← catalogue

Women and the Alphabet: A Series of Essays

by Thomas Wentworth Higginson · English · Gutenberg #13474 · 477,130 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Women and the Alphabet: A Series of Essays
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Women and the Alphabet: A Series of Essays

Author: Thomas Wentworth Higginson


        
Release date: September 15, 2004 [eBook #13474]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13474

Credits: E-text prepared by Judith B. Glad and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMEN AND THE ALPHABET: A SERIES OF ESSAYS ***

WOMEN AND THE ALPHABET

A Series of Essays

by

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

1881







PREFATORY NOTE

The first essay in this volume, "Ought Women to learn the Alphabet?"
appeared originally in the "Atlantic Monthly" of February, 1859, and has
since been reprinted in various forms, bearing its share, I trust, in the
great development of more liberal views in respect to the training and
duties of women which has made itself manifest within forty years. There
was, for instance, a report that it was the perusal of this essay which led
the late Miss Sophia Smith to the founding of the women's college bearing
her name at Northampton, Massachusetts.

The remaining papers in the volume formed originally a part of a book
entitled "Common Sense About Women" which was made up largely of papers
from the "Woman's Journal." This book was first published in 1881 and was
reprinted in somewhat abridged form some years later in London
(Sonnenschein). It must have attained a considerable circulation there, as
the fourth (stereotyped) edition appeared in 1897. From this London reprint
a German translation was made by Fräulein Eugenie Jacobi, under the title
"Die Frauenfrage und der gesunde Menschenverstand" (Schupp: Neuwied and
Leipzig, 1895).

T.W.H.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.





CONTENTS

I. OUGHT WOMEN TO LEARN THE ALPHABET?

II. PHYSIOLOGY.
       Too Much Natural History
       Darwin, Huxley, and Buckle
       The Spirit of Small Tyranny
       The Noble Sex
       The Truth about our Grandmothers
       The Physique of American Women
       The Limitations of Sex

III. TEMPERAMENT.
       The Invisible Lady
       Sacred Obscurity
       Virtues in Common
       Individual Differences
       Angelic Superiority
       Vicarious Honors
       The Gospel of Humiliation
       Celery and Cherubs
       The Need of Cavalry
       The Reason Firm, the Temperate Will
       Allures to Brighter Worlds, and leads the Way

IV. THE HOME.
       Wanted--Homes
       The Origin of Civilization
       The Low-Water Mark
       Obey
       Woman in the Chrysalis
       Two and Two
       A Model Household
       A Safeguard for the Family
       Women as Economists
       Greater includes Less
       A Copartnership
       One Responsible Head
       Asking for Money
       Womanhood and Motherhood
       A German Point of View
       Childless Women
       The Prevention of Cruelty to Mothers

V. SOCIETY.
       Foam and Current
       In Society
       The Battle of the Cards
       Some Working-Women
       The Empire of Manners
       Girlsterousness
       Are Women Natural Aristocrats?
       Mrs. Blank's Daughters
       The European Plan
       Featherses

VI. STUDY AND WORK.
       Experiments
       Intellectual Cinderellas
       Cupid-and-Psychology
       Self-Supporting Wives
       Thorough
       Literary Aspirants
       The Career of Letters
       Talking and Taking
       How to speak in Public

VII. PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT.
       We the People
       The Use of the Declaration of Independence
       Some Old-Fashioned Principles
       Founded on a Rock
       The Good of the Governed
       Ruling at Second-Hand

VIII. SUFFRAGE.
       Drawing the Line
       For Self-Protection
       Womanly Statesmanship
       Too Much Prediction
       First-Class Carriages
       Education _via_ Suffrage
       Follow Your Leaders
       How to make Women understand Politics
       Inferior to Man, and near to Angels

IX. OBJECTIONS TO SUFFRAGE.
       The Fact of Sex
       How will it Result?
       I have all the Rights I want
       Sense Enough to Vote
       An Infelicitous Epithet
       The Rob Roy Theory
       The Votes of Non-Combatants
       Manners repeal Laws
       Dangerous Voters
       How Women will legislate
       Individuals _vs._ Classes
       Defeats before Victories

INDEX







I

OUGHT WOMEN TO LEARN THE ALPHABET?


Paris smiled, for an hour or two, in the year 1801, when, amidst Napoleon's
mighty projects for remodelling the religion and government of his empire,
the ironical satirist, Sylvain Maréchal, thrust in his "Plan for a Law
prohibiting the Alphabet to Women."[1] Daring, keen, sarcastic, learned,
the little tract retains to-day so much of its pungency, that we can hardly
wonder at the honest simplicity of the author's friend and biographer,
Madame Gacon Dufour, who declared that he must be insane, and soberly
replied to him.

His proposed statute consists of eighty-two clauses, and is fortified by a
"whereas" of a hundred and thirteen weighty reasons. He exhausts the range
of history to show the frightful results which have followed this taste of
fruit of the tree of knowledge; quotes from the Encyclopédie, to prove that
the woman who knows the alphabet has already lost a portion of her
innocence; cites the opinion of Molière, that any female who has unhappily
learned anything in this line should affect ignorance, when possible;
asserts that knowledge rarely makes men attractive, and females never;
opines that women have no occasion to peruse Ovid's "Art of Love," since
they know it all in advance; remarks that three quarters of female authors
are no better than they should be; maintains that Madame Guion would have
been far more useful had she been merely pretty and an ignoramus, such as
Nature made her,--that Ruth and Naomi could not read, and Boaz probably
would never have married into the family had they possessed that
accomplishment,--that the Spartan women did not know the alphabet, nor the
Amazons, nor Penelope, nor Andromache, nor Lucretia, nor Joan of Arc, nor
Petrarch's Laura, nor the daughters of Charlemagne, nor the three hundred
and sixty-five wives of Mohammed; but that Sappho and Madame de Maintenon
could read altogether too well; while the case of Saint Brigitta, who
brought forth twelve children and twelve books, was clearly exceptional,
and afforded no safe precedent.

It would seem that the brilliant Frenchman touched the root of the matter.
Ought women to learn the alphabet? There the whole question lies. Concede
this little fulcrum, and Archimedea will move the world before she has done
with it: it becomes merely a question of time. Resistance must be made here
or nowhere. _Obsta principiis_. Woman must be a subject or an equal: there
is no middle ground. What if the Chinese proverb should turn out to be,
after all, the summit of wisdom, "For men, to cultivate virtue is
knowledge; for women, to renounce knowledge is virtue"?

No doubt, the progress of events is slow, like the working of the laws of
gravitation generally. Certainly there has been but little change in the
legal position of women since China was in its prime, until within the last
half century. Lawyers admit that the fundamental theory of English and
Oriental law is the same on this point: Man and wife are one, and that one
is the husband. It is the oldest of legal traditions. When Blackstone
declares that "the very being and existence of the woman is suspended
during the marriage," and American Kent echoes that "her legal existence
and authority are in a manner lost;" when Petersdorff asserts that "the
husband has the right of imposing such corporeal restraints as he may deem
necessary," and Bacon that "the husband hath, by law, power and dominion
over his wife, and may keep her by force within the bounds of duty, and may
beat her, but not in a violent or cruel manner;" when Mr. Justice Coleridge
rules that the husband, in certain cases, "has a right to confine his wife
in his own dwelling-house, and restrain her from liberty for an indefinite
time," and Baron Alderson sums it all up tersely, "The wife is only the
_servant_ of her husband,"--these high authorities simply reaffirm the
dogma of the Gentoo code, four thousand years old and more: "A man, both
day and night, must keep his wife so much in subjection that she by no
means be mistress of her own actions. If the wife have her own free will,
notwithstanding she be of a superior caste, she will behave amiss."

Yet behind these unchanging institutions, a pressure has been for centuries
becoming concentrated, which, now that it has begun to act, is threatening
to overthrow them all. It has not yet operated very visibly in the Old
World, where, even in England, the majority of women have not till lately
mastered the alphabet sufficiently to sign their own names in the marriage
register. But in this country the vast changes of the last few years are
already a matter of history. No trumpet has been sounded, no earthquake has
been felt, while State after State has ushered into legal existence one
half of the population within its borders. Surely, here and now, might poor
M. Maréchal exclaim, the bitter fruits of the original seed appear. The sad
question recurs, Whether women ought ever to have tasted of the alphabet.

It is true that Eve ruined us all, according to theology, without knowing
her letters. Still there is something to be said in defence of that
venerable ancestress. The Veronese lady, Isotta Nogarola, five hundred and
thirty-six of whose learned epistles were preserved by De Thou, composed a
dialogue on the question, Whether Adam or Eve had committed the
greater sin. But Ludovico Domenichi, in his "Dialogue on the Nobleness of
Women," maintains that Eve did not sin at all, because she was not even
created when Adam was told not to eat the apple. It was "in Adam all
died," he shrewdly says; nobody died in Eve: which looks plausible. Be
that as it may, Eve's daughters are in danger of swallowing a whole
harvest of forbidden fruit, in these revolutionary days, unless
something be done to cut off the supply.

It has been seriously asserted, that during the last half century more
books have been written by women and about women than during all the
previous uncounted ages. It may be true; although, when we think of the
innumerable volumes of _Mémoires_ by French women of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries,--each justifying the existence of her own ten
volumes by the remark, that all her contemporaries were writing as
many,--we have our doubts. As to the increased multitude of general
treatises on the female sex, however,--its education, life, health,
diseases, charms, dress, deeds, sphere, rights, wrongs, work, wages,
encroachments, and idiosyncrasies generally,--there can be no doubt
whatever; and the poorest of these books recognizes a condition of
public sentiment of which no other age ever dreamed.

Still, literary history preserves the names of some reformers before the
Reformation, in this matter. There was Signora Moderata Fonte, the
Venetian, who left a book to be published after her death, in 1592, "Dei
Meriti delle Donne." There was her townswoman, Lucrezia Marinella, who
followed, ten years after, with her essay, "La Nobilità e la Eccelenza
delle Donne, con Difetti e Mancamenti degli Uomini,"--a comprehensive
theme, truly! Then followed the all-accomplished Anna Maria Schurman, in
1645, with her "Dissertatio de Ingenii Muliebris ad Doctrinam et meliores
Literas Aptitudine," with a few miscellaneous letters appended in Greek
and Hebrew. At last came boldly Jacquette Guillaume, in 1665, and threw
down the gauntlet in her title-page, "Les Dames Illustres; où par bonnes
et fortes Raisons il se prouve que le Sexe Feminin surpasse en toute
Sorte de Genre le Sexe Masculin;" and with her came Margaret Boufflet
and a host of others; and finally, in England, Mary Wollstonecraft,
whose famous book, formidable in its day, would seem rather conservative
now; and in America, that pious and worthy dame, Mrs. H. Mather Crocker,
Cotton Mather's grandchild, who, in 1848, published the first book on the
"Rights of Woman" ever written on this side the Atlantic.

Meanwhile there have never been wanting men, and strong men, to echo these
appeals. From Cornelius Agrippa and his essay (1509) on the excellence of
woman and her preëminence over man, down to the first youthful thesis of
Agassiz, "Mens Feminae Viri Animo superior," there has been a succession of
voices crying in the wilderness. In England, Anthony Gibson wrote a book,
in 1599, called "A Woman's Woorth, defended against all the Men in the
World, proving them to be more Perfect, Excellent, and Absolute in all
Vertuous Actions than any Man of what Qualitie soever, _Interlarded with
Poetry_." _Per contra_, the learned Acidalius published a book in Latin,
and afterwards in French, to prove that women are not reasonable creatures.
Modern theologians are at worst merely sub-acid, and do not always say so,
if they think so. Meanwhile most persons have been content to leave the
world to go on its old course, in this matter as in others, and have thus
acquiesced in that stern judicial decree with which Timon of Athens sums up
all his curses upon womankind,--"If there sit twelve women at the table,
let a dozen of them be--as they are."

Ancient or modern, nothing in any of these discussions is so valuable as
the fact of the discussion itself. There is no discussion where there is no
wrong. Nothing so indicates wrong as this morbid self-inspection. The
complaints are a perpetual protest, the defences a perpetual confession. It
is too late to ignore the question; and, once opened, it can be settled
only on absolute and permanent principles. There is a wrong; but where?
Does woman already know too much, or too little? Was she created for man's
subject, or his equal? Shall she have the alphabet, or not?

Ancient mythology, which undertook to explain everything, easily accounted
for the social and political disabilities of woman. Goguet quotes the story
from Saint Augustine, who got it from Varro. Cecrops, building Athens, saw
starting from the earth an olive-plant and a fountain, side by side. The
Delphic oracle said that this indicated a strife between Minerva and
Neptune for the honor of giving a name to the city, and that the people
must decide between them. Cecrops thereupon assembled the men, and the
women also, who then had a right to vote; and the result was that Minerva
carried the election by a glorious majority of one. Then Attica was
overflowed and laid waste: of course the citizens attributed the calamity
to Neptune, and resolved to punish the women. It was therefore determined
that in future they should not vote, nor should any child bear the name
of its mother.

Thus easily did mythology explain all troublesome inconsistencies; but it
is much that it should even have recognized them as needing explanation.
The real solution is, however, more simple. The obstacle to the woman's
sharing the alphabet, or indeed any other privilege, has been thought by
some to be the fear of impairing her delicacy, or of destroying her
domesticity, or of confounding the distinction between the sexes. These may
have been plausible excuses. They have even been genuine, though minor,
anxieties. But the whole thing, I take it, had always one simple,
intelligible basis,--sheer contempt for the supposed intellectual
inferiority of woman. She was not to be taught, because she was not worth
teaching. The learned Acidalius aforesaid was in the majority. According to
Aristotle and the Peripatetics, woman was _animal occasionatum_, as if a
sort of monster and accidental production. Mediæval councils, charitably
asserting her claims to the rank of humanity, still pronounced her unfit
for instruction. In the Hindoo dramas she did not even speak the same
language with her master, but used the dialect of slaves. When, in the
sixteenth century, Françoise de Saintonges wished to establish girls'
schools in France, she was hooted in the streets; and her father called
together four doctors, learned in the law, to decide whether she was not
possessed by demons, to think of educating women,--_pour s'assurer
qu'instruire des femmes n'était pas un oeuvre du démon_.

It was the same with political rights. The foundation of the Salic Law was
not any sentimental anxiety to guard female delicacy and domesticity; it
was, as stated by Froissart, a blunt, hearty contempt: "The kingdom of
France being too noble to be ruled by a woman." And the same principle was
reaffirmed for our own institutions, in rather softened language, by
Theophilus Parsons, in his famous defence of the rights of Massachusetts
men (the "Essex Result," in 1778): "Women, what age soever they are of, are
not considered as having a sufficient acquired discretion [to exercise the
franchise]."

In harmony with this are the various maxims and _bon-mots_ of eminent men,
in respect to women. Niebuhr thought he should not have educated a girl
well,--he should have made her know too much. Lessing said, "The woman who
thinks is like the man who puts on rouge, ridiculous." Voltaire said,
"Ideas are like beards: women and young men have none." And witty Dr.
Maginn carries to its extreme the atrocity, "We like to hear a few words of
sense from a woman, as we do from a parrot, because they are so
unexpected." Yet how can we wonder at these opinions, when the saints have
been severer than the sages?--since the pious Fénelon taught that true
virgin delicacy was almost as incompatible with learning as with vice; and
Dr. Channing complained, in his "Essay on Exclusion and Denunciation," of
"women forgetting the tenderness of their sex," and arguing on theology.

Now this impression of feminine inferiority may be right or wrong, but it
obviously does a good deal towards explaining the facts it assumes. If
contempt does not originally cause failure, it perpetuates it.
Systematically discourage any individual, or class, from birth to death,
and they learn, in nine cases out of ten, to acquiesce in their
degradation, if not to claim it as a crown of glory. If the Abbé Choisi
praised the Duchesse de Fontanges for being "beautiful as an angel and
silly as a goose," it was natural that all the young ladies of the court
should resolve to make up in folly what they wanted in charms. All
generations of women having been bred under the shadow of intellectual
contempt, they have, of course, done much to justify it. They have often
used only for frivolous purposes even the poor opportunities allowed them.
They have employed the alphabet, as Molière said, chiefly in spelling the
verb _Amo_. Their use of science has been like that of Mlle. de Launay,
who computed the decline in her lover's affection by his abbreviation of
their evening walk in the public square, preferring to cross it rather
than take the circuit; "from which I inferred," she says, "that his
passion had diminished in the ratio between the diagonal of a rectangular
parallelogram and the sum of two adjacent sides." And their conception,
even of art, has been too often on the scale of Properzia de Rossi, who
carved sixty-five heads on a walnut, the smallest of all recorded symbols
of woman's sphere.

All this might, perhaps, be overcome, if the social prejudice which
discourages women would only reward proportionately those who surmount the
discouragement. The more obstacles, the more glory, if society would only
pay in proportion to the labor; but it does not. Women being denied, not
merely the training which prepares for great deeds, but the praise and
compensation which follow them, have been weakened in both directions. The
career of eminent men ordinarily begins with college and the memories of
Miltiades, and ends with fortune and fame: woman begins under
discouragement, and ends beneath the same. Single, she works with half
preparation and half pay; married, she puts name and wages into the keeping
of her husband, shrinks into John Smith's "lady" during life, and John
Smith's "relict" on her tombstone; and still the world wonders that her
deeds, like her opportunities, are inferior.

Evidently, then, the advocates of woman's claims--those who hold that "the
virtues of the man and the woman are the same," with Antisthenes, or that
"the talent of the man and the woman is the same," with Socrates in
Xenophon's "Banquet"--must be cautious lest they attempt to prove too much.
Of course, if women know as much as the men, without schools and colleges,
there is no need of admitting them to those institutions. If they work as
well on half pay, it diminishes the inducement to give them the other
half. The safer position is, to claim that they have done just enough
to show what they might have done under circumstances less discouraging.
Take, for instance, the common remark, that women have invented nothing.
It is a valid answer, that the only implements habitually used by woman
have been the needle, the spindle, and the basket; and tradition reports
that she herself invented all three. In the same way it may be shown that
the departments in which women have equalled men have been the
departments in which they have had equal training, equal encouragement,
and equal compensation; as, for instance, the theatre. Madame Lagrange,
the _prima donna_, after years of costly musical instruction, wins the
zenith of professional success; she receives, the newspapers affirm,
sixty thousand dollars a year, travelling expenses for ten persons,
country-houses, stables, and liveries, besides an uncounted revenue of
bracelets, bouquets, and _billets-doux._ Of course, every young
_débutante_ fancies the same thing within her own reach, with only a
brief stage-vista between. On the stage there is no deduction for sex,
and, therefore, woman has shown in that sphere an equal genius. But
every female common-school teacher in the United States finds the
enjoyment of her four hundred dollars a year to be secretly embittered
by the knowledge that the young college stripling in the next schoolroom
is paid twice that sum for work no harder or more responsible than her
own, and that, too, after the whole pathway of education has been
obstructed for her, and smoothed for him. These may be gross and
carnal considerations; but Faith asks her daily bread, and fancy must
be fed. We deny woman her fair share of training, of encouragement, of
remuneration, and then talk fine nonsense about her instincts and
intuitions. We say sentimentally with the Oriental proverbialist,
"Every book of knowledge is implanted by nature in the heart of
woman,"--and make the compliment a substitute for the alphabet.

Nothing can be more absurd than to impose entirely distinct standards, in
this respect, on the two sexes, or to expect that woman, any more than man,
will accomplish anything great without due preparation and adequate
stimulus. Mrs. Patten, who navigated her husband's ship from Cape Horn to
California, would have failed in the effort, for all her heroism, if she
had not, unlike most of her sex, been taught to use her Bowditch's
"Navigator." Florence Nightingale, when she heard of the distresses in the
Crimea, did not, as most people imagine, rise up and say, "I am a woman,
ignorant but intuitive, with very little sense and information, but
exceedingly sublime aspirations; my strength lies in my weakness; I can
do all things without knowing anything about them." Not at all: during
ten years she had been in hard training for precisely such services; had
visited all the hospitals in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, Lyons,
Rome, Brussels, and Berlin; had studied under the Sisters of Charity,
and been twice a nurse in the Protestant Institution at Kaiserswerth.
Therefore she did not merely carry to the Crimea a woman's heart, as her
stock in trade, but she knew the alphabet of her profession better than
the men around her. Of course, genius and enthusiasm are, for both sexes,
elements unforeseen and incalculable; but, as a general rule, great
achievements imply great preparations and favorable conditions. To
disregard this truth is unreasonable in the abstract, and cruel in its
consequences. If an extraordinary male gymnast can clear a height of ten
feet with the aid of a springboard, it would be considered slightly absurd
to ask a woman to leap eleven feet without one; yet this is precisely what
society and the critics have always done. Training and wages and social
approbation are very elastic springboards; and the whole course of history
has seen these offered bounteously to one sex, and as sedulously withheld
from the other. Let woman consent to be a doll, and there was no finery so
gorgeous, no baby-house so costly, but she might aspire to share its
lavish delights; let her ask simply for an equal chance to learn, to labor,
and to live, and it was as if that same doll should open its lips, and
propound Euclid's forty-seventh proposition. While we have all deplored the
helpless position of indigent women, and lamented that they had no
alternative beyond the needle, the wash-tub, the schoolroom, and the
street, we have usually resisted their admission into every new occupation,
denied them training, and cut their compensation down. Like Charles Lamb,
who atoned for coming late to the office in the morning by going away early
in the afternoon, we have first, half educated women, and then, to restore
the balance, only half paid them. What innumerable obstacles have been
placed in their way as female physicians; what a complication of
difficulties has been encountered by them, even as printers, engravers,
and designers! In London, Mr. Bennett was once mobbed for lecturing to
women on watchmaking. In this country, we have known grave professors
refuse to address lyceums which thought fit to employ an occasional female
lecturer. Mr. Comer stated that it was "in the face of ridicule and
sneers" that he began to educate American women as bookkeepers many years
ago; and it was a little contemptible in Miss Muloch to revive the same
satire in "A Woman's Thoughts on Women," when she must have known that
in half the retail shops in Paris her own sex rules the ledger, and
Mammon knows no Salic law.

We find, on investigation, what these considerations would lead us to
expect, that eminent women have commonly been exceptional in training and
position, as well as in their genius. They have excelled the average of
their own sex because they have shared the ordinary advantages of the other
sex. Take any department of learning or skill; take, for instance, the
knowledge of languages, the universal alphabet, philology. On the great
stairway at Padua stands the statue of Elena Cornaro, professor of six
languages in that once renowned university. But Elena Cornaro was educated
like a boy, by her father. On the great door of the University of Bologna
is inscribed the epitaph of Clotilda Tambroni, the honored correspondent of
Porson, and the first Greek scholar of southern Europe in her day. But
Clotilda Tambroni was educated like a boy, by Emanuele Aponte. How fine are
those prefatory words, "by a Right Reverend Prelate," to that pioneer book
in Anglo-Saxon lore, Elizabeth Elstob's grammar: "Our earthly possessions
are indeed our patrimony, as derived to us by the industry of our fathers;
but the language in which we speak is our mother tongue, and who so proper
to play the critic in this as the females?" Yet this particular female
obtained the rudiments of her rare education from her mother, before she
was eight years old, in spite of much opposition from her right reverend
guardians. Adelung declares that all modern philology is founded on the
translation of a Russian vocabulary into two hundred different dialects
by Catherine II. But Catherine shared, in childhood, the instructors of
her brother, Prince Frederick, and was subject to some reproach for
learning, though a girl, so much more rapidly than he did. Christina of
Sweden ironically reproved Madame Dacier for her translation of
Callimachus: "Such a pretty girl as you are, are you not ashamed to be so
learned?" But Madame Dacier acquired Greek by contriving to do her
embroidery in the room where her father was teaching her stupid brother;
and her queenly critic had herself learned to read Thucydides, harder
Greek than Callimachus, before she was fourteen. And so down to our own
day, who knows how many mute, inglorious Minervas may have perished
unenlightened, while Margaret Fuller Ossoli and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
were being educated "like boys."

This expression simply means that they had the most solid training which
the times afforded. Most persons would instantly take alarm at the very
words; that is, they have so little faith in the distinctions which Nature
has established, that they think, if you teach the alphabet, or anything
else, indiscriminately to both sexes, you annul all difference between
them. The common reasoning is thus: "Boys and girls are acknowledged to
be very unlike. Now, boys study Greek and algebra, medicine and
bookkeeping. Therefore girls should not." As if one should say: "Boys
and girls are very unlike. Now, boys eat beef and potatoes. Therefore,
obviously, girls should not."

The analogy between physical and spiritual food is precisely in point.
The simple truth is, that, amid the vast range of human powers and
properties, the fact of sex is but one item. Vital and momentous in
itself, it does not constitute the whole organism, but only a part.
The distinction of male and female is special, aimed at a certain end;
and, apart from that end, it is, throughout all the kingdoms of
Nature, of minor importance. With but trifling exceptions, from
infusoria up to man, the female animal moves, breathes, looks,
listens, runs, flies, swims, pursues its food, eats it, digests it, in
precisely the same manner as the male: all instincts, all
characteristics, are the same, except as to the one solitary fact of
parentage. Mr. Ten Broeck's race-horses, Pryor and Prioress, were
foaled alike, fed alike, trained alike, and finally ran side by side,
competing for the same prize. The eagle is not checked in soaring by
any consciousness of sex, nor asks the sex of the timid hare, its
quarry. Nature, for high purposes, creates and guards the sexual
distinction, but keeps it subordinate to those still more important.

Now all this bears directly upon the alphabet. What sort of philosophy is
that which says, "John is a fool; Jane is a genius: nevertheless, John,
being a man, shall learn, lead, make laws, make money; Jane, being a
woman, shall be ignorant, dependent, disfranchised, underpaid"? Of course,
the time is past when one would state this so frankly, though Comte comes
quite near it, to say nothing of the Mormons; but this formula really lies
at the bottom of the reasoning one hears every day. The answer is, Soul
before sex. Give an equal chance, and let genius and industry do the rest.
_La carrière ouverte aux talens_! Every man for himself, every woman for
herself, and the alphabet for us all.

Thus far, my whole course of argument has been defensive and explanatory. I
have shown that woman's inferiority in special achievements, so far as it
exists, is a fact of small importance, because it is merely a corollary
from her historic position of degradation. She has not excelled, because
she has had no fair chance to excel. Man, placing his foot upon her
shoulder, has taunted her with not rising. But the ulterior question
remains behind. How came she into this attitude originally? Explain the
explanation, the logician fairly demands. Granted that woman is weak
because she has been systematically degraded: but why was she degraded?
This is a far deeper question,--one to be met only by a profounder
philosophy and a positive solution. We are coming on ground almost wholly
untrod, and must do the best we can.

I venture to assert, then, that woman's social inferiority has been, to a
great extent, in the past a legitimate thing. To all appearance, history
would have been impossible without it, just as it would have been
impossible without an epoch of war and slavery. It is simply a matter of
social progress,--a part of the succession of civilizations. The past has
been inevitably a period of ignorance, of engrossing physical necessities,
and of brute force,--not of freedom, of philanthropy, and of culture.
During that lower epoch, woman was necessarily an inferior, degraded by
abject labor, even in time of peace,--degraded uniformly by war, chivalry
to the contrary notwithstanding. Behind all the courtesies of Amadis and
the Cid lay the stern fact,--woman a child or a toy. The flattering
troubadours chanted her into a poet's paradise; but alas! that kingdom of
heaven suffered violence, and the violent took it by force. The truth
simply was, that her time had not come. Physical strength must rule for a
time, and she was the weaker. She was very properly refused a feudal grant,
by reason, say "Les Coustumes de Normandie," of her unfitness for war or
policy: _C'est l'homme ki se bast et ki conseille_. Other authorities put
it still more plainly: "A woman cannot serve the emperor or feudal lord in
war, on account of the decorum of her sex; nor assist him with advice,
because of her limited intellect; nor keep his counsel, owing to the
infirmity of her disposition." All which was, no doubt, in the majority of
cases, true; and the degradation of woman was simply a part of a system
which has, indeed, had its day, but has bequeathed its associations.

From this reign of force, woman never freed herself by force. She could not
fight, or would not. Bohemian annals, to be sure, record the legend of a
literal war between the sexes, in which the women's army was led by Libussa
and Wlasla, and which finally ended with the capture, by the army of men,
of Castle Dziewin, Maiden's Tower, whose ruins are still visible near
Prague. The armor of Libussa is still shown at Vienna; and the guide calls
attention to the long-peaked toes of steel, with which, he avers, the
tender princess was wont to pierce the hearts of her opponents, while
careering through the battle. And there are abundant instances in which
women have fought side by side with men, and on equal terms. The ancient
British women mingled in the wars of their husbands, and their princesses
were trained to the use of arms in the Maiden's Castle at Edinburgh, in the
Isle of Skye. The Moorish wives and maidens fought in defence of their
European peninsula; and the Portuguese women fought on the same soil,
against the armies of Philip II. The king of Siam has, at present, a
body-guard of four hundred women: they are armed with lance and rifle, are
admirably disciplined, and their commander (appointed after saving the
king's life at a tiger-hunt) ranks as one of the royal family, and has ten
elephants at her service. When the all-conquering Dahomian army marched
upon Abbeokuta, in 1851, they numbered ten thousand men and six thousand
women. The women were, as usual, placed foremost in the assault, as being
most reliable; and of the eighteen hundred bodies left dead before the
walls, the vast majority were of women. The Hospital of the Invalides, in
Paris, has sheltered, for half a century, a fine specimen of a female
soldier, "Lieutenant Madame Bulan," who lived to be more than eighty years
old, had been decorated by Napoleon's own hand with the cross of the
Legion of Honor, and was credited on the hospital books with "seven years'
service, seven campaigns, three wounds, several times distinguished,
especially in Corsica, in defending a fort against the English." But these
cases, though interesting to the historian, are still exceptional; and the
instinctive repugnance they inspire is a condemnation, not of women, but
of war.

The reason, then, for the long subjection of woman has been simply that
humanity was passing through its first epoch, and her full career was to be
reserved for the second. As the different races of man have appeared
successively upon the stage of history, so there has been an order of
succession of the sexes. Woman's appointed era, like that of the Teutonic
races, was delayed, but not omitted. It is not merely true that the empire
of the past has belonged to man, but that it has properly belonged to him;
for it was an empire of the muscles, enlisting, at best, but the lower
powers of the understanding. There can be no question that the present
epoch is initiating an empire of the higher reason, of arts, affections,
aspirations; and for that epoch the genius of woman has been reserved. The
spirit of the age has always kept pace with the facts, and outstripped the
statutes. Till the fulness of time came, woman was necessarily kept a slave
to the spinning-wheel and the needle; now higher work is ready; peace has
brought invention to her aid, and the mechanical means for her emancipation
are ready also. No use in releasing her till man, with his strong arm, had
worked out his preliminary share in civilization. "Earth waits for her
queen" was a favorite motto of Margaret Fuller Ossoli; but it would be more
correct to say that the queen has waited for her earth, till it could be
smoothed and prepared for her occupancy. Now Cinderella may begin to think
of putting on her royal robes.

Everybody sees that the times are altering the whole material position of
woman; but most people do not appear to see the inevitable social and moral
changes which are also involved. As has been already said, the woman of
ancient history was a slave to physical necessities, both in war and peace.
In war she could do too little; in peace she did too much, under the
material compulsions which controlled the world. How could the Jews, for
instance, elevate woman? They could not spare her from the wool and the
flax, and the candle that goeth not out by night. In Rome, when the bride
first stepped across her threshold, they did not ask her, Do you know the
alphabet? they asked simply, Can you spin? There was no higher epitaph than
Queen Amalasontha's,--_Domum servavit, lanam fecit_. In Boeotia, brides
were conducted home in vehicles whose wheels were burned at the door, in
token that they were never to leave the house again. Pythagoras instituted
at Crotona an annual festival for the distaff; Confucius, in China, did the
same for the spindle; and these celebrated not the freedom, but the
serfdom, of woman.

And even into modern days this same tyrannical necessity has lingered. "Go
spin, you jades! go spin!" was the only answer vouchsafed by the Earl of
Pembroke to the twice-banished nuns of Wilton. Even now, travellers agree
that throughout civilized Europe, with the partial exception of England and
France, the profound absorption of the mass of women in household labors
renders their general elevation impossible. But with us Americans, and in
this age, when all these vast labors are being more and more transferred to
arms of brass and iron; when Rochester grinds the flour and Lowell weaves
the cloth, and the fire on the hearth has gone into black retirement and
mourning; when the wiser a virgin is, the less she has to do with oil in
her lamp; when the needle has made its last dying speech and confession in
the "Song of the Shirt," and the sewing-machine has changed those doleful
marches to delightful measures,--how is it possible for the blindest to
help seeing that a new era is begun, and that the time has come for woman
to learn the alphabet?

Nobody asks for any abolition of domestic labor for women, any more than of
outdoor labor for men. Of course, most women will still continue to be
mainly occupied with the indoor care of their families, and most men with
their external support. All that is desirable for either sex is such an
economy of labor, in this respect, as shall leave some spare time to be
appropriated in other directions. The argument against each new
emancipation of woman is precisely that always made against the liberation
of serfs and the enfranchisement of plebeians,--that the new position will
take them from their legitimate business. "How can he [or she] get wisdom
that holdeth the plough [or the broom],--whose talk is of bullocks [or of
babies]?" Yet the American farmer has already emancipated himself from
these fancied incompatibilities; and so will the farmer's wife. In a nation
where there is no leisure class and no peasantry, this whole theory of
exclusion is an absurdity. We all have a little leisure, and we must all
make the most of it. If we will confine large interests and duties to those
who have nothing else to do, we must go back to monarchy at once. If
otherwise, then the alphabet, and its consequences, must be open to woman
as to man. Jean Paul says nobly, in his "Levana," that, "before and after
being a mother, a woman is a human being, and neither maternal nor conjugal
relation can supersede the human responsibility, but must become its means
and instrument." And it is good to read the manly speech, on this subject,
of John Quincy Adams, quoted at length in Quincy's life of him, in which,
after fully defending the political petitions of the women of Plymouth, he
declares that "the correct principle is 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."

There are duties devolving on every human being,--duties not small nor few,
but vast and varied,--which spring from home and private life, and all
their sweet relations. The support or care of the humblest household is a
function worthy of men, women, and angels, so far as it goes. From these
duties none must shrink, neither man nor woman; the loftiest genius cannot
ignore them; the sublimest charity must begin with them. They are their own
exceeding great reward; their self-sacrifice is infinite joy; and the
selfishness which discards them is repaid by loneliness and a desolate old
age. Yet these, though the most tender and intimate portion of human life,
do not form its whole. It is given to noble souls to crave other interests
also, added spheres, not necessarily alien from these; larger knowledge,
larger action also; duties, responsibilities, anxieties, dangers, all the
aliment that history has given to its heroes. Not home less, but humanity
more. When the high-born English lady in the Crimean hospital, ordered to
a post of almost certain death, only raised her hands to heaven, and said,
"Thank God!" she did not renounce her true position as woman: she claimed
it. When the queen of James I. of Scotland, already immortalized by him in
stately verse, won a higher immortality by welcoming to her fair bosom the
dagger aimed at his; when the Countess of Buchan hung confined in her iron
cage, outside Berwick Castle, in penalty for crowning Robert the Bruce;
when the stainless soul of Joan of Arc met God, like Moses, in a burning
flame,--these things were as they should be. Man must not monopolize these
privileges of peril, the birthright of great souls. Serenades and
compliments must not replace the nobler hospitality which shares with woman
the opportunity of martyrdom. Great administrative duties also, cares of
state, for which one should be born gray-headed, how nobly do these sit
upon a woman's brow! Each year adds to the storied renown of Elizabeth of
England, greatest sovereign of the greatest of historic nations. Christina
of Sweden, alone among the crowned heads of Europe (so says Voltaire),
sustained the dignity of the throne against Richelieu and Mazarin. And
these queens most assuredly did not sacrifice their womanhood in the
process; for her Britannic Majesty's wardrobe included four thousand gowns;
and Mile, de Montpensier declares that when Christina had put on a wig of
the latest fashion, "she really looked extremely pretty."

_Les races se féminisent_, said Buffon,--"The world is growing more
feminine." It is a compliment, whether the naturalist intended it or not.
Time has brought peace; peace, invention; and the poorest woman of to-day
is born to an inheritance of which her ancestors never dreamed. Previous
attempts to confer on women social and political equality,--as when
Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, made them magistrates; or when the
Hungarian revolutionists made them voters; or when our own New Jersey
tried the same experiment in a guarded fashion in early times, and then
revoked the privilege, because (as in the ancient fable) the women
voted the wrong way;--these things were premature, and valuable only
as recognitions of a principle. But in view of the rapid changes now
going on, he is a rash man who asserts the "Woman Question" to be
anything but a mere question of time. The fulcrum has been already
given in the alphabet, and we must simply watch, and see whether the
earth does not move.

There is the plain fact: woman must be either a subject or an equal; there
is no middle ground. Every concession to a supposed principle only involves
the necessity of the next concession for which that principle calls. Once
yield the alphabet, and we abandon the whole long theory of subjection and
coverture: tradition is set aside, and we have nothing but reason to fall
back upon. Reasoning abstractly, it must be admitted that the argument has
been, thus far, entirely on the women's side, inasmuch as no man has yet
seriously tried to meet them with argument. It is an alarming feature of
this discussion, that it has reversed, very generally, the traditional
positions of the sexes: the women have had all the logic; and the most
intelligent men, when they have attempted the other side, have limited
themselves to satire and gossip. What rational woman can be really
convinced by the nonsense which is talked in ordinary society around
her,--as, that it is right to admit girls to common schools, and equally
right to exclude them from colleges; that it is proper for a woman to sing
in public, but indelicate for her to speak in public; that a post-office
box is an unexceptionable place to drop a bit of paper into, but a
ballot-box terribly dangerous? No cause in the world can keep above
water, sustained by such contradictions as these, too feeble and slight
to be dignified by the name of fallacies. Some persons profess to think
it impossible to reason with a woman, and such critics certainly show
no disposition to try the experiment.

But we must remember that all our American institutions are based on
consistency, or on nothing: all claim to be founded on the principles of
natural right; and when they quit those, they are lost. In all European
monarchies it is the theory that the mass of the people are children to be
governed, not mature beings to govern themselves; this is clearly stated
and consistently applied. In the United States we have formally abandoned
this theory for one half of the human race, while for the other half it
flourishes with little change. The moment the claims of woman are broached,
the democrat becomes a monarchist. What Americans commonly criticise in
English statesmen, namely, that they habitually evade all arguments based
on natural right, and defend every legal wrong on the ground that it works
well in practice, is the precise defect in our habitual view of woman. The
perplexity must be resolved somehow. Most men admit that a strict adherence
to our own principles would place both sexes in precisely equal positions
before law and constitution, as well as in school and society. But each has
his special quibble to apply, showing that in this case we must abandon all
the general maxims to which we have pledged ourselves, and hold only by
precedent. Nay, he construes even precedent with the most ingenious rigor;
since the exclusion of women from all direct contact with affairs can be
made far more perfect in a republic than is possible in a monarchy, where
even sex is merged in rank, and the female patrician may have far more
power than the male plebeian. But, as matters now stand among us, there is
no aristocracy but of sex: all men are born patrician, all women are
legally plebeian; all men are equal in having political power, and all
women in having none. This is a paradox so evident, and such an anomaly in
human progress, that it cannot last forever, without new discoveries in
logic, or else a deliberate return to M. Maréchal's theory concerning the
alphabet.

Meanwhile, as the newspapers say, we anxiously await further developments.
According to present appearances, the final adjustment lies mainly in the
hands of women themselves. Men can hardly be expected to concede either
rights or privileges more rapidly than they are claimed, or to be truer to
women than women are to each other. In fact, the worst effect of a
condition of inferiority is the weakness it leaves behind; even when we
say, "Hands off!" the sufferer does not rise. In such a case, there is but
one counsel worth giving. More depends on determination than even on
ability. Will, not talent, governs the world. Who believed that a poetess
could ever be more than an Annot Lyle of the harp, to soothe with sweet
melodies the leisure of her lord, until in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
hands the thing became a trumpet? Where are gone the sneers with which
army surgeons and parliamentary orators opposed Mr. Sidney Herbert's first
proposition to send Florence Nightingale to the Crimea? In how many towns
was the current of popular prejudice against female orators reversed by
one winning speech from Lucy Stone! Where no logic can prevail, success
silences. First give woman, if you dare, the alphabet, then summon her to
her career: and though men, ignorant and prejudiced, may oppose its
beginnings, they will at last fling around her conquering footsteps more
lavish praises than ever greeted the opera's idol,--more perfumed flowers
than ever wooed, with intoxicating fragrance, the fairest butterfly of the
ball-room.

[Footnote 1: _Projet d'une loi portant defense d'apprendre à lire aux
femmes._]




II

PHYSIOLOGY

    "Allein, bevor und nachdem man Mutter ist, ist Man ein Mensch; die
    mütterliche Bestimmung aber, oder gar die heeliche, 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."


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 our structure
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 reaction 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 preëminent."

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 or 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.




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 quite 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
anything in the intellectual sphere to correspond to the physical
difference; that here also the sexes are equal yet diverse, and each 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]

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.

If, in spite of man's enormous advantage in the start, woman is already
overtaking 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, the man 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 reinforce 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."

[Footnote 1: Pp. 22, 23, Am. ed.]

[Footnote 2: Vol. ii. p. 311, Am. ed]




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 green-grocer 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 anything 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 lifelong 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." [1]

[Footnote 1: _Physics and Politics_, p. 79.]




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 this, but I know that in some French villages the bride is still
married in a mourning-gown. I should think she would be.





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 just 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. Ball,--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 rude social conditions, as 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 primeval 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'Amerique 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.




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 reaction on their arrival. One of my informants went
so far as to express confidence that among his circle of friends in Boston
and in London a dinner party 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 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
half-century 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 reintroduced 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.





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 should 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 restrictions are merely conventional. But,
when all is said and done, there is no doubt that plenty of limitations
will remain on both sides.

That man has such limitations is clear. No matter how finely organized he
may be, how sympathetic, how tender, how loving, there is yet a barrier,
never to be passed, that separates him from the most precious part of the
woman's kingdom. 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
unnecessary, point after point that was once held essential. Still, if she
finds--as she undoubtedly will find--that some 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
outdoor 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 it; 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.




III

TEMPERAMENT

[Greek: 'Andros kai gunaikos ae autae antae aretae.]--ANTISTHENES in
Diogenes Laertius, vi. i, 5.

"Virtue in man and woman is the same."


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 signboard, 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
Boeotia, 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 stayed at home, and spun,"--_Domum servavit,
lanam 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, quite 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
of fashion 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 for an American to hear a woman speak in public than
it is for 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."




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 quae bene latuit,_" the meaning of this phrase 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 reassertions 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.




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 some time since,--

    "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 it yet remains true that "the virtues
of the man and the woman are the same."




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 each other 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 as 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
coeducation, impartial suffrage, and free cooperation 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 modern pianists, told a friend of
mine, his pupil, that he had learned more of music from hearing Madame
Malibran sing, than from anything else whatever.




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 react 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 reëstablished. 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 women 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
union 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 than mended because either half can claim angelic superiority over
the other half, but because it takes two halves to make a whole.




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" perhaps founded by women. 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, the dog 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 American scholarships already
mentioned. 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.




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 only 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 anybody who should attempt
to place him in that beautiful position of subjection whose spiritual
merits he had just been proclaiming. When it came to that, he was like
Thoreau, who believed resignation to be a virtue, but preferred "not to
practice 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 mayest 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.'"[1]

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.

[Footnote 1: _Religious Instruction of the Negroes._ Savannah, 1842, pp.
208-211.]




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.




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 takes a large share in 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
other hearts 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. 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.




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."




ALLURES TO BRIGHTER WORLDS, AND LEADS THE WAY


When a certain legislature 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. Shakespeare
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 anything 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.




IV

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.


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 house
shadowed by such misery is not a home, though it might have proved such 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 is perhaps needless to add that they are long since
divorced.

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 clubs constantly; the many use them occasionally. More absorbing
than these, 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 society meeting every evening of the week except Sunday, when
they go to church meeting. 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 such
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.




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 anything 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. _Però sim
muove_: "But it moves."

The motion once proved, the whole range of possible progress is before us.
The amazement of that Chinese visitor in Boston, the other day, when he saw
a woman addressing a missionary meeting; the astonishment of all English
visitors when young ladies teach 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 halfway 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? Perhaps 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, there is a step forward. One
more step in the spiral line of progress has brought us to the unveiled
face and comparatively free movements of the 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 gradually 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.




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 which appears most convincing 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 changing 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 it 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 anything 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."[1]

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?

[Footnote 1: Story's _Treatise on the Law of Contracts not under Seal_, §
84, p. 89.]




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. The Roman Catholics, you know, have never had it."

"Why do you object?" he asked. "Is it because you know that they will not
obey?"

"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 obtuse 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.




WOMAN IN THE CHRYSALIS


When the bride receives the ring upon her finger, and utters--if she utters
it--the promise to obey, she sees 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 paternal 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 could never 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 and property. No years, no
experience, could make her anything 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 paternal 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 merely
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
implies the chrysalis. Woman is the butterfly. Sooner or later she will be
wholly out.




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 everything. I should wish to have her from the adjoining room call
to me, '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
anything; 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; thirty years ago she could not, in New England, obtain a
collegiate education; even now she can only vote for school officers.

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 everything, 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
deathbed, 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."[1]

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 the same. 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.

[Footnote 1: _De L'Amour_, par de Stendhal (Henri Beyle). Paris, 1868
[written in 1822], pp. 182, 198.]




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 anything 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 the
remonstrant petitions legislatures 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
hummingbirds,--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 free wings from that pendent cradle, affords a
happier illustration of judicious nurture than is to be found in the
uncouth little offspring of the hornbills, which 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."




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 certain number of that comic journal,
there was 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 came to the rescue, and bravely defended 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. The proposal 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 Shakespeare'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.




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 anything: 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. 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.




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 Phillipps. 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 Phillipps--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."[1]

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 Phillipps felt that she had
never had a better tribute to her musical genius than this 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.

[Footnote 1: _De l'Amour_, par de Stendhal (Henri Beyle): "Les plaisirs du
grand monde n'en sont pas pour les femmes heureuses," p. 189.]




A COPARTNERSHIP


Marriage, considered merely in its financial and business relations, may be
regarded as a permanent copartnership.

Now, in an ordinary copartnership 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 copartnership 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 hayfield, 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 anything 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 copartnership. It so happens that the
outdoor 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.




ONE RESPONSIBLE HEAD


When we look through any business directory, there seem to be almost as
many copartnerships as single dealers; and three quarters of these
copartnerships 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 copartnership there are limitations on one side and special
privileges on the other,--marriage settlements, as it were; but the general
law of copartnership 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 fine-spun 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 may often 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 will 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.




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
everything 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 apply 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 made
my request. The annoyance was simply in the process of asking; and this
became so great, that I often underwent serious inconvenience rather than
do it. 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 when 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.





WOMANHOOD AND MOTHERHOOD


I always groan in spirit when any advocate of woman suffrage, carried away
by zeal, says anything disrespectf

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/13474