Paris smiled, for an hour or two, in the year 1801, when, amidst Napoleon's
mighty projects for remodelling the religion and government of his empire,
the ironical satirist, Sylvain Maréchal, thrust in his "Plan for a Law
prohibiting the Alphabet to Women."[1] Daring, keen, sarcastic, learned,
the little tract retains to-day so much of its pungency, that we can hardly
wonder at the honest simplicity of the author's friend and biographer,
Madame Gacon Dufour, who declared that he must be insane, and soberly
replied to him.
His proposed statute consists of eighty-two clauses, and is fortified by a
"whereas" of a hundred and thirteen weighty reasons. He exhausts the range
of history to show the frightful results which have followed this taste of
fruit of the tree of knowledge; quotes from the Encyclopédie, to prove that
the woman who knows the alphabet has already lost a portion of her
innocence; cites the opinion of Molière, that any female who has unhappily
learned anything in this line should affect ignorance, when possible;
asserts that knowledge rarely makes men attractive, and females never;
opines that women have no occasion to peruse Ovid's "Art of Love," since
they know it all in advance; remarks that three quarters of female authors
are no better than they should be; maintains that Madame Guion would have
been far more useful had she been merely pretty and an ignoramus, such as
Nature made her,--that Ruth and Naomi could not read, and Boaz probably
would never have married into the family had they possessed that
accomplishment,--that the Spartan women did not know the alphabet, nor the
Amazons, nor Penelope, nor Andromache, nor Lucretia, nor Joan of Arc, nor
Petrarch's Laura, nor the daughters of Charlemagne, nor the three hundred
and sixty-five wives of Mohammed; but that Sappho and Madame de Maintenon
could read altogether too well; while the case of Saint Brigitta, who
brought forth twelve children and twelve books, was clearly exceptional,
and afforded no safe precedent.
It would seem that the brilliant Frenchman touched the root of the matter.
Ought women to learn the alphabet? There the whole question lies. Concede
this little fulcrum, and Archimedea will move the world before she has done
with it: it becomes merely a question of time. Resistance must be made here
or nowhere. _Obsta principiis_. Woman must be a subject or an equal: there
is no middle ground. What if the Chinese proverb should turn out to be,
after all, the summit of wisdom, "For men, to cultivate virtue is
knowledge; for women, to renounce knowledge is virtue"?
No doubt, the progress of events is slow, like the working of the laws of
gravitation generally. Certainly there has been but little change in the
legal position of women since China was in its prime, until within the last
half century. Lawyers admit that the fundamental theory of English and
Oriental law is the same on this point: Man and wife are one, and that one
is the husband. It is the oldest of legal traditions. When Blackstone
declares that "the very being and existence of the woman is suspended
during the marriage," and American Kent echoes that "her legal existence
and authority are in a manner lost;" when Petersdorff asserts that "the
husband has the right of imposing such corporeal restraints as he may deem
necessary," and Bacon that "the husband hath, by law, power and dominion
over his wife, and may keep her by force within the bounds of duty, and may
beat her, but not in a violent or cruel manner;" when Mr. Justice Coleridge
rules that the husband, in certain cases, "has a right to confine his wife
in his own dwelling-house, and restrain her from liberty for an indefinite
time," and Baron Alderson sums it all up tersely, "The wife is only the
_servant_ of her husband,"--these high authorities simply reaffirm the
dogma of the Gentoo code, four thousand years old and more: "A man, both
day and night, must keep his wife so much in subjection that she by no
means be mistress of her own actions. If the wife have her own free will,
notwithstanding she be of a superior caste, she will behave amiss."
Yet behind these unchanging institutions, a pressure has been for centuries
becoming concentrated, which, now that it has begun to act, is threatening
to overthrow them all. It has not yet operated very visibly in the Old
World, where, even in England, the majority of women have not till lately
mastered the alphabet sufficiently to sign their own names in the marriage
register. But in this country the vast changes of the last few years are
already a matter of history. No trumpet has been sounded, no earthquake has
been felt, while State after State has ushered into legal existence one
half of the population within its borders. Surely, here and now, might poor
M. Maréchal exclaim, the bitter fruits of the original seed appear. The sad
question recurs, Whether women ought ever to have tasted of the alphabet.
It is true that Eve ruined us all, according to theology, without knowing
her letters. Still there is something to be said in defence of that
venerable ancestress. The Veronese lady, Isotta Nogarola, five hundred and
thirty-six of whose learned epistles were preserved by De Thou, composed a
dialogue on the question, Whether Adam or Eve had committed the
greater sin. But Ludovico Domenichi, in his "Dialogue on the Nobleness of
Women," maintains that Eve did not sin at all, because she was not even
created when Adam was told not to eat the apple. It was "in Adam all
died," he shrewdly says; nobody died in Eve: which looks plausible. Be
that as it may, Eve's daughters are in danger of swallowing a whole
harvest of forbidden fruit, in these revolutionary days, unless
something be done to cut off the supply.
It has been seriously asserted, that during the last half century more
books have been written by women and about women than during all the
previous uncounted ages. It may be true; although, when we think of the
innumerable volumes of _Mémoires_ by French women of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries,--each justifying the existence of her own ten
volumes by the remark, that all her contemporaries were writing as
many,--we have our doubts. As to the increased multitude of general
treatises on the female sex, however,--its education, life, health,
diseases, charms, dress, deeds, sphere, rights, wrongs, work, wages,
encroachments, and idiosyncrasies generally,--there can be no doubt
whatever; and the poorest of these books recognizes a condition of
public sentiment of which no other age ever dreamed.
Still, literary history preserves the names of some reformers before the
Reformation, in this matter. There was Signora Moderata Fonte, the
Venetian, who left a book to be published after her death, in 1592, "Dei
Meriti delle Donne." There was her townswoman, Lucrezia Marinella, who
followed, ten years after, with her essay, "La Nobilità e la Eccelenza
delle Donne, con Difetti e Mancamenti degli Uomini,"--a comprehensive
theme, truly! Then followed the all-accomplished Anna Maria Schurman, in
1645, with her "Dissertatio de Ingenii Muliebris ad Doctrinam et meliores
Literas Aptitudine," with a few miscellaneous letters appended in Greek
and Hebrew. At last came boldly Jacquette Guillaume, in 1665, and threw
down the gauntlet in her title-page, "Les Dames Illustres; où par bonnes
et fortes Raisons il se prouve que le Sexe Feminin surpasse en toute
Sorte de Genre le Sexe Masculin;" and with her came Margaret Boufflet
and a host of others; and finally, in England, Mary Wollstonecraft,
whose famous book, formidable in its day, would seem rather conservative
now; and in America, that pious and worthy dame, Mrs. H. Mather Crocker,
Cotton Mather's grandchild, who, in 1848, published the first book on the
"Rights of Woman" ever written on this side the Atlantic.
Meanwhile there have never been wanting men, and strong men, to echo these
appeals. From Cornelius Agrippa and his essay (1509) on the excellence of
woman and her preëminence over man, down to the first youthful thesis of
Agassiz, "Mens Feminae Viri Animo superior," there has been a succession of
voices crying in the wilderness. In England, Anthony Gibson wrote a book,
in 1599, called "A Woman's Woorth, defended against all the Men in the
World, proving them to be more Perfect, Excellent, and Absolute in all
Vertuous Actions than any Man of what Qualitie soever, _Interlarded with
Poetry_." _Per contra_, the learned Acidalius published a book in Latin,
and afterwards in French, to prove that women are not reasonable creatures.
Modern theologians are at worst merely sub-acid, and do not always say so,
if they think so. Meanwhile most persons have been content to leave the
world to go on its old course, in this matter as in others, and have thus
acquiesced in that stern judicial decree with which Timon of Athens sums up
all his curses upon womankind,--"If there sit twelve women at the table,
let a dozen of them be--as they are."
Ancient or modern, nothing in any of these discussions is so valuable as
the fact of the discussion itself. There is no discussion where there is no
wrong. Nothing so indicates wrong as this morbid self-inspection. The
complaints are a perpetual protest, the defences a perpetual confession. It
is too late to ignore the question; and, once opened, it can be settled
only on absolute and permanent principles. There is a wrong; but where?
Does woman already know too much, or too little? Was she created for man's
subject, or his equal? Shall she have the alphabet, or not?
Ancient mythology, which undertook to explain everything, easily accounted
for the social and political disabilities of woman. Goguet quotes the story
from Saint Augustine, who got it from Varro. Cecrops, building Athens, saw
starting from the earth an olive-plant and a fountain, side by side. The
Delphic oracle said that this indicated a strife between Minerva and
Neptune for the honor of giving a name to the city, and that the people
must decide between them. Cecrops thereupon assembled the men, and the
women also, who then had a right to vote; and the result was that Minerva
carried the election by a glorious majority of one. Then Attica was
overflowed and laid waste: of course the citizens attributed the calamity
to Neptune, and resolved to punish the women. It was therefore determined
that in future they should not vote, nor should any child bear the name
of its mother.
Thus easily did mythology explain all troublesome inconsistencies; but it
is much that it should even have recognized them as needing explanation.
The real solution is, however, more simple. The obstacle to the woman's
sharing the alphabet, or indeed any other privilege, has been thought by
some to be the fear of impairing her delicacy, or of destroying her
domesticity, or of confounding the distinction between the sexes. These may
have been plausible excuses. They have even been genuine, though minor,
anxieties. But the whole thing, I take it, had always one simple,
intelligible basis,--sheer contempt for the supposed intellectual
inferiority of woman. She was not to be taught, because she was not worth
teaching. The learned Acidalius aforesaid was in the majority. According to
Aristotle and the Peripatetics, woman was _animal occasionatum_, as if a
sort of monster and accidental production. Mediæval councils, charitably
asserting her claims to the rank of humanity, still pronounced her unfit
for instruction. In the Hindoo dramas she did not even speak the same
language with her master, but used the dialect of slaves. When, in the
sixteenth century, Françoise de Saintonges wished to establish girls'
schools in France, she was hooted in the streets; and her father called
together four doctors, learned in the law, to decide whether she was not
possessed by demons, to think of educating women,--_pour s'assurer
qu'instruire des femmes n'était pas un oeuvre du démon_.
It was the same with political rights. The foundation of the Salic Law was
not any sentimental anxiety to guard female delicacy and domesticity; it
was, as stated by Froissart, a blunt, hearty contempt: "The kingdom of
France being too noble to be ruled by a woman." And the same principle was
reaffirmed for our own institutions, in rather softened language, by
Theophilus Parsons, in his famous defence of the rights of Massachusetts
men (the "Essex Result," in 1778): "Women, what age soever they are of, are
not considered as having a sufficient acquired discretion [to exercise the
franchise]."
In harmony with this are the various maxims and _bon-mots_ of eminent men,
in respect to women. Niebuhr thought he should not have educated a girl
well,--he should have made her know too much. Lessing said, "The woman who
thinks is like the man who puts on rouge, ridiculous." Voltaire said,
"Ideas are like beards: women and young men have none." And witty Dr.
Maginn carries to its extreme the atrocity, "We like to hear a few words of
sense from a woman, as we do from a parrot, because they are so
unexpected." Yet how can we wonder at these opinions, when the saints have
been severer than the sages?--since the pious Fénelon taught that true
virgin delicacy was almost as incompatible with learning as with vice; and
Dr. Channing complained, in his "Essay on Exclusion and Denunciation," of
"women forgetting the tenderness of their sex," and arguing on theology.
Now this impression of feminine inferiority may be right or wrong, but it
obviously does a good deal towards explaining the facts it assumes. If
contempt does not originally cause failure, it perpetuates it.
Systematically discourage any individual, or class, from birth to death,
and they learn, in nine cases out of ten, to acquiesce in their
degradation, if not to claim it as a crown of glory. If the Abbé Choisi
praised the Duchesse de Fontanges for being "beautiful as an angel and
silly as a goose," it was natural that all the young ladies of the court
should resolve to make up in folly what they wanted in charms. All
generations of women having been bred under the shadow of intellectual
contempt, they have, of course, done much to justify it. They have often
used only for frivolous purposes even the poor opportunities allowed them.
They have employed the alphabet, as Molière said, chiefly in spelling the
verb _Amo_. Their use of science has been like that of Mlle. de Launay,
who computed the decline in her lover's affection by his abbreviation of
their evening walk in the public square, preferring to cross it rather
than take the circuit; "from which I inferred," she says, "that his
passion had diminished in the ratio between the diagonal of a rectangular
parallelogram and the sum of two adjacent sides." And their conception,
even of art, has been too often on the scale of Properzia de Rossi, who
carved sixty-five heads on a walnut, the smallest of all recorded symbols
of woman's sphere.
All this might, perhaps, be overcome, if the social prejudice which
discourages women would only reward proportionately those who surmount the
discouragement. The more obstacles, the more glory, if society would only
pay in proportion to the labor; but it does not. Women being denied, not
merely the training which prepares for great deeds, but the praise and
compensation which follow them, have been weakened in both directions. The
career of eminent men ordinarily begins with college and the memories of
Miltiades, and ends with fortune and fame: woman begins under
discouragement, and ends beneath the same. Single, she works with half
preparation and half pay; married, she puts name and wages into the keeping
of her husband, shrinks into John Smith's "lady" during life, and John
Smith's "relict" on her tombstone; and still the world wonders that her
deeds, like her opportunities, are inferior.
Evidently, then, the advocates of woman's claims--those who hold that "the
virtues of the man and the woman are the same," with Antisthenes, or that
"the talent of the man and the woman is the same," with Socrates in
Xenophon's "Banquet"--must be cautious lest they attempt to prove too much.
Of course, if women know as much as the men, without schools and colleges,
there is no need of admitting them to those institutions. If they work as
well on half pay, it diminishes the inducement to give them the other
half. The safer position is, to claim that they have done just enough
to show what they might have done under circumstances less discouraging.
Take, for instance, the common remark, that women have invented nothing.
It is a valid answer, that the only implements habitually used by woman
have been the needle, the spindle, and the basket; and tradition reports
that she herself invented all three. In the same way it may be shown that
the departments in which women have equalled men have been the
departments in which they have had equal training, equal encouragement,
and equal compensation; as, for instance, the theatre. Madame Lagrange,
the _prima donna_, after years of costly musical instruction, wins the
zenith of professional success; she receives, the newspapers affirm,
sixty thousand dollars a year, travelling expenses for ten persons,
country-houses, stables, and liveries, besides an uncounted revenue of
bracelets, bouquets, and _billets-doux._ Of course, every young
_débutante_ fancies the same thing within her own reach, with only a
brief stage-vista between. On the stage there is no deduction for sex,
and, therefore, woman has shown in that sphere an equal genius. But
every female common-school teacher in the United States finds the
enjoyment of her four hundred dollars a year to be secretly embittered
by the knowledge that the young college stripling in the next schoolroom
is paid twice that sum for work no harder or more responsible than her
own, and that, too, after the whole pathway of education has been
obstructed for her, and smoothed for him. These may be gross and
carnal considerations; but Faith asks her daily bread, and fancy must
be fed. We deny woman her fair share of training, of encouragement, of
remuneration, and then talk fine nonsense about her instincts and
intuitions. We say sentimentally with the Oriental proverbialist,
"Every book of knowledge is implanted by nature in the heart of
woman,"--and make the compliment a substitute for the alphabet.
Nothing can be more absurd than to impose entirely distinct standards, in
this respect, on the two sexes, or to expect that woman, any more than man,
will accomplish anything great without due preparation and adequate
stimulus. Mrs. Patten, who navigated her husband's ship from Cape Horn to
California, would have failed in the effort, for all her heroism, if she
had not, unlike most of her sex, been taught to use her Bowditch's
"Navigator." Florence Nightingale, when she heard of the distresses in the
Crimea, did not, as most people imagine, rise up and say, "I am a woman,
ignorant but intuitive, with very little sense and information, but
exceedingly sublime aspirations; my strength lies in my weakness; I can
do all things without knowing anything about them." Not at all: during
ten years she had been in hard training for precisely such services; had
visited all the hospitals in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, Lyons,
Rome, Brussels, and Berlin; had studied under the Sisters of Charity,
and been twice a nurse in the Protestant Institution at Kaiserswerth.
Therefore she did not merely carry to the Crimea a woman's heart, as her
stock in trade, but she knew the alphabet of her profession better than
the men around her. Of course, genius and enthusiasm are, for both sexes,
elements unforeseen and incalculable; but, as a general rule, great
achievements imply great preparations and favorable conditions. To
disregard this truth is unreasonable in the abstract, and cruel in its
consequences. If an extraordinary male gymnast can clear a height of ten
feet with the aid of a springboard, it would be considered slightly absurd
to ask a woman to leap eleven feet without one; yet this is precisely what
society and the critics have always done. Training and wages and social
approbation are very elastic springboards; and the whole course of history
has seen these offered bounteously to one sex, and as sedulously withheld
from the other. Let woman consent to be a doll, and there was no finery so
gorgeous, no baby-house so costly, but she might aspire to share its
lavish delights; let her ask simply for an equal chance to learn, to labor,
and to live, and it was as if that same doll should open its lips, and
propound Euclid's forty-seventh proposition. While we have all deplored the
helpless position of indigent women, and lamented that they had no
alternative beyond the needle, the wash-tub, the schoolroom, and the
street, we have usually resisted their admission into every new occupation,
denied them training, and cut their compensation down. Like Charles Lamb,
who atoned for coming late to the office in the morning by going away early
in the afternoon, we have first, half educated women, and then, to restore
the balance, only half paid them. What innumerable obstacles have been
placed in their way as female physicians; what a complication of
difficulties has been encountered by them, even as printers, engravers,
and designers! In London, Mr. Bennett was once mobbed for lecturing to
women on watchmaking. In this country, we have known grave professors
refuse to address lyceums which thought fit to employ an occasional female
lecturer. Mr. Comer stated that it was "in the face of ridicule and
sneers" that he began to educate American women as bookkeepers many years
ago; and it was a little contemptible in Miss Muloch to revive the same
satire in "A Woman's Thoughts on Women," when she must have known that
in half the retail shops in Paris her own sex rules the ledger, and
Mammon knows no Salic law.
We find, on investigation, what these considerations would lead us to
expect, that eminent women have commonly been exceptional in training and
position, as well as in their genius. They have excelled the average of
their own sex because they have shared the ordinary advantages of the other
sex. Take any department of learning or skill; take, for instance, the
knowledge of languages, the universal alphabet, philology. On the great
stairway at Padua stands the statue of Elena Cornaro, professor of six
languages in that once renowned university. But Elena Cornaro was educated
like a boy, by her father. On the great door of the University of Bologna
is inscribed the epitaph of Clotilda Tambroni, the honored correspondent of
Porson, and the first Greek scholar of southern Europe in her day. But
Clotilda Tambroni was educated like a boy, by Emanuele Aponte. How fine are
those prefatory words, "by a Right Reverend Prelate," to that pioneer book
in Anglo-Saxon lore, Elizabeth Elstob's grammar: "Our earthly possessions
are indeed our patrimony, as derived to us by the industry of our fathers;
but the language in which we speak is our mother tongue, and who so proper
to play the critic in this as the females?" Yet this particular female
obtained the rudiments of her rare education from her mother, before she
was eight years old, in spite of much opposition from her right reverend
guardians. Adelung declares that all modern philology is founded on the
translation of a Russian vocabulary into two hundred different dialects
by Catherine II. But Catherine shared, in childhood, the instructors of
her brother, Prince Frederick, and was subject to some reproach for
learning, though a girl, so much more rapidly than he did. Christina of
Sweden ironically reproved Madame Dacier for her translation of
Callimachus: "Such a pretty girl as you are, are you not ashamed to be so
learned?" But Madame Dacier acquired Greek by contriving to do her
embroidery in the room where her father was teaching her stupid brother;
and her queenly critic had herself learned to read Thucydides, harder
Greek than Callimachus, before she was fourteen. And so down to our own
day, who knows how many mute, inglorious Minervas may have perished
unenlightened, while Margaret Fuller Ossoli and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
were being educated "like boys."
This expression simply means that they had the most solid training which
the times afforded. Most persons would instantly take alarm at the very
words; that is, they have so little faith in the distinctions which Nature
has established, that they think, if you teach the alphabet, or anything
else, indiscriminately to both sexes, you annul all difference between
them. The common reasoning is thus: "Boys and girls are acknowledged to
be very unlike. Now, boys study Greek and algebra, medicine and
bookkeeping. Therefore girls should not." As if one should say: "Boys
and girls are very unlike. Now, boys eat beef and potatoes. Therefore,
obviously, girls should not."
The analogy between physical and spiritual food is precisely in point.
The simple truth is, that, amid the vast range of human powers and
properties, the fact of sex is but one item. Vital and momentous in
itself, it does not constitute the whole organism, but only a part.
The distinction of male and female is special, aimed at a certain end;
and, apart from that end, it is, throughout all the kingdoms of
Nature, of minor importance. With but trifling exceptions, from
infusoria up to man, the female animal moves, breathes, looks,
listens, runs, flies, swims, pursues its food, eats it, digests it, in
precisely the same manner as the male: all instincts, all
characteristics, are the same, except as to the one solitary fact of
parentage. Mr. Ten Broeck's race-horses, Pryor and Prioress, were
foaled alike, fed alike, trained alike, and finally ran side by side,
competing for the same prize. The eagle is not checked in soaring by
any consciousness of sex, nor asks the sex of the timid hare, its
quarry. Nature, for high purposes, creates and guards the sexual
distinction, but keeps it subordinate to those still more important.
Now all this bears directly upon the alphabet. What sort of philosophy is
that which says, "John is a fool; Jane is a genius: nevertheless, John,
being a man, shall learn, lead, make laws, make money; Jane, being a
woman, shall be ignorant, dependent, disfranchised, underpaid"? Of course,
the time is past when one would state this so frankly, though Comte comes
quite near it, to say nothing of the Mormons; but this formula really lies
at the bottom of the reasoning one hears every day. The answer is, Soul
before sex. Give an equal chance, and let genius and industry do the rest.
_La carrière ouverte aux talens_! Every man for himself, every woman for
herself, and the alphabet for us all.
Thus far, my whole course of argument has been defensive and explanatory. I
have shown that woman's inferiority in special achievements, so far as it
exists, is a fact of small importance, because it is merely a corollary
from her historic position of degradation. She has not excelled, because
she has had no fair chance to excel. Man, placing his foot upon her
shoulder, has taunted her with not rising. But the ulterior question
remains behind. How came she into this attitude originally? Explain the
explanation, the logician fairly demands. Granted that woman is weak
because she has been systematically degraded: but why was she degraded?
This is a far deeper question,--one to be met only by a profounder
philosophy and a positive solution. We are coming on ground almost wholly
untrod, and must do the best we can.
I venture to assert, then, that woman's social inferiority has been, to a
great extent, in the past a legitimate thing. To all appearance, history
would have been impossible without it, just as it would have been
impossible without an epoch of war and slavery. It is simply a matter of
social progress,--a part of the succession of civilizations. The past has
been inevitably a period of ignorance, of engrossing physical necessities,
and of brute force,--not of freedom, of philanthropy, and of culture.
During that lower epoch, woman was necessarily an inferior, degraded by
abject labor, even in time of peace,--degraded uniformly by war, chivalry
to the contrary notwithstanding. Behind all the courtesies of Amadis and
the Cid lay the stern fact,--woman a child or a toy. The flattering
troubadours chanted her into a poet's paradise; but alas! that kingdom of
heaven suffered violence, and the violent took it by force. The truth
simply was, that her time had not come. Physical strength must rule for a
time, and she was the weaker. She was very properly refused a feudal grant,
by reason, say "Les Coustumes de Normandie," of her unfitness for war or
policy: _C'est l'homme ki se bast et ki conseille_. Other authorities put
it still more plainly: "A woman cannot serve the emperor or feudal lord in
war, on account of the decorum of her sex; nor assist him with advice,
because of her limited intellect; nor keep his counsel, owing to the
infirmity of her disposition." All which was, no doubt, in the majority of
cases, true; and the degradation of woman was simply a part of a system
which has, indeed, had its day, but has bequeathed its associations.
From this reign of force, woman never freed herself by force. She could not
fight, or would not. Bohemian annals, to be sure, record the legend of a
literal war between the sexes, in which the women's army was led by Libussa
and Wlasla, and which finally ended with the capture, by the army of men,
of Castle Dziewin, Maiden's Tower, whose ruins are still visible near
Prague. The armor of Libussa is still shown at Vienna; and the guide calls
attention to the long-peaked toes of steel, with which, he avers, the
tender princess was wont to pierce the hearts of her opponents, while
careering through the battle. And there are abundant instances in which
women have fought side by side with men, and on equal terms. The ancient
British women mingled in the wars of their husbands, and their princesses
were trained to the use of arms in the Maiden's Castle at Edinburgh, in the
Isle of Skye. The Moorish wives and maidens fought in defence of their
European peninsula; and the Portuguese women fought on the same soil,
against the armies of Philip II. The king of Siam has, at present, a
body-guard of four hundred women: they are armed with lance and rifle, are
admirably disciplined, and their commander (appointed after saving the
king's life at a tiger-hunt) ranks as one of the royal family, and has ten
elephants at her service. When the all-conquering Dahomian army marched
upon Abbeokuta, in 1851, they numbered ten thousand men and six thousand
women. The women were, as usual, placed foremost in the assault, as being
most reliable; and of the eighteen hundred bodies left dead before the
walls, the vast majority were of women. The Hospital of the Invalides, in
Paris, has sheltered, for half a century, a fine specimen of a female
soldier, "Lieutenant Madame Bulan," who lived to be more than eighty years
old, had been decorated by Napoleon's own hand with the cross of the
Legion of Honor, and was credited on the hospital books with "seven years'
service, seven campaigns, three wounds, several times distinguished,
especially in Corsica, in defending a fort against the English." But these
cases, though interesting to the historian, are still exceptional; and the
instinctive repugnance they inspire is a condemnation, not of women, but
of war.
The reason, then, for the long subjection of woman has been simply that
humanity was passing through its first epoch, and her full career was to be
reserved for the second. As the different races of man have appeared
successively upon the stage of history, so there has been an order of
succession of the sexes. Woman's appointed era, like that of the Teutonic
races, was delayed, but not omitted. It is not merely true that the empire
of the past has belonged to man, but that it has properly belonged to him;
for it was an empire of the muscles, enlisting, at best, but the lower
powers of the understanding. There can be no question that the present
epoch is initiating an empire of the higher reason, of arts, affections,
aspirations; and for that epoch the genius of woman has been reserved. The
spirit of the age has always kept pace with the facts, and outstripped the
statutes. Till the fulness of time came, woman was necessarily kept a slave
to the spinning-wheel and the needle; now higher work is ready; peace has
brought invention to her aid, and the mechanical means for her emancipation
are ready also. No use in releasing her till man, with his strong arm, had
worked out his preliminary share in civilization. "Earth waits for her
queen" was a favorite motto of Margaret Fuller Ossoli; but it would be more
correct to say that the queen has waited for her earth, till it could be
smoothed and prepared for her occupancy. Now Cinderella may begin to think
of putting on her royal robes.
Everybody sees that the times are altering the whole material position of
woman; but most people do not appear to see the inevitable social and moral
changes which are also involved. As has been already said, the woman of
ancient history was a slave to physical necessities, both in war and peace.
In war she could do too little; in peace she did too much, under the
material compulsions which controlled the world. How could the Jews, for
instance, elevate woman? They could not spare her from the wool and the
flax, and the candle that goeth not out by night. In Rome, when the bride
first stepped across her threshold, they did not ask her, Do you know the
alphabet? they asked simply, Can you spin? There was no higher epitaph than
Queen Amalasontha's,--_Domum servavit, lanam fecit_. In Boeotia, brides
were conducted home in vehicles whose wheels were burned at the door, in
token that they were never to leave the house again. Pythagoras instituted
at Crotona an annual festival for the distaff; Confucius, in China, did the
same for the spindle; and these celebrated not the freedom, but the
serfdom, of woman.
And even into modern days this same tyrannical necessity has lingered. "Go
spin, you jades! go spin!" was the only answer vouchsafed by the Earl of
Pembroke to the twice-banished nuns of Wilton. Even now, travellers agree
that throughout civilized Europe, with the partial exception of England and
France, the profound absorption of the mass of women in household labors
renders their general elevation impossible. But with us Americans, and in
this age, when all these vast labors are being more and more transferred to
arms of brass and iron; when Rochester grinds the flour and Lowell weaves
the cloth, and the fire on the hearth has gone into black retirement and
mourning; when the wiser a virgin is, the less she has to do with oil in
her lamp; when the needle has made its last dying speech and confession in
the "Song of the Shirt," and the sewing-machine has changed those doleful
marches to delightful measures,--how is it possible for the blindest to
help seeing that a new era is begun, and that the time has come for woman
to learn the alphabet?
Nobody asks for any abolition of domestic labor for women, any more than of
outdoor labor for men. Of course, most women will still continue to be
mainly occupied with the indoor care of their families, and most men with
their external support. All that is desirable for either sex is such an
economy of labor, in this respect, as shall leave some spare time to be
appropriated in other directions. The argument against each new
emancipation of woman is precisely that always made against the liberation
of serfs and the enfranchisement of plebeians,--that the new position will
take them from their legitimate business. "How can he [or she] get wisdom
that holdeth the plough [or the broom],--whose talk is of bullocks [or of
babies]?" Yet the American farmer has already emancipated himself from
these fancied incompatibilities; and so will the farmer's wife. In a nation
where there is no leisure class and no peasantry, this whole theory of
exclusion is an absurdity. We all have a little leisure, and we must all
make the most of it. If we will confine large interests and duties to those
who have nothing else to do, we must go back to monarchy at once. If
otherwise, then the alphabet, and its consequences, must be open to woman
as to man. Jean Paul says nobly, in his "Levana," that, "before and after
being a mother, a woman is a human being, and neither maternal nor conjugal
relation can supersede the human responsibility, but must become its means
and instrument." And it is good to read the manly speech, on this subject,
of John Quincy Adams, quoted at length in Quincy's life of him, in which,
after fully defending the political petitions of the women of Plymouth, he
declares that "the correct principle is that women are not only justified,
but exhibit the most exalted virtue, when they do depart from the domestic
circle, and enter on the concerns of their country, of humanity, and of
their God."
There are duties devolving on every human being,--duties not small nor few,
but vast and varied,--which spring from home and private life, and all
their sweet relations. The support or care of the humblest household is a
function worthy of men, women, and angels, so far as it goes. From these
duties none must shrink, neither man nor woman; the loftiest genius cannot
ignore them; the sublimest charity must begin with them. They are their own
exceeding great reward; their self-sacrifice is infinite joy; and the
selfishness which discards them is repaid by loneliness and a desolate old
age. Yet these, though the most tender and intimate portion of human life,
do not form its whole. It is given to noble souls to crave other interests
also, added spheres, not necessarily alien from these; larger knowledge,
larger action also; duties, responsibilities, anxieties, dangers, all the
aliment that history has given to its heroes. Not home less, but humanity
more. When the high-born English lady in the Crimean hospital, ordered to
a post of almost certain death, only raised her hands to heaven, and said,
"Thank God!" she did not renounce her true position as woman: she claimed
it. When the queen of James I. of Scotland, already immortalized by him in
stately verse, won a higher immortality by welcoming to her fair bosom the
dagger aimed at his; when the Countess of Buchan hung confined in her iron
cage, outside Berwick Castle, in penalty for crowning Robert the Bruce;
when the stainless soul of Joan of Arc met God, like Moses, in a burning
flame,--these things were as they should be. Man must not monopolize these
privileges of peril, the birthright of great souls. Serenades and
compliments must not replace the nobler hospitality which shares with woman
the opportunity of martyrdom. Great administrative duties also, cares of
state, for which one should be born gray-headed, how nobly do these sit
upon a woman's brow! Each year adds to the storied renown of Elizabeth of
England, greatest sovereign of the greatest of historic nations. Christina
of Sweden, alone among the crowned heads of Europe (so says Voltaire),
sustained the dignity of the throne against Richelieu and Mazarin. And
these queens most assuredly did not sacrifice their womanhood in the
process; for her Britannic Majesty's wardrobe included four thousand gowns;
and Mile, de Montpensier declares that when Christina had put on a wig of
the latest fashion, "she really looked extremely pretty."
_Les races se féminisent_, said Buffon,--"The world is growing more
feminine." It is a compliment, whether the naturalist intended it or not.
Time has brought peace; peace, invention; and the poorest woman of to-day
is born to an inheritance of which her ancestors never dreamed. Previous
attempts to confer on women social and political equality,--as when
Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, made them magistrates; or when the
Hungarian revolutionists made them voters; or when our own New Jersey
tried the same experiment in a guarded fashion in early times, and then
revoked the privilege, because (as in the ancient fable) the women
voted the wrong way;--these things were premature, and valuable only
as recognitions of a principle. But in view of the rapid changes now
going on, he is a rash man who asserts the "Woman Question" to be
anything but a mere question of time. The fulcrum has been already
given in the alphabet, and we must simply watch, and see whether the
earth does not move.
There is the plain fact: woman must be either a subject or an equal; there
is no middle ground. Every concession to a supposed principle only involves
the necessity of the next concession for which that principle calls. Once
yield the alphabet, and we abandon the whole long theory of subjection and
coverture: tradition is set aside, and we have nothing but reason to fall
back upon. Reasoning abstractly, it must be admitted that the argument has
been, thus far, entirely on the women's side, inasmuch as no man has yet
seriously tried to meet them with argument. It is an alarming feature of
this discussion, that it has reversed, very generally, the traditional
positions of the sexes: the women have had all the logic; and the most
intelligent men, when they have attempted the other side, have limited
themselves to satire and gossip. What rational woman can be really
convinced by the nonsense which is talked in ordinary society around
her,--as, that it is right to admit girls to common schools, and equally
right to exclude them from colleges; that it is proper for a woman to sing
in public, but indelicate for her to speak in public; that a post-office
box is an unexceptionable place to drop a bit of paper into, but a
ballot-box terribly dangerous? No cause in the world can keep above
water, sustained by such contradictions as these, too feeble and slight
to be dignified by the name of fallacies. Some persons profess to think
it impossible to reason with a woman, and such critics certainly show
no disposition to try the experiment.
But we must remember that all our American institutions are based on
consistency, or on nothing: all claim to be founded on the principles of
natural right; and when they quit those, they are lost. In all European
monarchies it is the theory that the mass of the people are children to be
governed, not mature beings to govern themselves; this is clearly stated
and consistently applied. In the United States we have formally abandoned
this theory for one half of the human race, while for the other half it
flourishes with little change. The moment the claims of woman are broached,
the democrat becomes a monarchist. What Americans commonly criticise in
English statesmen, namely, that they habitually evade all arguments based
on natural right, and defend every legal wrong on the ground that it works
well in practice, is the precise defect in our habitual view of woman. The
perplexity must be resolved somehow. Most men admit that a strict adherence
to our own principles would place both sexes in precisely equal positions
before law and constitution, as well as in school and society. But each has
his special quibble to apply, showing that in this case we must abandon all
the general maxims to which we have pledged ourselves, and hold only by
precedent. Nay, he construes even precedent with the most ingenious rigor;
since the exclusion of women from all direct contact with affairs can be
made far more perfect in a republic than is possible in a monarchy, where
even sex is merged in rank, and the female patrician may have far more
power than the male plebeian. But, as matters now stand among us, there is
no aristocracy but of sex: all men are born patrician, all women are
legally plebeian; all men are equal in having political power, and all
women in having none. This is a paradox so evident, and such an anomaly in
human progress, that it cannot last forever, without new discoveries in
logic, or else a deliberate return to M. Maréchal's theory concerning the
alphabet.
Meanwhile, as the newspapers say, we anxiously await further developments.
According to present appearances, the final adjustment lies mainly in the
hands of women themselves. Men can hardly be expected to concede either
rights or privileges more rapidly than they are claimed, or to be truer to
women than women are to each other. In fact, the worst effect of a
condition of inferiority is the weakness it leaves behind; even when we
say, "Hands off!" the sufferer does not rise. In such a case, there is but
one counsel worth giving. More depends on determination than even on
ability. Will, not talent, governs the world. Who believed that a poetess
could ever be more than an Annot Lyle of the harp, to soothe with sweet
melodies the leisure of her lord, until in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
hands the thing became a trumpet? Where are gone the sneers with which
army surgeons and parliamentary orators opposed Mr. Sidney Herbert's first
proposition to send Florence Nightingale to the Crimea? In how many towns
was the current of popular prejudice against female orators reversed by
one winning speech from Lucy Stone! Where no logic can prevail, success
silences. First give woman, if you dare, the alphabet, then summon her to
her career: and though men, ignorant and prejudiced, may oppose its
beginnings, they will at last fling around her conquering footsteps more
lavish praises than ever greeted the opera's idol,--more perfumed flowers
than ever wooed, with intoxicating fragrance, the fairest butterfly of the
ball-room.
[Footnote 1: _Projet d'une loi portant defense d'apprendre à lire aux
femmes._]