not at
all. If an agent who has cheated you surrenders reluctantly one-half
your stolen goods, you do not stop there and say, “It is enough. Your
intention is honorable. Please continue my agent with increased pay.” On
the contrary, you say, “Your admission of wrong is a plea of guilty.
Give me the rest of what is mine.” There is no defence like
self-defence, no protection like self-protection.
All theories of chivalry and generosity and vicarious representation
fall before the fact that woman has been grossly wronged by man. That
being the case, the only modest and honest thing for man to do is to
say, “Henceforward have a voice in making your own laws.” Till this is
done, she has no sure safeguard, since otherwise the same men who made
the old barbarous laws may at any time restore them.
It is common to say that woman suffrage will make no great difference;
for that women will think very much as men do, and it will simply double
the vote without varying the result. About many matters this may be
true. To be sure, it is probable that on questions of conscience, like
slavery and temperance, the woman’s vote would by no means coincide with
man’s. But grant that it would. The fact remains,—and all history shows
it,—that on all that concerns her own protection a woman needs her own
vote. Would a woman vote to give her husband the power of bequeathing
her children to the control and guardianship of somebody else? Would a
woman vote to sustain the law by which a Massachusetts chief justice
bade the police take those crying children from their mother’s side in
the Boston court-room a few years ago, and hand them over to a
comparative stranger, because that mother had married again? You might
as well ask whether the colored vote would sustain the Dred Scott
decision. Tariffs or banks may come or go the same, whether the voters
be white or black, male or female. But, when the wrongs of an oppressed
class or sex are to be righted, the ballot is the only guaranty. After
they have gained a potential voice for themselves, the Sir Samuel
Romillys will remember them.
LXXXII.
WOMANLY STATESMANSHIP.
The newspapers periodically express a desire to know whether women have
given evidence, on the whole, of superior statesmanship to men. There
are constant requests that they will define their position as to the
tariff and the fisheries and the civil-service question. If they do not
speak, it is naturally assumed that they will forever after hold their
peace. Let us see how that matter stands.
It is said that the greatest mechanical skill in America is to be found
among professional burglars who come here from England. Suppose one of
these men were in prison, and we were to stand outside and taunt him
through the window: “Here is a locomotive engine: why do you not mend or
manage it? Here is a steam printing-press: if you know any thing, set it
up for me! You a mechanic, when you have not proved that you understand
any of these things? Nonsense!”
But Jack Sheppard, if he condescended to answer us at all, would coolly
say, “Wait a while, till I have finished my present job. Being in
prison, my first business is to get out of prison. Wait till I have
picked this lock, and mined this wall; wait till I have made a saw out
of a watch-spring, and a ladder out of a pair of blankets. Let me do my
first task, and get out of limbo, and then see if your little
printing-presses and locomotives are too puzzling for my fingers.”
Politically speaking, woman is in prison, and her first act of skill
must be in getting through the wall. For her there is no tariff
question, no question of the fisheries. She will come to that by and by,
if you please; but for the present her statesmanship must be employed
nearer home. The “civil-service reform” in which she is most concerned
is a reform which shall bring her in contact with the civil service. Her
political creed, for the present, is limited to that of Sterne’s
starling in the cage,—“I can’t get out.” If she is supposed to have any
common-sense at all, she will best show it by beginning at the point
where she is, instead of at the point where somebody else is. She would
indeed be as foolish as these editors think her if she now spent her
brains upon the tariff question, which she cannot reach, instead of upon
her own enfranchisement which she is fast reaching.
The woman suffrage movement in America, in all its stages and
subdivisions, has been the work of woman. No doubt men have helped in
it: much of the talking has been done by them, and they have furnished
many of the printed documents. But the energy, the methods, the
unwearied purpose, of the movement, have come from women: they have led
in all councils; they have established the newspapers, got up the
conventions, addressed the legislatures, and raised the money. Thirty
years have shown, with whatever temporary variations, one vast wave of
progress toward success, both in this country and in Europe. Now,
success is statesmanship.
I remember well the shouts of laughter that used to greet the
anti-slavery orators when they claimed that the real statesmen of the
country were not the Calhouns and Websters, who spent their strength in
trying to sustain slavery, and failed, but the Garrisons, who devoted
their lives to its overthrow, and were succeeding. Yet who now doubts
this? Tried by the same standard, the statesmanship of to-day does not
lie in the men who can find no larger questions before them than those
which concern the fisheries, but in the women whose far-reaching efforts
will one day make every existing voting-list so much waste paper.
Of course, when the voting-lists with the women’s names are ready to be
printed, it will be interesting to speculate as to how these new
monarchs of our destiny will use their power. For myself, a long course
of observation in the anti-slavery and woman suffrage movements has
satisfied me that women are not idiots, and that, on the whole, when
they give their minds to a question, whether moral or practical, they
understand it quite as readily as men. In the anti-slavery movement it
is certain that a woman, Elizabeth Heyrick, gave the first impulse to
its direct and simple solution in England; and that another woman, Mrs.
Stowe, did more than any man, except perhaps Garrison and John Brown, to
secure its right solution here. There was never a moment, I am
confident, when any great political question growing out of the
anti-slavery struggle might not have been put to vote more safely among
the women of New England than among the clergy, or the lawyers, or the
college-professors. If they have done so well in the last great issue,
it is fair to assume, that, after they have a sufficient inducement to
study out future issues, they at least will not be very much behind the
men.
But we cannot keep it too clearly in view, that the whole question,
whether women would vote better or worse than men on general questions,
is a minor matter. It was equally a minor matter in case of the negroes.
We gave the negroes the ballot, simply because they needed it for their
own protection; and we shall by and by give it to women for the same
reason. Tried by that test, we shall find that their statesmanship will
be genuine. When they come into power, drunken husbands will no longer
control their wives’ earnings, and a chief justice will no longer order
a child to be removed from its mother, amid its tears and outcries,
merely because that mother has married again. And if, as we are
constantly assured, woman’s first duty is to her home and her children,
she may count it a good beginning in statesmanship to secure to herself
the means of protecting both. That once settled, it will be time enough
to “interview” her in respect to the proper rate of duty on pig-iron.
LXXXIII.
TOO MUCH PREDICTION.
“Seek not to proticipate,” says Mrs. Gamp, the venerable nurse in
“Martin Chuzzlewit”—“but take ’em as they come, and as they go.” I am
persuaded that our woman-suffrage arguments would be improved by this
sage counsel, and that at present we indulge in too many bold
anticipations.
Is there not altogether too much tendency to predict what women will do
when they vote? Could that good time come to-morrow, we should be
startled to find to how many different opinions and “causes” the new
voters were already pledged. One speaker wishes that women should be
emancipated, because of the fidelity with which they are sure to support
certain desirable measures, as peace, order, freedom, temperance,
righteousness, and judgment to come. Then the next speaker has his or
her schedule of political virtues, and is equally confident that women,
if once enfranchised, will guarantee clear majorities for them all. The
trouble is, that we thus mortgage this new party of the future, past
relief, beyond possibility of payment, and incur the ridicule of the
unsanctified by committing our cause to a great many contradictory
pledges.
I know an able and high-minded woman of foreign birth, who courageously,
but as I think mistakenly, calls herself an atheist, and who has for
years advocated woman-suffrage as the only antidote to the rule of the
clergy. On the other hand, an able speaker in the late Boston convention
advocated the same thing as the best way of defeating atheism, and
securing the positive assertion of religion by the community. Both
cannot be correct: neither is entitled to speak for woman. That being
the case, would it not be better to keep clear of this dangerous ground
of prediction, and keep to the argument based on rights and needs? If
our theory of government be worth any thing, woman has the same right to
the ballot that man has: she certainly needs it as much for
self-defence. How she will use it, when she gets it, is her own affair.
It may be that she will use it more wisely than her brothers; but I am
satisfied to believe that she will use it as well. Let us not attribute
infallible wisdom and virtue, even to women; for, as dear Mrs. Poyser
says in Adam Bede, “God Almighty made some of ’em foolish, to match the
men.”
It is common to assume, for instance, that all women by nature favor
peace; and that, even if they do not always seem to promote it in their
social walk and conversation, they certainly will in their political.
When we consider how all the pleasing excitements, achievements, and
glories of war, such as they are, accrue to men only, and how large a
part of the miseries are brought home to women, it might seem that their
vote on this matter, at least, would be a sure thing. Thus far the
theory: the fact being that we have but just emerged from a civil war
which convulsed the nation, and cost half a million lives; and which
was, from the very beginning, fomented, stimulated, and applauded, at
least on one side, by the united voice of the women. It will be
generally admitted by those who know, that, but for the women of the
seceding States, the war of the Rebellion would have been waged more
feebly, been sooner ended, and far more easily forgotten. Nay, I was
told a few days since by an able Southern lawyer, who was long the mayor
of one of the largest Southern cities, that in his opinion the practice
of duelling—which is an epitome of war—owes its continued existence at
the South to a sustaining public sentiment among the women.
Again, where the sympathy of women is wholly on the side of right, it is
by no means safe to assume that their mode of enforcing that sentiment
will be equally judicious. Take, for instance, the temperance cause. It
is usual to assume that women are a unit on that question. When we look
at the two extremes of society,—the fine lady pressing wine upon her New
Year’s visitors, and the Irishwoman laying in a family supply of whiskey
to last over Sunday,—the assumption seems hasty. But grant it. Is it
equally sure, that when woman takes hold of that most difficult of all
legislation, the license and prohibitory laws, she will handle them more
wisely than men have done? Will her more ardent zeal solve the problem
on which so much zeal has already been lavished in vain? In large
cities, for instance, where there is already more law than can be
enforced, will her additional ballots afford the means to enforce it? It
may be so; but it seems wiser not to predict nor to anticipate, but to
wait and hope.
It is no reproach on woman to say that she is not infallible on
particular questions. There is much reason to suppose that in politics,
as in every other sphere, the joint action of the sexes will be better
and wiser than that of either singly. It seems obvious that the
experiment of republican government will be more fairly tried when
one-half the race is no longer disfranchised. It is quite certain, at
any rate, that no class can trust its rights to the mercy and chivalry
of any other, but that, the weaker it is, the more it needs all
political aids and securities for self-protection. Thus far, we are on
safe ground; and here, as it seems to me, the claim for suffrage may
securely rest. To go farther in our assertions, seems to me unsafe,
although many of our wisest and most eloquent may differ from me; and,
the nearer we approach success, the more important it is to look to our
weapons. It is a plausible and tempting argument, to claim suffrage for
woman on the ground that she is an angel; but I think it will prove
wiser, in the end, to claim it for her as being human.
LXXXIV.
FIRST-CLASS CARRIAGES.
In a hotly contested municipal election, the other day, an active
political manager was telling me his tactics. “We have to send carriages
for some of the voters,” he said. “First-class carriages! If we
undertake to wait on ’em, we must do it in good shape, and not leave the
best carriages to be hired by the other party.”
I am not much given to predicting just what will happen when women vote;
but I confidently assert that they will be taken to the polls, if they
wish, in first-class carriages. If the best horses are to be harnessed,
and the best cushions selected, and every panel of the coach rubbed till
you can see your face in it, merely to accommodate some elderly man who
lives two blocks away, and could walk to the polls very easily, then how
much more will these luxuries be placed at the service of every woman,
young or old, whose presence at the polls is made doubtful by mud, or
snow, or the prospect of a shower!
But the carriage is only the beginning of the polite attentions that
will soon appear. When we see the transformation undergone by every
ferry-boat and every railway-station, so soon as it comes to be
frequented by women, who can doubt that voting-places will experience
the same change? They will soon have—at least in the “ladies’
department,”—elegance instead of discomfort, beauty for ashes, plenty of
rocking-chairs, and no need of spittoons.[19] Very possibly they may
have all the modern conveniences and inconveniences,—furnace-registers,
tea-kettles, Washington-pies, and a young lady to give checks for
bundles. Who knows what elaborate comforts, what queenly luxuries, may
be offered to women at voting-places, when the time has finally arrived
to sue for their votes?
Footnote 19:
Since this was written, the legislature of Massachusetts has passed,
with little opposition, a law prohibiting smoking at voting-places,—an
explicit fulfilment of this prophecy.
The common impression has always been quite different from this. People
look at the coarseness and dirt now visible at so many voting-places,
and say, “Would you expose women to all that?” But these places are not
dirtier than a railway smoking-car; and there is no more coarseness than
in any ferry-boat which is, for whatever reason, used by men only. You
do not look into those places, and say with indignation, “Never, if I
can help it, shall my wife or my beloved great-grandmother travel by
steamboat or by rail!” You know that with these exemplary relatives will
enter order and quiet, carpets and curtains, brooms and dusters. Why
should it be otherwise with wardrooms and town-halls?
There is not an atom more of intrinsic difficulty in providing a
decorous ladies’ room for a voting-place, than for a post-office or a
railway-station; and it is as simple a thing to vote a ticket as to buy
one. This being thus easily practicable, all men will desire to provide
it. And the example of the first-class carriages shows that the parties
will vie with each other in these pleasing arrangements. They will be
driven to it, whether they wish it or not. The party which has most
consistently and resolutely kept woman away from the ballot-box will be
the very party compelled, for the sake of self-preservation, to make her
“rights” agreeable to her when once she gets them. A few stupid or noisy
men may indeed try to make the polls unattractive to her, the very first
time; but the result of this little experiment will be so disastrous
that the offenders will be sternly suppressed by their own
party-leaders, before another election-day comes. It will soon become
clear, that, of all possible ways of losing votes, the surest lies in
treating women rudely.
Lucy Stone tells a story of a good man in Kansas, who, having done all
he could to prevent women from being allowed to vote on school
questions, was finally comforted, when that measure passed, by the
thought that he should at least secure his wife’s vote for a pet
schoolhouse of his own. Election-day came, and the newly enfranchised
matron showed the most culpable indifference to her privileges. She made
breakfast as usual, went about her housework, and did on that perilous
day precisely the things that her anxious husband had always predicted
that women never would do under such circumstances. His hints and advice
found no response; and nothing short of the best pair of horses and the
best wagon finally sufficed to take the farmer’s wife to the polls. I am
not the least afraid that women will find voting a rude or disagreeable
arrangement. There is more danger of their being treated too well, and
being too much attacked and allured by these cheap cajoleries. But women
are pretty shrewd, and can probably be trusted to go to the polls, even
in first-class carriages.
LXXXV.
EDUCATION _via_ SUFFRAGE.
I know a rich bachelor of large property, who fatigues his friends by
perpetual denunciations of every thing American, and especially of
universal suffrage. He rarely votes; and I was much amazed, when the
popular vote was to be taken on building an expensive schoolhouse, to
see him go to the polls, and vote in the affirmative. On being asked his
reason, he explained, that, while we labored under the calamity of
universal (male) suffrage, he thought it best to mitigate its evils by
educating the voters. In short, he wished, as Mr. Lowe said in England
when the last Reform Bill passed, “to prevail upon our future masters to
learn their alphabets.”
These motives may not be generous; but the schoolhouses, when they are
built, are just as useful. Even girls get the benefit of them, though
the long delay in many places before girls got their share came in part
from the want of this obvious stimulus. It is universal male suffrage
that guarantees schoolhouse and school. The most selfish man understands
that argument: “We must educate the masses, if it is only to keep them
from our throats.”
But there is a wider way in which suffrage guarantees education. At
every election-time, political information is poured upon the whole
voting community, till it is deluged. Presses run night and day to print
newspaper extras; clerks sit up all night to frank congressional
speeches; the most eloquent men in the community expound the most
difficult matters to the ignorant. Of course each party affords only its
own point of view; but every man has a neighbor who is put under
treatment by some other party, and who is constantly attacking all who
will listen to his provoking and pestilent counter-statements. All the
common-school education of the United States does not equal the
education of election-day; and, as in some States elections are held
very often, this popular university seems to be kept in session almost
the whole year round. The consequence is a remarkable average popular
knowledge of political affairs,—a training which American women now
miss, but which will come to them with the ballot.
And in still another way, there will be an education coming to woman
from the right of suffrage. It will come from her own sex, proceeding
from highest to lowest. We often hear it said, that, after
enfranchisement, the more educated women will not vote, while the
ignorant will. But Mrs. Howe admirably pointed out, at a Philadelphia
convention, that, the moment women have the ballot, it will become the
pressing duty of the more educated women, even in self-protection, to
train the rest. The very fact of the danger will be a stimulus to duty,
with women, as it already is with men.
It has always seemed to me rather childish, in a man of superior
education, or talent, or wealth, to complain that when election-day
comes he has no more votes than the man who plants his potatoes or puts
in his coal. The truth is, that under the most thorough system of
universal suffrage the man of wealth or talent or natural leadership has
still a disproportionate influence, still casts a hundred votes where
the poor or ignorant or feeble man throws but one. Even the outrages of
New York elections turned out to be caused by the fact that the leading
rogues had used their brains and energy, while the men of character had
not. When it came to the point, it was found that a few caricatures by
Nast and a few columns of figures in the Times were more than a match
for all the repeaters of the ring. It is always so. Andrew Johnson, with
all the patronage of the nation, had not the influence of “Nasby” with
his one newspaper. The whole Chinese question was perceptibly and
instantly modified when Harte wrote “The Heathen Chinee.”
These things being so, it indicates feebleness or dyspepsia when an
educated man is heard whining, about election-time, with his fears of
ignorant voting. It is his business to enlighten and control that
ignorance. With a voice and a pen at his command, with a town-hall in
every town for the one, and a newspaper in every village for the other,
he has such advantages over his ignorant neighbors that the only doubt
is whether his privileges are not greater than he deserves. For one, in
writing for the press, I am impressed by the undue greatness, not by the
littleness, of the power I wield. And what is true of men will be true
of women. If the educated women of America have not brains or energy
enough to control, in the long-run, the votes of the ignorant women
around them, they will deserve a severe lesson, and will be sure, like
the men in New York, to receive it. And thenceforward they will educate
and guide that ignorance, instead of evading or cringing before it.
But I have no fear about the matter. It is a libel on American women to
say that they will not go anywhere or do any thing which is for the good
of their children and their husbands. Travel West on any of our great
lines of railroad, and see what women undergo in transporting their
households to their new homes. See the watching and the feeding, and the
endless answers to the endless questions, and the toil to keep little
Sarah warm, and little Johnny cool, and the baby comfortable. What a
hungry, tired, jaded, forlorn mass of humanity it is, as the sun rises
on it each morning, in the soiled and breathless railway-car! Yet that
household group is America in the making; those are the future kings and
queens, the little princes and princesses, of this land. Now, is the
mother who has undergone for the transportation of these children all
this enormous labor, to shrink at her journey’s end from the slight
additional labor of going to the polls to vote whether those little ones
shall have schools or rumshops? The thought is an absurdity. A few fine
ladies in cities will fear to spoil their silk dresses, as a few foppish
gentlemen now fear for their broadcloth. But the mass of intelligent
American women will vote, as do the mass of men.
LXXXVI.
“OFF WITH HER HEAD!”
In “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” the Queen of Hearts settles all
disputes at croquet by ordering somebody’s head to be taken off. It is
the old royal remedy. The Roman Tarquin, when his son sent to ask him
the best way of reducing a discontented city, merely slashed off the
heads of the tallest poppies, as he walked in the garden. The young man
took the hint, and performed a similar process upon the leading
citizens.
Every year makes it plainer that the community must imitate Tarquinius
Superbus and the Queen of Hearts if it wishes to get rid of the woman
suffrage movement. So long as every woman favors it whenever she gets
her head above a certain point, so long those conspicuous heads must be
recognized. You must either put them on the voting-list, or on the list
ordered for immediate execution: there is no middle ground.
There are the women who write books, for instance. When authorship first
came up among the women of America, they not only claimed nothing more
than the mere privilege of having brains, but they almost apologized for
that. Their early authors, as Mrs. Child and Mrs. Leslie, had a way of
preparing a cookery-book apiece, as a propitiation to the tyrant man,
before proceeding to what is called “the intellectual feast.” They held,
with Miss Bremer, that you can get any thing you like from a man if you
will only have something nice to pop into his mouth. Mrs. Sarah J. Hale,
in her “Woman’s Record,” published twenty years ago, adopted a different
form of submission. She seemed very anxious to prove that women had
taken a prominent part in the world; but also to show, that, if they
were only forgiven for this, they would never, never, never make
themselves any more prominent. It is but within a few years that
literary women have dared to go beyond literature, and ask for a vote
besides.
But now, with what a terrible confidence they come to the demand for
suffrage when they acquire voice enough to make themselves heard! Mrs.
Stowe helps to free Uncle Tom in his cabin, and then strikes for the
freedom of women in her own “Hearth and Home.” Mrs. Howe writes the
“Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and keeps on writing more battle-hymns in
behalf of her own sex. Miss Alcott not only delineates “Little Women,”
but wishes to emancipate them. Miss Phelps desires to see the “Gates
Ajar” for her sex, both in heaven and on earth. Mrs. Child, who risked
her literary popularity in early life by her “Appeal for that Class of
Americans called Africans,” was as ready to risk it again for that class
of Americans called women.
Of course, there are social circles in America where all desire for
leadership on the part of literary women would be repudiated; nay, where
the fact that a woman had written a book would imply a loss of caste.
When Karl von Beethoven signed himself “_Gutsbesitzer_,” or “land
proprietor,” his brother Ludwig signed himself “_Hirnbesitzer_,” or
“proprietor of a brain.” Posterity remembers only the great musical
composer; yet, doubtless, to the society of that period, the stupid
elder brother was by far the greater man. Such perversities cannot be
helped; but I write for reasonable people. Among the women who dance the
German, woman suffrage may be just now unpopular; but the women who
translate German will in the long-run have most influence, and their
verdict seems to tend the other way. It is said that the leading dancer
among the young men of one of our cities was transformed into an equally
prominent lawyer by a single suggestion from an elder sister, that it
was “better to be a man of books than a man of toes.” It is likely that
America will be more influenced at last by the women of heads than by
the women of heels.
LXXXVII.
FOLLOW YOUR LEADERS.
“There go thirty thousand men,” shouted the Portuguese, as Wellington,
with a few staff-officers, rode along the mountain-side. The action of
the leaders’ minds, in any direction, has a value out of all proportion
to their numbers. In a campaign, there is a council of officers,—Grant
and Sherman and Sheridan perhaps. They are but a trifling minority, yet
what they plan the whole army will do; and such is the faith in a real
leader, that, were all the restraints of discipline for the moment
relaxed, the rank and file would still follow his judgment. What a few
general officers see to be the best to-day, the sergeants and corporals
and private soldiers will usually see to be best to-morrow.
In peace, also, there is a silent leadership; only that in peace, as
there is more time to spare, the leaders are expected to persuade the
rank and file, instead of commanding them. Yet it comes to the same
thing in the end. The movement begins with certain guides, and, if you
wish to know the future, keep your eye on them. If you wish to know what
is already decided, ask the majority; but, if you wish to find out what
is likely to be done next, ask the leaders.
It is constantly said that the majority of women do not yet desire to
vote, and it is true. But, to find out whether they are likely to wish
for it, we must keep our eyes on the women who lead their sex. The
representative women,—those who naturally stand for the rest, those most
eminent for knowledge and self-devotion,—how do they view the thing? The
rank and file do not yet demand the ballot, you say; but how is it with
the general officers?
Now, it is a remarkable fact, about which those who have watched this
movement for twenty years can hardly be mistaken, that almost any woman
who reaches a certain point of intellectual or moral development will
presently be found desiring the ballot for her sex. If this be so, it
predicts the future. It is the judgment of Grant and Sherman and
Sheridan as against that of the average private soldier of the Two
Hundredth Infantry. Set aside, if you please, the specialists of this
particular agitation,—those who were first known to the public through
its advocacy. There is no just reason why they should be set aside, yet
concede that for a moment. The fact remains that the ablest women in the
land—those who were recognized as ablest in other spheres, before they
took this particular duty upon them—are extremely apt to assume this
cross when they reach a certain stage of development.
When Margaret Fuller first came forward into literature, she supposed
that literature was all she wanted. It was not till she came to write
upon woman’s position that she discovered what woman needed. Clara
Barton, driving her ambulance or her supply-wagon at the battle’s edge,
did not foresee, perhaps, that she should make that touching appeal,
when the battle was over, imploring her own enfranchisement from the
soldiers she had befriended. Lydia Maria Child, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, Louisa Alcott, came to the claim for the ballot earlier
than a million others, because they were the intellectual leaders of
American womanhood. They saw farthest, because they were in the highest
place. They were the recognized representatives of their sex before they
gave in their adhesion to the new demand. Their judgment is as the
judgment of the council of officers; while Flora McFlimsey’s opinion is
as the opinion of John Smith, unassigned recruit. But, if the generals
make arrangements for a battle, the chance is that John Smith will have
to take a hand in it, or else run away.
It is a rare thing for the petition for suffrage from any town to
comprise the majority of women in that town. It makes no difference: if
there are few women in the town who want to vote, there is as much
propriety in their voting as if there were ten millions, so long as the
majority are equally protected in their right to stay at home. But, when
the names of petitioners come to be weighed as well as counted, the
character, the purity, the intelligence, the social and domestic value,
of the petitioners, is seldom denied. The women who wish to vote are not
the idle, the ignorant, the narrow-minded, or the vicious; they are not
“the dangerous classes:” they represent the best class in the community,
when tried by the highest standard. They are the natural leaders. What
they now see to be right, will also be perceived even by the foolish and
the ignorant by and by.
In a poultry-yard in spring, when the first brood of ducklings go
toddling to the water-side, no doubt all the younger or feebler broods,
just hatched out of similar eggs, think these innovators dreadfully
mistaken. “You are out of place,” they feebly pipe. “See how happy we
are in our safe nests. Perhaps, by and by, when properly introduced into
society, we may run about a little on land, but to swim!—never!”
Meanwhile their elder kindred are splashing and diving in ecstasy; and,
so surely as they are born ducklings, all the rest will swim in their
turn. The instinct of the first duck solves the problem for all the
rest. It is a mere question of time. Sooner or later, all the broods in
the most conservative yard will follow their leaders.
LXXXVIII.
HOW TO MAKE WOMEN UNDERSTAND POLITICS.
An English member of Parliament said in a speech, some years ago, that
the stupidest man had a clearer understanding of political questions
than the brightest woman. He did not find it convenient to say what must
be the condition of a nation which for many years has had a woman for
its sovereign; but he certainly said bluntly what many men feel. It is
not indeed very hard to find the source of this feeling. It is not
merely that women are inexperienced in questions of finance or
administrative practice, for many men are equally ignorant of these. But
it is undoubtedly true of a large class of more fundamental
questions,—as, for instance, of some now pending at Washington,—which
even many clear-headed women find it hard to understand, while men of
far less general training comprehend them entirely. Questions of the
distribution of power, for instance, between the executive, judicial,
and legislative branches of government,—or between the United States
government and those of the separate States,—belong to the class I mean.
Many women of great intelligence show a hazy indistinctness of views
when the question arises whether it is the business of the General
Government to preserve order at the voting-places at a congressional
election, for instance, as the Republicans hold; or whether it should be
left absolutely in the hands of the State officials, as the Democrats
maintain. Most women would probably say that so long as order was
preserved, it made very little difference who did it. Yet, if one goes
into a shoe-shop or a blacksmith’s shop, one may hear just these
questions discussed in all their bearings by uneducated men, and it will
be seen that they involve a principle. Why is this difference? Does it
show some constitutional inferiority in women, as to this particular
faculty?
The question is best solved by considering a case somewhat parallel. The
South Carolina negroes were considered very stupid, even by many who
knew them; and they certainly were densely ignorant on many subjects.
Put face to face with a difficult point of finance legislation, I think
they would have been found to know even less about it than I do. Yet the
abolition of slavery was held in those days by many great statesmen to
be a subject so difficult that they shrank from discussing it; and
nevertheless I used to find that these ignorant men understood it quite
clearly in all its bearings. Offer a bit of sophistry to them, try to
blind them with false logic on this subject, and they would detect it as
promptly, and answer it as keenly, as Garrison or Phillips would have
done; and, indeed, they would give very much the same answers. What was
the reason? Not that they were half wise and half stupid; but that they
were dull where their own interests had not trained them, and they were
sharp and keen where their own interests were concerned.
I have no doubt that it will be so with women when they vote. About some
things they will be slow to learn; but, about all that immediately
concerns themselves, they will know more at the very beginning than many
wise men have learned since the world began. How long it took for
English-speaking men to correct, even partially, the iniquities of the
old common law!—but a parliament of women would have set aside at a
single sitting the alleged right of the husband to correct his wife with
a stick no bigger than his thumb. It took the men of a certain State of
this Union a good many years to see that it was an outrage to confiscate
to the State one-half the property of a man who died childless, leaving
his widow only the other half; but a legislature of women would have
annihilated that enormity by a single day’s work. I have never seen
reason to believe that women on general questions would act more wisely
or more conscientiously, as a rule, than men: but self-preservation is a
wonderful quickener of the brain; and, in all questions bearing on their
own rights and opportunities as women, it is they who will prove shrewd
and keen, and men who will prove obtuse, as indeed they have usually
been.
Another point that adds force to this is the fact that wherever women,
by their special position, have more at stake than usual in public
affairs, even as now organized, they are apt to be equal to the
occasion. When the men of South Carolina were ready to go to war for the
“States-Rights” doctrines of Calhoun, the women of that State had also
those doctrines at their fingers’-ends. At Washington, where politics
make the breath of life, you will often find the wives of members of
Congress following the debates, and noting every point gained or lost,
because these are matters in which they and their families are
personally concerned; and, as for that army of women employed in the
“departments” of the government, they are politicians every one, because
their bread depends upon it.
The inference is, that, if women as a class are now unfitted for
politics, it is because they have not that pressure of personal interest
and responsibility by which men are unconsciously trained. Give this,
and self-interest will do the rest; aided by that power of conscience
and affection which is certainly not less in them than in men, even if
we claim no more. A young lady of my acquaintance opposed woman suffrage
in conversation on various grounds, one of which was that it would, if
enacted, compel her to read the newspapers, which she greatly disliked.
I pleaded that this was not a fatal objection; since many men voted
“early and often” without reading them, and in fact without knowing how
to read at all. She said, in reply, that this might do for men, but that
women were far more conscientious, and, if they were once compelled to
vote, they would wish to know what they were voting for. This seemed to
me to contain the whole philosophy of the matter; and I respected the
keenness of her suggestion, though it led me to an opposite conclusion.
LXXXIX.
“INFERIOR TO MAN, AND NEAR TO ANGELS.”
If it were anywhere the custom to disfranchise persons of superior
virtue because of their virtue, and to present others with the ballot,
simply because they had been in the State Prison,—then the exclusion of
women from political rights would be a high compliment, no doubt. But I
can find no record in history of any such legislation, unless so far as
it is contained in the doubtful tradition of the Tuscan city of Pistoia,
where men are said to have been ennobled as a punishment for crime.
Among us crime may often be a covert means of political prominence, but
it is not the ostensible ground; nor are people habitually struck from
the voting-lists for performing some rare and eminent service, such as
saving human life, or reading every word of a Presidential message. If a
man has been President of the United States, we do not disfranchise him
thenceforward; if he has been governor, we do not declare him
thenceforth ineligible to the office of United States senator. On the
contrary, the supposed reward of high merit is to give higher civic
privileges. Sometimes these are even forced on unwilling recipients, as
when Plymouth Colony in 1633 imposed a fine of twenty pounds on any one
who should refuse the office of governor.
It is utterly contrary to all tradition and precedent, therefore, to
suppose that women have been hitherto disfranchised because of any
supposed superiority. Indeed, the theory is self-annihilating, and
involves all supporters in hopeless inconsistency. Thus the Southern
slaveholders were wont to argue that a negro was only blest when a
slave, and there was no such inhumanity as to free him. Then, if a slave
happened to save his master’s life, he was rewarded by emancipation
immediately, amid general applause. The act refuted the theory. And so,
every time we have disfranchised a rebel, or presented some eminent
foreigner with the freedom of a city, we have recognized that
enfranchisement, after all, means honor, and disfranchisement implies
disgrace.
I do not see how any woman can help a thrill of indignation, when she
first opens her eyes to the fact that it is really contempt, not
reverence, that has so long kept her sex from an equal share of legal,
political, and educational rights. In spite of the duty paid to
individual women as mothers, in spite of the reverence paid by the
Greeks and the Germanic races to certain women as priestesses and
sibyls, the fact remains that this sex has been generally recognized, in
past ages of the human race, as stamped by hopeless inferiority, not by
angelic superiority. This is carried so far, that a certain taint of
actual inferiority is held to attach to women, in barbarous nations.
Among certain Indian tribes, the service of the gods is defiled if a
woman but touches the implements of sacrifice; and a Turk apologizes to
a Christian physician for the mention of the women of his family, in the
phrases used to soften the mention of any degrading creature. Mr. Leland
tells us, that, among the English gypsies, any object that a woman
treads upon, or sweeps with the skirts of her dress, is destroyed or
made away with in some way, as unfit for use. In reading the history of
manners, it is easy to trace the steps from this degradation up to the
point now attained, such as it is. Yet even the habit of physiological
contempt is not gone, as readers of late controversies on “Sex in
Education” know full well; and I do not see how any one can read history
without seeing, all around us, in society, education, and politics, the
tradition of inferiority. Many laws and usages which in themselves might
not strike all women as intrinsically worth striving for—as the
exclusion of women from colleges or from the ballot-box—assume great
importance to a woman’s self-respect, when she sees in these the plain
survival of the same contempt that once took much grosser forms.
And it must be remembered that in civilized communities the cynics, who
still frankly express this utter contempt, are better friends to women
than the flatterers, who conceal it in the drawing-room, and only utter
it freely in the lecture-room, the club, and the North American Review.
Contempt at least arouses pride and energy. To be sure, in the face of
history, the contemptuous tone in regard to women seems to me untrue,
unfair, and dastardly; but, like any other extreme injustice, it leads
to re-action. It helps to awaken women from that shallow dream of
self-complacency into which flattery lulls them. There is something
tonic in the manly arrogance of Fitzjames Stephen, who derides the
thought that the marriage-contract can be treated as in any sense a
contract between equals; but there is something that debilitates in the
dulcet counsel given by an anonymous gentleman, in an old volume of the
Ladies’ Magazine that lies before me, “She ought to present herself as a
being made to please, to love, and to seek support; _a being inferior to
man, and near to angels._”
OBJECTIONS TO SUFFRAGE.
“When you were weak and I was strong, I toiled for you. Now you are
strong and I am weak. Because of my work for you, I ask your aid. I ask
the ballot for myself and my sex. As I stood by you, I pray you stand by
me and mine.”—CLARA BARTON.
[Appeal to the returned soldiers of the United States, written from
Geneva, Switzerland, by Clara Barton, invalided by long service in the
hospitals and on the field during the civil war.]
XC.
THE FACT OF SEX.
It is constantly said that the advocates of woman suffrage ignore the
fact of sex. On the contrary, they seem to me to be the only people who
do not ignore it.
Were there no such thing as sexual difference, the wrong done to woman
by disfranchisement would be far less. It is precisely because her
traits, habits, needs, and probable demands are distinct from those of
man, that she is not, never was, never can, and never will be, justly
represented by him. It is not merely that a vast number of human
individuals are disfranchised; it is not even because in many of our
States the disfranchisement extends to a majority, that the evil is so
great; it is not merely that we disfranchise so many units and tens: but
we exclude a special element, a peculiar power, a distinct interest,—in
a word, a sex.
Whether this sex is more or less wise, more or less important, than the
other sex, does not affect the argument: it is a sex, and, being such,
is more absolutely distinct from the other than is any mere race from
any other race. The more you emphasize the fact of sex, the more you
strengthen our argument. If the white man cannot justly represent the
negro,—although the two races are now so amalgamated that not even the
microscope can always decide to which race one belongs,—how impossible
that one sex should stand in legislation for the other sex!
This is so clear, that, so soon as it is stated, there is a shifting of
the ground. “But consider the danger of introducing the sexual influence
into legislation!” ... Then we are sure to be confronted with the case
of Miss Vinnie Ream, the sculptor. See how that beguiling damsel cajoled
all Congress into buying poor statues! they say. If one woman could do
so much, how would it be with one hundred? Precisely the Irishman’s
argument against the use of pillows: he had put one feather on a rock,
and found it a very uncomfortable support. Grant, for the sake of
argument, that Miss Ream gave us poor art; but what gave her so much
power? Plainly, that she was but a single feather. Congress being
composed exclusively of men, the mere fact of her sex gave her an
exceptional and dangerous influence. Fill a dozen of the seats in
Congress with women, and that danger at least will be cancelled. The
taste in art may be no better; but an artist will no more be selected
for being a pretty girl than now for being a pretty boy. So in all such
cases. Here, as everywhere, it is the advocate of woman suffrage who
wishes to recognize the fact of sex, and guard against its perils.
It is precisely so in education. Believing boys and girls to be unlike,
and yet seeing them to be placed by the Creator on the same planet and
in the same family, we hold it safer to follow his method. As they are
born to interest each other, to stimulate each other, to excite each
other, it seems better to let this impulse work itself off in a natural
way,—to let in upon it the fresh air and the daylight, instead of
attempting to suppress and destroy it. In a mixed school, as in a
family, the fact of sex presents itself as an unconscious, healthy,
mutual stimulus. It is in the separate schools that the healthy relation
vanishes, and the thought of sex becomes a morbid and diseased thing.
This observation first occurred to me when a pupil and a teacher in
boys’ boarding-schools years ago: there was such marked superiority as
to sexual refinement in the day-scholars, who saw their sisters and the
friends of their sisters every day. All later experience of our
public-school system has confirmed this opinion. It is because I believe
the distinction of sex to be momentous, that I dread to see the sexes
educated apart.
The truth of the whole matter is, that Nature will have her
rights—innocently if she can, guiltily if she must; and it is a little
amusing that the writer of an ingenious paper on the other side, called
“Sex in Politics,” in an able New York journal, puts our case better
than I can put it, before he gets through, only that he is then speaking
of wealth, not women: “Anybody who considers seriously what is meant by
the conflict between labor and capital, of which we are only just
witnessing the beginning, and what is to be done _to give money
legitimately that influence on legislation which it now exercises
illegitimately_, must acknowledge at once that the next generation will
have a thorny path to travel.” The Italics are my own. Precisely what
this writer wishes to secure for money, we claim for the disfranchised
half of the human race,—open instead of secret influence; the English
tradition instead of the French; women as rulers, not as kings’
mistresses; women as legislators, not merely as lobbyists; women
employing in legitimate form that power which they will otherwise
illegitimately wield. This is all our demand.
XCI.
HOW WILL IT RESULT?
“It would be a great convenience, my hearers,” said old Parson
Withington of Newbury, “if the moral of a fable could only be written at
the beginning of it, instead of the end. But it never is.” Commonly the
only thing to be done is to get hold of a few general principles, hold
to those, and trust that all will turn out well. No matter how
thoroughly a reform may have been discussed,—negro-emancipation or
free-trade, for instance,—it is a step in the dark at last, and the
detailed results never turn out to be precisely according to the
programme.
An “esteemed correspondent,” who has written some of the best things yet
said in America in behalf of the enfranchisement of woman, writes
privately to express some solicitude, since, as she thinks, we are not
ready for it yet. “I am convinced,” she writes, “of the abstract right
of women to vote; but all I see of the conduct of the existing women,
into whose hands this change would throw the power, inclines me to hope
that this power will not be conceded till education shall have prepared
a class of women fit to take the responsibilities.”
Gradual emancipation, in short!—for fear of trusting truth and justice
to take care of themselves. Who knew, when the negroes were set free,
whether they would at first use their freedom well, or ill? Would they
work? would they avoid crimes? would they justify their freedom? The
theory of education and preparation seemed very plausible. Against that,
there was only the plain theory which Elizabeth Heyrick first announced
to England,—“Immediate, unconditional emancipation.” “The best
preparation for freedom is freedom.” What was true of the negroes then
is true of women now.
“The lovelier traits of womanhood,” writes earnestly our correspondent,
“simplicity, faith, guilelessness, unfit them to conduct public affairs,
where one must deal with quacks and charlatans.... We are not all at
once ‘as gods, knowing good and evil;’ and the very innocency of our
lives, and the habits of pure homes, unfit us to manage a certain class
who will flock to this standard.”
But the basis of all republican government is in the assumption that
good is ultimately stronger than evil. If we once abandon this, our
theory has gone to pieces, at any rate. If we hold to it, good women are
no more helpless and useless than good men. The argument that would here
disfranchise women has been used before now to disfranchise clergymen. I
believe that in some States they are still disfranchised; and, if they
are not, it is partly because good is found to be as strong as evil,
after all, and partly because clergymen are not found to be so
angelically good as to be useless. I am very confident that both these
truths will be found to apply to women also.
Whatever else happens, we may be pretty sure that one thing will. The
first step towards the enfranchisement of women will blow to the winds
the tradition of the angelic superiority of women. Just as surely as
women vote, we shall have occasionally women politicians, women
corruptionists, and women demagogues. Conceding, for the sake of
courtesy, that none such now exist, they will be born as
instantaneously, after enfranchisement, as the frogs begin to pipe in
the spring. Those who doubt it ignore human nature; and, if they are not
prepared for this fact, they had better consider it in season, and take
sides accordingly. In these pages, at least, they have been warned.
What then? Suppose women are not “as gods, knowing good and evil:” they
are not to be emancipated as gods, but as fallible human beings. They
are to come out of an ignorant innocence, that may be only weakness,
into a wise innocence that will be strength. It is too late to remand
American women into a Turkish or Jewish tutelage: they have emerged too
far not to come farther. In a certain sense, no doubt, the butterfly is
safest in the chrysalis. When the soft thing begins to emerge, the world
certainly seems a dangerous place; and it is hard to say what will be
the result of the emancipation. But when she is once half out, there is
no safety for the pretty creature but to come the rest of the way, and
use her wings.
XCII.
“I HAVE ALL THE RIGHTS I WANT.”
When Dr. Johnson had published his English Dictionary, and was asked by
a lady how he chanced to make a certain mistake that she pointed out, he
answered, “Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.” I always feel disposed to
make the same comment on the assertion of any woman that she has all the
rights she wants. For every woman is, or may be, or might have been, a
mother. And when she comes to know that even now, in many parts of the
Union, a married mother has no legal right to her child, I should think
her tongue would cleave to her mouth before she would utter those
foolish words again.
All the things I ever heard or read against slavery did not fix in my
soul such a hostility to it as a single scene in a Missouri slave-market
some twenty-five years ago. As I sat there, a purchaser came in to buy a
little girl to wait on his wife. Three little sisters were brought in,
from eight to twelve years old: they were mulattoes, with sweet, gentle
manners; they had evidently been taken good care of, and their
pink-calico frocks were clean and whole. The gentleman chose one of
them, and then asked her, good-naturedly enough, if she did not wish to
go with him. She burst into tears, and said, “I would rather stay with
my mother.” But her tears were as powerless, of course, as so many salt
drops from the ocean.
That was all. But all the horrors of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the stories
told me by fugitive slaves, the scarred backs I afterwards saw by dozens
among colored recruits, did not impress me as did that hour in the jail.
The whole probable career of that poor, wronged, motherless, shrinking
child passed before me in fancy. It seemed to me that a man must be
utterly lost to all manly instincts who would not give his life to
overthrow such a system. It seemed to me that the woman who could
tolerate, much less defend it, could not herself be true, could not be
pure, or must be fearfully and grossly ignorant.
You acquiesce, fair lady. You say it was horrible indeed, but, thank
God! it is past. Past? Is it so? Past, if you please, as to the law of
slavery, but, as to the legal position of woman, still a fearful
reality. It is not twelve years since a scene took place in a Boston
court-room, before Chief-Justice Chapman, which was worse, in this
respect, than that scene in St. Louis, inasmuch as the mother was
present when the child was taken away, and the wrong was sanctioned by
the highest judicial officer of the State. Two little girls, who had
been taken from their mother by their guardian, their father being dead,
had taken refuge with her against his wishes; and he brought them into
court under a writ of _habeas corpus_, and the court awarded them to him
as against their mother. “The little ones were very much affected,” says
the Boston Herald, “by the result of the decision which separated them
from their mother; and force was required to remove them from the
court-room. The distress of the mother was also very evident.”
There must have been some special reason, you say, for such a seeming
outrage: she was a bad woman. No: she was “a lady of the highest
respectability.” No charge was made against her: but, being left a
widow, she had married again; and for that, and that only, so far as
appears, the court took from her the guardianship of her own
children,—bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh, the children for
whom she had borne the deepest physical agony of womanhood,—and awarded
them to somebody else.
You say, “But her second husband might have misused the children.”
Might? So the guardian might, and that where they had no mother to
protect them. Had the father been left a widower, he might have made a
half-dozen successive marriages, have brought stepmother after
stepmother to control these children, and no court could have
interfered. The father is recognized before the law as the natural
guardian of the children. The mother, even though she be left a widow,
is not. The consequence is a series of outrages of which only a few
scattered instances come before the public; just as in slavery, out of a
hundred little girls sold away from their parents, only one case might
ever be mentioned in any newspaper.
This case led to an alteration of the law in Massachusetts, but the same
thing might yet happen in some States of the Union. The possibility of a
single such occurrence shows that there is still a fundamental wrong in
the legal position of woman. And the fact that most women do not know
it, only deepens the wrong—as Dr. Channing said of the contentment of
the Southern slaves. The mass of men, even of lawyers, pass by such
things, as they formerly passed by the facts of slavery.
There is no lasting remedy for these wrongs, except to give woman the
political power to protect herself. There never yet existed a race, nor
a class, nor a sex, which was noble enough to be trusted with political
power over another sex, or class, or race. It is for self-defence that
woman needs the ballot. And, in view of a single such occurrence as I
have given, I charge that woman who professes to have “all the rights
she wants,” either with a want of all feeling of motherhood, or with
“ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.”
XCIII.
“SENSE ENOUGH TO VOTE.”
There is one special point on which men seem to me rather insincere
toward women. When they speak to women, the objection made to their
voting is usually that they are too angelic. But when men talk to each
other, the general assumption is, that women should not vote because
they have not brains enough—or, as old Theophilus Parsons wrote a
century ago, have not “a sufficient acquired discretion.”
It is an important distinction. Because, if women are too angelic to
vote, they can only be fitted for it by becoming more wicked, which is
not desirable. On the other hand, if there is no objection but the want
of brains, then our public schools are equalizing that matter fast
enough. Still, there are plenty of people who have never got beyond this
objection. Listen to the first discussion that you encounter among men
on this subject, wherever they may congregate. Does it turn upon the
question of saintliness, or of brains? Let us see.
I travelled the other day upon the Boston and Providence Railroad with a
party of mechanics, mostly English and Scotch. They were discussing this
very question, and, with the true English habit, thought it was all a
matter of property. Without it a woman certainly should not vote, they
said; but they all favored, to my surprise, the enfranchisement of women
of property. “As a general rule,” said the chief speaker, “a woman
that’s got property has got sense enough to vote.”
There it was! These foreigners, who had found their own manhood by
coming to a land which not only the Pilgrim Fathers but the Pilgrim
Mothers had settled, and subdued, and freed for them, were still ready
to disfranchise most of the daughters of those mothers, on the ground
that they had not “sense enough to vote.” I thanked them for their blunt
truthfulness, so much better than the flattery of most of the
native-born.
My other instance shall be a conversation overheard in a railway-station
near Boston, between two intelligent citizens, who had lately listened
to Anna Dickinson. “The best of it was,” said one, “to see our minister
introduce her.”—“Wonder what the Orthodox churches would have said to
that ten years ago?” said the other. “Never mind,” was the answer.
“Things have changed. What I think is, it’s all in the bringing up. If
women were brought up just as men are, they’d have just as much brains.”
(Brains again!) “That’s what Beecher says. Boys are brought up to do
business, and take care of themselves: that’s where it is. Girls are
brought up to dress and get married. Start ’em alike! That’s what
Beecher says. Start ’em alike, and see if girls haven’t got just as much
brains.”
“Still harping on my daughter,” and on the condition of her brains! It
is on this that the whole question turns, in the opinion of many men.
Ask ten men their objections to woman suffrage. One will plead that
women are angels. Another fears discord in families. Another points out
that women cannot fight,—he himself being very likely a non-combatant.
Another quotes St. Paul for this purpose,—not being, perhaps, in the
habit of consulting that authority on any other point. But with the
others, very likely, every thing will turn on the question of brains.
They believe, or think they believe, that women have not sense enough to
vote. They may not say so to women, but they habitually say it to men.
If you wish to meet the common point of view of masculine voters, you
must find it here.
It is fortunate that it is so. Of all points, this is the easiest to
settle; for every intelligent woman, even if she be opposed to woman
suffrage, helps to settle it. Every good lecture by a woman, every good
book written by one, every successful business enterprise carried on,
helps to decide the question. Every class of girls that graduates from
every good school helps to pile up the argument on this point. And the
vast army of women, constituting nine out of ten of the teachers in our
American schools, may appeal as logically to their pupils, and settle
the argument based on brains. “If we had sense enough to educate you,”
they may say to each graduating class of boys, “we have sense enough to
vote beside you.”
XCIV.
AN INFELICITOUS EPITHET.
“The ladies actively working to secure the co-operation of their sex
in caucuses and citizens’ conventions are not actuated by love of
notoriety, and are not, therefore, to be classed with the absolute
woman suffragists.”—_Boston Daily Transcript_, Sept. 1, 1879.
When the eloquent colored abolitionist, Charles Remond, once said upon
the platform that George Washington, having been a slaveholder, was a
villain, Wendell Phillips remonstrated by saying, “Charles, the epithet
is not felicitous.” Reformers are apt to be pelted with epithets quite
as ill-chosen. How often has the charge figured in history, that they
were “actuated by love of notoriety”! The early Christians, it was
generally believed, took a positive pleasure in being thrown to the
lions, under the influence of this motive; and at a later period there
was a firm conviction that the Huguenots consented readily to being
broken on the wheel, or sawed in pieces between two boards, feeling
amply rewarded by the pleasure of being talked about. During the whole
anti-slavery movement, while the abolitionists were mobbed, fined, and
imprisoned,—while they were tabooed by good society, depleted of their
money, kept out of employment, checked in their advancement, by the mere
fact of their abolitionism,—there never was a moment when their sole
motive was not considered by many persons to be the love of notoriety.
Why should the advocates of woman suffrage expect any different
treatment now?
It is not necessary, in order to dispose of this charge, to claim that
all reformers are heroes or saints. Even in the infancy of any reform,
it takes along with it some poor material; and unpleasant traits are
often developed by the incidents of the contest. Doubtless many
reformers attain to a certain enjoyment of a fight, at last: it is one
of the dangerous tendencies which those committed to this vocation must
resist. But, so far as my observation goes, those who engage in reform
for the sake of notoriety generally hurt the reform so much that they
render it their chief service when they leave it; and this happy
desertion usually comes pretty early in their career. The besetting sin
of reformers is not, so far as I can judge, the love of notoriety, but
the love of power and of flattery within their own small circle,—a
temptation quite different from the other, both in its origin and its
results.
Notoriety comes so soon to a reformer, that its charms, whatever they
may be, soon pall upon the palate, just as they do in case of a popular
poet or orator, who is so used to seeing his name in print that he
hardly notices it. I suppose there is no young person so modest that he
does not, on first seeing his name in a newspaper, cut out the passage
with a certain tender solicitude, and perhaps purchase a few extra
copies of the fortunate journal. But when the same person has been
battered by a score or two of years in successive unpopular reforms, I
suppose that he not only would leave the paper uncut or unpurchased, but
would hardly take the pains even to correct a misstatement, were it
asserted that he had inherited a fortune or murdered his grandmother.
The moral is, that the love of notoriety is soon amply filled, in a
reformer’s experience, and that he will not, as a rule, sacrifice home
and comfort, money and friends, without some stronger inducement. This
is certainly true of most of the men who have interested themselves in
this particular movement, the “weak-minded men,” as the reporters, with
witty antithesis, still describe them; and it must be much the same with
the “strong-minded women” who share their base career.
And it is to be remembered, above all, that, considered as an engine for
obtaining notoriety, the woman suffrage agitation is a great waste of
energy. The same net result could have been won with far less
expenditure in other ways. There is not a woman connected with it who
could not have achieved far more real publicity as a manager of charity
fairs or as a sensation letter-writer. She could have done this, too,
with far less trouble, without the loss of a single “genteel” friend,
without forfeiting a single social attention, without having a single
ill-natured thing said about her—except perhaps that she bored people, a
charge to which the highest and lowest forms of prominence are equally
open. Nay, she might have done even more than this, if notoriety was her
sole aim: for she might have become a “variety” minstrel or a female
pedestrian; she might have written a scandalous novel; she might have
got somebody to aim at her that harmless pistol, which has helped the
fame of so many a wandering actress, while its bullet somehow never hits
any thing but the wall. All this she might have done, and obtained a
notoriety beyond doubt. Instead of this, she has preferred to prowl
about, picking up a precarious publicity by giving lectures to willing
lyceums, writing books for eager publishers, organizing schools, setting
up hospitals, and achieving for her sex something like equal rights
before the law. Either she has shown herself, as a seeker after
notoriety, to be a most foolish or ill-judging person,—or else, as was
said of Washington’s being a villain, “the epithet is not felicitous.”
XCV.
THE ROB ROY THEORY.
The Saturday Review, in an article which denounces all equality in
marriage-laws and all plans of woman-suffrage, admits frankly the
practical obstacles in the way of the process of voting. “Possibly the
presence of women as voters would tend still further to promote order
than has been done by the ballot.” It plants itself wholly on one
objection, which goes far deeper, thus:—
“If men choose to say that women are not their equals, women have
nothing to do but to give in. Physical force, the ultimate basis of
all society and all government, must be on the side of the men; and
those who have the key of the position will not consent permanently
to abandon it.”
It is a great pleasure when an opponent of justice is willing to fall
back thus frankly upon the Rob Roy theory:—
“The good old rule
Sufficeth him, the simple plan
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can.”
It is easy, I think, to show that the theory is utterly false, and that
the basis of civilized society is not physical force, but, on the
contrary, brains.
In the city where the Saturday Review is published, there are three
regiments of “Guards” which are the boast of the English army, and are
believed by their officers to be the finest troops in the world. They
have deteriorated in size since the Crimean war; but I believe that the
men of one regiment still average six feet two inches in height; and I
am sure that nobody ever saw them in line, without noticing the contrast
between these magnificent men and the comparatively puny officers who
command them. These officers are from the highest social rank in
England, the governing classes; and, if it were the whole object of this
military organization to give a visible proof of the utter absurdity of
the Saturday Review’s theory, it could not be better done. There is no
country in Europe, I suppose, where the hereditary aristocracy is
physically equal to that of England, or where the intellectual class has
so good a physique. But set either the House of Lords or the Saturday
Review contributors upon a hand-to-hand fight against an equal number of
“navvies” or “costermongers,” and the patricians would have about as
much chance as a crew of Vassar girls in a boat-race with Yale or
Harvard. Take the men of England alone, and it is hardly too much to say
that physical force, instead of being the basis of political power in
any class, is apt to be found in inverse ratio to it. In case of
revolution, the strength of the governing class in any country is not in
its physical, but in its mental power. Rank and money, and the power to
influence and organize and command, are merely different modifications
of mental training, brought to bear by somebody.
In our country, without class distinctions, the same truth can be easily
shown. Physical power lies mainly in the hands of the masses: wherever a
class or profession possesses more than its numerical share of power, it
has usually less than its proportion of physical vigor. This is easily
shown from the vast body of evidence collected during our civil war. In
the volume containing the medical statistics of the Provost Marshal
General’s Bureau, we have the tabulated reports of about 600,000 persons
subject to draft, and of about 500,000 recruits, substitutes, and
drafted men; showing the precise physical condition of more than a
million men.
It appears, that, out of the whole number examined, rather more than 257
in each 1,000 were found unfit for military service. It is curious to
see how generally the physical power among these men is in inverse ratio
to the social and political prominence of the class they represent. Out
of 1,000 unskilled laborers, for instance, only 348 are physically
disqualified; among tanners, only 216; among iron-workers, 189. On the
other hand, among lawyers, 544 out of 1,000 are disqualified; among
journalists, 740; among clergymen, 954. Grave divines are horrified at
the thought of admitting women to vote, when they cannot fight; though
not one of twenty of their own number is fit for military duty, if he
volunteered. Of the editors who denounce woman suffrage, only about one
in four could himself carry a musket; while, of the lawyers who fill
Congress, the majority could not be defenders of their country, but
could only be defended. If we were to distribute political power with
reference to the “physical basis” which the Saturday Review talks about,
it would be a wholly new distribution, and would put things more
hopelessly upside down than did the worst phase of the French Commune.
If, then, a political theory so utterly breaks down when applied to men,
why should we insist on resuscitating it in order to apply it to women?
The truth is, that, as civilization advances, the world is governed more
and more unequivocally by brains; and whether those brains are deposited
in a strong body or a weak one becomes a matter of less and less
importance. But it is only in the very first stage of barbarism that
mere physical strength makes mastery; and the long head has controlled
the long arm since the beginning of recorded time.
And it must be remembered that even these statistics very imperfectly
represent the case. They do not apply to the whole male sex, but
actually to the picked portion only, to the men presumed to be of
military age, excluding the very old and the very young. Were these
included, the proportion unfit for military duty would of course be far
greater. Moreover, it takes no account of courage or cowardice,
patriotism or zeal. How much all these considerations tell upon the
actual proportion, may be seen from the fact, that in the town where I
am writing, for instance, out of some twelve thousand inhabitants and
about three thousand voters, there are only some three hundred who
actually served in the civil war,—a number too small to exert a
perceptible influence on any local election. When we see the community
yielding up its voting power into the hands of those who have actually
done military service, it will be time enough to exclude women for not
doing such service. If the alleged physical basis operates as an
exclusion of all non-combatants, it should surely give a monopoly to the
actual combatants.
XCVI.
THE VOTES OF NON-COMBATANTS.
The tendency of modern society is not to concentrate power in the hands
of the few, but to give a greater and greater share to the many. Read
Froissart’s Chronicles, and Scott’s novels of chivalry, and you will see
how thoroughly the difference between patrician and plebeian was then a
difference of physical strength. The knight, being better nourished and
better trained, was apt to be the bodily superior of the peasant, to
begin with; and this strength was re-enforced by armor, weapons, horse,
castle, and all the resources of feudal warfare. With this greater
strength went naturally the assumption of greater political power. To
the heroes of “Ivanhoe,” or “The Fair Maid of Perth,” it would have
seemed as absurd that yeomen and lackeys should have any share in the
government, as it would seem to the members in an American legislature
that women should have any such share. In a contest of mailed knights,
any number of unarmed men were but so many women. As Sir Philip Sidney
said, “The wolf asketh not how many the sheep may be.”
But time and advancing civilization have tended steadily in one
direction. “He giveth power to the weak, and to them who have no might
He increaseth strength.” Every step in the extension of political rights
has consisted in opening them to a class hitherto humbler. From kings to
nobles, from nobles to burghers, from burghers to yeomen; in short, from
strong to weak, from high to low, from rich to poor. All this is but the
unconscious following-out of one sure principle,—that legislation is
mainly for the protection of the weak against the strong, and that for
this purpose the weak must be directly represented. The strong are
already protected by their strength: it is the weak who need all the
vantage-ground that votes and legislatures can give them. The feudal
chiefs were stronger without laws than with them. “Take care of
yourselves in Sutherland,” was the anxious message of the old
Highlander: “the law has come as far as Tain.” It was the peaceful
citizen who needed the guaranty of law against brute force.
But can laws be executed without brute force? Not without a certain
amount of it, but that amount under civilization grows less and less.
Just in proportion as the masses are enfranchised, statutes execute
themselves without crossing bayonets. “In a republic,” said De
Tocqueville, “if laws are not always respectable, they are always
respected.” If every step in freedom has brought about a more peaceable
state of society, why should that process stop at this precise point?
Besides, there is no possibility in nature of a political division in
which all the men shall be on one side and all the women on the other.
The mutual influence of the sexes forbids it. The very persons who hint
at such a fear refute themselves at other times, by arguing that “women
will always be sufficiently represented by men,” or that “every woman
will vote as her husband thinks, and it will merely double the numbers.”
As a matter of fact, the law will prevail in all English-speaking
nations: a few men fighting for it will be stronger than many fighting
against it; and, if those few have both the law and the women on their
side, there will be no trouble.
The truth is, that, in this age, _cedant arma togæ_: it is the civilian
who rules on the throne or behind it, and who makes the fighting-men his
mere agents. Yonder policeman at the corner looks big and formidable: he
protects the women, and overawes the boys. But away in some corner of
the City Hall, there is some quiet man, out of uniform, perhaps a
consumptive or a dyspeptic or a cripple, who can overawe the burliest
policeman by his authority as city marshal or as mayor. So an army is
but a larger police; and its official head is that plain man at the
White House, who makes or unmakes, not merely brevet-brigadiers, but
major-generals in command,—who can by the stroke of the pen convert the
most powerful man of the army into the most powerless. Take away the
occupant of the position, and put in a woman, and will she become
impotent because her name is Elizabeth or Maria Theresa? It is brains
that more and more govern the world; and whether those brains be on the
throne, or at the ballot-box, they will soon make the owner’s sex a
subordinate affair. If woman is also strong in the affections, so much
the better. “Win the hearts of your subjects,” said Lord Burleigh to
Queen Elizabeth, “and you will have their hands and purses.”
War is the last appeal, and happily in these days the rarest appeal, of
statesmanship. In the multifarious other duties that make up
statesmanship, we cannot spare the brains, the self-devotion, and the
enthusiasm, of woman. One of the most important treaties of modern
history, the peace of Cambray, in 1529, was negotiated, after previous
attempts had failed, by two women,—Margaret, aunt of Charles V., and
Louisa, mother of Francis I. Voltaire said that Christina of Sweden was
the only sovereign of her time who maintained the dignity of the throne
against Mazarin and Richelieu. Frederick the Great said that the Seven
Years’ War was waged against three women,—Elizabeth of Russia, Maria
Theresa, and Mme. Pompadour. There is nothing impotent in the
statesmanship of women when they are admitted to exercise it: they are
only powerless for good when they are obliged to obtain by wheedling and
flattery a sway that should be recognized, responsible, and limited.
XCVII.
“MANNERS REPEAL LAWS.”
There is in Boswell’s Life of Johnson a correspondence which is well
worth reading by both advocates and opponents of woman suffrage.
Boswell, who was of an old Scotch family, had a difference of opinion
with his father about an entailed estate which had descended to them.
Boswell wished the title so adjusted as to cut off all possibility of
female heirship. His father, on the other hand, wished to recognize such
a contingency. Boswell wrote to Johnson in 1776 for advice, urging a
series of objections, physiological and moral, to the inheritance of a
family estate by a woman; though, as he magnanimously admits, “they
should be treated with great affection and tenderness, and always
participate of the prosperity of the family.”
Dr. Johnson, for a wonder, took the other side, defended female
heirship, and finally summed up thus: “It cannot but occur that women
have natural and equitable claims as well as men, and these claims are
not to be capriciously or lightly superseded or infringed. When fiefs
inspired military service, it is easily discerned why females could not
inherit them; but the reason is at an end. _As manners make laws, so
manners likewise repeal them._”
This admirable statement should be carefully pondered by those who hold
that suffrage should be only co-extensive with military duty. The
position that woman cannot properly vote because she cannot fight for
her vote efficiently, is precisely like the position of feudalism and of
Boswell, that she could not properly hold real estate because she could
not fight for it. Each position may have had some plausibility in its
day, but the same current of events has made each obsolete. Those who in
1881 believe in giving woman the ballot argue precisely as Dr. Johnson
did in 1776. Times have changed, manners have softened, education has
advanced, public opinion now acts more forcibly; and the reference to
physical force, though still implied, is implied more and more remotely.
The political event of the age, the overthrow of American slavery, would
not have been accomplished without the “secular arm” of Grant and
Sherman, let us agree; but neither would it have been accomplished
without the moral power of Garrison the non-resistant, and Harriet
Beecher Stowe the woman. When the work is done, it is unfair to
disfranchise any of the participants. Dr. Johnson was right: “When fiefs
[or votes] implied military service, it is easily discerned why women
should not inherit [or possess] them; but the reason is at an end. As
manners make laws, so manners likewise repeal them.”
Under the feudal system it would have been absurd that women should hold
real estate, for the next armed warrior could dispossess her. By Gail
Hamilton’s reasoning, it is equally absurd now: “One man is stronger
than one woman, and ten men are stronger than ten women; and the
nineteen millions of men in this country will subdue, capture, and
execute or expel the nineteen millions of women just as soon as they set
about it.” Very well: why, then, do not all the landless men in a town
unite, and take away the landed property of all the women? Simply
because we now live in civilized society and under a reign of law;
because those men’s respect for law is greater than their appetite for
property; or, if you prefer, because even those landless men know that
their own interest lies, in the long-run, on the side of law. It will be
precisely the same with voting. When any community is civilized up to
the point of enfranchising women, it will be civilized up to the point
of sustaining their vote, as it now sustains their property-rights, by
the whole material force of the community. When the thing is once
established, it will no more occur to anybody that a woman’s vote is
powerless because she cannot fight, than it now occurs to anybody that
her title to real estate is invalidated by the same circumstance.
Woman is in the world; she cannot be got rid of: she must be a serf or
an equal; there is no middle ground. We have outgrown the theory of
serfdom in a thousand ways, and may as well abandon the whole. Women
have now a place in society: their influence will be exerted, at any
rate, in war and in peace, legally or illegally; and it had better be
exerted in direct, legitimate, and responsible methods, than in ways
that are dark, and by tricks that have not even the merit of being
plain.
XCVIII.
KILKENNY ARGUMENTS.
It always helps a good cause when its opponents are in the position of
the famous Kilkenny cats, and mutually eat each other up. In the
anti-slavery movement, it was justly urged that the slaves might
possibly be (as slaveholders alleged) a race of petted children, whose
hearts could not possibly be alienated from their masters; or they might
be (as was also alleged by slaveholders) a race of fiends, whom a
whisper could madden: but they could not well be both. Every claim that
the negro was happy was stultified by that other claim, that the South
was dwelling on a barrel of gunpowder, and that the mildest anti-slavery
tract meant fire and explosion. The twin arguments saved abolitionists a
great deal of trouble. Either by itself would have required an answer;
but the two answered each other,—devoured each other, in fact, like the
Kilkenny cats.
So, whenever the advocates of woman suffrage are assailed on the ground
that women are too superstitious, and will, if enfranchised, be governed
by religion and the Church alone, there is always sure to come in some
obliging advocate with his “Besides, the tendency of the movement is to
utter lawlessness, to the destruction of religion, the marriage-vows,
the home”—and all the rest of it. The boy in the story is hardly more
selfcontradictory, when, in answer to his friend’s appeal for his
jack-knife, he replies, “I haven’t any. Besides, I want to use it.”
Here, for instance, is Mr. Nathan N. Withington of Newbury, Mass., who
in an address on woman suffrage, while waiving many arguments against
it, plants himself strongly on the ground that it must be fatal to the
family. “No one whose opinion is worth reckoning, with whom I have
talked on the matter, ever denied entirely that the logical result of
the movement was what is called free love.” My inference would be, in
passing, that my old neighbor Mr. Withington must confine himself to a
very narrow circle, in the way of conversation; or, that he must find
nobody’s opinion “worth reckoning” if it differs from his own. Certainly
I have talked with hardly an advocate of woman suffrage in New England
who would not deny entirely—and with a good deal of emphasis—any such
assumptions as he here makes. But let that go: the subject has already
been discussed far more than its intrinsic importance required; and
convention after convention has taken unnecessary pains to refute a
charge more baseless than the slaveholders’ fears of insurrection. What
I wish to point out is, that such charges have, in one way, great value:
they precisely neutralize and utterly annihilate the equally baseless
terror of “Too superstitious.”
If it is true, as is sometimes alleged, that women are constitutionally
under the dominion of religion and the Church, then it is pretty sure,
that, under these auspices, the moral restraints of the community, as
marriage and the home, will be maintained. If it is true on the other
hand, as Mr. Withington honestly thinks, that the tendency of woman
suffrage is to create a deluge that shall sweep away the home, then it
is certain that all vestiges of churchly superstition will be swamped in
the process. The logical outcome of the movement may be, if you please,
to establish the Spanish Inquisition or to bring back the horrors of the
French Revolution, but it seems clear that it cannot simultaneously
bring both. The advocates of both theories are equally sincere,
doubtless, in their predictions of alarm; but one set of alarmists or
the other set of alarmists must be wofully disappointed when the time
comes. And, if either, why not both?
The simple fact is, that whosoever draws upon his imagination, for
possible disasters from any particular measure, has a great fund at his
disposal, whether he looks right or left. He has always this advantage
over the practical reformer, that whereas the claims of the reformer
are, or should be, definite, coherent, practical, the opponent can, if
he wishes, have the whole cloudy domain of possibility to draw upon: he
can marshal an army in the atmosphere, while the practical reformer must
stay on earth. It is a comfort when two of these nebulous armies of
imaginary obstacles fight in the air, as in the present case, like the
shadowy hosts in Kaulbach’s great cartoon; and so destroy one another,
bringing back clear sky.
Woman needs the ballot for self-respect and self-protection, and to do
her share for the education and moral safety of the children she bears.
This is enough to begin with. In seeking after this we have firm
foothold. The old Eastern fable describes a certain man as finding a
horse-shoe. His neighbor soon begins to weep and wail, because, as he
justly points out, the man who has found a horse-shoe may some day find
a horse, and may shoe him; and the neighbor’s child may some day go so
near the horse’s heels as to be kicked, and die; and then the two
families may quarrel and fight, and several valuable lives be lost
through that finding of a horse-shoe. The gradual advancement of women
must meet many fancies as far-fetched as this, and must see them
presented as arguments; and we must be very grateful if they prove
Kilkenny arguments, and destroy one another.
XCIX.
WOMEN AND PRIESTS.
The chief reason given by the Italian radicals for not supporting woman
suffrage was the alleged readiness of women to accept the control of the
priests. The same objection has, before now, been heard in other
countries,—in France, England, and America. John Bright, especially,
made it the ground of his opposition to a movement in which several
members of his family have been much engaged. The same point of view was
presented, in this country, several years ago, by Mr. Abbot of the
Index. But to how much, after all, does this objection amount?
No one doubts that the religious sentiment seems stronger in women than
in men; but it must be remembered that this sentiment has been
laboriously encouraged by men, while the field of action allowed to
women has been sedulously circumscribed, and her intellectual education
every way restricted. It is no wonder if, under these circumstances, she
has gone where she has been welcomed, and not where she has been
snubbed. Priests were glad to hail her as a saint, while legislators and
professors joined in repelling her as a student or a reformer. What
wonder that she turned from the study or the law-making of the world to
its religion? But in all this, whose was the fault,—hers, or those who
took charge of her? If she did not trust the clergy, who alone
befriended her, whom should she trust?
But observe that the clergy of all ages, in concentrating the strength
of woman on her religious nature, have summoned up a power that they
could not control. When they had once lost the confidence of those ruled
by this mighty religious sentiment, it was turned against them. In the
Greek and Roman worship, women were the most faithful to the altars of
the gods; yet, when Christianity arose, the foremost martyrs were women.
In the Middle Ages women were the best Catholics, but they were
afterwards the best Huguenots. It was a woman, not a man, who threw her
stool at the offending minister’s head in a Scotch kirk; it was a woman
who made the best Quaker martyr on Boston Common. And, from vixenish
Jenny Geddes to high-minded Mary Dyer, the whole range of womanly
temperament responds as well to the appeal of religious freedom as of
religious slavery. It is religion that woman needs, men say; but they
omit to see that the strength of her religious sentiment is seen when
she resists her clerical advisers as well as when she adores them or
pets them. Frances Wright and Lucretia Mott are facts to be considered,
quite as much as the matrons and maids who work ecclesiastical slippers,
and hold fancy fairs to send their favorite clergymen to Europe.
At any rate, if the clergy still retain too much of their control, the
evil is not to be corrected by leaving the whole matter in their hands.
The argument itself must be turned the other way. Women need the mental
training of science to balance the over-sympathy of religion; they need
to participate in statesmanship to develop the practical side of their
lives. We are outgrowing the sarcasm of the Frenchman who said that in
America there were but two amusements,—politics for the men, and
religion for the women. When both women and men learn to mingle the two
more equally, both politics and religion will become something more than
an amusement.
C.
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC BUGBEAR.
“Those who wish the Roman Catholic Church to subvert our school
system, control legislation, and become a mighty political force,
cannot do better than labor day and night for woman suffrage. This,
it is true, is opposed to every principle and tradition of that
great church, which nevertheless would reap from it immense
benefits. The priests have little influence over a considerable part
of their male flock; but their power is great over the women, who
would repair to the polls at the word of command, with edifying
docility and zeal.”—FRANCIS PARKMAN _on “The Woman Question” in
North American Review_, September, 1879.
I am surprised that a man like Mr. Parkman, who has done so much to
vindicate the share of Roman Catholic priests and laymen in the early
settlement of this continent, should have introduced this paragraph into
a serious discussion of what he himself recognizes as an important
question. Here is the case. One-half the citizens of every State are
unrepresented in the government: the ordinary means of republican
influence are withheld from them, as they are from idiots and criminals.
It is the rights and claims of these women, as women, that statesmanship
has to consider. Whether their enfranchisement will help the nation or
the race, as a whole, is legitimate matter for argument. Whether their
votes will temporarily tell for this or that party or sect, is a wholly
subordinate matter, that ought not to be obtruded into a serious debate.
If republican government is not strong enough to stand on its own
principles, if its fundamental theory must be interpreted and modified
so that it shall work for or against a particular church or class of
citizens, then it is a worse failure than even Mr. Parkman represents
it. The “woman question,” whenever it is settled, must be settled on its
own merits, with no more reference to Roman Catholics, as such, than to
Mormons or Chinese. Having said this before, when advocates of woman
suffrage were presenting the movement as an anti-Catholic movement, I
can consistently repeat it now, when the movement is charged with being
unconsciously pro-Catholic in its tendencies. It is not its business to
be for or against any religion: its business is with principles.
The paragraph throws needless odium on a large and an inseparable
portion of the community,—the Roman Catholics. “Aliens to our blood and
race!” cried indignantly the orator Shiel, in the House of Commons, when
some one had thus characterized the Irish. “Heavens! have I not, upon
the battle-field, seen those aliens do their duty to England?” It is too
soon after the great civil war to stigmatize, even by implication, a
class on whom we were then glad to call. Whole regiments of Roman
Catholics were then called into the service; Roman Catholic chaplains
were commissioned, than whom none did their duty better, or in a less
sectarian spirit. In case of another war, all these would be summoned to
duty again. We have no right, in reasoning on American institutions, to
treat this religious element as something by itself, an alien member,
not to be assimilated, virtually antagonistic to republican government.
It has never proved to be so in Switzerland, where about half the
cantons are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, and yet the federal union is
preserved, and the republican feeling is as strong in these cantons as
in any other.
No doubt there would be great objections to the domination of any single
religious body, and the more thorough its organization the worse; but
this is an event in the last degree improbable in any State of the
Union. It is doubtful if even the Roman Catholic Church will ever again
be relatively so powerful as in the early years of our government, when
it probably had a majority of the population in three States,—Maryland,
Louisiana, and Kentucky,—whereas now it has lost it in all. It may be
many years before we again see, as we saw for a quarter of a century, a
Roman Catholic chief justice of the United States (Taney). If we ever
see this church come into greater power, it will be because it shows, as
in England, such tact and discretion and moderation as to disarm
opposition, and earn the right to influence. The common feeling and
prejudice of American people is, and is likely to remain, overwhelmingly
against it; and none know this better than the Roman Catholic priests
themselves. They know very well that nothing would more exasperate this
feeling than to marshal women to the polls like sheep; and this alone
would prevent their doing it, were there no other obstacle.
The abolitionists used to say that the instinct of any class of
oppressors was infallible, and that if the slaveholders, for instance,
dreaded a certain policy, that policy was the wise one for the slaves.
If the priests are such oppressors as Mr. Parkman thinks, they must have
the instinct of that class; and their present unanimous opposition to
woman suffrage is sufficient proof that it promises no good to them. How
easy it is to misinterpret their policy, has been shown in the school
suffrage matter. It was confidently stated that a certain priest in the
city where I live, had demanded from the pulpit a certain sum—two
thousand dollars—to pay the poll-taxes for women voters. Most people
believed it; yet, when it came to the point, not a Roman Catholic woman
applied for assessment. It will be thus with Mr. Parkman’s fears. Women
will ultimately vote,—as indeed, he seems rather to expect; and the
effect will be to make them more intelligent, and therefore less likely
to obey the will of any man. Roman Catholic men are learning to think
for themselves; and the best way to make women do so is to treat them as
intelligent and responsible beings.
CI.
DANGEROUS VOTERS.
One of the few plausible objections brought against women’s voting is
this: that it would demoralize the suffrage by letting in very dangerous
voters; that virtuous women would not vote, and vicious women would. It
is a very unfounded alarm.
For, in the first place, our institutions rest—if they have any basis at
all—on this principle, that good is stronger than evil, that the
majority of men really wish to vote rightly, and that only time and
patience are needed to get the worst abuses righted. How any one can
doubt this, who watches the course of our politics, I do not see. In
spite of the great disadvantage of having masses of ignorant foreign
voters to deal with,—and of native black voters, who have been purposely
kept in ignorance,—we certainly see wrongs gradually righted, and the
truth by degrees prevail. Even the one great, exceptional case of New
York City has been reached at last; and the very extent of the evil has
brought its own cure. Now, why should this triumph of good over evil be
practicable among men, and not apply to women also?
It must be either because women, as a class, are worse than men,—which
will hardly be asserted,—or because, for some special reason, bad women
have an advantage over good women such as has no parallel in the other
sex. But I do not see how this can be. Let us consider.
It is certain that good women are not less faithful and conscientious
than good men. It is generally admitted that those most opposed to
suffrage will very soon, on being fully enfranchised, feel it their duty
to vote. They may at first misuse the right through ignorance, but they
certainly will not shirk it. It is this conscientious habit on which I
rely without fear. Never yet, when public duty required, have American
women failed to meet the emergency; and I am not afraid of it now.
Moreover, when they are once enfranchised and their votes are needed,
all the men who now oppose or ridicule the demand for suffrage will
begin to help them to exercise it. When the wives are once enfranchised,
you may be sure that the husbands will not neglect those of their own
household: they will provide them with ballots, vehicles, and policemen,
and will contrive to make the voting-places pleasanter than many
parlors, and quieter than some churches.
On the other hand, it seems altogether probable that the very worst
women, so far from being ostentatious in their wickedness upon
election-day, will, on the contrary, so disguise and conceal themselves
as to deceive the very elect, and, if it were possible, the very
policemen. For whatever party they may vote, they will contribute to
make the voting-places as orderly as railway-stations. These covert ways
are the very habit of their lives, at least by daylight; and the women
who have of late done the most conspicuous and open mischief in our
community have done it, not in their true character as evil, but, on the
contrary, under a mask of elevated purpose.
That women, when they vote, will commit their full share of errors, I
have always maintained. But that they will collectively misuse their
power, seems to me out of the question; and that the good women are
going to stay at home, and let bad women do the voting, appears quite as
incredible. In fact, if they do thus, it is a fair question whether the
epithets “good” and “bad” ought not, politically speaking, to change
places. For it naturally occurs to every one, on election-day, that the
man who votes, even if he votes wrong, is really a better man, so far as
political duties go, than the very loftiest saint who stays at home and
prays that other people may vote right. And it is hard to see why it
should be otherwise with women.
CII.
HOW WOMEN WILL LEGISLATE.
It is often said, that, when women vote, their votes will make no
difference in the count, because they will merely duplicate the votes of
their husbands and brothers. Then these same objectors go on and predict
all sorts of evil things, for which women will vote, quite apart from
their husbands and brothers. Moreover, the evils thus predicted are apt
to be diametrically opposite. Thus Goldwin Smith predicts that women
will be governed by priests, and then goes on to predict that women will
vote to abolish marriage; not seeing, that, as Professor Cairnes has
pointed out, these two predictions destroy each other.
On the other hand, I think that the advocates of woman suffrage often
err by claiming too much,—as that all women will vote for peace, for
total abstinence, against slavery, and the rest. It seems better to rest
the argument on general principles, and not to seek to prophesy too
closely. The only thing which I feel safe in predicting is, that woman
suffrage will be used, as it should be, for the protection of woman.
Self-respect and self-protection,—these are, as has been already said,
the two great things for which woman needs the ballot.
It is not the nature of things, I take it, that a class politically
subject can obtain justice from the governing class. Not the least of
the benefits gained by political equality for the colored people of the
South is, that the laws now generally make no difference of color in
penalties for crime. In slavery times, there were dozens of crimes which
were punished more severely by the statute if committed by a slave or a
free negro, than if done by a white. I feel very sure that under the
reign of impartial suffrage we should see fewer such announcements as
this, which I cut from a late New York “Evening Express:”—
“Last night Capt. Lowery, of the Twenty-seventh Precinct, made a
descent upon the dance-house in the basement of 96 Greenwich Street,
and arrested fifty-two men and eight women. The entire batch was
brought before Justice Flammer, at the Tombs Police Court, this
morning. Louise Maud, the proprietress, was held in five hundred
dollars bail to answer at the Court of General Sessions. _The
fifty-two men were fined three dollars each, all but twelve paying
at once; and the eight women were fined ten dollars each, and sent
to the Island for one month._”
The Italics are my own. When we reflect that this dance-house, whatever
it was, was unquestionably sustained for the gratification of men,
rather than of women; when we consider that every one of these fifty-two
men came there, in all probability, by his own free will, and to spend
money, not to earn it; and that the undoubted majority of the women were
driven there by necessity or betrayal, or force or despair,—it would
seem that even an equal punishment would have been cruel injustice to
the women. But when we observe how trifling a penalty was three dollars
each to these men, whose money was sure to go for riotous living in some
form, and forty of whom had the amount of the fine in their pockets; and
how hopelessly large an amount was ten dollars each to women who did
not, probably, own even the clothes they wore, and who were to be sent
to prison for a month in addition,—we see a kind of injustice which
would stand a fair chance of being righted, I suspect, if women came
into power. Not that they would punish their own sex less severely;
probably they would not: but they would put men more on a level as to
the penalty.
It may be said that no such justice is to be expected from women;
because women in what is called “society” condemn women for mere
imprudence, and excuse men for guilt. But it must be remembered, that in
“society” guilt is rarely a matter of open proof and conviction, in case
of men: it is usually a matter of surmise; and it is easy for either
love or ambition to set the surmise aside, and to assume that the worst
reprobate is “only a little wild.” In fact, as Margaret Fuller pointed
out years ago, how little conception has a virtuous woman as to what a
dissipated young man really is! But let that same woman be a Portia, in
the judgment-seat, or even a legislator or a voter, and let her have the
unmistakable and actual offender before her, and I do not believe that
she will excuse him for a paltry fine, and give the less guilty woman a
penalty more than quadruple.
Women will also be sure to bring special sympathy and intelligent
attention to the wrongs of children. Who can read without shame and
indignation this report from “The New York Herald”?
THE CHILD-SELLING CASE.
Peter Hallock, committed on a charge of abducting Lena Dinser, a
young girl thirteen years old, whom, it was alleged, her father,
George Dinser, had sold to Hallock for purposes of prostitution, was
again brought yesterday before Judge Westbrook in the Supreme Court
Chambers, on the writ of habeas-corpus previously obtained by Mr.
William F. Howe, the prisoner’s counsel. Mr. Howe claimed that
Hallock could not be held on either section of the statute for
abduction. Under the first section the complaint, he insisted,
should set forth that the child was taken contrary to the wish and
against the consent of her parents. On the contrary, the evidence,
he urged, showed that the father was a willing party. Under the
second section, it was contended that the prisoner could not be
held, as there was no averment that the girl was of previous chaste
character. Judge Westbrook, a brief counter argument having been
made by Mr. Dana, held that the points of Mr. Howe were well taken,
and ordered the prisoner’s discharge.
Here was a father, who, as the newspapers allege, had previously sold
two other daughters, body and soul, and against whom the evidence seemed
to be in this case clear. Yet through the defectiveness of the statute,
or the remissness of the prosecuting attorney, he goes free, without
even a trial, to carry on his infamous traffic for other children. Grant
that the points were technically well taken and irresistible,—though
this is by no means certain,—it is very sure that there should be laws
that should reach such atrocities with punishment, whether the father
does or does not consent to his child’s ruin; and that public sentiment
should compel prosecuting officers to be as careful in framing their
indictments where human souls are at stake as where the question is of
dollars only. It is upon such matters that the influence of women will
make itself felt in legislation.
CIII.
WARNED IN TIME.
As a reform advances, it draws in more and more people who are not
immaculate. Such people are often found, indeed, among the very pioneers
of reform; and their number naturally increases as the reform grows
popular. The larger a coral island grows, the more driftwood attaches
itself; and the coral insects might as well stipulate that every
floating log should be sound and stanch, as a reform that all its
converts should be in the highest degree reputable. We expect, sooner or
later, to be in the majority. But we certainly do not expect to find all
that majority saints.
Yet many good people are constantly distressing themselves, and writing
letters of remonstrance, public or private, to editors, because this or
that unscrupulous person chooses to join our army. If we select that
person for a general, we are doubtless to be held responsible; but for
nothing else. People may indeed say—and justly—that every such ally
brings suspicion upon us. Very likely; then we must work harder to avert
suspicion. People may urge that no reform was ever watched so anxiously
as this, for its effect on female character especially, and that a
single discreditable instance may do incalculable harm. No doubt. And
yet, after all, we are to work with human means and under human
limitations; and God accomplishes much good in this world through rather
poor instruments—such as you and me.
I have no manner of doubt that the great majority of those who take up
this movement will do it from tolerably pure motives, and will, on the
whole, do credit to it by their personal demeanor. But of course there
will be exceptions,—hypocrites, self-seekers, and black sheep generally.
Horace Mann used to say that the clergy were, on the whole, pure men;
but that some of the worst men in every age and place were always found
among the clergy also,—taking that disguise as a cloak for wickedness.
For “clergy” in this case read “reformers.”
And there is this special good done, in a reform, by the sinners who
take hold of it, that they warn us in time that all reform is limited by
the imperfections of average humanity. The theory of the Roman Catholic
Church is a sublime one,—that every pope should be a saint; but it is
limited by the practical difficulty of securing a sufficient supply of
the article. So it is with the woman suffrage movement. “Would it not be
desirable,” write enthusiastic correspondents, “that every woman in this
sacred enterprise should have a heart free from guile?” Perhaps not. The
plan looks attractive certainly; but would there not be this objection,
that, could you enlist this regiment of perfect beings, they would give
a very false impression of the sex for which they stand? If women are
not all saints,—if they are capable, like men, of selfishness and
ambition, malice and falsehood,—it is of great importance that we should
be warned in time. Better see their faults now, and enfranchise them
with our eyes open, than enfranchise them as angels, and then be
dismayed when they turn out to be human beings.
There is no use in carrying this reform, or any other, on mistaken
expectations. Multitudes of persons are looking to woman suffrage,
mainly as a means of elevating politics. Every woman who awakens
distrust or contempt damps the ardor of these persons. It is a
misfortune that they should be discouraged; but, if they have idealized
woman too much, they may as well be disenchanted first as last. Woman
does not need the ballot chiefly that she may take it in her hands, and
elevate man; but she needs it primarily for her own defence, just as men
need it. Which will use it best, who can say? Women are doubtless less
sensual than men; but the sensual vices are the very least of the vices
that corrupt our politics. Selfishness, envy, jealousy, vanity,
cowardice, bigotry, caste-prejudice, recklessness of assertion,—these
are the traits that demoralize our public men. Is there any reason to
believe that women are, on the whole, more free from these? If not, we
may as well know it by visible, though painful, examples. Knowing it, we
may take a reasonable view of woman, and legislate for her as she is. I
do not believe with Mrs. Croly, that “women are nearly all treacherous
and cruel to each other;” but I believe that they are, as Gen. Saxton
described the negroes, “intensely human,” and that we may as well be
warned of this in time.
CIV.
INDIVIDUALS _vs._ CLASSES.
As the older arguments against woman suffrage are abandoned, we hear
more and more of the final objection, that the majority of women have
not yet expressed themselves on the subject. It is common for such
reasoners to make the remark, that if they knew a given number of
women—say fifty, or a hundred, or five hundred—who honestly wished to
vote, they would favor it. Produce that number of unimpeachable names,
and they say that they have reconsidered the matter, and must demand
more,—perhaps ten thousand. Bring ten thousand, and the demand again
rises. “Prove that the majority of women wish to vote, and they shall
vote.”—“Precisely,” we say: “give us a chance to prove it by taking a
vote;” and they answer, “By no means.”
And, in a certain sense, they are right. It ought not to be settled that
way,—by dealing with woman as a class, and taking the vote. The
agitators do not merely claim the right of suffrage for her as a class:
they claim it for each individual woman, without reference to any other.
Class legislation—as Mary Ann in Bret Harte’s “Lothaw” says of Brook
Farm—“is a thing of the past.” If there is only one woman in the nation
who claims the right to vote, she ought to have it.
In Oriental countries all legislation is for classes, and in England it
is still mainly so. A man is expected to remain in the station in which
he is born; or, if he leaves it, it is by a distinct process, and he
comes under the influence, in various ways, of different laws. If the
iniquities of the “Contagious Diseases” act in England, for instance,
had not been confined in their legal application to the lower social
grades, the act would never have passed. It was easy for men of the
higher classes to legislate away the modesty of women of the lower
classes; but if the daughter of an earl could have been arrested, and
submitted to a surgical examination at the will of any policeman, as the
daughter of a mechanic now can, the law would not have stood a day. So,
through all our slave States, there was class legislation for every
person of negro blood: the laws of crime, of punishment, of testimony,
were all adapted to classes, not individuals. Emancipation swept this
all away, in most cases: classes ceased to exist before the law, so far
as men at least were concerned; there were only individuals. The more
progress, the less class in legislation. We claim the application of
this principle as rapidly as possible to women.
Our community does not refuse permission for women to go unveiled till
it is proved that the majority of women desire it; it does not even ask
that question: if one woman wishes to show her face, it is allowed. If a
woman wishes to travel alone, to walk the streets alone, the police
protects her in that liberty. She is not thrust back into her house with
the reproof, “My dear madam, at this particular moment the overwhelming
majority of women are indoors: prove that they all wish to come out, and
you shall come.” On the contrary, she comes forth at her own sweet will:
the policeman helps her tenderly across the street, and waves back with
imperial gesture the obtrusive coal-cart. Some of us claim for each
individual woman, in the same way, not merely the right to go shopping,
but to go voting; not merely to show her face, but to show her hand.
There will always be many women, as there are many men, who are
indifferent to voting. For a time, perhaps always, there will be a
larger percentage of this indifference among women. But the natural
right to a share in the government under which one lives, and to a voice
in making the laws under which one may be hanged,—this belongs to each
woman as an individual; and she is quite right to claim it as she needs
it, even though the majority of her sex still prefer to take their
chance of the penalty, without perplexing themselves about the law. The
demand of every enlightened woman who asks for the ballot—like the
demand of every enlightened slave for freedom—is an individual demand;
and the question whether they represent the majority of their class has
nothing to do with it. For a republic like ours does not profess to deal
with classes, but with individuals; since “the whole people covenants
with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, for the
common good,” as the constitution of Massachusetts says.
And, fortunately, there is such power in an individual demand that it
appeals to thousands whom no abstract right touches. Five minutes with
Frederick Douglass settled the question, for any thoughtful person, of
that man’s right to freedom. Let any woman of position desire to enter
what is called “the lecture-field,” to support herself and her children,
and at once all abstract objections to women’s speaking in public
disappear: her friends may be never so hostile to “the cause,” but they
espouse her individual cause; the most conservative clergyman subscribes
for tickets, but begs that his name may not be mentioned. They do not
admit that women, as a class, should speak,—not they; but for this
individual woman they throng the hall. Mrs. Dahlgren abhors politics: a
woman in Congress, a woman in the committee-room,—what can be more
objectionable? But I observe, that, when Mrs. Dahlgren wishes to obtain
more profit by her husband’s inventions, all objections vanish: she can
appeal to Congressmen, she can address committees, she can, I hope,
prevail. The individual ranks first in our sympathy: we do not wait to
take the census of the “class.” Make way for the individual, whether it
be Mrs. Dahlgren pleading for the rights of property, or Lucy Stone
pleading for the rights of the mother to her child.
CV.
DEFEATS BEFORE VICTORIES.
After one of the early defeats in the War of the Rebellion, the
commander of a Massachusetts regiment wrote home to his father: “I wish
people would not write us so many letters of condolence. Our defeat
seemed to trouble them much more than it troubles us. Did people suppose
there were to be no ups and downs? We expect to lose plenty of battles,
but we have enlisted for the war.”
It is just so with every successful reform. While enemies and
half-friends are proclaiming its defeats, those who advocate it are
rejoicing that they have at last got an army into the field to be
defeated. Unless this war is to be an exception to all others, even the
fact of having joined battle is a great deal. It is the first step.
Defeat first; a good many defeats, if you please: victory by and by.
William Wilberforce, writing to a friend in the year 1817, said, “I
continue faithful to the measure of Parliamentary reform brought forward
by Mr. Pitt. I am firmly persuaded that at present a prodigious majority
of the people of this country are adverse to the measure. In my view, so
far from being an objection to the discussion, this is rather a
recommendation.” In 1832 the reform-bill was passed.
In the first Parliamentary debate on the slave-trade, Col. Tarleton, who
boasted to have killed more men than any one in England, pointing to
Wilberforce and others, said, “The inspiration began on that side of the
house;” then turning round, “The revolution has reached to this also,
and reached to the height of fanaticism and frenzy.” The first vote in
the House of Commons, in 1790, after arguments in the affirmative by
Wilberforce, Pitt, Fox, and Burke, stood, ayes, 88; noes, 163: majority
against the measure, 75. In 1807 the slave-trade was abolished, and in
1834 slavery in the British colonies followed; and even on the very
night when the latter bill passed, the abolitionists were taunted by
Gladstone, the great Demerara slaveholder, with having toiled for forty
years and done nothing. The Roman Catholic relief-bill, establishing
freedom of thought in England, had the same experience. It passed in
1829 by a majority of a hundred and three in the House of Lords, which
had nine months before refused by a majority of forty-five to take up
the question at all.
The English corn-laws went down a quarter of a century ago, after a
similar career of failures. In 1840, there were hundreds of thousands in
England who thought that to attack the corn-laws was to attack the very
foundations of society. Lord Melbourne, the prime minister, said in
Parliament, that “he had heard of many mad things in his life, but,
before God, the idea of repealing the corn-laws was the very maddest
thing of which he had ever heard.” Lord John Russell counselled the
House to refuse to hear evidence on the operation of the corn-laws. Six
years after, in 1846, they were abolished forever.
How Wendell Phillips, in the anti-slavery meetings, used to lash
pro-slavery men with such formidable facts as these,—and to quote how
Clay and Calhoun and Webster and Everett had pledged themselves that
slavery should never be discussed, or had proposed that those who
discussed it should be imprisoned,—while, in spite of them all, the
great reform was moving on, and the abolitionists were forcing
politicians and people to talk, like Sterne’s starling, nothing but
slavery!
We who were trained in the light of these great agitations have learned
their lesson. We expect to march through a series of defeats to victory.
The first thing is, as in the anti-slavery movement, so to arouse the
public mind as to make this the central question. Given this prominence,
and it is enough for this year or for many years to come. Wellington
said that there was no such tragedy as a victory, except a defeat. On
the other hand, the next best thing to a victory is a defeat, for it
shows that the armies are in the field. Without the unsuccessful attempt
of to-day, no success to-morrow.
When Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble came to this country, she was amazed to
find Americans celebrating the battle of Bunker Hill, which she had
always heard claimed as a victory for King George. Such it was doubtless
called; but what we celebrated was the fact that the Americans there
threw up breastworks, stood their ground, fired away their
ammunition,—and were defeated. And thus the reformer, looking at his
failures, often sees in them such a step forward, that they are the
Bunker Hill of a new revolution. Give us plenty of such defeats, and we
can afford to wait a score of years for the victories. They will come.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
4. Enclosed bold font in =equals=.
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