A New Atmosphere
by Gail Hamilton · English · Gutenberg #36152 · 447,765 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of A New Atmosphere
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: A New Atmosphere
Author: Gail Hamilton
Release date: May 18, 2011 [eBook #36152]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36152
Credits: Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A NEW ATMOSPHERE ***
Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
A NEW ATMOSPHERE
BY
GAIL HAMILTON,
AUTHOR OF "COUNTRY LIVING AND COUNTRY THINKING,"
"GALA DAYS," AND "STUMBLING-BLOCKS."
BOSTON:
FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.
1870.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by
TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the
District of Massachusetts
SEVENTH EDITION.
UNIVERSITY PRESS:
WELCH, BIGELOW, AND COMPANY,
CAMBRIDGE.
A NEW ATMOSPHERE.
I.
A vitiated atmosphere is fatal to healthy development. One may be ever
so wise, learned, rich, and beautiful, but if the air he breathes is
saturated with fever, pestilence, or any noxious vapor, nothing will
avail him. The subtile malaria creeps into his inmost frame, looks out
from his languid eye, settles in his sallow cheek, droops in his
tottering step, and laughs to scorn all his learning and gold and
grandeur. He must rid himself of the malaria, or the malaria will rid
itself of him.
There are many evils in the world, deep-seated and deleterious. I
rejoice to see noble men and women working at the overthrow of these
old Dagons; but the processes are many and long. Grievances are
suffered which can be redressed only by the repeal of old and the
enactment of new laws. Health suffers from ignorance which scientific
discoveries, patient observation, and correct reasoning must dispel.
Religion suffers from a narrowness and shallowness which broader and
deeper culture must remove. Heaven send the laws, the science, and the
culture, for these ills are indeed sore and of long continuance; but
we need not wait upon the slow steps of law and science. Every man and
woman can begin at this moment a renovation. Behind all law and all
literature, the very air we breathe, the moral atmosphere not of books
and benches only, but of kitchen and keeping-room, is impure and
unwholesome. The interests of humanity demand a purification.
What I am going to say may have been said before; but if so, the
present condition of things shows that it has been said to too little
purpose. I have myself glanced at it askance, but I have never looked
it square in the face. I have spoken ships bound to my port, but not
freighted with my cargo. Success to them all! There is sea-room for
every keel, and use for all their treasures. I am so far from claiming
to be original, that I rather marvel there is any necessity for my
being at all. The truths which I design to illustrate lie so on the
surface that I should suppose they would commend themselves to the
most casual notice. I can account for the obscurity which seems to
enshroud them only by supposing that the days of Eli have reached down
to us, and that there is no open vision. Therefore the truth needs to
be repeated and repeated, in different forms and tones, if it is to be
made effectual to the pulling down of strongholds. I will do my part
of the reiteration. If I can state no new truths, I will at least help
to ring the old truths into the ears of this generation till every
unjust judge shall moan in bitterness of soul, "Though I fear not God
nor regard man, yet, because these women trouble me, I will avenge
them, lest by their continual coming they weary me."
In pursuance of my plan, it will be necessary for me sometimes to
recur more than once to the same topic; but the repetition involved
will be more apparent than real. It will be such repetition as the
multiplication-table displays, whose first column gives you two times
four, its third four times two, its fourth four times five, and so on
to the end. You have the same figures, but in different combinations.
I shall bring forward the same facts, but they will be presented under
different lights, and will bear upon different conclusions.
I shall also, without hesitation, discuss topics on which I have
spoken at former times, but without perceiving all their relations. No
architect would reject stones which were necessary to the symmetry of
his building because he had previously used them for other purposes.
I shall touch upon many and diverse themes; but nothing will be
irrelevant. An atmosphere embraces the whole globe, and nothing human
is foreign to it.
One person may not succeed in dispelling all the miasms of the earth,
but if he can only cleanse one little corner of it, if he can but send
through the murky air one cool, bracing, healthy gale, he will do much
better than to sit under his vine, scared by the greatness of the evil
and the dignity of those who support it.
II.
The laws and customs regarding the education of girls and the
employment of women may be wrong and difficult of righting; but a more
elemental wrong, and one that lies within reach of every parent, is
the coarse, mercenary, and revolting tone of sentiment in which girls
are brought up and in which women live, entirely apart from their
technical education and employment. I refer now to the refined and
educated, as well as, and indeed more than, to the rude and
illiterate, for it is their altitude which determines the level of all
below. This tone of sentiment is such as to diminish girls'
self-respect, mar their purity, and dwarf their being. They inhale,
they imbibe, they are steeped in the idea, that the great business of
their life is marriage, and if they fail to secure that they will
become utterly bankrupt and pitiable. Naturally this idea becomes
their ruling motive; all their course is bent to its guidance; and
from this idea and this course of action spring crime, and sorrow, and
disaster, "in thick array of depth immeasurable."
In this and in many other instances you will doubtless think that I
overstate the truth. Looking into an empty bucket, you would say the
air is colorless; looking into the depths of the atmosphere, you see
that it is blue. I am not writing about a bucket, but about the
atmosphere.
Viewing the circumstances which form women, together with the women
who are formed by them, one is filled with astonishment at the
indwelling dignity and divinity of the womanly nature; and the thought
can but arise, if a flower so fair can spring from a soil so badly
tilled, what graceful and glorious growths might we not see did art
but combine with nature to produce the conditions of the highest
development! We lament heathendom, but much of our spirit is
essentially heathenish. Little girls see in their geographies pictures
of Circassian fathers selling their daughters to Turkish husbands, and
they think it very inhuman and pagan. But, little girls, your fathers
will traffic in you without scruple. Matters will not be managed in
quite so business-like a fashion, but such a pressure will be brought
to bear upon you that you will have very little more spontaneity than
the Circassian slave who looks so pitiful in the geography book. At
home you will hear yourself talked about, talked at, and talked to, in
such a manner that you will have no choice left but to marry. It is
expected and assumed. I do not mean girls who are to snatch their
unhappy fathers from exposure and disgrace by a rich and hated
marriage. Such things belong to ballads. We are dealing now with life.
I have seen girls,--respectable, well-educated, daughters of Christian
families, of families who think they believe that man's chief end is
to glorify God and enjoy him forever, who profess to make the Bible
their rule of faith and practice, to eschew the pomps and vanities of
this world, and consecrate themselves to the Lord,--who are yet
trained to think and talk of marriage in a manner utterly commercial
and frivolous. Allusions to and conversations on the subject are of
such a nature that they cannot remain unmarried without shame. They
are taught, not in direct terms at so much a lesson, like music or
German, but indirectly, and with a thoroughness which no music-master
can equal, that, if a woman is not married, it is because she is not
attractive, that to be unattractive to men is the most dismal and
dreadful misfortune, and that for an unmarried woman earth has no
honor and no happiness, but only toleration and a mitigated or
unmitigated contempt.
What is the burden of the song that is sung to girls and women? Are
they counselled to be active, self-helpful, self-reliant, alert,
ingenious, energetic, aggressive? Are they strengthened to find out a
path for themselves, and to walk in it unashamed? Are they braced and
toned up to solve for themselves the problems of life, to bear its
ills undaunted and meet its happinesses unbewildered? Go to! Such a
thing was never heard of. It is woman's rights! It is strong-minded!
It is discontented with your sphere! It is masculine! Milton and St.
Paul to the rescue!
"For contemplation he, and valor formed,
For softness she, and sweet attractive grace."
So "she" is urged to cultivate sweet attractive grace by acquainting
herself with housework, by learning to sew, and starch, and make
bread, to be economical and housewifely, and so a helpmeet to the
husband who is assumed for her. This is the true way to be attractive,
she is informed. "Men admire you in the ball-room," say the mentors
and mentoresses, "but they choose a wife from the home-circle."
Marriage is simply a reward of merit. Do not be extravagant, or
careless, or bold, or rude, for so you will scare away suitors. Be
prudent, and tidy, and simple, and gentle, and timid, and you will be
surrounded by them, and that is heaven, and secure a husband, which is
the heaven of heavens. A flood of stories and anecdotes deluges us
with proof. Arthur falls in love with beautiful, romantic, poetic,
accomplished Leonie, till she faints one day, and he rushes into her
room for a smelling-bottle, and finds no hartshorn, but much confusion
and dust, while plain Molly's room is neat and tidy, and overflows
with hartshorn; whereupon he falls out of love with Leonie, in with
Molly, and virtue and vice have their reward. Or Charles pays a
morning visit, and is entertained sumptuously in the parlor by Anabel,
and Arabel, and Claribel, and Isabel, in silk, while Cinderella stays
in the kitchen in calico and linen collar. But Charles catches a
glimpse of Cinderella behind the door, and loves and marries the
humble, grateful girl, to the disappointment and deep disgust of her
flounced and jewelled sisters. Or Jane at the tea-table cuts the
cheese-rind too thick, and handsome young Leonard infers that she will
be extravagant; Harriet pares it too thin, and that stands for
niggardliness; but Mary hits the golden mean, and is rewarded with and
by handsome young Leonard. Or a broomstick lies in the way, over which
Clara, Anna, Laura, and the rest step unheeding or indifferent, and
only Lucy picks it up and replaces it, which Harry, standing by, makes
a note of, and Lucy is paid with the honor of being Harry's wife.
Moral: Go you and do likewise, and verily you shall have your reward,
or at least you stand a much better chance of having it than if you do
differently. "Be good, and you will be married," is the essence of the
lesson.
Laying aside now all question of the dignity and delicacy of such
proceedings, assuming for the time that it is the proper course, let
us notice whether it is followed out to its conclusions. Not in the
least. Having done its best to transpose the feminine raw material
into the orthodox texture and pattern of "good wives," society lays it
on the shelf to run its own risk of finding a purchaser. It neither
provides husbands for the "good wives" which it has made, nor suffers
them to go and look up husbands for themselves. If a girl is ready to
enter service, she can enroll her name at the intelligence office. If
she is prepared to teach, she sends to the "Committee." If she desires
to be a saleswoman, she applies at the different shops; but your "good
wife" candidate must wait patiently,--not the grand old theological
"waiting in the use of means," but the Micawber waiting for something
to turn up. She has learned the bread-making and the clear-starching;
she is mistress of domestic economy; she is familiar with all the
little details of puddings and preserves; she is ripe for wifehood and
green for all else, and now she wants an arena for the exercise of her
skill. But she would better pull her tongue out at once than say so.
People may talk to girls at pleasure of the fair domestic realm where
they will be queen, of the glory of such a kingdom, and the
unsatisfying emptiness of any and every other; but no crime is more
fatal to a girl's reputation and prospects than the suspicion of
husband-hunting. That fate, that career, that glory, which has been
constantly mapped out to her as the very Land of Promise, the goal of
her ambition, the culmination of her happiness, is the one fate, the
one career, the one glory, which she must not lift an eyelash to
secure. Let a girl, the very same girl whom you have been pushing
through a course of the received proper training, be supposed to set
but so much as a feather on her hat, a smile on her lips, a tone in
her voice, to attract the admiration which she has been constantly
taught is the guerdon of all the virtues,--and her reputation sinks at
once to zero. "Trying to get a husband," whether couched in the
decorous phrase of polite society, or in the uncompromising language
of more primitive circles, is the death-warrant of a girl's good name.
She must sedulously prepare herself for a position to which she must
be totally indifferent. She must learn all domestic accomplishments,
but she must take no measures, she must exhibit no symptoms of a
desire to secure a domestic situation. You bid her make ready the
wedding-garments and the marriage feast, and then sit quietly waiting
till the bridegroom cometh, her small hands folded, her meek eyelashes
drooping, no throb of impatience or discontent or anxiety in her
heart, no reaching out for any career at home or abroad, except a meek
ministration in her father's house, or a mild village benevolence. But
will Nature set aside her laws at your behest? Is it of any use for
you to lay down your yardstick and say, "Thus far shalt thou go, and
no farther"? Do you not see the inevitable result is a course of
falsehood?
Is this a strong statement, a libel upon the female sex? But you read
novel after novel in which the larger number of women--all, perhaps,
except the heroine--are represented as artful, sly, deceitful,
managing; and generally the main object of their artifice is to secure
a husband for themselves or for their daughters: yet you do not at
once cry out in indignant protest against such misrepresentation. On
the contrary, you follow the plot with lively interest, think the
author has a very clear insight into human nature, and especially
excels in the delineation of female character!
Hear what one of your own writers says: "If all the world were paper,
all the sea ink, all the plants and trees pens, and every man a
writer,--yet were they not able, with all labor and cunning, to set
down all the craft and deceits of women."
If my statement is a libel, it is less a libel than statements and
implications under which people have hitherto rested with a wonderful
degree of equanimity. It would be marvellous if it were a libel. A
girl receives such training that it is wellnigh impossible for her to
be sincere. You cannot give her whole life for six or a dozen years
one direction, and then set her face suddenly towards another quarter,
banishing from her mind every remembrance of past lessons, and every
thought of her portrayed future. But unless such an erasure is made,
or seems to be made, she knows that she forfeits good opinion, and
stands in great danger of losing the one prize which has been placed
before her, and which she may hope, but must not be detected in
hoping, to win. Consequently she learns to dissemble. It is her only
resource. Duplicity passes into her blood, and she learns to conceal
and deny what you have taught her it is improper to feel, but what you
have also made it impossible for her not to feel. I only wonder that
any uprightness is left among women. That there are women upon whose
garments the smell of fire has not passed,--that there are women whose
robes of whiteness have but a faint tinge of flame,--is not because
the fagots have not been piled around them and the torch applied.
This is one result of the famous, the infamous "good wife" doctrines.
Another, less fatal but sufficiently evil and more vexatious, is the
injury that is inflicted upon natural and healthful association. Men
and women are not allowed to look upon each other as rational beings;
every woman is a wife in the grub, every man is a possible husband in
the chrysalis state. If young people enjoy each other's conversation,
and make opportunities to secure it, there are dozens of gossips, male
and female, who proceed to forecast "a match." Intelligent interchange
of opinion and sentiments between a man and a woman for the mere
delight in it, with no design upon each other's name or fortune, is a
thing of which a large majority of civilized Americans have no
conception. Such a commodity never had a place in their inventory. A
man and a woman find each other agreeable, they cultivate each other's
society, and anon, East, West, South, and North goes the report that
they are "engaged." It is easy to see what a check this gives to an
intercourse that would be in the highest degree beneficial to both
sexes; beneficial, by giving to each a more accurate knowledge of the
other, and by improving what in each is good, and diminishing what is
bad.
One of three things should be done: cease to urge a girl on to
marriage by every terror threatened and every allurement displayed; by
making it the reward of all her exertion, the arena of all her
accomplishment, the condition of all her development; or take measures
to provide her with a suitable husband, so that she shall not be left
for an indefinite time in uncertainty and doubt, settling, perhaps, at
length into frivolity, waste, and despair; or cease to condemn her for
taking matters into her own hand, and furnishing herself an
opportunity for the exercise of those powers whose cultivation you
have strenuously urged, and for whose employment you have made no
provision. "Get a husband!" Why should she not get a husband? What
should you think of a boy who had been fitted by long training for the
duties and responsibilities of a clergyman, or a lawyer, or a
statesman, and should then make no attempt to become a clergyman, a
lawyer, or a statesman? What would you think of a father who should
train his son for any especial office, and should then forbid his son,
upon pain of universal derision, to do anything to secure an induction
into office?
I am loath to linger here, but I descend into the valley of shadows to
show that, even on your own ground, you are a wicked and slothful
servant.
Whom do I mean by "you"? I mean ninety-nine out of every hundred of
the men who will read this, and, in a modified degree, all the women
whom they have drilled to acquiescence in their decisions.
This baleful teaching goes still further. It not only drives girls
into deception: it drives them into uncongenial marriages. It forces
them to degradation. It does not permit them to view marriage in its
natural and proper light. By perpetually assuming it as their destiny,
even before they have any knowledge either of marriage or destiny, you
so force their inclinations that they come to prefer marrying an
indifferent person to not marrying at all,--or even to running the
risk of not marrying at all. Instead of letting their minds take a
healthful turn, branching off in such directions as nature chooses,
you dwarf them in every direction but one, and in that you stimulate.
If society were equally divided; if for every girl there were a man
exactly adapted to her, and the two might by your words be induced to
meet and marry, your talk might be harmless, and possibly beneficial;
but as the world is, at least this part of it, there is no such
arrangement, and no remote possibility of such an arrangement. The
material does not exist, even suppose the sagacity to discern and
dispose of it did. The number of women is much larger than the number
of men. In New England, at least, it is a dangerous thing for a woman
to set her heart on marrying for a living. When, therefore, you make
marriage indispensable, you institute an indiscriminate scramble.
Since in theory every girl must marry, and there are few to choose
from, she must take such as she can get, and be thankful. She would
like this, that, or the other quality, but it will not do to dally.
The chance of a better husband is very remote; numbers are worse off
than she, inasmuch as they have none at all; the contingency of going
unsupplied is not to be thought of, and accordingly she takes up with
what comes to hand. The few who are endowed with unusual charms of
mind or person may exercise a limited choice, but the common run of
girls must make a common run of it. If one who is so attractive as to
have many admirers remains long unmarried, she is abundantly
admonished of her danger. She is duly informed that she will one day
grow old, and will certainly not always have such opportunities as she
now enjoys. Her attractiveness is her stock in trade, which she must
invest while the market is brisk. Great will be her loss if she does
not. If without special attractions, a girl's position is still more
embarrassing. Dependent in her father's house, with no career open to
her, no arena for her action, what is to become of her? Anything is
better than a dependence which, her own heart tells her, is not long
grateful to her father. He may not be unkind or miserly toward her; he
may not--and he may, for such things are done--taunt her with her want
of success in making a match; he may even be generous and chivalric
towards her; but she is conscious that he is disappointed. He may not
acknowledge it even to himself, but she knows that she is not
fulfilling his wishes, not meeting his ideal. Her support is somewhat
a burden, her enforced presence somewhat a shame. He rejoiced in her
infancy, childhood, and youth, but he did not expect to have her on
his hands all her life. He would gladly spend twice as much on her
dowry as he gives for her allowance. She has a _sense_ of all this,
and, rather than remain in this state of pupilage, a woman in
character, a child in position, she marries the first man that holds
out the golden spectre,--I meant sceptre, but perhaps the first will
do just as well. I am speaking of the masses. I know that there are
exceptions. In spite of circumstances, there are women so
strong,--strong-minded if you like, but so symmetrical that you see no
peculiar strength or sweetness, only "a perfect woman,"--so strong,
that public opinion and private opinion, all the blare and blarney of
lecture-room and female-school orators, all the thinly disguised
paganism of church-worldlings, beat against them and leave them
unmoved as Gibraltar by the summer ripples of its southern sea. You
see them yourself, perhaps; but so beautiful, so gentle and lovely,
that you do not discern the granite which underlies beauty and grace,
and which alone redeems beauty and grace from the charge of gaud, and
makes their value; and in your low Dutch dialect you "wonder she
doesn't get married."
There are fathers and mothers, though these are rarer, who joy in
their children with a rational and Christian joy; who believe in God
and righteousness, immortality and human destiny; whose daughters are
polished stones, not in the palaces of earthly pride, vanity, and
ambition, but in the temple of the living God. Such parents and such
children are few, but they are enough to reveal possibilities. The
higher the few can reach, the higher the many shall rise. But these
are the strong, and the strong can take care of themselves. I have
nothing to say for them. I speak for those who are not strong,--for
the good and true-hearted, who feel themselves overborne by external
pressure, and swept along into a hateful and hated vortex,--for those
who wish to lead an upright Christian life, but who need a helping
hand. Still more, and saddest of all, I speak for those on whom the
blight has so long rested that they have lost the sense of
uprightness; they feel no wrong, and aspire to nothing higher. More
than this, I speak for those whose opening lives are yet untouched,
for whom warning and caution may not be too late. It is these--the
weak, the plastic, the impressible--whom your earth-born morality is
corrupting, whose possibilities of happiness and self-respect your
enervating woman's-sphere-ism is destroying. Women may be weak, yet
even in weakness is strength, but you have trodden down strength. You
trample under foot all sensibility, all delicacy, all dignity. A woman
can preserve her integrity only so far as she repels and represses
your miserable didactics;--by word and look, if the power be given
her; by a silent indignation of protest, if that is her only resource.
I know well, judging from past experience, that there will not be
wanting those who will think I am depreciating and deprecating
marriage. But it would be extremely foolish to set one's self against
marriage, for it would be holding out a straw to dam a river. I not
only do not hold out the straw, I do not even wish to dam the river.
But I would prevent it from being banked up here and banked up there,
and narrowed, twisted, and tortured, till it bursts all bounds,
natural and acquired, and rushes wildly over the country, destroying
villages, inundating harvests, sweeping away lives, and becoming a
terror and a fate instead of the beneficence it was meant to be.
_I_ depreciate marriage? I magnify it! It is you that depreciate, by
debasing it. You lower it to the level of the market. You degrade it
to a question of political and domestic economy. You look upon it as
an arrangement. I believe it to be a sacrament. You subordinate it to
ways and means. I see in it the type of mortal and immortal union. You
make it but the cradle of mankind. I make it also the crown. All that
is tender, grand, and ennobling finds there its home, its source and
sustenance, its inspiration, and its exceeding great reward.
But by as much as marriage is sacred, by so much is he a blasphemer
who travesties it; and he thrice and four times blasphemous who leads
others to do so. No sin is so dwelt on in the Bible with a stern,
reiterated fixedness of divine abhorrence as the sin of Jeroboam, the
son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin. They who barter their children
for a string of beads, or a talent of gold, are no more pagan than
they who, by accumulated indirections, lead them to barter themselves.
I do not undertake the defence of all "woman's rights," but with
whatever strength God has given me I will do battle for woman's right
to be pure. "Caesar's wife should be above suspicion," said haughty
Caesar, and the world applauds; but every woman is czarina by divine
right. No wretched outcast, wandering through the darkness of the
great city,
"With hell in her heart
And death in her hand,
Daring the doom of the unknown land,"
but has lost a crown. For her who, through weakness or despair, has
forfeited her birthright, the world has no pardon. I do not say that
ye should pray for it to be otherwise. But a deeper sin, a tenfold
more gross and revolting violation of God's law written on the human
heart,--giving force to the law written erewhile on the tables of
stone,--does she commit who, in the holy name of love, under the holy
forms of marriage, burns incense to false gods. Where love may walk
white-robed and stainless, brushing the morning dews from the grass,
only to descend again in fresher and fragrant showers, pride or
prudence or ambition can but bring the deepest profanation: roses
spring in his pathway; behind them is the desert.
Marriage contracted to subserve material ends, however innocent those
ends may be in themselves, is legalized prostitution; as much more
vilifying, as mischief framed by a law is more destructive than
mischief wrought in spite of law. To such vice the world is lenient,
scarcely recognizing it as vice; but the soul bears its marks of
wounds forever and forever.
Marriage is a result, not a cause. In God's great economy it may have
its separate and important work; but from a human point of view, it is
conclusion and not premise. It cannot be made the premise without
bringing fatal and disastrous conclusions. Whatever ends nature may
design her institution to compass, be sure nature will work out.
III.
I do not design to sketch any Utopia for woman; but there are certain
things which can be done in this world, in this country, in this
generation, at this moment,--simple, practical, practicable measures,
which can be accomplished without any change in laws, without any
palpable revolution or disruption of society, but by which women shall
be relieved of the indignity that is constantly put upon them, even by
the society which considers itself, and which perhaps is, the most
civilized and chivalric in the world.
First, every man who has daughters is either able to support them or
he is not. If he is, he ought to do it in a way that shall make them
feel as little trammelled as possible. He should so treat them, from
first to last, that they shall feel that they are dear and pleasant to
him, his delight and ornament. So far from wishing to be rid of them,
he finds his balm and solace and zest of life in their society, their
interests, and their ministrations. While he contemplates the
contingency of their marriage, and makes what preparations such
contingency may require, it should be well understood that he
contemplates it only as a contingency; and that all his wishes and
hopes will be best met by their happiness, whether it is to be
promoted by a life away from him or with him. If they are so deficient
in amiability, capability, or adaptability that his home cannot be
comfortable with them in it,--that, so far from being a reason why he
should be eager to part with them, is the strongest reason why he
should earnestly endeavor to keep them with him. Almost without fail,
their faults lie at his door; and it is just and right that, if any
home is to be made miserable by them, it should be the one which has
made them _miserific_. On the other hand, if they wish to go from his
roof to follow paths of their own, he ought to aid and encourage them
as far as lies in his power. It matters not that he is able and
willing to supply their every want. He is _not_ able, if they have
immortal wants,--wants which the parental heart and purse cannot
satisfy,--want of activity, want of a plan, want of some work which
shall engage their young and eager energies. However liberal, kind,
and fond he may be, in their father's house their position must be
subordinate, and it may well happen that they shall wish to taste the
sweets of an independent, self-helping, self-directing life. They wish
to feel their own hands at the helm; they wish to know what
responsibility and foresight and planning mean. They are drawn by a
strong, inexplicable attraction in certain directions; and as he
values not only their happiness, but their salvation,--their love for
him, their health of body and mind,--he shall give them ample room and
verge enough. He shall not abate one jot or tittle of fatherly
affection. He shall not attempt to persuade them from their
inclination till he finds persuasion of no avail, and then in a fit of
angry petulance bid them go, and leave them to their own destruction.
He shall give them such aid as can be made available. He shall
surround them with his love, if not with his care. He shall, above
all, show them that his arms are always open to them, if through
weakness or weariness they faint by the way. His sympathy and
protection, and fatherly cherishing, shall be new every morning and
fresh every evening. If they quickly tire in their new paths, they
will come back to him with stronger love and faith. Their life abroad
will have only endeared their happy home. The enlargement of their
experience will have intensified their appreciation of their
blessings. If their call was indeed from above, and their first feeble
explorations opened for them a new world, through which they learn to
walk with ever firmer tread, they will return from time to time to lay
at his feet with unutterable gratitude the treasures which he enabled
them to discover. He will know that he has contributed to the world's
wealth, and his happy children will rise up and call him blessed.
But if they do not incline to such a life, he shall not force them,
however strongly he may be persuaded of its propriety, wisdom, and
dignity. Because they are obliged to grow under the whole
superincumbent weight of society, he must not be severe if they attain
but a partial growth. With boys the preponderance of influence is
overwhelmingly on the side of an active, positive life. With girls, it
is against it. If a boy does not do something in the world, he must
show cause for it; a girl must show cause if she does. Therefore, if
the father is not able, by precept and persuasion, to induce his
daughters to embrace an active life, he must lay it to society, and do
the next best thing by protecting them as far as possible from the
resultant evils of their situation; not quite all to society either,
for, as a general thing, if his own precept and example have been
right, his children will be right; the influence of father and mother,
by its nearness, intensity, and continuity, very often more than
balances the superior bulk of society's influence. Parents say things
which they ought to mean, and which they wish to be considered to
mean, and which they suppose they do mean, but which they are really
the farthest in the world from meaning, and then marvel that their
children should disregard their instructions and go wrong; but such
instructions are but as the dust in the balance. The ideal which they
actually, though perhaps unconsciously, hold up to their children, is
the model upon which the children form themselves. What they are, not
what they say, is the paramount influence. So if a father heartily
believes in womanly work, his daughters will hardly fail to be
woman-workers.
If a father is not able to support his daughters in a manner
compatible with comfort and refinement, he should see to it that they
have some way opened in which they can do it, or help do it, for
themselves, in a manner consistent with their dignity and
self-respect. It is very rarely that a human being is born without
possible power in some one direction. The field which is traversable
to women is much more circumscribed than that which is traversed by
men, yet I have somewhere read a statement that the number of
employments in which women of the United States are actually engaged
is, I think, greater than five hundred. If this is so, or anything
nearly so, men surely have no need to "marry off" their daughters as
an economical measure. Out of five hundred occupations, a woman can
certainly choose one which, though not perhaps that which enlists her
enthusiasm, is yet better than the debasement of herself which an
indifferent marriage necessitates. It is better to be not wholly
well-placed than to be wholly ill-placed. Indeed, there are many
chances in favor of the assumption that she may find even a suitable
employment. Literature and art are open to her on equal terms with
men. Teaching is free to her, with the disadvantage of being
miserably, shamefully, wickedly underpaid, both as regards the
relative and intrinsic value of her work; but this is an arrangement
which does not degrade her, only the men who employ her. Many
mechanical employments she is at perfect liberty to acquire, and the
greater delicacy of her organization gives her a solid advantage over
her masculine competitors. In factories, in printing-offices, and in
all manner of haberdashers' shops, she is quite at home; and this
branch of trade she ought to monopolize, for surely a man is as much
out of his sphere in holding up a piece of muslin at arm's length, and
expatiating on its merits to a bevy of women, as a woman is in the
pulpit or before the mast. Especially do private houses invite her
over all the country. The whole land groans under inefficient domestic
assistance; and if healthy, intelligent, well-behaved American girls
would be willing to work in kitchens which they do not own one half as
hard as most women work in kitchens which they do own, thousands of
doors would fly open to them. There is a foolish pride and prejudice
which rises up against "going out to service." But everybody in this
world, who is not a cumberer of the ground, is out at service. If it
is true service and well performed, one thing is as honorable as
another. The highest plaudit mortal can hope to receive is, "Well
done, good and faithful servant." It is the absence of moral dignity
and character, not, as is often supposed, its presence, which causes
this reluctance. A nobleman ennobles his work. A king among
basket-makers is none the less a king. How women can be so enamored of
the needle as to choose to make a pair of cotton drilling drawers,
with buckles, button-holes, straps, and strings, for four and one
sixth cents, or fine white cotton shirts with fine linen "bosoms" for
sixteen cents apiece, rather than go into a handsome house in the next
street to make the beds, and scour the knives, and iron the clothes
for a dollar and a half a week,[1] besides board and rent, I do not
understand. That so many are ready to brave the din of machinery, and
the smells of a factory for ten hours a day, with only a great,
dreary, unhomelike boarding-house to go to at night, while there are
so very few, if any, who are willing to preside over a comfortable and
plentiful kitchen, with at least a possibility of home comforts,
pleasant association, and true appreciation, is equally inexplicable.
[1] This was written before the advent of high prices. At
present such service would command perhaps twice that sum.
But enough has been said to show, that, if women have a desire, or are
under the necessity, of getting an honest living, ways and means may
be found; not so stimulating, not so lucrative, not so varied as might
be desired, but honest and honorable. Girls, however, make the mistake
of rushing pell-mell into school-houses, as if that were the only
respectable path to independence. I heard a man the other day speaking
about the High School of his native city. It was a good school,--he
had nothing to say against its conduct,--it gave girls a good
education; and yet he sometimes thought it did more harm than good.
Every year a class was graduated, and they were all ladies and did not
want to work, but must all teach, and there were no schools for so
many; what could be done with them? It was an evil that seemed to be
growing worse every year. The implied grievance was, that educated
women were a drug in the market; and the implied remedy, that girls
should be left more uncultivated that they might be turned to commoner
uses. I pass over that accurate knowledge of things shown in the
unconscious contrast between working and teaching,--over the gross
utilitarianism implied in both grievance and redress,--simply
remarking, that, if the excess of supply over demand would justify the
breaking up of High Schools, the domestic education of this generation
should be largely discontinued for the same reason, and that in fact
there seems to be no real and adequate resource, except to manage with
girl babies as you do with kittens, save the fifth and drown the
rest,--to say that girls do very wrong in regarding teaching as the
sole or the chief honorable employment. That occupation is the one for
them to which a natural taste calls them, no matter what may be its
rank in society. In fact, let it not be forgotten that society looks
with a degree of disfavor on any remunerative employment for women. To
be entirely beyond the reach of cavil, they must be consumers, and not
producers; and since, to turn into producers will forfeit somewhat
their caste, let them make capital out of the rural and remote adage,
that one may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, and while they are
about it, follow the thing that good is to them. If girls of wealth
and standing, who also possess character and decision, would act upon
their principles when they have them, and follow the lead of their
tastes when their taste leads them into a milliner's shop, or a watch
factory, or a tailor's room, they would do much more than satisfy
their own consciences. They would do a service to their sex, and
through their sex to the other, and so to the whole world, which would
outweigh whatever small sacrifice it might cost them. For the world is
so constituted that to him that hath shall be given. If he have power,
he shall have still more. Those who are independent of the world's
sufferance are tolerably sure to get it. Let a poor girl go to work,
and it is nothing at all. She is obliged to do it, and society does
not so much as turn a look upon her; but let a girl go out from her
brown-stone five-story house, from the care and attendance of
servants, to work for three or five hours a day, because she honestly
believes that the accident of wealth does not relieve her from moral
responsibility, and because, of all forms of labor practicable to her,
that seems the one to which she is best adapted, and immediately there
is a commotion. The brown-stone friends are shocked and scandalized,
which is probably the best thing that could happen to them. Desperate
cases can only be electrified back into life. But it is the first girl
alone that will cause a shock. The second will make but a faint
sensation. The third will be quite commonplace, and when things come
to that pass, that if a woman wishes to do a thing she can do it, and
that is the end of it, there is little more to be desired in that
line.
I know a young lady, the only daughter of a distinguished family, with
abundant means at her command, with parents whose great happiness it
is to promote hers,--a young lady who has only to fancy what a nice
thing it must be to live in a bird's-nest on a tree-top, and
immediately the carpenters come and build her a bower in the tallest
tree that overlooks the sea. This young lady has a strong inclination
to surgery, a most perverted and unwomanly taste, of course; but so
long as it is a womanly weakness to break one's arms, perhaps it is as
well that some woman should be unwomanly enough to set them. At any
rate, there was the taste; nobody put it there, and something must be
done about it. Being the sensible daughter of sensible parents, who
looked upon tastes as hints of powers, instead of disregarding this
hint and devoting her life to her garden, making calls, and a forced
and feeble piano-worship,--all very nice things, but not quite
exhaustive of immortal capacities,--she set herself down to the study
of surgery and medicine. It was no superficial and sensational whim.
Year after year, month after month, week after week, showed no
abatement of enthusiasm. On the contrary, her interest grew with her
growing knowledge. She left without regret, without any weak regrets,
her luxurious home for the secluded and severe student's life, and by
patient and laborious application made herself master of the science.
I look upon her almost as an apostle, though she is very far from
taking on apostolic airs. She quietly pursues the even tenor of her
way as if it were the beaten track. But in doing this she does ten
thousand times more. She opens the path for a host of feet less strong
than hers.
But one great obstacle in the way of woman's attaining strength is her
lack of perseverance. Of the many pursuits possible to women, few are
embraced to any great extent, because girls are said to be, and
probably are, unwilling to bestow upon a trade or a profession the
study and thought which are necessary to insure skill. But this is a
result as well as a cause, and must be removed by the removal of the
cause. Promotion and political preferment shine before a man as a
reward for whatever eminence of character or intelligence he may
attain. His business is a separate department, and dispenses its
separate reward. The first of these is entirely, and the second
partially, wanting to women. A female assistant in a high school, a
woman of education, refinement, accomplishments, tact, and sense,
receives six hundred dollars, and if she stays six hundred years she
will receive no more. A male assistant, fresh from a college or a
normal school, thoroughly unseasoned, without elegance of manners, or
dignity of presence, or experience, teaching only temporarily, with a
view to the pulpit, or the bar, or a professorship, receives a
thousand dollars. His thousand is because he is a man. Her six hundred
is because she is a woman. Her little finger may be worth more to the
school than his whole body, but that goes for nothing. In a certain
"college" I wot of, the "Professors" have a larger salary than the
"Preceptresses," who perform double the amount of labor, and without
any hope of promotion. Female assistants in a grammar school receive
three or four hundred dollars where the male principal has ten or
twelve hundred, and where the difference of salary bears no proportion
to the difference of care and labor. No matter how assiduously they
may devote themselves to their duties, nor how successful they may be
in results, they have attained the maximum. Worse than this: since the
increase of prices consequent upon the war, teachers' salaries have
been increased; but where two hundred dollars have been added to the
salary of the male principal, only twenty-five have been added to
those of the female assistants: so that the man's salary is sixteen
per cent higher, while the woman's is only six per cent higher. This
is done in Massachusetts. One excuse is, that it does not cost a woman
so much to live as it costs a man. It costs a woman just as much to
live as it does a man. If men would be willing to practise the small
economies that women practise, they could live at no greater expense.
There are some things in which women have the advantage; there are
others in which it lies with the man. A woman's calico gown does not
cost so much as a man's broadcloth coat, but her dress, the wardrobe
through, costs just as much as his. He can be decent on just as small
a sum as she. Another excuse is, that men have a family to support. I
suppose, then, that women never have families to support. No female
teacher ever has a widowed mother or an invalid father to assist, or
brothers and sisters to educate. No widow ever had recourse to the
school-room to provide bread for her fatherless children. Or if such
things ever happen, the authorities make adequate provision for it.
The school committee, of course, before it assigns the salary inquires
into these background facts, and acts accordingly. The rich girl has
indeed but a small income from her teaching, but the poor girl is paid
according to the number of people dependent upon her, and the
unmarried man is confined to narrower fortunes.
You know that such a thing is never done. The men always receive the
high salaries and the women always receive the low salaries; no one
ever asks who does the work or who supports the families. It is only a
feeble excuse to hide men's selfish greed. They are the lions, and
they take the lion's share. They _can_ give themselves plenty and
women a pittance, and they do it, and they mean to do it, and they
will do it. It matters not that the ten or twelve or fourteen hundred
dollars divided among the man's family of himself, his wife, and his
one or two or no children, gives to each, even to the little baby
playing on the floor, as much money for support as the female teacher
receives who devotes her whole time and strength to the school. It
matters not that his children are growing up to be the staff of his
declining years, while the unmarried female assistant has only her own
self for reliance. Man is a thief and holds the bag, and if women do
not like to teach for what they can get, so much the better. They will
be all the more willing to become household drudges.
Again, read the following paragraph from a prominent newspaper printed
in Massachusetts.
"The custom of employing ladies as clerks in the public departments at
Washington is meeting with increased favor. It is said that, generally
speaking, they write more correctly than the men, and as they receive
much smaller salaries, the gain to the government is considerable."
Could six lines better express the wickedness of the relations which
exist between man and woman under the "best government in the world"?
The shabby chivalry of "ladies"; the matter-of-fact manner in which
not only a wrong, but an absurdity, is mentioned, as if it were as
evident as a syllogism, and had no more to do with morality than the
multiplication-table; and then the neat little patriotico-economical
chuckle at the end! Women do the work better than men, and receive
much smaller salaries. A logical sequence, and an excellent example of
the reasoning which is brought to bear on women. Especially dignified
and commanding is the attitude assumed for our government. The Great
Republic, stretching its arms across a continent, vexing every land
for its treasures, and whitening every sea with its sails, yet stoops
over a poor woman's pocket to take toll of the few pennies which her
labor has fairly earned. "The wise _save_ it call."
But there is a lower deep than this. The very same paper that so
naively blazoned forth its own shame, made another brilliant essay at
about the same time. I quote the paragraph from memory, but it is
substantially correct.
"Miss Anna Dickinson demanded three [or six, or whatever it was]
hundred dollars for two lectures delivered for the benefit of the
Sanitary Fair in Chicago. Miss Charlotte Cushman gave eight thousand
dollars, the entire proceeds of her theatrical tour, to the Sanitary
Commission. Comment is unnecessary."
For all that, we will have a little comment. Here is one woman in a
million rising by the sheer force of her God-given genius above the
miserable necessities of women. She needs not to endure or to beg. She
is sovereign in her own right and can dictate her own terms. Men
cannot grind her face, for she is stronger than they. What do they do?
They hold her up to odium because they cannot extort from her the
money which they cannot prevent her from earning. Most women they can
prevent from earning it. Most working-women they can keep down to what
prices they choose to pay. But here is one to whom they cannot dole
out pennies: "with one white arm-sweep" she gathers in a golden
harvest. But they will at least force her Pactolian stream into a
channel of their own choosing. Not at all.
"If she will, she will, you may depend on 't;
If she won't, she won't, and there's an end on 't."
Nothing, therefore, is left to these high-minded gentry, but to stand
at a distance and "make faces"!
Somebody assumed to excuse Miss Dickinson, by saying that she gave up
other and far more lucrative engagements for this; but it was entirely
a work of supererogation. Miss Dickinson needed no excuse. One might,
indeed, think within himself that Miss Cushman has nearly closed her
public career, and is already possessed of an independent fortune,
while Miss Dickinson's life lies before her, and her fortune is still
to be made. But all this is irrelevant. The whole paragraph is an
impertinence. Why is any person to be mulcted at another's instance in
any sum for any charity or any purpose whatever? What right has any
newspaper to decide the direction or the amount of a citizen's
benevolence? Had it concerned a man, it would have been impertinence;
concerning a woman, it is something worse,--not because of her
womanhood, but because of the injustice which is wrought upon her sex
wherever there is the ability to be unjust.
These are very small things, but they are signs of great ones.
It may be inferred, therefore, that woman's indifference to excellence
in work does not necessarily impugn either her character or calibre.
Excellence is indeed good in itself, and desirable, without reference
to the money it brings; yet money and promotion are a spur, and
therefore they must be taken into the account when we are dealing with
facts and not merely with theories.
Now, then, let women, disregarding senseless and wicked customs, make
a point of making a point of something, and then let them lay aside
every weight which social injustice or indifference hangs upon them,
and the consequent sin of superficiality which so easily besets them,
and make that point perfect. No matter that they are ill-paid and held
down, let them assert themselves; let them work so well that their
work shall assert itself, and pay and promotion will come--to woman,
if not to themselves--as the inevitable result.
I do not mean that every woman should study medicine, or apprentice
herself to a trade. Indeed, I consider it to be a wrong state of
society in which there is any other necessity for her doing so than
that which arises from her own inward promptings. It is very likely
that she can find in her father's house abundant scope for the
exercise of every faculty. She may have a leaning to home life, and to
no other. Because a girl remains at home, it by no means follows that
she is accomplishing nothing. What I do mean is, that she shall not
dawdle away her time simply because she is a girl; and that if, moved
by her own instincts, which are from God, or impelled by
circumstances, which are generally the fault of men, she enters the
arena where men strive, she shall have no other disabilities than
those which Nature lays upon her. Do not fail to note the distinction
between choice and necessity in her adoption of a career. When a
woman, of her own free will and delight, pursues a study or an
occupation beyond the common female range, it is one thing. When she
is obliged to earn her own living, and for that purpose goes out into
the paths where men walk, it is another thing. In both cases she
should work on equal terms with men; in the first, because the very
strength of her purpose, overcoming the natural disinclinations of her
sex, shows it to be of celestial origin, and therefore worthy of
respect; in the second, because, if man fails to give to woman the
support which is her due, the smallest step towards reparation is to
allow her every advantage in the attempt to support herself. It is
always a sorrowful, I think it is always an injurious thing, for a
woman to be obliged to compete with men, that is, to earn money. She
can do it only at the constant torture, or the constant
sacrifice--perhaps both--of something higher than can be brought into
the strife. But so much the more should she be freed from every
unnecessary pain and hinderance. Moreover, evil as is the imperative
assumption by woman of man's work, it combats a greater evil, and
therefore also should her hands be upheld. The most persistent and
kindly encouragement can never change, in the womanly heart, love of
home into love of conquest and renown; but it can do much to soften
the harshness of an uncongenial lot, and take somewhat from the
bitterness of a cup that never can be sweet.
The mere fact of a daughter's services being needed at home is no
reason why they shall be claimed after she has become of age, either
through years, or maturity of character, when such service is
distasteful to her, and other service is tasteful and possible. If,
for instance, a girl has a strong desire to be a milliner, or a
mantua-maker, or an artist, she should not be prevented because her
mother wants her at home to help take care of the children and do the
work. I suppose to many this will seem unnatural and undutiful. It is
neither the one nor the other. There are remarkable notions afloat
concerning nature and duty. If one may judge from popular ethics, the
duty seems to lie chiefly on one side. Lions, we are told, would
appear to the world in a very different light if lions wrote history;
so filial and parental relations, discussed as they always are by the
parental part of the community, have a different bearing from what
they would if looked at from the children's point of view. In our
eagerness to enforce the claims which parents have on children, we
seem sometimes ready to forget the equally stringent claims which
children have on parents. Much is said about the gratitude which
parental care imposes upon the child; very little about the
responsibility which his involuntary birth imposed upon himself.
Here is a daughter, an immortal being, accountable to God. Surely,
when she has become a woman, she has a right to direct her life in the
manner best adapted to bring out its abilities. No human being has a
right to appropriate another human being's life,--even if they be
mother and daughter. You say that she owes life itself to her parents.
True, but in such a way that it confers an additional obligation on
them to give her every opportunity to make the most of life, and not
in such a way as to justify them in monopolizing it, nor in such a way
as to render her accountable to them alone for its use. The person who
gives life is under much stronger bonds than the person who receives
life. Life is a momentous thing. It may be an eternal curse. It is
almost certain to involve deep sorrow. Sin, disease, pain, are almost
sure to follow in its wake. It is a Pandora's box whose best treasure
is only a compensation. The happiest thing we know of it is, that it
will one day come to an end: Psyche will rend off her disguises, and
soar in her proper form. The uncertainty of the future is our solace
against the certainty of the present. Surely, then, of all people in
the world, those who impose this fearful burden are the very last who
should add even a feather's weight to it, and the very first and
foremost who should at any sacrifice of less important matters lighten
it as far as possible. Filial unfaithfulness is a sin, but parental
unfaithfulness is a chief of sins. The first violates relations which
it finds. The second violates those which it makes. Almost invariably
the second is the direct cause of the first. There may be
extraordinary malformations: a child may be born with some organic
incapacity for love, or gratitude, or virtue, as children are born
blind or deaf. But, as a rule, parental love and wisdom result in
filial love and duty growing stronger and stronger every day, and
removing the possibility of sacrifice by making all service a
pleasure. Because, where I knew the circumstances, I never saw an
instance of filial misbehavior that could not be traced directly to
parental mismanagement or neglect, I believe it is so where I do not
know the circumstances. I am persuaded that Solomon had the spirit of
truth when he declared, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and
when he is old he will not depart from it." A son administers arsenic
to his parents, and the world starts back in horror. I would not
diminish its horror; but before you lavish all your execration on the
son, find out whether the parents have not been administering poison,
or suffered poison to be administered, to his mind and heart from his
earliest infancy. Be shocked at that. I never saw or heard of a son
born of virtuous parents, and wisely trained in the ways of virtue,
who turned about and poisoned his parents after he had grown up. The
eider-duck plucks the down from her own breast to warm the nest for
her young, and I do not suppose an ungrateful or rebellious
eider-duckling was ever heard of; but if the eider-duck plucks the
down from the breasts of her young to line the nest for herself--what
then?
If a daughter, out of love or a "sense of duty," chooses to sacrifice
her inclinations,--by inclinations I do not mean the mere promptings
of self-indulgence, but the voice of her soul calling her to a work in
life,--I say not that she does not well. I only say that her mother
has no right to demand such a sacrifice. It is an unjust exaction. It
is a selfish building up of comfort on the ruins of another's
happiness, possibly of character, since few things are so apt to warp
the tone of mind and temper as a forced performance of unsuitable
work. Before children are old enough to choose for themselves, their
parents must choose for them,--even then with a wary care lest they
mistake a prompting of nature for a whim, but every restraint that is
put upon a child for any other purpose than his own benefit is a sin
against a soul. What duty his love does not prompt, you shall not by
the sheer brute force of your position require. His life is in his own
hands, put there by you, and he must make it into a vessel of honor or
dishonor. You shall not hold back his hand from working its own
beautiful designs, that it may putty up the cracks in your time-worn
vessel. You make great account of the care which you took of his
helpless infancy; but he owes no especial gratitude for that. As may
be inferred from what I have before said, it was a debt you owed him.
Having endowed him with life, the least you could do was to help him
make the best of it. It would have been cruel not to do it. You have
only made things even in doing it,--and hardly that. Besides, such
considerations are logically useless. You may fill a child's book,
paper, and ears with his mother's anxiety and care for him. You may
tell him how she has watched over him and toiled for him during his
helpless infancy, and conjure him on that account to love and obey
her. It will be a waste of breath. You might just as well conjugate a
Latin verb to him. He will no more form an intelligent conception of a
mother's love and care from your most forcible description, than he
would from _amo_, _amas_, _amat_. He is not capable of such a
conception. A child's love is an instinct. It gradually develops into
a sentiment which permeates his whole being. The mother's love is also
an instinct. She nurses her child just as instinctively as a hen
gathers her chickens under her wings. There generally is something
more than instinct, but there is instinct. But at no stage of a
child's life is love a matter of reasoning. If it is within him, it
cannot be argued out; if it is not, it cannot be argued in. Never a
person loved because he was convinced he ought to love. He loves
because he loves, and that is all that can be said about it.
I hope I shall not be considered as attempting to weaken the cords
between parents and children. On the contrary, I wish to strengthen
them. But I wish to strengthen them by making them of that unseen,
spiritual substance which alone is worthy of the relation,--proof
against every external force, and drawing more and more closely with
every opening year,--not of that gross and palpable outward material
which chafes and irritates, and which will snap asunder the moment
that young vigor spreads its wings.
IV.
Another truth, which seems to have been forgotten, and which needs to
be newly revealed to this generation, is, that though manhood and
womanhood are two distinct things, the humanity which underlies them
is one and indivisible. We are told that God made man male and female,
but we are first told that God made man in his own image. There is no
distinction. Woman is made in God's image just as much as man; and it
is just as wicked to deface that image in her as in him. It is defaced
when her powers are crippled, and her organs enfeebled, whether it be
by turning her toes under till they touch the heels, and then
bandaging them so, or whether that process be enacted on her mind. If
a boy should stand god-like erect, in native honor clad, so should a
girl. She may not be as tall, but she may be as straight. The palm
cannot turn into an oak, and has not the smallest desire to turn into
an oak; but there is no reason why it should not be the best kind of a
palm,--and in the deserts of this world a fruitful palm cheereth the
heart of both God and man.
Read, in the light of these facts, a "sonnet" and its accompanying
comments, which I chanced to find while looking over a twelve-year-old
number of a magazine which stands among the first in America.
"The learned 'science-women' of the day, the 'deep, deep-blue
stockings' of the time, are fairly hit off in the ensuing satirical
sonnet:--
'I idolize the LADIES! They are fairies,
That spiritualize this world of ours;
From heavenly hot-beds most delightful flowers,
Or choice cream-cheeses from celestial dairies,
But learning, in its barbarous seminaries,
Gives the dear creatures many wretched hours,
And on their gossamer intellect sternly showers
SCIENCE, with all its horrid accessaries.
Now, seriously, the only things, I think,
In which young ladies should instructed be,
Are--stocking-mending, love, and cookery!--
Accomplishments that very soon will sink,
Since Fluxions now, and Sanscrit conversation,
Always form part of female education!'
"Something good in the way of inculcation may be educed from this
rather biting sonnet. If woman so far forgets her 'mission,' as it is
common to term it now-a-days, as to choose those accomplishments whose
only recommendation is that they are 'the vogue,' in preference to
acquisitions which will fit her to be a better wife and mother, she
becomes a fair subject for the shafts of the satirical censor."
Leaving "gossamer intellects" to educe whatever of good in the way of
inculcation may be found in this biting sonnet, and in the equally
mordacious remarks of the mulierivorous commentator, let me refer to
another paragraph in which popular opinion is crystallized. It is
found in a book printed and published in London, and coming to me
through several hands from the library of an English nobleman, but a
book so atrocious in its sentiments, and so feeble in its expression,
that I will not give the small impulse to its circulation which the
mention of its name might impart: "In woman, weakness itself is the
true charter of power; it is an absolute attraction, and by no means a
defect; it is the mysterious tie between the sexes, a tie as
irresistible as it is captivating, and begetting an influence peculiar
to itself." This is the fancy sketch. One of our best writers has
drawn the true portrait of such a woman: a woman "to be the idol of
her school-boy son, to be remembered in his gray old age with a
reverential tenderness as a glorified saint, but a woman also to drive
that same son to desperation in actual life by her absorption in
trifles, by her weak credulity,... by her inability to sympathize with
his ambition, to enter into his difficulties, or to share in the
faintest degree his aspirations."
"In short," proceeds the advocate of the oak-and-vine humanity, "_all
independence is unfeminine_; the more dependent that sex becomes, the
more will it be cherished."
Independence is unfeminine: what a pity that starvation and insanity
are not unfeminine also! Independence is unfeminine, but what
provision is made for dependence? Look about the world. How many men
are there, dependence on whom would be agreeable to a sensitive woman?
and what shall the women do who have nobody to be dependent on,--the
women without husbands or fathers, and the women with drunken,
thriftless, extravagant, miserly, feeble or incapable husbands or
fathers? When every woman in the country is placed above the
possibility of want, it will be time enough to talk about the sweets
of dependence; but so long as women are liable, and are actually
reduced to want, to shame, to ignominy, to starvation, and degradation
and death, through the meanness, the misconduct, or the inability of
their natural protectors, it will be well at least to connive at their
efforts to help themselves. An independent woman may be a nuisance,
but I think rather less so than an immoral woman, or an insane woman,
or a dead woman in the bottom of a canal in Lowell, or a live woman
making shirts for Milk Street merchants in Boston, at five cents
apiece. O men, you who shut your eyes to the stern and awful facts of
life, and rhapsodize over your fine-spun theories, what will you say
when the Lord maketh inquisition for blood? In that great and terrible
day that shall open the books of judgment, that shall wrest from the
earth and the sea the secrets which are in them, when the dead women
come forth from their suicidal graves, when they swarm up from under
the river-bridges, when they pour out from the gateways of hell, will
it seem to you then a wise and righteous thing that you branded
independence as unfeminine?
Apart from the bearings of this doctrine, one word as to its facts.
There are two kinds of dependence,--the one of love, the other of
necessity. Each may comprise the other, and all is well. But each may
exist without the other, and then half is ill. The first is a delight.
The second is a dread. The first is a delight,--but no more to woman
than to man, for though the matters in which they are dependent
differ, the dependence itself is mutual, and mutually dear and
precious. Nobody need enforce it by argument. It commends itself by
its own inherent sweetness. But the second is an evil, and only an
evil under the sun,--a state which no man and no woman of any spirit
will for a moment willingly endure. Dependence is a joy only where it
is a boon; other wise it is a burning torture if there is any soul to
feel.
But masculine deprecation of feminine independence is not entirely
owing to a tender regard for the preservation unimpaired of feminine
loveliness. Men think if women strike out in a career of their own,
the matter of securing and disposing of a wife may not be quite the
easy thing it is at present.
They now have things their own way. The world is all before them where
to choose. They have only to walk leisurely on, and it is O whistle
and I'll come to you, my lad. You think I put it too strongly: that is
because you are looking into the bucket. I am speaking of the
atmosphere. You have only to listen to the usual talk of usual people
in villages and cities, and to the floating literature. You are not to
take the intellectual in the one, nor the immortal in the other, for
their rills spring from deeper sources, and represent the individual.
It is the flitting, the ephemeral, the stories that Maggie Marigold
and Kittie Katnip print in the county papers; it is the talk that Mrs.
Smith and Mrs. Jones have about Nancy Briggs; it is the women in the
novels who are not the heroines,--these give the best photograph of
actual popular opinion, and these give you six women intriguing for
one man. It is not surprising that at first sight men should think it
a fine thing to have a whole bazaar of beauty to choose from, with the
market so glutted that the goods will be sold at prices to suit the
purchasers. It is not necessary to be very good or very great, to win
the prize. There is no prize to be won. It is only pick and choose.
But have men no misgivings? Is necessity the surest warrant of
adaptation? Are men conscious that their assumption is, that they are
so unattractive, and the marriage yoke so heavy, that women will not
endure either unless they are left without any other resource? Is it
pleasant to reflect that they cannot trust themselves to woo, but that
girls must be reduced to the alternative of marriage or nothing? What
pleasure can there be in a victory so easily gained? I know a man who
says the reason why he married his wife was, because she was the only
girl in the town whom he was not sure of beforehand. With nothing to
do, women are as beggars by the wayside, holding up their feeble hands
to the passer, and entreating, "We will eat our own bread and wear our
own apparel: only let us be called by thy name to take away our
reproach." Is this pleasant to think of? Does it flatter a man's
self-love? Would it not be more agreeable for a husband to suppose
that he is his wife's choice and not--Hobson's?
Let boarding-school anniversary orators and Mother's Magazine editors
trust more in nature, and make themselves easy. Providence is never at
a loss. There is not the slightest danger that marriage will fall into
disuse through the absorption of female interests in other directions.
If every girl in the world were independent, full mistress of herself,
she would not be any more disinclined to marriage than she is now. She
would not hang upon its skirts, dragging them into the mud, with such
a helpless, desperate death-clutch as now. She would not be at the
mercy of every schemer, every speculator, every unprincipled,
unscrupulous manikin, who knows no better use for angels than to wash
the dishes. She would not be such an article of traffic, such a beast
of burden, such a tame, spiritless, long-suffering, sly little
sycophant, as she too often is now. There is not one woman in a
million who would not be married, if--I borrow a phrase from the
popular, pestilent patois, but I transfigure it with its highest
meaning--if she could get a chance. How do I know? Just as I know that
the stars are now shining in the sky, though it is high noon. I never
saw a star at midday, but I know it is the nature of stars to shine in
the sky, and of the sky to hold its stars. Genius or fool, rich or
poor, beauty or the beast, if marriage were what it should be, what
God meant it to be, what even with the world's present possibilities
it might be, it would be the Elysium, the sole complete Elysium, of
woman, yes, and of man. Greatness, glory, usefulness, happiness, await
her otherwhere; but here alone all her powers, all her being, can find
full play. No condition, no character even, can quite hide the gleam
of the sacred fire; but on the household hearth it joins the warmth of
earth to the hues of heaven. Brilliant, dazzling, vivid, a beacon and
a blessing, her light may be, but only a happy home blends the
prismatic rays into a soft serene whiteness, that floods the world
with divine illumination. Without wifely and motherly love, a part of
her nature must remain unclosed,--a spring shut up, a fountain sealed;
but a thousand times better that it should remain unclosed than that
it should be rudely rent open, or opened only to be defiled. A
thousand times better that the vestal fire should burn forever on the
inner shrine than that it should be brought out to boil the pot. But
the pot must boil, you say, and so it must; but with oak-wood and
shavings, not with beaten olive-oil.
This it is that I denounce,--not the use, but the abuse, of sacred
things. I want girls to be saved from sacrilege. I do not want them to
lay open their lives to spoliation. I want every woman to fill her
heart with hopes and plans and purposes; and if a man will marry her,
let him be so strong as to break down all barriers, check the whole
flood-tide of her life, and sweep it around himself. If a woman is
worth having, she is worth winning. Jacob served seven years for
Rachel and seven more, and they seemed unto him but a few days for the
love he had to her. Shiver and scatter the wan, weak attachments that
dare to call themselves _love_. Scorn for this frothy, green whey that
stands for the wine of life! Better that girls should be pirated away
as the rough-handed Romans won their Sabine wives, than that a man
should have but to touch the tree with his cane as he walks through
the orchard, and down comes the ready-ripe fruit. In Von Fink's fiery
wooing of Lenore, I hear the right trumpet-ring: "With rifle and
bullet I have bought your stormy heart." I would have a woman marry,
not because it is the only thing that offers, but because a
magnificence sweeps by, in whose glorious sun her pale stars faint and
fade. Her soul shall be filled and fired with the heavenly radiance.
All her dross shall be consumed, and all her gold refined. She shall
go to her marriage-feast as Zenobia went to Rome, crowned with
flowers, but bound with golden chains, a conquered captive, and the
banner over her shall be love. I would have her go obedient, not to
the requirements of a false and fatal materialism, naming itself with
the names of morality and womanhood, but to the unerring instincts of
her own nature. She shall not fly to the only refuge from the vacuum
and despair of her life; but her great heart and her strong hands
shall be wrenched from their bent by the mysterious force of an
irresistible magnetism. When you have a character that can so command,
a love that can so control, you have set up on earth the pillars of
Heaven, and redemption draweth nigh.
V.
But if the pursuit of a separate and independent career should not
disincline girls to marriage, you think it would unfit them for its
duties; that an education, an occupation, and an interest in any other
than a domestic direction would produce an indifferent housewife. Is
this necessary? Is it even probable? Is there any sufficient reason
why a woman who has trained her judgment in a medical school, shall
not go into life, not only with no disadvantage, but with positive
advantage from such training? If her mind have acquired power of
observation, and her fingers skill in execution, will she not be so
much the better prepared for the duties of her situation, whatever
they may be? The ordering of a family is not like a trade,--a thing to
be learned. It is multifarious and distracting. The mistress of a
household is like the sovereign of a free empire. She does not need,
and cannot serve, an apprenticeship. The only way to prepare her for
its duties is to enlarge her capacity to discharge them. She needs a
thorough education. Everything that helps to build up mind and
body,--everything that makes her healthful, hopeful, cheerful,
spirited, self-reliant, energetic, strong, helps her to administer her
affairs successfully. A woman who can do one thing can do another
thing, and she can do it all the better for having done the other one
first; so that the pursuit of a profession, instead of incapacitating
her for a domestic life, makes her better fitted for it. If for a
year, or two or three, she has been studying the human system, or the
stars, or the flowers, or the mysteries of cloak, or bonnet, or
counter, or mint, she can turn aside at the beck of the master just as
well as if she had been all the while frittering herself away, and she
will also be a great deal better worth beckoning to. The entrance upon
a "career" does not, as many seem to think and fear, prescribe
perpetual adherence to it.
A girl may have a certain end in view, and design most clearly to
follow it, and she does follow it--God bless her! But Nature also has
her ends, and when her unerring finger points in another quarter,
"This is the way, walk ye in it," be sure the girl will go. Activity
will never keep her from happiness, but it will keep her from byways
and stumbling-blocks, from the traps which Nature never set, but which
a sentimentalism, born of selfishness, has put in her path. And be
doubly sure of this: if one or two or a dozen years of industry and
resolution unfit a girl to be a wife, she would never have been a
prize. Any intelligent girl can learn household science in six months,
and every girl ought to have, and generally does have, at least six
months' warning. Experience will do the rest for her, and do it well,
if she is a girl of sense; and if not, nothing would have helped the
matter. One of the best cooks I know started in life with only a
cabbage for capital; and with sense and spirit, out of that solitary
cabbage, with whose proper management she chanced to be acquainted,
sprang pies, puddings, preserves, such as it is not well even to think
of in war-times.
So much for that portion of the objection which is put forward and has
a just foundation. But the main part of it is under ground. In my
opinion, the real danger lies in quite the opposite quarter from the
one that is sought to be defended. The trouble is not that women do
not think enough about household affairs. It is that they think too
much. But if one might judge from the tenor of public and private
talk, one would suppose that cooking was the chief end of woman and
the chief solace of man. I distinguish cooking above all the other
items of the domestic establishment, because I find it so
distinguished before me. Four hundred volumes of papyrus, recovered
from Herculaneum, related chiefly to music, rhetoric, and cookery. The
god of whom Paul told the Philippians, even weeping, is worshipped
to-day. Isaac acted after his kind when he loved Esau because he did
eat of his venison! To know how to cook, to keep the husband in good
humor with tempting viands, to prevent his being annoyed with burnt
meat, soured with heavy bread, or vexed by late dinners, is the burden
of a thousand ditties besides that of our sarcastic sonneteer. Printed
"Advice to Marriageable Young Ladies" informs them that "a man is
better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his
wife talks good French." I should like to be absolute monarch of
America long enough to enact a decree that every man who opens his
mouth to tell girls to learn to make bread, shall live a week on putty
and water. What! are girls then to neglect to learn to make bread? By
no means. Nor to roast beef, nor to boil potatoes. But suppose General
Hooker should lead out his whole army against a detachment of the
Rebels, and, neglecting Lee and Jackson with their myrmidons, should
expend all his ammunition and skill on a handful of the foe, would you
not adjudge him worthy of court-martial? But the detachment ought to
be captured. Perhaps it ought. Send out a detachment and capture it.
But do not waste your whole strength on an awkward squad, and leave
the main body of the enemy to ravage at will. Defeat the latter, and
the former will disappear of themselves.
Now when you bring out your drums and beat your dismal tattoo about
learning to cook, you are doing just this; you are devoting all your
strength to the destruction of an outwork whose fall will but very
remotely affect the citadel. The remedy for an ignorance of cookery is
not necessarily a knowledge of cookery. What is the reason that a man
has cause to complain that his wife does not know how to cook? Is it
that she devoted too much of her maiden time to teaching, preaching,
doctoring, and dressmaking? Ten thousand to one, no. It is because she
is ignorant or because she is silly. Treat girls sensibly. Educate
their observation, their perception, their judgment. Give them a
knowledge of human nature: and then be yourself so noble as to command
their respect, and so amiable as to secure their affection, and you
will have no trouble with heavy bread. If you insist on making women
ignorant and silly, be sure their ignorance and silliness will crop
out. Thrust them down in one place, and they will immediately rise in
another. Sooner or later, you will prove the truth of Lord Burleigh's
assurance to his son, and "find to your regret that there is nothing
more fulsome than a she-fool."
But the general direction of your counsel is wrong, even supposing the
immediate object at which it is aimed to be right. Its tendency is to
induce women to give more attention to cookery than they now do; and
they already devote to it a great deal more than they ought. They do
not cook too well, but too much. A few mixtures should be better
arranged than now, but a great many should be left alone. Cooking is
the chief concern of a very large number of New England wives and
mothers. They spend the larger part of their ingenuity in devising,
and the larger part of their strength and skill and time in preparing,
food which is unnecessary and often hurtful. It never occurs to them
to alter their course. They do not think of it as an unjust conjugal
exaction, but as a Divine allotment. It is not always the one, and
seldom if ever the other; but it is a custom. We are pre-eminently an
eating people. Our women are cooking themselves to death, and cooking
the nation into a materialism worse than death. Suppose you have been
boarding or visiting for a month or two in a stranger family, and some
one asks you if they live well, what do you understand him to mean? Is
he inquiring if they are honorable, if they conduct their lives on
Christian principles, if they are courteous, and self-respectful and
self-controlled? Are they just in their dealings, disinterested in
their motives, pure in word and work? Nothing is further from his
thoughts. He means--and you at once understand him--Do they have
highly-spiced and numerous meats, much cake and pie, many sauces and
preserves? To what degradation have we descended! To live well is to
eat rich food! Honor, integrity, refinement, culture, are all chopped
up into mince-pie. Heart and soul are left to shift for themselves,
and the guaranty of right and righteous living is
"A fair round belly with good capon lined."
In the olden times there lived, we are told, a race of men called
Bisclaverets, who were half man and half wolf; or, to speak more
accurately, were half the time man and half the time wolf. Some
indications in our own day lead us to believe that the race of the
Bisclaverets is not wholly extinct. Some stragglers must have found
their way from the shores of Bretagne to our Western wilds, and left a
posterity whose name is Legion. I copy from one of the most prominent
and liberal of our religious newspapers the following "elegant
extract," not original in its columns, but adopted from some other
paper, with such undoubted indorsement and commendation as an
insertion without comment implies:--
"The business man who has been at work hard all day, will enter his
house for dinner as crabbed as a hungry bear,--crabbed because he is
as hungry as a hungry bear. The wife understands the mood, and, while
she says little to him, is careful not to have the dinner delayed. In
the mean time, the children watch him cautiously, and do not tease him
with questions. When the soup is gulped, and he leans back and wipes
his mouth, there is an evident relaxation, and his wife ventures to
ask for the news. When the roast beef is disposed of, she presumes
upon gossip, and possibly upon a jest; and when, at last, the dessert
is spread upon the table, all hands are merry, and the face of the
husband and father, which entered the house so pinched, and savage,
and sharp, becomes soft, and full, and beaming as the face of the
round summer moon."
Are we talking about a man or a wild beast? Is it wife or female? Are
they children or cubs? Does he wipe his mouth or lick his chops?
"_Ventures_ to ask the news"! "_Presumes_ upon a jest"! The whole
picture is disgusting from beginning to end. It is the portraiture of
sensuality and despotism. Hunger is not a sublime sensation, nor is
eating a graceful act; but both are ordained of God, and are given us
with that broad blank margin which almost invariably accompanies His
gifts. Religion and culture can take up the necessity, and work so
deftly that it shall become an adornment; and the ordinance of eating
stand for the sunniest part of life. The grossness of the act, the
mere animal and mechanical function of furnishing supplies, can be so
larded with wit and wisdom, with love and good-will, with pleasant
talk, interchange of civilities and courtesies, and all the light,
sweet, gentle amenities of life, that a bare act becomes almost a
rite. The rough structure is veiled into beauty with roses and lilies
and the soft play of lights and shadows. But this paragraph portrays
gobbling. A woman, instead of pandering to it by service and silence,
ought to lift up her voice and repress it in its earliest stages. Make
a man understand that he shall eat his dinner like a gentleman or he
shall have no dinner to eat. If he will be crabbed and gulp, let him
go down into the coal-bin and have it out alone; but do not let him
bring his Feejeeism into the dining-room to defile the presence of his
wife and corrupt the manners of his children.
If you think the picture is overdrawn, I pray you to remember that I
did not draw it. It is a published, and, I think, a man's sketch of
manhood. I only take it as I find it. I do not myself think that
materialism has attained quite that degree of repulsiveness, but it is
too near it. Eating is not perpetrated, but the appetite is pampered.
If a man is able to hire a cook, very well. Cooking is the cook's
profession; she ought to attain skill, and her employer has a right to
require it, and as great a variety and profusion of dishes as he can
furnish material for. But if he is not able to hire a cook, and must
depend entirely upon his wife, the case is different. Cooking is not
her profession. It is only one of the duties incident to her station.
It is incumbent upon her to spread a plentiful and wholesome table. It
is culpable inefficiency to do less than this. It is palpable
immorality to do more. No matter how fond of cooking, or how skilful
or alert a woman may be, she has only twenty-four hours in her day,
and two hands for her work; and one woman who has the sole care of a
family cannot, if she has any rational and Christian idea of life, of
personal, household, and social duties, have any more time and
strength than is sufficient for their simple discharge. Overdoing in
one direction must be compensated by underdoing in another. She cannot
pamper Peter without pinching Paul. Much that you laud as a virtue I
lament as a vice. You revel in the cakes and the pastries and the
dainties, and boast the skill of the housewife; and indeed her marvels
are featly wrought, sweet to the taste, and to be desired if honestly
come by; but if there has been plunder and extortion, if it is a soul
that flakes in the pastry, if it is a heart that is embrowned in the
gravies; if leisure and freshness and breadth of sympathy and keen
enjoyment have been frittered away on the fritters, and simmered away
in the sweetmeats, and battered away in the puddings, give me, I pray
you, a dinner of herbs. Johnny-cake was royal fare in Walden woods
when a king prepared the banquet and presided at the board. Peacocks'
tongues are but common meat to peacocks.
The _pate de foie gras_ is a monstrous dish. A goose is kept in some
warm, confined place that precludes any extended motion, and fed with
fattening food, so that his liver enlarges through disease till it is
considered fit to be made into a pie,--a luxury to epicures, but a
horror to any healthful person. Just such a goose is many a woman,
confined by custom and her consenting will in a warm, narrow kitchen,
only instead of her liver it is her life which she herself makes up
into pies; but the pastry which you find so delicious seems to me
disease.
The ancients buried in urns the ashes of their bodies: we deposit in
urns the ashes of our souls, and pass them around at the tea-table.
Women not only injure themselves by what they neglect, but injure
others by what they perform. Such stress is laid upon the commissary
department, that they lose discrimination, and come to think that
dainty morsels are a panacea for all the ills of the flesh, instead of
being the chief cause of most of them. I knew a young wife whose
husband used to come down from his study worn and weary with much
brain-work, his muscles flaccid, his eyes heavy, his circulation
sluggish, and she would come up from the kitchen her face all aglow
with eagerness and love and cooking-stove heat, her hands full of
abominable little messes which she had been plotting against him,
reeking with butter and sugar, and all manner of glorified
greasiness,--I am happy to say I do not know by what name she called
her machinations, but I call them broiled dyspepsia, toasted
indigestions, fricasseed nightmare,--and the poor husband would nibble
here and nibble there, sure of grim consequences, but loath to seem a
churl by indifference, and neither give nor take satisfaction. I could
bear his suffering with great equanimity, for there was a poetic
justice in it, though he himself was not a sinner above others, nor
yet so much as many. If only those men who are continually preaching
the larder could be forced, sick or well, to swallow every combination
which the fertile feminine brain can devise, and the nimble feminine
fingers accomplish, I should listen to their exhortations with the
most lively satisfaction. But even that would not atone for the female
suffering. With what disconsolate countenance would my tender, anxious
young wife ring the bell and send away the scarcely-diminished
dish-lings, and wonder in her fond tortured heart what next she could
do to smooth the wrinkled brow and light up the dull eyes, and so
revolve perpetually in her troubled mind the mysterious question that
loomed up mystically before us all in our Mother Goose days, "Why
didn't Jack eat his supper?"
Why? O sweet and silly little wife? Because he wanted a thorough
shaking-up. Because mind and body were flabby from too long poring
over his books. If you could but have performed the impossible; if you
could but have parted with the feeble cant which you had learned from
infancy; if you would but have driven him out alike from his study and
your sitting-room, going with him, if such inducement became
necessary, into the fresh air; if you would but have walked him, or
worked him, or in some way kneaded him into firm, hard thew and sinew,
and kept him out and active till he should have got such an appetite
that cold brown bread and molasses would have seemed to him a dish fit
to set before a king, you would have done him true wifely service.
Then you might have come home and fed him with butter and sugar to
your heart's content,--and not to the perpetual discontent and
rebellion of his body.
But among all the lectures to young wives or old wives or no wives at
all, I never heard or read one that counselled a woman to take her
husband out walking, or rowing, or riding, or driving, or bowling, or
do any other sensible thing. I have dived into oceans of nonsense, but
never found the pearl.
Our New England people considers itself to have advanced much further
in civilization than the aborigines, whose chief occupation, according
to the histories, is hunting and fishing. But why is it barbarous to
devote your life to procuring food, and civilized to devote your life
to cooking it? Of the two, I think I should prefer the former. The
Savage may not present an inviting bill of fare; but the excitement of
the chase, the close contact with nature, the wide freedom of sea and
sky, the grand play of all the powers, the mighty strengthening of all
the organs, the fine culture of the senses, the health and vigor of
every nerve and tissue, the leap and sparkle of all the springs of
life, this, surely, would be no insignificant compensation: but a
continual pottering over gridirons and frying-pans is good for neither
brain nor brawn. Civilization may quick upfly and kick the beam: I
would much rather be a good Sioux Indian than most New England
housewives.
VI.
The much talk of fitness for marriage leads one to reflect on the
advantages of living in the nineteenth century. With all the
sewing-machines, washing-machines, wringing-machines, carpet-sweepers,
cooking-ranges, and the innumerable devices by which labor is sought
and is supposed to be saved, I do not see that there is any great
gain. The requirements of civilized society rather more than keep
abreast with the inventions of civilized ingenuity. Fifty years ago a
bonnet cost twenty dollars. Now a comely bonnet can be bought for one
dollar. But the twenty-dollar bonnet lasted ten years, and the
one-dollar bonnet three months, so that, notwithstanding the superior
cheapness of the material, the item bonnet costs more money than it
used, and vastly more time and thought. A calico dress was not deemed
unreasonable at seventy cents a yard. Lately it could be had for
twelve and a half: but at seventy-five cents it was an heirloom, while
at twelve and a half it stands over the wash-tub by the second year,
and by the third goes into the rag-bag. The lively sewing-machine runs
up a seam twenty times as swiftly as the most lively fingers: but
there are twenty times as many seams to run up. Just as fast as skill
"turns off" work, just so fast fashion turns it on. Nay, fashion in
heaping up entirely outstrips ingenuity in lowering the pile of work;
so that we do not get the benefit of our skill. The day now is no
longer than the day of fifty years ago. The mother of five children
seems to have no more time for educating her five children, for
enjoying and training their opening lives, for studying their
characters, for associating with them and acquiring their confidence,
for planting unexpected roses in the little flower-plats of their
years, for sitting a whole summer day with them among the beauties and
wonders and delights of the woods, for spending a whole winter evening
with them in games and reading, for informing her own mind and
disciplining her own heart and strengthening and beautifying her own
body, for cultivating the possible beneficences of society, for genial
and growing acquaintance and sympathy with the poets, the
philosophers, the historians, and the sages, than the mother of five
children had fifty years ago. I suppose more women now-a-days know how
to read and write; but do they read and write? Of the people in your
village, your street, your sewing-society: how many do you find who
spend as much as an hour a day in reading Milton, or Chaucer, or
Spenser, or Tennyson, or Mrs. Browning? How many are there who are
familiar with Hume, or Robertson, or Macaulay, or Motley, or Palfrey?
How many have lingered with delight over the pages of Lord Bacon, or
Jeremy Taylor, or John Stuart Mill? How many know the relation between
a cat and a tiger, or what are the ingredients of buttermilk, or why
yeast makes bread rise, or how the heat of the oven works, or whether
a cloverhead has anything to do with a marrowfat pea? How many are
interested to peer into the mysteries of the heavens above or the
earth beneath or the waters under the earth? How many ever heard of
the Areopigitica or the Witena-gemot, or discern any connection
between Runnymede and Fort Sumter, or have the faintest opinion as to
whether Runnymede is a man or a mouse? How many can tell you whether
the Reformation was a revelation confronting a superstition or a
fruitful branch grafted upon a barren olive-tree, or an old religion
throwing off the layers of acquired corruption? How many understand
the origin and bearings of Calvinism or the Nicene Creed or the
Pauline Epistles? I speak, you see, not of things which have passed
away leaving only a slender and hidden thread of connection, but of
those which still touch life at many points. The great boast of the
present day is the dissemination of knowledge: but knowledge is trash
if it is not assimilated into wisdom. Knowledge which is simply
plastered on to the outside of the soul and does not chemically
combine to become part and parcel of the soul's substance, produces an
effect little better than grotesque. Names and dates may store the
memory; but why have the memory stored if you do not use its
treasures? What better off am I for having a heap of isolated facts in
my lumber-room if I have nothing for those facts to do? I may know in
what year the battle of Hastings was fought, but unless I can locate
that battle otherwhere than in geography and chronology, I might as
well have committed to the charge of my memory the youthful facts of
"Onery Twoery ickery see,
Halibut crackibut pendalee.
Pin pon musket John,
Triddle traddlecome Twenty-one."
Bricks and boards are neither shelter from wind nor shade from sun. It
is only when all are fitly framed together into the strength and
sweetness of spirit that they become the temple of the living God,
whereinto Shekinah shall come. We talk about the universal circulation
of newspapers, but sometimes it seems to me that newspapers are only
an enormous expansion of village gossip. Now if a murder is committed
in New York we hear of it, whereas formerly we did not know it unless
it were committed in the next town. But such knowledge we could very
readily dispense with. Is anything added to the worth of life by
learning that Bridget McArthy has been fined five dollars and costs
for breaking Ellen Maloney's windows. In the old wars, it was three
weeks after a victory was gained before you heard of it; now you hear
of it six months before the battle is fought, and after all it turns
out to be no victory, but a masterpiece of strategy.[2] What I wish to
know is this: does the constant interflow of currents really deepen
and broaden the channel of life? Are women any stronger of will,
firmer of purpose, broader of view, sounder of judgment, than they
used to be? Can they front fortune with serener brow, unawed by her
malice, unflattered by her promise, unmoved by her caprice? Are they
any more independent of the circumstances of life, any more
concentrated in its essence? Do they think more deeply, love more
nobly, live more spiritually? Are they any more divorced from the lust
of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life; any more
wedded to whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest,
whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever
things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report?
[2] Heaven be praised that the course of events has blunted
the point of this sentence.
I think we are in a transition-state. The increased facilities of
labor are improvements, and we shall by and by reap the fruits of
them; but we have hardly yet done so. We have lassoed our wild horse,
but we have not harnessed him. He shows us wonderful freaks of
strength, but he drags us quite as often as we drive him. "Sweet Puck"
has been caught, and made to put his girdle round about the earth in
forty minutes; in
"one night, ere glimpse of morn,
His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn,
That ten day-laborers could not end."
But he is not yet tamed down into a trustworthy domestic drudge. If he
does not actually transmute himself into a Robin Goodfellow, that
bootless makes the breathless housewife churn, and the drink to bear
no barm, and mislead night-wanderers, he yet annuls his work, shutting
the eyes of the ten day-laborers so that they do not gain rest for his
interference; his earth-girdle binds no bundle of myrrh for the
well-beloved. Our great diffusion of knowledge has not given us
corresponding mastery. Our knives are sharper, but we only whittle.
Knowledge is poured abroad, but it is not absorbed. Yet the hour
approaches. By and by, out of this wishy-washy chaos, slowly shall
arise the coast-line of a new continent whereon the redeemed shall
walk: meanwhile, do not let us deceive ourselves. The millennium is
not yet come. We are scarcely beyond the multiplication-table of our
mathematics. We are blind and blundering, and for all our skill and
science, we stumble through life but little wiser than our fathers. We
have the swift, clean stove-oven for the cumbrous old bake-kettle, but
meanwhile we have lost the fireside, and have found no substitute; and
a man's life lies not in ovens or bake-kettles, but in firesides.
This truth needs to be engraven on our brains and hearts with a pen of
iron and the point of a diamond. The soul is the king and not the
servant of the body. Every device, every invention, every measure,
that does not subserve the interests of the soul, is worthless. Every
invention that may subserve those interests, but stops short of such
subserviency, stops so far short of its goal. If the cooking-range
only makes that mince-pie be eaten once a day instead of once a year;
if steam-power only causes that fine wheat-bread shall take the place
of coarse corn-bread; if sewing-machines are going to give women more
tucks to their skirts, more flounces to their gowns, more dresses to
their wardrobes, and not more hours to their day, we might just as
well be without the sewing-machines and the cooking-ranges and the
steam-power. Is a woman any better, or any better off, for having six
gowns where her mother had three? Is she not worse off? She can wear
but one at a time, and she is expending brain-power and heart-power,
and lifting the incidents of life into the sphere of its essentials.
There are women who buy dresses, and make them, and hang them up in
their closets, there to remain till the fashion changes, and the dress
has to be re-made without having been once worn. O terrible emptiness
of life which this signalizes! O wanton and wicked waste of priceless
treasures! What shall be said in the day when God maketh inquisition?
I wage no war against the aesthetics of life; but I do protest that
they shall be means and not ends. Let richness drape the form, and
variety crown the board, and luxury fill the house, if so be you do
not wrong the king, the Master. There need be no other limitation.
Wrong to one's self involves and implies all other wrong. Nothing
human is foreign to any man. Nothing personal is foreign to humanity.
You cannot defraud yourself of your birthright without defrauding all
those to whom your birthright might bring blessings. The keenest barb
of your injustice to another pierces your own breast.
But the larger number of New England families earn their bread by the
sweat of their brow, and must sacrifice the one or the other,--the
soul or the body. They cannot command both luxury and life; and they
choose--which? Look around and answer. How many houses do you know
that have no carpets on the floors, no cushions in the chairs, no
paper on the walls, no silks in the wardrobes, no china in the
closets, but plenty of books in the library; a harp, a piano, a
violin, in one corner, an easel, a box of crayons in another; an
aquarium by the window, a camp-stool in the cupboard, a fishing-rod on
the shelf, a portfolio on the table; where pies and fries and cakes
and preserves and pickles and puddings seldom come; where flounces and
velvets and feathers and embroideries are unseen, but where the walls
are adorned with drawings from the mother's own hands, with bouquets,
finely selected, pressed and arranged by the daughters; with cabinets
of minerals gathered, classified, and labelled by the sons; and fresh
flowers from the garden, cultivated and culled by the father; where
the homely fare is seasoned with Attic salt; where wit and wisdom and
sprightliness and fun and heart's-ease make the simple, wholesome, and
plentiful meal a fit banquet for gods; where work is work, and not
simply labor; where rest is change, and not simply torpidity; where
the heart is rich in love, and the head rich in lore, and intellect
and affection go hand in hand; where the inmates are not the creatures
of the house, but the house is the dear handiwork of the inmates;
where they derive no lustre from their dwelling, but shine all through
it with such sweet, soft lights, that elegance waits upon their
footsteps, beauty lingers upon their brows, every spot which they
tread is enchanted ground, every room which they enter is the
audience-chamber of a king. On the other hand, how many houses do you
know where everything is in abundance except that which alone gives
abundance its value? Where moss-soft carpets and heavy curtains and
gilded cornices and silver and china and sumptuous fare make a
glittering pageant, but work and worry and weariness, or frivolous
pleasures and frivolous interests, empty life of all its priceless
possessions. How many do you know where neither wealth nor worth
reigns? Where hard, grinding, pinching toil is all that the evening
and the morning have to give, and everything lovely to the eye and
pleasant to the soul is crushed between the upper and the nether
millstones? How many young couples think they could begin housekeeping
without a carpet for the parlor floor? How many think of providing
that parlor with a score of the rich, ripe, mellow English classics?
But to the end of the days, the authors will be a joy and strength and
consolation, and the carpet will be only a dusty woollen rag. No, no;
we cannot give up our trappings. Such is the poverty of our life, and
we may not uncover its nakedness. We must have jewels and gold to hide
our squalor and our leanness. It is tinsel or nothing. Take away our
fine clothes, our fine furniture, our much eating and drinking, and
what is left? True,--what is left? Vacancy and desolation. Suppose the
work and worry to be suddenly abrogated to the degree that the
thousands of harassed women who toil with broom or needle or
dish-cloth or kneading-trough from morning till night should suddenly
find on their hands four hours every day of leisure,--leisure that
absolutely need be filled up by no family knitting, mending, or
oversight,--would it be a boon? In many cases I greatly fear not.
After the first luxury of utter rest from strenuous work, I greatly
fear that that four hours would be the dullest and dreariest part of
the day, and its close more gladly welcomed than its commencement. But
this only shows the need, not the impossibility, of reformation. If it
has come to this, that we know not what to do with ourselves, shall we
go on providing toys, or shall we turn about and straightway learn
self-direction? Is it so that we must fill our lives with husks,
because we have fed on them so long that we have no relish for
nourishing food? Have we so held in abeyance our spiritual forces that
they have lost their life? Have we so given ourselves to our grosser
uses, that they have usurped the throne, and shall we now make no
effort to depose them and restore the rightful lord? Shall we go on
forming and frocking our wax dolls, and give no heed to the marble
which it is our life-work to fashion into the image and likeness of
God? Better Romulus and Remus, suckled by a wolf, than our puny
nurslings of conventionality! O for men and women with blood in their
veins, and muscles in their bodies, and brains in their skulls,--men
and women who believe in their manhood and their womanhood! who will
be as valiant, as aggressive, as enduring in peace as they are showing
themselves in war, who dare stand erect, who will walk their own
paths, who brave solitudes, who see things and not the traditions of
things, who will blow away, with one honest breath, our shabby gew-gaw
finery! America was founded on the rights of man: why do we set our
affections on silks and satins? Why entangle our young limbs with the
fetters of an old civilization, golden though they be? Never had any
nation such opportunity as ours. Here is the race-course ready, the
battle-ground prepared. It needs only that we be swift and strong.
There are no morasses of old prejudice to beguile our feet, no tangle
of old growths to retard our progress. We have no institutions to
fight against: all our institutions fight with us. No garter, no
ribbon, no courtly presentation, is demanded as our stamp of rank; the
badge of each man's order is set on his brow and breast. Worth needs
not to have flowed down through musty ages if it would receive its
meed; every man bears his seal direct from God. Humanity is more
accounted of than a coat of arms. We have only to be noble, and we
belong at once to the nobility. It is ourselves alone that will fail
if there be failure; not opportunity. It is for us to rise to the
height of the great argument. It is only that we reverence ourselves,
that we esteem man as of greater mark than his meat or his raiment.
Give us full and free development. Tear away these gilded fetters, and
let the children of God have free course to run and be glorified.
Throw off allegiance to trifles, and with the heart believe, and with
the mouth make confession, and with the upright life attest: There is
no God but God.
This can be done only when women and men will work together to the
same end. It is not to be done by stripping away the restraints of
fashion and society and leaving life bare of its proprieties.
Deformity is not lovely by being exposed. What we are to do is to
supplant those restraints by the gentle growths of a larger and finer
culture; to replace meagreness with rounded beauty; to make the life
so rich and full that all else shall seem poor in comparison; to show
it so fair and fertile that every luxury shall seem but its natural
outgrowth, its proper adornment; to make the soul so simply dominant
as to give their laws to fashion and society instead of receiving laws
from them, and so have fashion and society for its nimble servitors
instead of being itself their creature and slave. Is it not so now?
Who dares bend social life to his uses? Who dares run counter to its
caprices? Who dares stand on his own dignity and defy its frown or
sneer? But, you say, this adaptation of one's self to others is what
Christianity requires. This self-seeking, this self-elevation, is
directly opposed to the spirit of the Gospel, which demands that every
one seek not his own, but the things which are another's. Not at all.
You can in no other way benefit your generation than through your own
heart and life. Can a stream rise higher than its fountain? Can a
corrupt tree bring forth good fruits? The Apostle says: Let no man
seek his own, but every man another's wealth. Does that mean that a
farmer must not plough his own field, or plant his own corn, or hoe
his own potatoes, but go over to till his neighbor's farm and leave
his own fallow? But it is written, "He that provideth not for his own
house hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel," and common
sense need not be propped up by revelation, for it stands firmly on
the same ground. You say a woman must not be thinking of herself, her
own growth, and good all the time. So do I. But is she to obtain and
exhibit self-forgetfulness by self-culture, or self-neglect? Will you
be most likely to forget your head by thoroughly combing and brushing
your hair every morning, or by brushing it not at all? Does not health
consist in having your organs in such a condition that you do not know
you have organs? A dyspeptic man is the most subjective person in the
world. He thinks more about himself in a week than a well person does
in a year. The true way for women and men to be thoroughly
self-forgetful, is to be so thoroughly self-cultured, so healthy, so
normal, so perfect, that all they have to do is their work. Themselves
are perfectly transparent. No headaches and heartaches interpose
between themselves and their duties. They are not forced back to
concentrate their interest on a torpid liver, or tubercled lungs. They
are not wasting their power by working in constant jar and clash. They
are at full liberty to bring means to bear on ends. And just in
proportion as sound minds have sound bodies, will people be able to
forget themselves and do good to others.
Now--the connection between some of my paragraphs may be a little
underground, but it is always there. If you don't quite see it, you
must jump. If I should stop to say everything, I should never get
through. I am not sure I shall, as it is--now, such has been the
amount of gluttony, and all manner of frivolity and materialism,
indirectly but strenuously inculcated by literature, that we are
arrived at a point where they are almost the strongest grappling-hooks
between the sexes. Understand: I am not saying that dress is
frivolity. Dress is development. A woman's dress is not her first
duty, but it follows closely on first duty's heels. She should dress
so as to be grateful to her husband's eye, I grant, nay, I enjoin: and
he is under equally strong obligations to dress so as to be grateful
to her eye. But this is scarcely a matter of expense. It need not
cost, appreciably, more to be neat and tasteful than it does to be
dowdy and slouching. But, I have heard women say, variety in dress is
necessary in order that a husband may not be wearied. But does a man
ever think of having several winter coats or summer waistcoats, so
that his wife may not weary of him? Does she ever think of being tired
of seeing one hat till it begins to look shabby? And if a man buys his
clothes and wears them according to his needs,--which is quite
right,--why shall not a woman do the same? Is there any law or gospel
for forcing a woman to be pleasing to her husband, while the husband
is left to do that which is right in his own eyes? Or are the visual
organs of a man so much more exquisitely arranged than those of a
woman, that special adaptations must be made to them, while a woman
may see whatever happens to be _a la mode_? Or has a man's dress
intrinsically so much more beauty and character than a woman's, that
less pains need be taken to make it charming?
But granting to variety all the importance that is claimed for it, are
we using the lever to advantage? Suppose the gown is changed every
day, while the face above it never varies, or varies only from one
vapidity to another, and what is gained? If variety is the
desideratum, why not attempt it in the direction in which variety is
spontaneous, resultant, and always delightful? You may flit from brown
merino to blue poplin, and from blue poplin to black alpaca, and be
queen of all that is tiresome still. But enlarge every day the horizon
of your heart: be tuneful on Monday with the birds; be fragrant on
Tuesday among your roses; be thoughtful on Wednesday with the sages;
be chemical on Thursday over your bread-trough; be prophetic on Friday
with history; be aspiring on Saturday in spite of broom and duster; be
liberal and catholic on Sunday: be fresh and genial and natural and
blooming with the dews that are ready to gather on every smallest
grass-blade of life, and a pink-sprigged muslin will be new for a
whole season, yes, and half a dozen of them. Take example from the
toad: swallow your dress; not precisely in the same sense, but as
effectually. Overpower, subordinate your dress, till it shall be only
a second cuticle, not to be distinguished from yourself, but a natural
element of your universal harmony.
What are you going to wear to church this summer? I say church,
because I am speaking now to people whose best dress is their Sunday
dress. I am not writing for the Newport and Niagara frequenters, who
know no currency smaller than gold eagles. You will not have many new
clothes because it is "war-times," but you must have a silk mantle;
that will cost fifteen dollars. You could have bought one last summer
for ten dollars, but silk is now higher. You will have a barege dress,
which, with the increased price of linings and trimmings and making,
will cost before it is ready to be worn fifteen more. Your gloves will
be a dollar and a half, and your bonnet, whitened and newly trimmed
with last summer's ribbon, will be three dollars or so. The whole cost
will be about thirty-five dollars. But suppose, instead of a barege
gown and silk shawl, you had bought a pretty gingham and had it made
in the same way, dress and mantle alike, and had taken that for your
summer outfit; and had substituted for your kid gloves a pair of
Lisle-thread at sixty-two cents. The gingham will last longer than the
barege, and will be good for more uses after it is outworn as a dress.
It will last as long in the mantle as the shape of the mantle will be
fashionable, and then it will make over as economically, and into a
larger number of articles. The Lisle-thread gloves will last as long
as the kid, and will be much better on the whole, because they will
wash. "But I should make a figure, walking up the broad aisle in a
gingham mantilla!" Be sure you would, and a very pretty figure too.
For you look, in it, perfectly fresh and tidy; and because you have
not been fagged and fretted with its great cost you will be quite
happy and pleased, and that pleasure will beam out in your face and
figure, and your young, elastic tread; and there is not a man in
church who will suspect that everything is not precisely as it should
be. Men judge in generals, not in particulars; and the few who are
conversant with minutiae, and look beyond the facts of becomingness or
unbecomingness into the question of texture and fabric, are such
microscopic sort of men that you do not value their opinion one way or
the other. You are triumphant so far as the men are concerned.
The women will not let you off so easily. Mrs. Judkins will think you
are "very odd"; but how much better to be oddly right than evenly
wrong! Mrs. Jenkins will call it _real mean_, when you are as well
able to dress decently as she is! But you are the very plant and
flower of decency. Mrs. Perkins will hate to see people try to be
different from other folks. Ah! Mrs. Perkins, when the vapor from your
heated face goes down to-morrow meeting the vapor that comes steaming
up from your foaming tub, will you find it any consolation for your
heat and fatigue that you went to church yesterday and are broiling
over your wash-tub to-day "like other folks." Meanwhile you, by your
gingham, have saved ten dollars. Ten dollars! I am lost in amazement
when I think of the good that may be accomplished with ten dollars!
For ten dollars you can hire a washerwoman all summer and
save--absolutely add to your life six hours every Monday for three
months; look at the reading, the writing, the conversation, the
enjoyment that can be crowded into an hour, and then multiply it by
seventy-five, and say whether your gingham dress be not a very robe of
royalty. And besides the good you do yourself, and the good that will
shine from you upon all around you, you will be helping to solve the
great problem of the age: you will be helping to give employment to
the thousands of women who are perishing for lack of something to do,
and dragging society down with them. You will be setting supply and
demand face to face. If you could but induce a few of your neighbors
to join you,--which they will be glad to do when they see how happy
and fresh it makes you,--the employment you would furnish would
comfortably support some destitute unmarried woman, or some childless
widow, and go far towards providing bread and butter, perhaps shoes
and stockings, possibly spelling-books, to a family of children. There
are, possibly, as many women who need to do more than they are doing
as there are who need to do less, and you will be helping to restore
or create the desired equilibrium. Or, if you choose instead, ten
dollars will take your rustic little ones into the city to stock and
startle their minds with ideas from the navy-yard, the museum, the
aquarial gardens, the picture-galleries; or it will take your civic
little ones into the country and set them down in the midst of
orchards and blooms and birds, and all the pure sweet influences of
long summer days. It will give you four or five drives with your
husband and children,--drives that involve fascinating white baskets;
napkins spread out on the grass, hungry mouths, chattering tongues,
and oh! such happy hearts. Or you can go to the beach and hear the
little monkeys scream for joy and terror in the rushing, lapping,
embracing waves, and see them roll over and over in the soft sand, and
gather untold wealth of worthless shells and heaps of shining sand for
back-yard gardens. For ten dollars you can buy picture-books,
long-desired toys, flowers and flower-stands for winter, roots for
bedding in summer, and still have enough left to give an extra lemon
to a score of wounded soldiers in a hospital ward. You can buy
yourself leisure to become acquainted with your children and to make
them acquainted with the brightest phases of yourself. You can put
into their lives such sunny memories as no after bitterness can
efface; such sunny memories as shall wreathe you with a glory in the
coming years when your head is laid low in the grave. O my friend, I
can almost see the light of the celestial city shining through that
ten dollars,--and you talk about a silk cape!
Mind, I counsel no penuriousness, no mean retrenchment for
accumulation, no domestic pillage, no mere selfish gratification. I
suggest intelligent and high-minded economy for the purpose of liberal
expenditure. I would take in sail where only sensualism and
ostentation blow; but I would spread every rag of canvas to catch the
smallest breath of an enlarged and Christian happiness. I would cease
to pinch the angel, that the beast may wax fat. I would keep the beast
under, that the angel may have room.
Do you say that the picture is fanciful? Everything is fanciful till
it is put in practice. Fancy is often but the foreshadow of a coming
fact.
If some such course as this is not possible, if we must inevitably and
perpetually move on in the same rut in which we move now, then, in a
thousand and a thousand cases, life seems to me not worth the living.
VII.
It is not simply that women are chained to a body of death. Men are
equally victims. The world is kept back from its goal. One member
cannot suffer without involving all the members in its suffering.
Marriage, in its truest type, is love spiritualizing life; the union
of the mightiest and subtlest forces working the noblest results.
Marriage in its commonest manifestations is a clumsy mechanical
contrivance. Marriage is too often mirage,--far off, in books, in
dreams, lovely and divine; approached, it resolves itself into washing
and ironing and cooking and nursing and house-cleaning and making and
mending and long-suffering from New Year to Christmas and from
Christmas on to New Year, to the great majority of all the women I
know anything about. I do not mean simply the dull, uninteresting
women, of whom there are really not many, but the bright and
intellectual, capable of adorning any station, of whom there are more
than you think, because, buried under household ruins, you scarcely
catch a glimpse of what they long to be and what they might be. And
they do not like it. Volumes may be written and spoken, extolling the
tidy kitchens, the trim wives, the snowy table-cloths, and telling us
how beautiful a woman is when doing her house-work; and a few foolish
women will be found to accept it all and work the harder. Hundreds of
years ago, when a person I know was inconceivably young, and found
great delight in hanging about the kitchen during the seed-time and
harvest of pies and preserves, to glean up the remnants of mince-meat
and various mixtures left in the pans, a tiny relative much more acute
than he used to practise upon his approbativeness by soliloquizing to
himself while both their spoons were clattering around the sides of
the tin pan with frantic rapidity, "Now Peggoty isn't going away, and
let me have the rest. Peggoty is going to stay and eat it all up." The
result was that Peggoty used immediately to walk off and leave his
cormorant kinsman to the undivided booty. Just about as astute as the
kinsman, and just about as silly as Peggoty, are the men who prepare
and the women who suck the thin pap of our milk-and-water novels and
newspapers. But the latter are growing fewer and fewer every day. Some
women have a natural taste for cooking. Some women are specially
skilled in sewing. Some women are born with a broom in their hands,
and some find the sick-room their peculiar paradise: but I never saw
or heard of any woman who had a natural fondness for being worked and
worried from morning till night, hurrying from pillar to post, and
conscious all the time that things were left in an unfinished state,
from sheer want of time to complete them properly. Within a week, a
woman, a model housekeeper, devoted to her family,--a woman who never
wrote a word for print, nor ever addressed so much as a female meeting
of any kind, a woman whose husband looks upon strong-mindedness as a
species of leprosy, to be lamented rather than denounced, but at any
cost kept from spreading,--has told me that, if it were not for the
talk it would make, she would shut up her house, take her whole
family, and go to a hotel to board from June to October, so worn and
wearied is she with her household duties. Yet her family consists of
only three members, and her husband is full of loving-kindness and
consideration. Another woman, equally accomplished in all domestic
arts and graces, and equally happy in her conjugal relations, once
told me that she has seen from her window a carriage of friends coming
up the road to her house, and has been forced to wipe away the tears
before she could go to the door to greet them; so utterly disheartened
was she at the prospect of still further weight upon her already
overburdened shoulders. Yet she was no misanthrope, no nun. She loved
society, and was fitted to shine in it; but the inexorable,
unremitting labor of her household was such, that it was impossible
for her to receive from society the solace which it ought to give and
which it has to give. So heavily pressed the yoke, that a party of
friends was no pleasure to look forward to, but only more cake to be
made, more meat to be roasted, more sheets to be washed.
Women are accounted the weaker sex; but there is no comparison to be
made between the labor of the weaker and the stronger. Of fathers of
families and mothers of families, the real wear and tear of life comes
on the latter. If there is anxiety as to a sufficiency of support, the
mother shares it equally with the father, and feels it none the less
for not being able to contribute directly to the supply of the
deficiency; forced, passive endurance of an evil is quite as difficult
a virtue as unsuccessful struggle against it. If there is no anxiety
in that direction, the occupations of men can scarcely give them any
hint of the peculiar perplexing, depressing, irritating nature of a
woman's ordinary household duties. Pamphleteers exhort women to hush
up the discords, drive away the clouds, and have only smiles and
sunshine for the husband coming home wearied with his day's labor.
They would be employing themselves to much better advantage, if they
would enjoin him to bring home smiles and sunshine for his wife. She
is the one that pre-eminently needs strength and soothing and
consolation. She needs a warm heart to lean on, a strong arm, and a
steady hand to lift her out of the sloughs in which she is ready to
sink, and set her on the high places where birds sing and flowers
bloom and breezes blow. The husband's work may be absorbing and
exhaustive, but a fundamental difference lies in the simple fact, that
a man has constant and certain change of scene, and a woman has not. A
man goes out to his work and comes in to his meals. Two or three times
a day, sometimes all the evening, always at night and on Sunday, he is
away from his business and his place of business. The day may be long
or short, but there is an end to it. A woman is on the spot all the
time, and her cares never cease. She eats and drinks, she goes out and
comes in, she lies down and rises up, tethered to one stone. It does
not seem to amount to much, that a man closes his shop and goes home;
that he unyokes his oxen, ties up his cows, and sits down on the
door-step: but let the merchant, year after year, eat and sleep in his
counting-room, the schoolmaster in his school-room, the shoemaker over
his lapstone, the blacksmith by his anvil, the minister in his study,
the lawyer in his chambers, with only as frequent variations as a
housekeeper's visiting and tea-drinkings give her, and I think he
would presently learn that he needs not to possess powers acute enough
to divide a hair 'twixt north and northwest side, in order to
distinguish the difference. A distance of half a mile, or even a
quarter of a mile, breaks off all the little cords that have been
compressing a man's veins, and lets the blood rush through them with
force and freedom. It is change of scene, change of persons, change of
atmosphere, and a consequent change of a man's own self. He is made
over new.
But his wife moils on in the same place. Dark care sits behind her at
breakfast and dinner and supper. The walls are festooned with her
cares. The floors are covered with them as thick as the dust in the
Interpreter's house. _He_ shakes off the dust from his feet and goes
home: _her_ home is in the dust. What wonder that it strangles and
suffocates her?
Moreover, a man's occupation has uniformity, or rather unity. His path
lies in one line; sometimes he has only to walk mechanically along it.
Rather stupid, but not wearing work; for generally if he had been a
man upon whom it would have worn he would have done something else:
always he has power to bring everything to bear on his business. If it
is mental labor, he has the opportunity of solitude, or only such
association as assists. His helpers, and all with whom he is
concerned, are mature, intelligent, trained, and often ambitious and
self-respectful and courteous. He can set his fulcrum close to the
weight, and all he has to do is to bear down on the lever.
The wife's assistants, if she has any, are unspeakably in the rough,
and little children make all her schemes "gang a-gley." The incautious
slam of a door will shatter the best-laid plans, and the stubbing of a
chubby toe sinks her morning deep into the midday. Children are to a
man amusement, delight, juvenescence, a truthful rendering of the old
myth, that wicked kings were wont to derive a ghoul-like strength by
transfusion of the blood of infants. The father has them for a little
while. He frolics with them. He rejoices over them. They are beautiful
and charming. He is new to them, and they are new to him, and by the
time the novelty is over it is the hour for them to go to bed. He
feels rested and refreshed for his contact with them. They present
strong contrasts to the world he deals with all day. Their
transparency shines sweetly against its opacity. Even their little
wants and vanities and bickerings are to him only interesting
developments of human nature. His power is pleased with their
dependence; his pride flatters itself with their future; his
tenderness softens to their clinging; his earthliness cleaves away
before their innocence, and he thinks his quiver can never be too full
of them.
This is the poetry, and he reads it with great delight; but there is a
prose department, and that comes to the mother. She has had the
cherubs all day, and she knows that the trail of the serpent is over
them all. She sees the angel, in their souls as well as he, often
better; but she sees too the mark of the beast on their
forehead,--which he seldom discovers. His playthings are her
stumbling-blocks. The constancy of her presence forbids novelty, and
throws her upon her inventive powers for resources. All their
weariness and fretfulness and tumbles and aches are poured into her
lap. She has no division of labor, no concentration of forces; no five
or ten hours devoted to housework, and two or three to her children,
taking them into her heart to do good like a medicine. They patter
through every hour to stay her from doing with her might any of the
many things which her hands find to do. Nothing keeps limits;
everything laps over. God has given her a love so inexhaustible, that,
notwithstanding the washings and watchings, the sewing and dressing
which children necessitate, notwithstanding the care, the check, the
pull-back, the weariness, the heartsickness, which they occasion, the
"little hindering things" are--my pen is not wont to be timid, but it
shrinks from attempting to say what little ones are to a mother. But
divine arrangement does not prevent human drawback; and looking not at
inward solace, but outward business, it remains true that the business
of providing for the wants of a family is not of that smooth,
uncreaking nature to the mother that it is to the father. Let a man
take two or three little children--two or three? Let him take one!--of
one, two, three, or four years of age, to his shop, or stall, or
office, and take care of him all the time for a week, and he will see
what I mean.
I do not say that a man's work may not be harder for an hour, or five
or ten hours, more exhaustive of mental and vital power, more
exclusive of all diversions than his wife's for the same time. It may
or may not be; quite as often the latter as the former: but I do say
that severe prearranged, intermittent labor wears less upon the
temper, the nerves, and the spirits, that is, upon body and soul, than
lighter, confused, unintermitting labor. Work that enlists the
energies and the enthusiasm will weary, but the weariness itself is
welcome, and brings with it a satisfaction,--the pleasant sense of
something accomplished. The multiplicity of a woman's labors distracts
as well as wearies, and each one is so petty that she has scarcely
anything to look back on. Not one of them is great enough to brace and
stimulate, and all together they form a multitudinous heap, and not a
mountain. It is a round of endless detail; little, insignificant,
provoking items that she gets no credit for doing, but fatal discredit
for leaving undone. Nobody notices that things are as they should be;
but if things are not as they should be, it were better for her that a
millstone were hanged about her neck, &c.!
In a community, you find the husbands devoted to different pursuits.
Baker, miller, farmer, advocate, clerk,--each one has a peculiar
calling for which he is supposed to have a special taste, fitness, or
motive, perhaps all; but their wives have no room for choice. Whether
they have a gift of it or not, they have the same routine of baking
and brewing and house-cleaning. Suppose the woman does not like it?
The supposition is not an impossible, not even an unnatural one.
Woman's-sphere writers confound distinctions; they seem to think that
woman was not created in the garden in native honor clad like man, but
rather, like the turtle, with her house on her back, and that a modern
American house and its belongings; so that if she dislikes any of the
conclusions which such a house premises, it is as unnatural and
unwomanly as if she should be coarse or cruel. Womanliness, in their
vocabulary, implies fondness of and pleasure in domestic drudgery.
Their ideal woman is enamored of wash-tubs and broom-handles and
frying-pans. But modern housekeeping is no more woman's sphere than
farming is man's sphere, nor so much. If you go back far enough, you
will find that man was directly and divinely ordained to that very
pursuit. The Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of
Eden, _to dress it and to keep it_. His sphere was expressly marked
out. He was to be a gardener, a farmer, a tiller of the soil. What of
the woman? "The Lord God said, It is not good _that the man should be
alone_: I will make him an help meet for him." What kind of help was
meant is here implied, but is more clearly discovered further on by
Adam's own interpretation: "The woman whom thou gavest _to be with
me_." She was made for society, to be company for him; to talk and
laugh and cheer and keep him from being lonesome. Not a word about
housekeeping. Adam is concerned to put the very best face on the
matter, and he does not say, "the woman whom thou gavest to train up
the vines, to pare the apples, to stone the raisins, to gather the
currants, to press the grapes, to preserve the peaches," or for any
other purposes of an Eden household. It is simply "thou gavest _to be
with me_." Whatever may have come in afterwards to modify the original
arrangement, came for "the hardness of your hearts." But here, before
the fall, is seen, in all its beauty and simplicity, the original
plan. You have the whole "woman question" in a nutshell. Yet people
who are fond of quoting the Bible manage to skip this. They go back to
the curse, "thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over
thee," and there they stop. Their nature is nature accursed, and even
that is silent on the point of menial service: they do not go back to
nature innocent, where it is excluded by implication. But if the Bible
is proof on one side, it is proof on the other. If the husband is made
to be the head of the woman, he is also made to be her serving-man.
Nay, even the silence of the curse is more golden than the speech of
man, for the same allotment of penalty which lays upon her the sorrow
of conception lays upon him the sorrow of toil: so that every man
whose wife is obliged to eat bread in the sweat of her brow is out of
his sphere, and has failed of his "mission." He lays upon the
shoulders of a weak woman his own burden as well as hers. And every
man who is not a farmer is out of his sphere, and should put himself
into it before he casts a single stone at any woman; and he is as much
more guilty as his sphere is more accurately defined.
So much for the revelation of the word; now for the revelation of
nature.
Naturally, I suppose women's tastes are not any more likely to be
uniform than men's tastes. The narrow range of their lives has
undoubtedly tended to keep them down towards one standard, but every
new-born child is a new protest of nature,--a new outburst of
individuality against monotony, so that the work is really never done,
and never comes anywhere near being so far done as that all women, or
the majority of women, should choose the life of a housekeeper. As far
as my observation goes, the best women, the brightest women, the
noblest women, are the very ones to whom it is most irksome. I do not
mean housekeeping with well-trained servants, for that is general
enough to admit a "brother near the throne"; but that, alas! is almost
unknown in the world wherein _I_ have lived; and a woman who is
satisfied with the small cares, the small economies, the small
interests, the constant contemplation of small things which many a
household demands, is a very small sort of woman. I make the assertion
both as an inference and an observation. A noble discontent--not a
peevish complaining, but an inward and spiritual protest--is a woman's
safeguard against the deterioration which such a life threatens, and
her proof of capacity and her note of preparation for a higher. Such a
woman does not do her work less well, but she rises ever superior to
her work. I know such women.
You talk about the mother-instinct. The mother-instinct makes a mother
love her children, but it does not make her love to destroy herself
with unremitting toil for them. It makes her do it, but it does not
make her love to do it. And because, in her great love, she will do it
when the necessity is laid upon her,--a wicked perversion of God's
good gift often lays the necessity upon her when God does not. The
mother-instinct in woman corresponds to the father-instinct in man;
and the wifely love to the husbandly love. Each is strong enough to
bear joyfully all that God lays upon it, and patiently much that he
does not lay and never intended to be laid. But he who counts upon
that strength, for the purpose of abusing it, is guilty of a high
crime against humanity. Each sex has the same uniformity in its loves,
and would undoubtedly have the same variety in its tastes if it were
not hindered. Men do not themselves believe so much as they profess in
this menial gravitation. If they did, they would never lecture women
so much about it. The very frenzy and frequency of their exhortations
are suspicious. They join together what God has not joined. They claim
identity where he has established diversity. Women are continually and
publicly admonished of their household obligations, but who ever heard
an assembly of men admonished of theirs? Yet men are as often derelict
in furnishing provision for their families as women are lax in its
administration. And while the husband may do his part in the way which
seems good in his own eyes, the wife must do hers in only one way,
whether it seem good or bad. The wise woman must tread "the old dull
round of things" as well as the foolish woman, and then she is so
footsore that she cannot enter upon that higher path which is open
only to her, and shut to the foolish woman. The low necessities usurp
the throne of the lofty possibilities. Oh! for this what tender
consideration should she not receive! Confined to the uninteresting
routine of domestic drudgery, while her tastes incline and her powers
fit her for other things, no admiration is too deep, no sympathy too
warm. The gentlest and most thoughtful attention is her smallest due.
Let men fancy for a moment that at marriage they must give up the law,
the pulpit, the machine-shop, the farm, in which they excel, and which
is adequate to purse and pleasure, and turn hod-carrier or
road-mender, and they may have a glimpse of the sacrifice which many a
gifted woman has made. If she made it unwittingly, marrying before she
knew her powers, or the life which marriage involves, a generous pity
and love will smooth her path as much as may be, and press back the
unexpected thorns. If she made it wittingly, choosing, in her strong
love, to lay upon the altar her pleasant things, so much the more will
a generous man constrain her to forget, in the fervor and efficacy of
his love, the fruit which once her soul longed for. If he cannot
prevent the sacrifice, he can cause that it shall not have been made
in vain.
Again, a man receives immediate and definite results from his work. He
has salary or wages,--so much a day, a year, a job. He is Lord High
Chancellor of the Exchequer and irresponsible. His wife gets no money
for her work. She has no funds under her own control, no resources of
which she is mistress. She must draw supplies from her husband, and
often with much outlay of ingenuity. Some men dole out money to their
wives as if it were a gift, a charity, something to which the latter
have no right, but which they must receive as a favor, and for which
they must be thankful. They act as if their wives were trying to
plunder them. Now a man has no more right to his earnings than his
wife has. They belong to her just as much as to him. There is a
mischievous popular opinion that the husband is the producer and the
wife the consumer. In point of fact, the wife is just as much a
producer as the husband. Her part in the concern is just as important
as his. She earns it as truly, and has just as strong a claim and just
as much a right to it as he; if possible she has more, for she ought
to receive some compensation for the gap that yawns between work and
wages. It is much more satisfactory to receive the latter as a direct
result of the former, than as a kind of alms. Many a woman does as
much to build up her husband's prosperity as he does himself. Many a
woman saves him from failure and disgrace. And, as a general rule, the
fate and fortunes of the family lie in her hands as much as in his.
What absurdity to _pay_ him his _wages_ and to _give_ her money to go
shopping with!
A woman who went around to make a collection for a small local
charity, told me that she could not help noticing the difference
between the married and the unmarried women. The latter took out their
purses on the spot and gave their mite or mint without hesitation. The
former parleyed and would see about it, gave rather uncertainly, and
must speak to Edward before they could decide. Now it may well be that
a woman who has only her own self to provide for can give more
liberally than one upon whose purse come the innumerable requisitions
of a family. The mother may be forced to make many sacrifices, and yet
be so blessed in the making that there shall be no sacrifice. The
pleasure shall overbalance the pain. But there is no reason why a
married woman should hesitate, or be embarrassed, or consult Edward as
to the expenditure of a dime or a dollar, any more than an unmarried
one. There may be more calls on the purse, but she ought to be
mistress of it. She ought to know her husband's circumstances well
enough to know what she can afford to give away, and she ought to be
as free to use her judgment as he is to use his. In any unusual
emergency, each will wish to consult the other; but he does not think
of asking her as to the disposal of every chance quarter of a dollar,
neither should she think of asking him. If circumstances make it
necessary to sail close to the wind, sail close to the wind; but let
both be in the same boat.
All this miserable and humiliating halting arises from the miserable
and humiliating notion that the husband is the power and the wife the
weight. It comes out, more convenient in substance, but just as
objectionable in shape, in the wife's "allowance." The husband
_allows_ her so much a year for her expenses. If it means simply that
so much is set aside for that purpose, very well; only it would sound
rather strange to say that she allows him so much to carry on his
business. A woman does not wish to be conversant with the details of
her husband's shop any more than he wishes to understand the details
of her kitchen: but he desires to know enough of that to be sure of
prompt, sufficient, and agreeable meals, and a tidy house, at a cost
within his means. So she should know with sufficient accuracy the
extent and sources of their income to be able to arrange her ordinary
disbursements without constant recurrence to him. He does not take his
dinner as a boon from her. He feels under no obligations for it. He
does not consider himself on his good behavior out of gratitude. It is
a regular institution, a blessing entirely common to both, and excites
no emotion. So should her money be,--as regularly and mechanically
supplied as the dinner, exciting no more comment and needing no more
argument. Whether it is kept in her pocket or his may be of small
moment; but as she does not lock up the dinner in the cupboard, and
then stand at the door and dole it out to him by the plateful, but
sets it on the table for him to help himself: so it is better, more
pacific, that he should deposit the money in an equally neutral and
accessible locality.
I portray to myself the flutter which such a proposition would raise
in many marital bosoms; would that they might be soothed. It is well
known among farmers that hens will not eat so much if you set a
measure of corn where they can pick whenever they choose, as they will
if you only fling down a handful now and then, and keep them
continually half starved. At the same time they will be in better
condition. So, looking at the matter from the very lowest stand-point,
a woman who has free access to the money will not be half so likely to
lavish it as the woman who is put off with scanty and infrequent sums.
She who knows how much there is to spend will almost invariably keep
within the limits. If she does not know, her imagination will be very
likely to magnify the fountain, and if but meagre supplies are
forthcoming, she will attribute it to niggardliness, and will consider
everything that can be got from her husband as legal plunder; and with
under-ground pipes and above-ground trenches it shall go hard but she
will drain him tolerably dry. Then he will inveigh against her
extravagance, and so not only lose his money, but his temper, his
calmness, and his complacency, all the while blaming her when the
fault is chiefly his own. If he had but frankly acquainted her with
the main facts; if he had but permitted her to look in and see what
was the capacity of the reservoir, instead of leaving her to sit under
the walls, knowing nothing of its resources but what she could learn
from the occasional spouting of a single small pipe, he would have
avoided all the trouble. It is so rarely that a wife will recklessly
transcend her reasonable income, that I do not think it worth while to
suggest any provision against the evil. It is an abnormal and sporadic
case, to be treated physiologically rather than philosophically. The
man has unfortunately allied himself to a mad woman, or he has found
to his regret that there is nothing more fulsome than a she-fool.
It irks me to say these things. It is almost a profanation to connect
such cold-blooded business matters with a relation which is supposed
to involve, and which should involve, the highest, the purest, the
fairest traits of human life. In true marriage there is indeed no need
of these considerations. A complete and perfect marriage breaks down
all barriers, and fuses each separate interest into one. In such there
is no mine and thine, but unity and identity. For perfect marriages I
do not write; but for the imperfect, and the marriages not yet
contracted. Let us have another standard set up, another
starting-point established, another goal fixed, that we may run
without weariness, and walk without faintness, and be crowned at last
with a laurel worth the wearing. A ten years' wife once said to a
young lady who was spending money rather freely,--money which was,
however, her own, for which she had to depend upon no one,--"You ought
to lay up something for yourself. You should have a little money--if
only five hundred dollars, it will be better than nothing--in the
bank, so that when you are married you will have something of your own
to go to, and not have to depend entirely upon your husband. You will
be a great deal happier to have something that you can do what you
choose with, and not feel that you must account for every cent, and
make it go as far as possible." But it seems to me that this is _felo
de se_. Doubtless, people often find that they have married the wrong
person; but it is supposed to be a mistake, and not a walking into the
ditch with eyes open. If a girl knows, or even suspects, or entertains
the possibility beforehand, that she is going to marry a man from whom
it is necessary to provide for herself a pecuniary refuge, why does
she marry him at all? If she deliberately unites herself to one who
she believes, or even fears, will not receive her as a trust from God,
bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, she forfeits all sympathy and
pity, whatever may befall her. If the husband whom she is to take
threatens to be greedy, or unsympathizing, or selfish, or stolid, her
best defence against him is, not to put money in a bank, but to keep
herself out of his reach. It is impossible to conceive of happiness in
marriage, where the financial wheels do not run--I will not say
smoothly, but evenly. The road may be rough, roundabout, and steep,
without precluding wholesome and hearty happiness; but if one wheel
drags while the other turns, if one goes back while the other goes
forward, if for any reason the two do not move by parallel lines in
the same direction, the whole carriage is bewitched, the whole journey
is embittered, the whole object is baffled.
It is marvellous to see the insensibility with which men manage these
delicate matters. It is impossible for a man to be too scrupulous, too
chivalrous, too refined, in his bearing towards his wife. Her
dependence should be the strongest appeal to his manhood. The very act
of receiving money from him puts her in a position so equivocal, that
the utmost affection and attention should be brought into play to
reassure her. The velvet touch of love should disguise the iron hand
of business. A sensitive woman is fully enough alive to her relations.
There is need that every gentle and tender courtesy should assure and
convince her that the money which she costs is a pleasure and a
privilege. Her delicacy, her self-respect, her confidence in his
appreciation, are the strongest ties that can bind her to himself. Let
them but be sundered, and he has no longer any hold on happiness, any
safeguard against discord. Let chivalry be forgotten, let
sensitiveness be violated, let money intrude into the domain of love,
and the spell is broken. Your stately silver urn is become an iron
kettle.
Yet men will deliberately, in the presence of their wives, _to_ their
wives, groan over the cost of living. They do not mean extravagant
purchases of silk and lace and velvet, which might be a wife's fault
or thoughtlessness, and furnish an excuse for rebuke; but the
butcher's bill, and the grocer's bill, and the joiner's bill. Man,
when a woman is married, do you think she loses all personal feeling?
Do you think your glum look over the expenses of housekeeping is a
fulfilment of your promise to love and cherish? Is it calculated to
retain and increase her tenderness for you? Does it bring sunshine and
lighten toil, and bless her with knightly grace? Do you not know that
it is only a way of regretting that you married her? It is a way of
saying that you did not count the cost. You may not present it to
yourself in that light, but in that light you present it to her. And
do you think it is a pleasant thing to her? You go out to your shop,
or sit down to your newspaper, and forget all about it. She sits down
to her sewing, or stands over her cooking-stove, and meditates upon it
with an indescribable pain. I do not say that every kind of uneasiness
regarding expense is or ought to be thus construed. There may be an
uneasiness springing directly from love. A strong and great-hearted
affection frets that it cannot minister the beauty and the comfort
which it longs to do, or defend against the emergencies which a future
may bring. But this uneasiness is rarely if ever mistaken. Love can
usually find a way to soothe the sorrows of love, and a wife's hand
can almost always smooth out the wrinkles from the brow which is
corrugated only for her. The complaint which I mean is of quite
another character. Women know it, if men do not;--the women who have
suffered from it, for it is pleasant to think that there are women to
whose experience every such sensation is entirely foreign. These very
men who complain because it costs so much to live will lose by bad
debts more than their wives spend. They will, by sheer negligence, by
a selfish reluctance to present a bill to a disagreeable person, by a
cowardly fear lest insisting on what is due should alienate a
customer, by culpable mismanagement of business, by indorsing a note,
or lending money, through mere want of courage to say "No," or of
shrewdness to detect dishonesty or incapacity, lose money enough to
foot up half a dozen bills. They will waste money in cigars, in
oyster-suppers, in riding when walking would be better for them, in
keeping a horse which "eats his head off," in buying luxuries which
they would be better off without, in sending packages and luggage by
express, rather than have the trouble of taking them themselves, in
numberless small items of which they make no account, but of which the
bills make great account. If one might judge from the newspapers,
extravagance is a peculiarity of women. So far as my observation goes,
the extravagance of women is not for a moment to be compared with the
extravagance of men.[3] A man is perversely, persistently, and with
malice aforethought, extravagant. He is extravagant in spite of
admonition and remonstrance. Where his personal comfort or interest is
concerned, he scorns a sacrifice. He laughs at the suggestion that
such a little thing makes any difference one way or another. He has
not even the idea of economy. He does not know what the word means. He
does not know the thing when he sees it. Women take to it naturally. A
certain innate sense of harmony keeps them from being wasteful. Their
extravagance is the exception, not the rule. They are willing to incur
self-denial. They do not scorn to take thought and trouble, and be put
to inconvenience, for the sake of saving money. The greater animalism
of man also comes out here in full force. If sacrifice must be, a
woman will sacrifice her comforts before her taste. The man will let
his tastes go, and keep his comforts, and call it good sense. A
woman's extravagance is to some purpose. A man's to none. She buys
many dresses, but she gives her old ones away, or cuts them over for
the children, and works dextrously. A man buys and destroys. Look at
the manner in which men manage the national housekeeping, and see
whether it is men or women who are extravagant. Look at the clerkships
in the departments, look at members of Congress browsing among
government supplies, look at army and navy; walk through a camp: see
the barrels of good food thrown away, see the wood wasted, see the
tools wantonly destroyed. I think the wives of the soldiers could
support themselves comfortably on the fragments of the soldiers'
feasts. Nobody complains. A great nation must not look too closely
after the pennies. A great army always makes great waste, say the
newspapers that exhort women against extravagance, as if it were as
much a law of nature as gravitation. Why not say housekeeping is
always wasteful, and fall back on that as a primal law of nature also?
Because housekeeping is not always wasteful, you say. Precisely.
Housekeeping is nearly always economically conducted, and your
animadversions amount just to this: because women are generally
prudent, they are to be chided for all shortcomings. But men are
always wasteful, therefore they must be let alone. Only be universally
bad, and you shall be as unmolested as if you were good. You say that
it is easier to be economical in a family than in an army. Perhaps so;
but if the soldiers, instead of being men, were women, do you for a
moment imagine that there would be any such waste? Let all other
circumstances be unchanged. Let all the cost come upon the government
just as it does. Let all provisions be furnished in the same abundance
as now, and I do not believe there would be much more waste than there
is in average families. I do not believe you could force women at the
point of the bayonet to such reckless prodigality as men indulge in.
It is against their nature. It hurts them. It violates God's law,
written in their hearts. They would also be too conscientious to do
it. They would not consider the fact that "Uncle Sam foots the bills"
a reason why a saw should be tossed aside on the first symptom of
dulness, and a new one bought. They would not throw away a half loaf
because there were plenty of whole ones, but keep it and steam it. And
not only would there be a great deal less waste, but there would be a
great deal better supply. If women had charge of the commissariat, I
do not believe there would have been one half so much friction as
there has been. Hungry regiments would not get to the end of a long
march and find nothing to eat. Sick soldiers would not be expected to
recover health from salt pork and muddy coffee. Experience or no
experience, red tape or no tape, women would have managed to bring
hungry mouths and hot soups together, and to furnish delicate food for
delicate health. They would not only have supplied the soldiers at
less cost to government, but the less cost would have produced a
larger bill of fare. How did the English army fare till Florence
Nightingale came by and knocked their granary doors open? That my
remarks are not mere theory, or rather that my theory is founded on
truth, is abundantly proved by a statement printed in the North
American Review for January, 1864, long after my words were written.
It is from an article on the Sanitary Commission.
[3] The discussions which, since this was written, have
arisen concerning expenditure and extravagance, in
connection with the women's pledge against the purchase of
foreign goods, only increase the strength of my position.
But let it be remembered, that I speak not for an emergency,
but for the conduct of life.
"At this moment, the only region in the loyal States that is
definitely out of the circle is Missouri. The rest of our loyal
territory is all embraced within one ring of method and federality.
This is chiefly due to the wonderful spirit of nationality that beats
in the breasts of American women. They, even more than the men of the
country, from their utter withdrawal from partisan strifes and local
politics, have felt the assault upon the life of the nation in its
true national import. They are infinitely less _State-ish_, and more
national in their pride and in their sympathies. They see the war in
its broad, impersonal outlines; and while their particular and special
affections are keener than men's, their general humanity and tender
sensibility for unseen and distant sufferings is stronger and more
constant.
"The women of the country, who are the actual creators, by the labor
of their fingers, of the chief supplies and comforts needed by the
soldiers, have been the first to understand, appreciate, and
co-operate with the Sanitary Commission. It is due to the sagacity and
zeal with which they have entered into the work, that the system of
supplies, organized by the extraordinary genius of Mr. Olmstead, has
become so broadly and nationally extended, and that, with Milwaukee,
Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Louisville, Pittsburg, Philadelphia,
New York, Brooklyn, New Haven, Hartford, Providence, Boston, Portland,
and Concord for centres, there should be at least fifteen thousand
Soldiers' Aid Societies, all under the control of women, combined and
united in a common work,--of supplying, through the United States
Sanitary Commission, the wants of the sick and wounded in the great
Federal army.
"The skill, zeal, business qualities, and patient and persistent
devotion exhibited by those women who manage the truly vast operations
of the several chief centres of supply, at Chicago, Boston, Cleveland,
Philadelphia, Pittsburg, and New York, have unfolded a new page in the
history of the aptitudes and capacities of women. To receive,
acknowledge, sort, arrange, mark, repack, store, hold ready for
shipment, procure transportation for, and send forward at sudden call,
the many thousand boxes of hospital stores which, at the order of the
General Secretary at Washington, have been for the past two years and
a half forwarded at various times by the 'Women's Central' at New
York, the Soldiers' Aid Society of Northern Ohio, at Cleveland, the
Branches at Cincinnati and at Philadelphia, or the Northwestern Branch
at Chicago, has required business talents of the highest order. A
correspondence demanding infinite tact, promptness, and method has
been carried on with their local tributaries, by the women from these
centres, with a ceaseless ardor, to which the Commission owes a very
large share of its success, and the nation no small part of the
sustained usefulness and generous alacrity of its own patriotic
impulses.
"To collect funds (for the supply branches have usually raised their
own funds from the immediate communities in which they have been
situated) has often tasked their ingenuity to the utmost. In Chicago,
for instance, the Branch has lately held a fair of colossal
proportions, to which the whole Northwest was invited to send
supplies, and to come in mass! On the 26th of October last, when it
opened, a procession of three miles in length, composed of wagon-loads
of supplies, and of people in various ways interested, paraded through
the streets of Chicago; the stores being closed, and the day given up
to patriotic sympathies. For fourteen days the fair lasted, and every
day brought reinforcements of supplies, and of people and purchasers.
The country people, from hundreds of miles about, sent in upon the
railroads all the various products of their farms, mills, and hands.
Those who had nothing else sent the poultry from their barnyards; the
ox, or bull, or calf, from the stall; the title-deed of a few acres of
land; so many bushels of grain, or potatoes, or onions. Loads of hay,
even, were sent in from ten or a dozen miles out, and sold at once in
the hay-market. On the roads entering the city were seen rickety and
lumbering wagons, made of poles, loaded with mixed freight,--a few
cabbages, a bundle of socks, a coop of tame ducks, a few barrels of
turnips, a pot of butter, and a bag of beans,--with the proud and
humane farmer driving the team, his wife behind in charge of the baby,
while two or three little children contended with the boxes and
barrels and bundles for room to sit or lie. Such were the evidences of
devotion and self-sacrificing zeal the Northwestern farmers gave, as
in their long trains of wagons they trundled into Chicago, from twenty
and thirty miles' distance, and unloaded their contents at the doors
of the Northwestern Fairs, for the benefit of the United States
Sanitary Commission. The mechanics and artisans of the towns and
cities were not behind the farmers. Each manufacturer sent his best
piano, plough, threshing-machine, or sewing-machine. Every form of
agricultural implement, and every product of mechanical skill, was
represented. From the watchmaker's jewelry to horseshoes and harness;
from lace, cloth, cotton and linen, to iron and steel; from wooden and
waxen and earthen ware, to butter and cheese, bacon and beef;--nothing
came amiss, and nothing failed to come, and the ordering of all this
was in the hands of women. They fed in the restaurant, under 'the
Fair,' at fifty cents a meal--fifteen hundred mouths a day, for a
fortnight--from food furnished, cooked, and served by the women of
Chicago; and so orderly and convenient, so practical and wise were the
arrangements, that, day by day, they had just what they had ordered
and what they counted on,--always enough, and never too much. They
divided the houses of the town, and levied on No. 16 A Street, for
five turkeys, on Monday; No. 37 B Street, for twelve apple-pies, on
Tuesday; No. 49 C Street, for forty pounds of roast beef, on
Wednesday; No. 23 D Street was to furnish so much pepper on Thursday;
No. 33 E Street, so much salt on Friday. In short, every preparation
was made in advance, at the least inconvenience possible to the
people, to distribute in the most equal manner the welcome burden of
feeding the visitors, at the fair, at the expense of the good people
of Chicago, but for the pecuniary benefit of the Sanitary Commission.
Hundreds of lovely young girls, in simple uniforms, took their places
as waiters behind the vast array of tables, and everybody was as well
served as at a first-class hotel, at a less expense to himself, and
with a great profit to the fair. Fifty thousand dollars, it is said,
will be the least net return of this gigantic fair to the treasury of
the Branch at Chicago. It is universally conceded that to Mrs.
Livermore and Mrs. Hoge, old and tried friends of the soldier and of
the Sanitary Commission, and its ever active agents, are due the
planning, management, and success of this truly American exploit. What
is the value of the money thus raised, important as it is, when
compared with the worth of the spirit manifested, the loyalty
exhibited, the patriotism stimulated, the example set, the prodigious
tide of national devotion put in motion! How can rebellion hope to
succeed in the face of such demonstrations as the Northwestern Fair?
They are bloodless battles, equal in significance and results to
Vicksburg and Gettysburg, to New Orleans and Newbern."
Men, have you read this paragraph? Please to read it again! Think of
all your inveighing against female extravagance and incapacity, and
read it yet again. Put on sackcloth and ashes, and read it aloud to
your wife, to your mother, to your daughter, to your sister, to your
grandmother, to your aunt, to your niece, to your mother-in-law, and
all your relatives-in-law, and to every woman who suffers your
presence, and then lay your hand on your mouth, and your mouth in the
dust, and cry, "Woe is me! for I am undone." Inexperience? Had Mrs.
Hoge and Mrs. Livermore any more experience in feeding fifteen hundred
mouths a day than the quartermaster of a regiment? Have the women of
Chicago generally devoted their lives to trafficking in tame ducks,
loads of hay, threshing-machines, and beef and bacon? Yet you have the
very essence of business tact in "nothing came amiss, and nothing
failed to come"; and the very essence of economy in "always enough,
and never too much"; and the crowning glory--write it on the posts of
thy house, and on thy gates; teach it diligently unto thy children,
and talk of it when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest
by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up; bind it
for a sign upon thine hand, and let it be as a frontlet between thine
eyes--"the ordering of all this was in the hands of women."
This ascription of female extravagance, whether made publicly in
newspapers or privately in family conclave, is not only false and
fatal, but it is fatal in the very innermost and vital points of life.
What is destroyed is not an adventitious thing, but the spring of all
satisfaction. The relations between a man and his wife decide the weal
of his life. The whole chain of his circumstances can be no stronger
than the link between him and her. He may be ever so rich or renowned,
but he can bear no heavier weight of happiness than that link can
sustain. The newspaper paragraphs do the harm of confirming individual
men in their notions that it is the wife who incurs the unnecessary
expense, and so divert their attention from their own duties, and urge
them on in their evil courses to their own undoing. But a man is just
as powerful for good as he is for evil. By as much as he can alienate
his wife from himself by his petty financiering, by so much can he
draw her to his heart by a gentle chivalry. Invested by the law with
power, he has only to transmute it into love to secure a loyalty
capable of any sacrifice. Let a wife read in her husband's face and
bearing how grateful is her society, how precious her life, how
sweetest of all pleasures to him is the knowledge of her pleasure; let
her feel that she is to him something different from all earthly
interests,--something above and beyond all other joys; let her see
that, with her coming, money ceased to be mere current coin, that
labor acquired a new dignity, and prudence a new charm, because they
all might minister to her convenience or delight; let her see that she
adjusts, harmonizes, and completes his life; that she is the central
sun, about which all minor interests and plans revolve; and--what have
you gained? A good housekeeper? A well-ordered household? More than
this. An empire. Supreme dominion. You have only to be tender and
true, and nothing can sweep away the golden mist through which,
whatever you may be to others, you shall appear to her eyes a knight
without fear and without reproach.
Wrong opinions concerning the relations between husband and wife are
also occasionally expressed in another and opposite manner. A wife
comes into the possession of property. The husband, determined not to
encroach upon her rights, leaves the disposal of the property to her.
He insists that it shall be invested in her name. He will take no
responsibility as to the mode of investment. This may be done from
honorable motives. The man means to be just and blameless; and if he
is conscious of innate weakness or wickedness, or if the marriage be
an ill-assorted one, he may be pursuing the best course. There may
also be outside, merely business reasons which make it the best
course. But to do it simply from a notion of justice, is as far as
possible from what ought to be. The man shows himself entirely at
fault regarding the range of justice. If life were what it should be,
the law would be right in recognizing for the woman no existence
separate from her husband. Love is but the fulfilling of that law. The
reason why such a law is unjust is, that life is so constant a
violation of the higher spiritual law, that this lower one which
embodies it works mischief. It fits the righteous theory only, not the
wicked facts. But law is for the evil, not for the good. There is no
enactment that a man shall possess his own property. The enactments
are to punish those who attempt to wrest his property from him. There
need be no enactment that a man shall be master of his wife's
possessions; he has but to be to her a true husband, and all that she
has is his. The law should punish him for neglect of duty and
disregard of claims, by a forfeiture of property. If the law this day
completely reversed the position of husband and wife, it would make no
jot or tittle of change in their actual position, where they love each
other as they ought. Women naturally have a distaste to business, and
an indifference to money. Of their own motion, they would leave such
things in the hands of men, if the instinct of self-preservation did
not force them to interference. In addition to this generic negative
willingness, the happy wife has a positive delight in enriching with
every blessing the man she loves. When Aurora gave her love with all
lavishment, and prayed Romney,
"If now you'd stoop so low to take my love,
And use it roughly, without stint or spare,
As men use common things with more behind,
To any mean and ordinary end,--
The joy would set me like a star, in heaven,
So high up, I should shine because of height
And not of virtue,"--
did she make a mental reservation to herself of the money which her
books had brought her?
What the law should do, is to step in and guard woman against the
possible disastrous consequences which may spring from the spontaneous
self-abnegation of love. What it should not do, is to guarantee to the
miser, the spendthrift, the tyrant, debauchee, or vampire, the things
which _a man_ would possess of his own inalienable right. What a
husband should do, is to show himself great enough and good enough to
know and feel that, in love, giving and receiving wear the selfsame
grace. What he should not do, is to talk of justice when they twain
should be one flesh.
VIII.
Woman's rank in life depends entirely on what life is. Her importance
is decided when it is decided what service is important. If money is
the one thing needful, and its acquisition the chief end of man, the
wife's position is very inferior to her husband's. The greater part of
the money is earned in his, and often spent in her department. He does
the work that is paid for, and he belongs to the sex that is paid. She
does the work that is not paid for, and she belongs to the sex that is
pillaged. Men go out and gain money: wives stay at home and spend it.
The case is against them--if that is the whole case. But if money is
only means to an end; if happiness, intelligence, integrity, are more
worth than gold; if a life ruled by the law of God, if the development
of the divine in the human, if the education of every faculty, and the
enjoyment of every power, be more lovely and more desirable than bank
stock, then the woman walks not one whit behind the man, but side by
side, with no unequal steps. He furnishes and she fashions the
material from which grace and strength are wrought. Her work is in
point of fact incomparably fairer, finer, more difficult, more
important than his. It is not money-getting alone, or chiefly, but
money-spending, that influences and indicates character. A man may
work up to his knees in swamp-meadows, or breathe all day the foul air
of a court-room; but if, when released, he turns naturally to sunshine
and apple-orchards and womanly grace, swamp-mud and vile air have not
polluted him. He is a clean-souled man through it all. But if a man
find rest from his work in mere eating and drinking, if the money
which he has earned goes to gross amusements and coarse companions, he
shows at once the lowness of his character, however high may be his
occupation.
Those hands which have the ordering of house and home, have a large
share in the ordering of character. The man who provides the house
does an important part, but she who refines it into a home is the true
artist. To whom is the palm awarded, to the painter who, from ochre
and lead, lays on the rough canvas the lovely landscape, touched with
a beauty borrowed from his own soul, or the huckster who sells him
ochre, lead, and canvas, or even the successful shoddy-contractor who
pays five thousand of his Judas Iscariot dollars, that he may hang it
in a bad light in his dining-room till such day as he shall have the
grace to go and hang himself? It has been said that in the highest
departments women have never produced a masterpiece. Painting has its
old masters, but no old mistresses. Jenny Lind may entrance the world
from her "heaven-kissing hill," but on the mountain-tops Mendelssohn
and Beethoven stand uncompanioned. Sappho plumed her wings, but
plunged quickly from the Leucadian cliff, and Milton soars steadfastly
to the sun alone. We shall see about this one day, but meanwhile life
itself is higher than any of the arts of life, and in living no man
has risen to loftier heights than a woman, and the mass of men are
infinitely lower than the mass of women, and would be lower still if
it were not for female assistance. With all the help which they
receive from women, they are perpetually lapsing into brutality, and
whenever they go off into a community by themselves, they go headlong
downwards, following their natural gravitation.
It is women that make men fit to live. They often confess it
themselves without meaning anything by it. I take advantage of the
confession; as the malignant Minister in Titan "retained the habit,
when an open-hearted soul showed him its breaches, of marching in upon
it through those breaches, as if he himself had made them." In toasts
and festive speeches none can be more bland than they. With sweet and
smiling, arch and gracious humility, they dwell upon the refining and
elevating influence of "lovely woman," as if it were a pretty thing to
be growling and snappish and stroked into quiescence and acquiescence
by a soft hand,--as if a midsummer-night's dream were a
midwinter-day's truth, and man were content to be Bottom the weaver,
with his ass's head stuck full with musk-roses by fairy Titanias. But
I say it not as a man gallantly towards women, nor as a woman angrily
towards men, but as a simple statement of fact by an unconcerned
spectator, and far more in sorrow than in anger. What is proffered as
compliment I accept and reproduce as truth, and if men will not stand
convicted of false dealing, let them show their faith by their works,
and yield themselves, plastic and unresisting, to the hands that will
mould them to fairest shapes.
Over against this mistaken notion stands its opponent notion, equally
mistaken, more extensive, circulated by men, adopted by women, and
doing its mischievous work silently and surely. Public opinion,
floating about in novels and periodicals, lays upon the shoulders of
women burdens which they are not able to bear, which they were never
intended to bear, and which ought never to be laid upon them. Before
marriage, society agrees to make men grasp the laboring oar. They must
choose and woo and win; while the woman's strength is to sit still.
But after marriage the scene suddenly shifts. The wife must take the
wooing and winning into her hands. She must make home pleasant. She
must rear the children. She must manage society. She must incur the
responsibility of the welfare and happiness of the family. The husband
is on the one side a wild animal who must be managed but not
controlled; on the other, a piece of rare china, which must be
carefully handled and kept from all rough contact.
"It is the wife who makes the home, and the home makes the man," says
the country newspaper, in its domestic column.
"If a wife would make the husband delighted with home, she must first
make home delightful. She must first woo him there by all the arts of
affection,--by cheerfulness, tidiness, orderliness without excess: by
a clean-swept hearth, a bright fire, flowers upon the mantel, a
well-set table and well-cooked food. She must be careful of imposing
restraints upon his tastes, inclinations, movements, and render him
free of every suspicion of domestic imprisonment. If his masculine
tastes, as they will, draw him from home at times, to the club, to the
lodge, or the political meeting, or elsewhere, let her second them
with that ready cheerfulness which will prove one of the strong cords
to draw him back to home as the centre of his earthly joys," says its
virtuous neighbor.
"I have heard women speak of their rights. If they had made the men of
the world what God intended they should make of them, there would have
been no need of this complaining," says the orthodox heroine in the
orthodox novel.
"What makes a man feel at home in the house?... Is it to leave him
absolute master of his rightful position, the large liberty to go and
come, trusting for her part religiously in the virtue and the
sovereign power of her love,--knowing, as if she had read it out of
Holy Writ, for her own heart has told her" (_her_ being the heroine
aforementioned, now become the hero's wife) "that, if she shall ever
cease to hold the love and trust which she has won, the fault, as the
loss, is hers?"
"She" (_she_ being the aforesaid orthodox heroine and orthodox
submissive wife, now become the orthodox devoted mother),--"She had
the consciousness that it was hers to make of this child what she
would!"
I have spoken before of the comparative work of the husband and wife,
considered merely as labor. I refer now to the comparative moral
weight belonging to their respective positions.
All masculine and all orthodox feminine tractates on female education,
all male lectures on female duties, all anniversary orators to female
schools, ring the changes on the importance of educating girls to be
good wives and mothers, with the persistency of the old song which
shuttled back and forth some twenty times or more to tell us that
"John Brown had a little Indian." But were the graduating class of a
college ever exhorted to be good husbands and fathers? Are fathers
ever admonished to teach their sons domestic virtues, to make them
fond and faithful and good providers for the wives they may one day
possess? But I should like to know if girls have any stronger tendency
to become wives and mothers, than the boys have to become husbands and
fathers? Are they any more likely to be bad wives and mothers, than
boys are to be bad husbands and fathers? Is the number of incompetent
wives obviously greater than the number of incompetent husbands? Is
the number of injudicious mothers obviously greater than the number of
injudicious fathers? And where the wife and mother is incompetent and
injudicious, does it generally seem to be owing to too great strength
of mind and culture of intellect, and too little domestic education,
or is it owing to weakness of character? It is not a remote, but it
seems to be an entirely unobserved truth, that for every wife there is
a husband, and for every mother there is a father; and so far as my
observation extends, domestic mismanagement and unhappiness, in an
overwhelming majority of cases, are owing to the shortcomings of the
husband, and not of the wife, or to the wife in an inferior and
resultant measure. "There is blame on both sides," say the observers,
oracularly, and this most superficial of all superficial generalizations
is supposed to be an impartial and exhaustive summary. It is just as
much a summary as the statement that two and two make four. Two and
two do make four, but it is nothing to the purpose here. To say that
there is blame on both sides, is simply saying that neither a man nor
a woman is perfect, which nobody ever maintained. So long as humanity
is humanity, it is not probable that one person will be entirely
sinless and another entirely sinful; but there are, and will continue
to be, many cases in which the blame on one side is much more heavy
and condemning than the blame on the other. The man's blame is most
often one of aggression, of the first provocation, of unprincipled and
heartless behavior, of cruel disappointing and thwarting, of a giant's
strength used giantly. The woman's is a blame of imprudence, of
weakness, of disappointment, unwisely met and impatiently or otherwise
ill-borne; of an inability to manage with sagacity, and so to master
by superior moral power the wild beast that has clutched her,--a blame
that is negative rather than positive, passive rather than active, and
not to be compared with the other in point of heinousness. Why, then,
do you bear down so hard on the woman's duty and leave the man to go
his way unadmonished? If you do not enforce on college-boys the duty
of providing for their future families, why do you enforce on
seminary-girls the duty of directing their future families? If you do
not educate young men to make good husbands, why should you educate
young women to make good wives? If you do not exhort young men so to
live and learn as to make their wives happy and train their children
aright, why should you exhort young women to study to make their
husbands happy and train their children aright? Because, you say, in
the words already quoted, "It is the wife that makes the home, and the
home makes the man." It is nothing of the sort. It is the wife and the
husband together that make the home, and the man was already made. The
most that wife and home in conjunction can do is to modify the man. If
a husband be intemperate, or given over to money-getting, or
money-saving, or money-spending,--if he be ill-tempered, indelicate,
ignorant, obstinate, arrogant,--no wife, be she ever so prudent, wise,
affectionate, can make the home what it ought to be. At best she can
only mend it. Her energies are wasted. The ingenuity, the love, the
care, that should be expended in making it happy are sacrificed in the
attempt to make it as little unhappy as possible. With the best of
husbands and the best of wives there are always evils enough lying in
wait. Danger, disease, sin, are ever ready to spring upon the happy
home, even when both the keepers stand guard at the portals; how,
then, can you expect the wife to ward off even her own part of these,
when you lay upon her the husband's part, and he himself is the
greatest evil of all?
And what right have men to depend upon home and wife to "make" them?
What is a man doing all the twenty or thirty years before he is
married, that he has not made himself? And on what grounds does he
come to her for completion? How came she to be any more finished than
he? or any more capable of putting the finishing touches to another?
Are wives generally mature and experienced, while husbands are young
and inexperienced? Have wives generally more knowledge of the world,
and more opportunities to become self-possessed and firmly and evenly
balanced than husbands? Or is the masculine material naturally and
permanently more plastic than the feminine? Let us know the pretext
upon which a full-grown man charges a delicate woman, who has had
little if anything to do with him until he became a full-grown man,
with the cure of his soul? If there is anything to be done in the way
of education and reformation, one would naturally suppose that it is
the stronger sex which should educate and reform the weaker. It would
seem as if the sex that is looked up to and sets itself up as
sovereign should mould the sex which looks up and recognizes it as
sovereign. Where, in the Bible, does a man find any warrant for laying
himself to the account of his wife? When God calls every man to
judgment, will he be able to pass over his shortcomings to his wife?
The first man tried it, but with very small success. "The woman whom
thou gavest to be with me," whimpered Adam; but it was a sorry refuge
of lies, and did not avail to stay the curse from descending heavily
upon his head. The plea that did not avail the first man is not likely
to avail the last, nor any man between. "If thou art wise, thou art
wise for thyself, but if thou scornest, thou alone shalt bear it." As
a matter of fact, neither the wife makes the husband nor the husband
the wife, but they both influence each other. She softens him and he
strengthens her; or if, as not unfrequently happens, her nature is the
stronger, she communicates to him of its strength. In a true marriage,
delicacy is imparted on the one side and vigor on the other, to
whichever side they originally belonged. Where the union is founded
upon truth, there is always a tendency to equilibrium, woman supplying
the spiritual, man the material element. She raises a mortal to the
skies; he draws an angel down.
And no more than it belongs to the wife to make the home and the
husband, does it belong to the mother to train up the children in the
way they should go. The family is a joint-stock concern, so
established both by nature and revelation. Where, in the Bible, do we
find that the mother can make of her child what she will, or that God
gave the making of the men of the world into her hand? In Holy Writ,
the father's duties loom up as largely as the mother's, and if there
is any difference it is not one that discriminates in his favor or in
favor of his release from duty. Fathers and mothers in the Bible
receive equal honor and equal deference, but the instruction and
guidance of the children are much more definitely and repeatedly
attributed to and inculcated upon and implied as belonging to the
father than the mother. He is recognized as the head. At his door lies
the responsibility. Ahaziah walked in the ways of his mother, but of
his father also when he did evil in the sight of the Lord. It is the
sins of the fathers, not of the mothers, that are visited upon the
children. It was the fathers, not the mothers, who were to make known
to the children the truth of Jehovah. It was the instruction of his
father that Solomon commanded his son to hear, and the law of his
mother which he commanded him not to forsake,--an arrangement which
modern opinions seem inclined to reverse. It is the fathers who are
pronounced to be the glory of children, not the mothers; and glory
implies action. A father may die, and his dying prayer and his
conscientious life, both commending his family to God, may descend
upon them in ever-renewing blessing. Such is the promise of the Lord.
A father may neglect his children, and the mother's care and love be
so blessed of Heaven that they shall be burning and shining lights in
the temple of the Most High. But this is God's uncovenanted mercy, and
the father has no right to expect it. Yet one not seldom hears or sees
anecdotes which imply that such neglect of children is not a crime,--a
crime against children, against mothers, against society, against God.
In times of financial disaster I have more than once heard of men's
consoling themselves for the ruin of their business by playfully
declaring that they should now go home and get acquainted with their
children. But the non-acquaintance with children, of which many
fathers are guilty, is not a theme to be lightly spoken of. Is it a
small thing to give life to a soul that can never die; that, through
unending ages, in happiness or in misery, clothed with glory or with
shame, beautiful, strong, upright, or disfigured and deformed, must
live on and on and on, forever and forever? Is it a small thing to
give life to a sentient being, that must know even the experience of
this world? That may be bowed down with guilt, remorse, wretchedness,
bringing other souls with it to the dust, or may be upborne through a
pure, happy, and beneficent career, bearing other souls with it to the
skies? How dare a man look upon these helpless, hapless souls, and
know that to him they owe their being, with all its dread
possibilities; that upon him may fall the curse of their ruined lives,
and--neglect them? How dare he leave them to another? To no other do
they belong. His duty he cannot delegate. After country, which
includes all things, his first duty is to his family. He is a father,
and at no price can he sell his fatherhood.
I see notices of Female Prayer-Meetings. The mothers of a regiment
assemble to pray for their sons who have gone to the war. There are
Mothers' Guides and Mothers' Assistants and Mothers' Hymn-Books. But
where are the Fathers' Hymn-Books? Where are the Paternal
Prayer-Meetings? When do the Fathers of Regiments assemble to pray for
their soldier-sons? If boys need their mothers' prayers, they need
also their fathers' prayers. Does the fervent, effectual prayer of
righteous women avail so much that righteous men can feel they have
nothing to do but give themselves up to their farms and their
merchandise, to buy and to sell and to get gain? Can men wait upon the
Lord by proxy? Shall we bring political economy into religion, and
arrange a wise division of labor by which the wife shall serve God,
and the husband shall serve Mammon,--the wife do the praying and the
husband see to the marketing,--he make sure of this world and she look
out for the next? It is a nice little arrangement, but--He that
sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have it in
derision.
But fathers must attend to their business. They must earn money to
support the family. They must provide wherewith to keep the pot
boiling. Certainly they must; but it requires no more time, or
attention, or ingenuity, or vitality, or strength, or spirits, or
endurance, no more expenditure of any of the forces of life, to go out
and earn something to put into the pot, than it does to stay at home
and boil it. If the mother, with her harassing cares, the never-ending
details of her never-ending work, can find time for studying her
maternal relations and responsibilities, and comparing her experience
with that of others for purposes of improvement and the highest
efficiency, and for joining in social prayer for the blessing of God
on her efforts, the father can find time for similar study, effort,
and prayer. If she can leave her baby, he can leave his books. If she
can leave her kitchen, he can leave his counting-room. His bench, his
desk, his fields, his office, are no more exacting than her nursery,
her laundry, her work-basket. Women will go to the mothers' meeting
who have to sit up till one o'clock in the morning to darn the little
fro
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/36152