Discontent is a vice six thousand years old, and it will be eternal;
because it is in the race. Every human being has a complaining side,
but discontent is bound up in the heart of woman; it is her original
sin. For if the first woman had been satisfied with her conditions, if
she had not aspired to be "as gods," and hankered after unlawful
knowledge, Satan would hardly have thought it worth his while to
discuss her rights and wrongs with her. That unhappy controversy has
never ceased; and, with or without reason woman has been perpetually
subject to discontent with her conditions, and, according to her
nature, has been moved by its influence. Some it has made peevish,
some plaintive, some ambitious, some reckless, while a noble majority
have found in its very control that serene composure and cheerfulness
which is granted to those who conquer, rather than to those who
inherit.
But, with all its variations of influence and activity, there has
never been a time in the world's history when female discontent has
assumed so much and demanded so much as at the present day; and both
the satisfied and the dissatisfied woman may well pause to consider
whether the fierce fever of unrest which has possessed so large a
number of the sex is not rather a delirium than a conviction; whether
indeed they are not just as foolishly impatient to get out of their
Eden, as was the woman Eve six thousand years ago.
We may premise, in order to clear the way, that there is a noble
discontent which has a great work to do in the world; a discontent
which is the antidote to conceit and self-satisfaction, and which
urges the worker of every kind continually to realize a higher ideal.
Springing from Regret and Desire, between these two sighs, all
horizons lift; and the very passion of its longing gives to those who
feel this divine discontent the power to overleap whatever separates
them from their hope and their aspiration.
Having acknowledged so much in favor of discontent, we may now
consider some of the most objectionable forms in which it has attacked
certain women of our own generation. In the van of these malcontents
are the women dissatisfied with their home duties. One of the saddest
domestic features of the day is the disrepute into which housekeeping
has fallen; for that is a woman's first natural duty and answers to
the needs of her best nature. It is by no means necessary that she
should be a Cinderella among the ashes, or a Nausicaa washing linen,
or a Penelope forever at her needle, but all women of intelligence now
understand that good cooking is a liberal science, and that there is a
most intimate connection between food and virtue, and food and health,
and food and thought. Indeed, many things are called crimes that are
not as bad as the savagery of an Irish cook or the messes of a
fourth-rate confectioner.
It must be noted that this revolt of certain women against housekeeping
is not a revolt against their husbands; it is simply a revolt
against their duties. They consider housework hard and monotonous and
inferior, and confess with a cynical frankness that they prefer to
engross paper, or dabble in art, or embroider pillow-shams, or sell
goods, or in some way make money to pay servants who will cook their
husband's dinner and nurse their babies for them. And they believe that
in this way they show themselves to have superior minds, and ask credit
for a deed which ought to cover them with shame. For actions speak
louder than words, and what does such action say? In the first place,
it asserts that any stranger--even a young uneducated peasant girl
hired for a few dollars a month--is able to perform the duties of
the house-mistress and the mother. In the second place, it substitutes
a poor ambition for love, and hand service for heart service. In the
third place, it is a visible abasement of the loftiest duties of
womanhood to the capacity of the lowest-paid service. A wife and
mother cannot thus absolve her own soul; she simply disgraces and
traduces her holiest work.
Suppose even that housekeeping is hard and monotonous, it is not more
so than men's work in the city. The first lesson a business man has to
learn is to do pleasantly what he does not like to do. All regular,
useful work must be monotonous, but love ought to make it easy; and at
any rate the tedium of housework is not any greater than the tedium of
office work. As for housekeeping being degrading, that is the veriest
nonsense. Home is a little royalty; and if the housewife and mother be
of elements finely mixed and loftily educated, all the more she will
regard the cold-mutton question of importance, and consider the
quality of the soup, and the quantity of chutnee in the curry, as
requiring her best attention. It is only the weakest, silliest women
who cannot lift their work to the level of their thoughts, and so
ennoble both.
There are other types of the discontented wife, with whom we are all
too familiar: for instance, the wife who is stunned and miserable
because she discovers that marriage is not a lasting picnic; who
cannot realize that the husband must be different from the lover, and
spends her days in impotent whining. She is always being neglected,
and always taking offence; she has an insatiable craving for
attentions, and needs continual assurances of affection, wasting her
time and feelings in getting up pathetic scenes of accusation, which
finally weary, and then alienate her husband. Her own fault! There is
nothing a man hates more than a woman going sobbing and complaining
about the house with red eyes; unless it be a woman with whom he must
live in a perpetual fool's paradise of perfection.
There are also discontented wives, who goad their husbands into
extravagant expenditure, and urge them to projects from which they
would naturally recoil. There are others, whose social ambitions slay
their domestic ones, and who strain every nerve, in season and out of
season, and lose all their self-respect, for a few crumbs of
contemptuous patronage from some person of greater wealth than their
own. Some wives fret if they have no children, others just as much if
children come. In the first case, they are disappointed; in the
second, inconvenienced; and in both, discontented. Some lead
themselves and others wretched lives because they have not three times
as many servants as are necessary; a still greater number because they
cannot compass a life of constant amusement and excitement.
A very disagreeable kind of discontented woman is the wife who,
instead of having a God to love and worship, makes a god of her
religion, alienates love for an ecclesiastical idea, or neglects
her own flesh and blood to carry the religious needs of the world;
forgetting that the good wife keeps her sentiments very close to her
own heart and hearth. But perhaps the majority of discontented wives
have no special thing to complain of; they fret because they are
"so dull." If they took the trouble to look for the cause of this
"dulness," they would find it in the want of some definite plan of
life, and some vigorous aim or object. Of course any aim implies
limitation, but limitation implies both virtue and pleasure. Without
rule and law, not even the games of children could exist, and the
more strictly the rules of a game are obeyed, the greater the
satisfaction. A wife's duty is subject to the same conditions. If
aimless, plaintive women would make strict laws for their households,
and lay out some possible vigorous plan for their own lives, they
would find that those who love and work have no leisure for
complaining.
But from whatever cause domestic discontent springs, it makes the home
full of idleness, ennui, and vagrant imaginations, or of fierce
extravagance, and passionate love of amusement. And as a wife holds
the happiness of many in her hands, discontent with her destiny is
peculiarly wicked. If it is resented, she gets what she deserves; if
it is quietly endured, her shame is the greater. For nothing does so
much honor to a wife as her patience; and nothing does her so little
honor as the patience of her husband. And however great his patience
may be, she will not escape personal injury; since none are to be held
innocent who do harm even to their own soul and body. Besides, it is
the inflexible order of things that voluntary faults are followed by
inevitable pain.
Married women, however, are by no means the only complainers. There
is a great army of discontents who, having no men to care for them,
are clamoring, and with justice, for their share of the world's work
and wages. Such women have a perfect right to make a way for
themselves, in whatever direction they best can. Brains are of no sex
or condition, and at any rate, there is no use arguing either their
ability or their right, for necessity has taken the matter beyond the
reach of controversy. Thousands of women have now to choose between
work, charity, or starvation, for the young man of to-day is not a
marrying man. He has but puny passions, and his love is such a very
languid preference that he cannot think of making any sacrifice for
it. So women do not marry, they work; and as the world will take good
work from whoever will give it, the world's custom is flowing to them
by a natural law.
Now, earnest, practical women-workers are blessed, and a blessing; but
the discontented among them, by much talking and little doing,
continually put back the cause they say they wish to advance. No
women are in the main so discontented as women-workers. They go into
the arena, and, fettered by old ideas belonging to a different
condition, they are not willing to be subject to the laws of the
arena. They want, at the same time, the courtesy claimed by weakness
and the honor due to prowess. They complain of the higher wages given
to men, forgetting that the first article of equal payment is equal
worth and work. They know nothing about what Carlyle calls "the
silences;" and the babble of their small beginnings is, to the
busy world, irritating and contemptible. It never seems to occur to
discontented working-women that the best way to get what they want
is to act, and not to talk. One silent woman who quietly calculates
her chances and achieves success does more for her sex than any
amount of pamphleteering and lecturing. For nothing is more certain
than that good work, either from man or woman, will find a market;
and that bad work will be refused by all but those disposed to give
charity and pay for it.
The discontent of working-women is understandable, but it is a wide
jump from the woman discontented about her work or wages to the woman
discontented about her political position. Of all the shrill
complainers that vex the ears of mortals, there are none so foolish as
the women who have discovered that the founders of our republic left
their work half finished, and that the better half remains for them to
do. While more practical and sensible women are trying to put their
kitchens, nurseries, and drawing-rooms in order, and to clothe
themselves rationally, this class of discontents are dabbling in the
gravest national and economic questions. Possessed by a restless
discontent with their appointed sphere and its duties, and forcing
themselves to the front in order to ventilate their theories and show
the quality of their brains, they demand the right of suffrage as the
symbol and guarantee of all other rights.
This is their cardinal point, though it naturally follows that the
right to elect contains the right to be elected. If this result be
gained, even women whose minds are not taken up with the things of the
State, but who are simply housewives and mothers, may easily predicate
a few of such results as are particularly plain to the feminine
intellect and observation. The first of these would be an entirely new
set of agitators, who would use means quite foreign to male
intelligence. For instance, every favorite priest and preacher would
gain enormously in influence and power; for the ecclesiastical zeal
which now expends itself in fairs and testimonials would then expend
itself in the securing of votes in whatever direction they were
instructed to secure them. It might even end in the introduction of
the clerical element into our great political Council Chambers,--the
bishops in the House of Lords would be a sufficient precedent,--and a
great many women would really believe that the charming rhetoric of
the pulpit would infuse a higher tone in legislative assemblies.
Again, most women would be in favor of helping any picturesque
nationality, without regard to the Monroe doctrine, or the state of
the finances, or the needs of the market. Most women would think it a
good action to sacrifice their party for a friend. Most women would
change their politics, if they saw it to be their interest to do so,
without a moment's hesitation. Most women would refuse the primary
obligation on which all franchises rest,--that is, to defend their
country by force of arms, if necessary. And if a majority of women
passed a law which the majority of men felt themselves justified in
resisting by physical force, what would women do? Such a position in
sequence of female suffrage is not beyond probability, and yet if it
happened, not only one law, but _all_ law would be in danger. No one
denies that women have suffered, and do yet suffer, from grave
political and social disabilities, but during the last fifty years
much has been continually done for their relief, and there is no
question but that the future will give all that can be reasonably
desired. Time and Justice are friends, though there are many moments
that are opposed to Justice. But all such innovations should imitate
Time, which does not wrench and tear, but detaches and wears slowly
away. Development, growth, completion, is the natural and best
advancement. We do not progress by going over precipices, nor re-model
and improve our houses by digging under the foundations.
Finally, women cannot get behind or beyond their nature, and their
nature is to substitute sentiment for reason,--a sweet and not
unlovely characteristic in womanly ways and places; yet reason, on the
whole, is considered a desirable necessity in politics. At the Chicago
Fair, and at other convocations, it has been proven that the
strongest-minded women, though familiar with platforms, and deep in
the "dismal science" of political economy, when it came to disputing,
were no more philosophical than the simplest housewife. Tears and
hysteria came just as naturally to them as if the whole world wagged
by impulse only; yet a public meeting in which feeling and tears
superseded reason and argument would in no event inspire either
confidence or respect. Women may cease to be women, but they can never
learn to be men, and feminine softness and grace can never do the work
of the virile virtues of men. Very fortunately this class of
discontented women have not yet been able to endanger existing
conditions by combinations analogous to trades-unions; nor is it
likely they ever will; because it is doubtful if women, under any
circumstances, could combine at all. Certain qualities are necessary
for combination, and these qualities are represented in women by their
opposites.
Considering discontented women of all kinds individually, it is
evident that they must be dull women. They see only the dull side of
things, and naturally fall into a monotonous way of expressing
themselves. They have also the habit of complaining, a habit which
quickens only the lower intellect. Where is there a more discontented
creature than a good watch-dog? He is forever looking for some
infringement of his rights; and an approaching step or a distant
bark drives him into a fury of protest. Discontented women are always
egotists; they view everything in regard to themselves, and have
therefore the defective sympathies that belong to low organizations.
They never win confidence, for their discontent breeds distrust and
doubt, and however clever they may naturally be, an obtrusive self,
with its train of likings and dislikings, obscures their judgment,
and they take false views of people and things. For this reason, it
is almost a hopeless effort to show them how little people
generally care about their grievances; for they have thought about
themselves so long and so much that they cannot conceive of any
other subject interesting the rest of the world. We may even admit
that the women discontented on public subjects are often women of
great intelligence, clever women with plenty of brains. Is that the
best? Who does not love far more than mere cleverness that sweetness
of temper, that sunny, contented disposition, which goes through the
world with a smile and a kind word for every one? It is one of the
richest gifts of heaven; it is, according to Bishop Wilson,
"nine-tenths of Christianity."
Fortunately, the vast majority of women have been loyal to their sex
and their vocation. In every community the makers and keepers of homes
are the dominant power; and these strictures can apply only to two
classes,--first, the married women who neglect husband, children, and
homes, for the foolish _eclat_ of the club and the platform, or for
any assumed obligation, social, intellectual or political, which
conflicts with their domestic duties: secondly, the unmarried women
who, having comfortable homes and loving protectors, are discontented
with their happy secluded security and rush into weak art, or feeble
literature, or dubious singing and acting, because their vanity and
restless immorality lead them into the market place, or on to the
stage. Not one of such women has been driven afield by indisputable
genius. Any work they have done would have been better done by some
unprotected, experienced woman already in the fields they have
invaded. And the indifference of this class to the money value of
their labor has made it difficult for the women working because they
must work or starve, to get a fair price for their work. It is the
baldest effrontery for this class of rich discontents to affect
sympathy with Woman's Progress. Nothing can excuse their intrusion
into the labor market but unquestioned genius and super-excellence of
work; and this has not yet been shown in any single case.
The one unanswerable excuse for woman's entrance into active public
life of any kind is _need_, and, alas, need is growing daily, as
marriage becomes continually rarer, and more women are left adrift in
the world without helpers and protectors. But this is a subject too
large to enter on here, though in the beginning it sprung from
discontented women, preferring the work and duties of men to their own
work and duties. Have they found the battle of life any more ennobling
in masculine professions than in their old feminine household ways? Is
work done in the world for strangers any less tiresome and monotonous
than work done in the house for father and mother, husband and
children? If they answer truly, they will reply, "The home duties were
the easiest, the safest, and the happiest."
Of course all discontented women will be indignant at any criticism of
their conduct. They expect every one to consider their feelings
without examining their motives. Paddling in the turbid maelstrom of
life, and dabbling in politics and the most unsavory social questions,
they still think men, at least, ought to regard them as the Sacred
Sex. But women are not sacred by grace of sex, if they voluntarily
abdicate its limitations and its modesties, and make a public display
of unsexed sensibilities and unabashed familiarity with subjects they
have nothing to do with. If men criticise such women with asperity it
is not to be wondered at; they have so long idealized women that they
find it hard to speak moderately. They excuse them too much, or else
they are too indignant at their follies, and unjust and angry in their
denunciation. Women must be criticised by women; then they will hear
the bare, uncompromising truth, and be the better for it.
In conclusion, it must be conceded that some of the modern discontent
of women must be laid to unconscious influence. In every age there is
a kind of atmosphere which we call "the spirit of the times," and
which, while it lasts, deceives as to the importance and truth of its
dominant opinions. Many women have doubtless thus caught the fever of
discontent by mere contact, but such have only to reflect a little,
and discover that, on the whole, they have done quite as well in life
as they have any right to expect. Then those who are married will
find marriage and the care of it, and the love of it, quite able to
satisfy all their desires; and such as really need to work will
perceive that the great secret of content abides in the unconscious
acceptance of life and the fulfilment of its duties,--a happiness
serious and universal, but full of comfort and help. Thus they will
cease to vary from the kindly race of women, and through the doors of
Love, Hope, and Labor, join that happy multitude who have never
discovered that life is a thing to be discontented with.