It is better not to base any plea for woman on the ground of her angelic
superiority. The argument proves too much. If she is already so perfect,
there is every inducement to let well alone. It suggests the expediency of
conforming man's condition to hers, instead of conforming hers to man's. If
she is a winged creature, and man can only crawl, it is his condition that
needs mending.
Besides, one may well be a little incredulous of these vast claims.
Granting some average advantage to woman, it is not of such completeness as
to base much argument upon it. The minister, looking on his congregation,
rarely sees an unmixed angel, either at the head or at the foot of any pew.
The domestic servant rarely has the felicity of waiting on an absolute
saint at either end of the dinner-table. The lady's-maid has to compare her
little observations of human infirmity with those of the valet de chambre.
The lover worships the beloved, whether man or woman; but marriage bears
rather hard on the ideal in either case; and those who pray out of the same
book, "Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners," are not supposed to be
offering up petitions for each other only.
We all know many women whose lives are made wretched by the sins and
follies of their husbands. There are also many men whose lives are turned
to long wretchedness by the selfishness, the worldliness, or the bad temper
of their wives. Domestic tyranny belongs to neither sex by monopoly. If man
tortures or depresses woman, she also has a fearful power to corrupt and
deprave man. On the other hand, to quote old Antisthenes once more, "the
virtues of the man and woman are the same." A refined man is more refined
than a coarse woman. A child-loving man is infinitely tenderer and sweeter
toward children than a hard and unsympathetic woman. The very qualities
that are claimed as distinctively feminine are possessed more abundantly by
many men than by many of what is called the softer sex.
Why is it necessary to say all this? Because there is always danger that we
who believe in the equality of the sexes should be led into
over-statements, which will react against ourselves. It is not safe to say
that the ballot-box would be reformed if intrusted to feminine votes
alone. Had the voters of the South been all women, it would have plunged
earlier into the gulf of secession, dived deeper, and come up even more
reluctantly. Were the women of Spain to rule its destinies unchecked, the
Pope would be its master, and the Inquisition might be reëstablished. For
all that we can see, the rule of women alone would be as bad as the rule of
men alone. It would be as unsafe to give women the absolute control of man
as to make man the master of woman.
Let us be a shade more cautious in our reasonings. Woman needs equal
rights, not because she is man's better half, but because she is his other
half. She needs them, not as an angel, but as a fraction of humanity. Her
political education will not merely help man, but it will help herself. She
will sometimes be right in her opinions, and sometimes be altogether wrong;
but she will learn, as man learns, by her own blunders. The demand in her
behalf is that she shall have the opportunity to make mistakes, since it is
by that means she must become wise.
In all our towns there is a tendency toward "mixed schools." We rarely hear
of the sexes being separated in a school after being once united; but we
constantly hear of their being brought together after separation. This
union is commonly, but mistakenly, recommended as an advantage to the boys
alone. I once heard an accomplished teacher remonstrate against this
change, when thus urged. "Why should my girls be sacrificed," she said,
"to improve your boys?" Six months after, she had learned by experience.
"Why," she asked, "did you rest the argument on so narrow a ground? Since
my school consisted half of boys, I find with surprise that the change
has improved both sexes. My girls are more ambitious, more obedient, and
more ladylike. I shall never distrust the policy of mixed schools again."
What is true of the school is true of the family and of the state. It is
not good for man, or for woman, to be alone. Granting the woman to be, on
the whole, the more spiritually minded, it is still true that each sex
needs the other. When the rivet falls from a pair of scissors, we do not
have than mended because either half can claim angelic superiority over
the other half, but because it takes two halves to make a whole.