"The hopeless defect of women in all practical matters," said a shrewd
merchant the other day, "is that it is impossible to make them thorough."
It was a shallow remark, and so I told him. Women are thorough in the
things which they have been expected to regard as their sphere,--in their
housekeeping and their dress and their social observances. There is nothing
more thorough on earth than the way housework is done in a genuine New
England household. There is an exquisite thoroughness in the way a
milliner's or a dressmaker's work is done,--a work such as clumsy man
cannot rival, and can hardly estimate. No general plans his campaigns or
marshals his armies better than some women of society--the late Mrs. Paran
Stevens, for instance--manage the circles of which they are the centre. Day
and night, winter and summer, at city or watering-place, year in and year
out, such a woman keeps open house for her gay world. She has a perpetual
series of guests who must be fed luxuriously, and amused profusely; she
talks to them in three or four languages; at her entertainments she notes
who is present and who absent, as carefully as Napoleon watched his
soldiers; her interchange of cards, alone, is a thing as complex as the
army muster-rolls: thus she plans, organizes, conquers, and governs. People
speak of her existence as that of a doll or a toy, when she is the most
untiring of campaigners. Grant that her aim is, after all, unworthy, and
that you pity the worn face which has to force so many smiles. No matter:
the smiles are there, and so is the success. I often wish that the
reformers would do their work as thoroughly as the women of society do
theirs.
No, there is no constitutional want of thoroughness in women. The trouble
is that into the new work upon which they are just entering they have not
yet brought their thoroughness to bear. They suffer and are defrauded and
are reproached, simply because they have not yet nerved themselves to do
well the things which they have asserted their right to do. A distinguished
woman, who earns one of the largest incomes ever honestly earned by any one
of her sex, off the stage, told me the other day that she left all her
business affairs to the management of others, and did not even know how to
draw a check on a bank. What a melancholy self-exhibition was that of a
clever American woman, whom I knew, the author of half a dozen successful
books, refusing to look her own accounts in the face until they had got
into such a tangle that not even her own referees could disentangle them to
suit her! These things show, not that women are constitutionally wanting in
thoroughness, but that it is hard to make them carry this quality into new
fields.
I wish I could possibly convey to the young women who write for advice on
literary projects something of the meaning of this word "thorough" as
applied to literary work. Scarcely any of them seem to have a conception of
it. Dash, cleverness, recklessness, impatience of revision or of patient
investigation, these are the common traits. To a person of experience,
no stupidity is so discouraging as a brilliancy that has no roots. It
brings nothing to pass; whereas a slow stupidity, if it takes time enough,
may conquer the world. Consider that for more than twenty years the path of
literature has been quite as fully open for women as for men, in America,--
the payment the same, the honor the same, the obstacles no greater.
Collegiate education has until quite recently been denied them, but how
many men succeed as writers without that advantage! Yet how little, how
very little, of permanent literary work has yet been done by American
women! Young girls appear one after another: each writes a single clever
story or a single sweet poem, and then disappears forever. Look at
Griswold's "Female Poets of America," and you are disposed to turn back to
the title-page, and see if these utterly forgotten names do not really
represent the "female poets" of some other nation. They are forgotten, as
most of the more numerous "female prose writers" are forgotten, because
they had no root. Nobody doubts that women have cleverness enough, and
enough of power of expression. If you could open the mails, and take out
the women's letters, as somebody says, they would prove far more graphic
and entertaining than those of the men. They would be written, too, in what
Macaulay calls--speaking of Madame d'Arblay's early style--"true woman's
English, clear, natural, and lively." What they need, in order to convert
this epistolary brilliancy into literature, is to be thorough.
You cannot separate woman's rights and her responsibilities. In all ages of
the world she has had a certain limited work to do, and has done that well.
All that is needed, when new spheres are open, is that she should carry the
same fidelity into those. If she will work as hard to shape the children of
her brain as to rear her bodily offspring, will do intellectual work as
well as she does housework, and will meet her moral responsibilities as she
meets her social engagements, then opposition will soon disappear. The
habit of thoroughness is the key to all high success. Whatever is worth
doing is worth doing well. Only those who are faithful in a few things will
rightfully be made rulers over many.