THE MODERN WOMAN AND HER FUTURE
Up to this point I have dealt only with the great shaping and moulding
principles of life, with indirect influence rather than direct. How far
direct teaching on matters of sex should be given to our girls has been
a far greater perplexity to me than in the case of boys. In the present
state of our schools and our streets our boys must get to know evil.
Hitherto it was possible to say that our girls _might_ get to know evil,
and between that "must" and "might" lay a great and perplexing chasm. We
do not want our garden lilies to smell of anything but pure dews and
rains and sun-warmed fragrance. But is this ideal possible any longer,
except in a few secluded country homes, where, hidden like Keats's
nightingale "among the leaves," they may remain innocent and ignorant of
the world's evil?
But with the ordinary conditions of the present day, with the greater
freedom accorded to women, the wider range of education, involving a
wider range of reading, with modern newspapers left about, I ask, How is
it possible for a mother to keep her girls in ignorance and unconscious
innocence? A volume of short stories comes into the house from the
circulating library; they are clever and apparently absolutely harmless.
Yet embedded in the heart of one such volume, which shall be nameless, I
came upon a story almost as vile as anything in a French novel, and
conveying the most corrupt knowledge. How, I ask, can a busy mother read
through every book of short stories before letting it fall into the
hands of her girls; or how, if they are to read Latin and Greek, or even
carefully to study our own old literature, is she to guard them from a
knowledge of evil conveyed in classical allusions, or in the coarse
plainness of speech of an earlier age? I know as a fact, whether we
recognize it or not, that behind our mature backs our girls are
discussing these moral problems with quite an alarming amount of
freedom, and some at least, guided by no teaching, and with no practical
knowledge of the great laws of human life, are coming to quite startling
conclusions, which would make their mothers' hair stand on end. And one
most undesirable, and I may add unnatural, result noticeable among the
more advanced section is a certain distaste for marriage, a tendency to
look upon it as something low and animal, which strikes me as simply a
fatal attitude for women to take up.
Have we not, therefore, got clearly to recognize that the old order has
changed, giving place to new, and requiring, therefore, new methods. We
may or we may not like the new order, but it is _there_. Under the
changed conditions of modern life it is inevitable; therefore it must be
in the providence of God; it cannot be wholly bad, and if we will work
in with it loyally, and not thrust it aside for some old order of our
own, it may be, nay, it will be, wholly for good. Let us remember that
the two most conservative organic forms, the two that have most resisted
progressive evolution, are the donkey and the goose. To ignore the new
order, to cling to the old views and methods, is to court moral
extinction as a living force. As well think to find safety in escaping
from the advance of an express engine by adopting the stately pace of
our grandmothers, which was perfectly adapted for getting out of the way
of a lumbering stage-coach. May not He
"Whose large plan ripens slowly to a whole"
be working out a progressive ideal such as we trace in the great
spiritual records of our race? The Bible, thank God! neither begins nor
ends with sin; but it begins with a sinless garden, it ends with a
strong city of God, with evil known and recognized, but cast out beyond
its walls. May He not be leading us to form a wiser, deeper, stronger
ideal; to aim for our girls not so much at Innocence, with her fading
wreath of flowers--fading, as, alas! they must ever fade in a world like
this--but to aim at Virtue, with her victor's crown of gold, tried in
the fire? May it not be that His divine providence is constraining us to
take as our ideal for our womanhood, not the old sheltered garden, but a
strong city of God, having foundations, whose very gates are made of
pearl, through which nothing that defileth is suffered to enter, and
whose common ways are paved with pure gold, gold of no earthly temper,
but pure and clear as crystal;--a city of refuge for all who are
oppressed with wrong, and from which all foul forms of evil are banned
by the one word "_Without_"? Sure I am that if we will accept this
deeper and larger ideal, and endeavor, however imperfectly, to work it
out on the earth, in the midst of it, as in the old garden ideal, will
be found the tree of life; but then its very leaves will be for the
healing of the nations.
But whether you go with me as far as this or not, I think you will agree
with me that we must not leave our girls to their own crude notions on
the deepest matters of life. Still less must we leave them to get their
teaching on marriage and matters of sex from some modern novels, which I
can only characterize as tuberculosis of the moral sense, but from
which, as I have already pointed out, we cannot always guard them. We
must give them direct teaching of some kind.
First, I think our girls, as well as our boys, need far more direct
teaching than has been customary as to the sanctity of the body. This is
especially true of girls who are sent to boarding-schools, as some of
the moral evils of boys' schools are not, I am sorry to say, altogether
unknown in girls' schools, though, as far as I can ascertain, the evil
is much less in extent, and in some is non-existent. Still, all girls
need to be taught that the body is the temple of the Lord and Giver of
life, and that from the crown of their heads to the sole of their feet
those bodies belong to Christ.
Secondly, I think that they ought to have some such teaching about life
and birth as that which I have already recommended for boys, that they
may see how through the marital tie and the consequent rise of the
parental relation, a world of blind mechanical force gradually developed
into a world of life and beauty, and at last crowned itself with a
conscious love in an indissoluble union, which makes marriage the very
type of the union of the soul with God, of Christ with His Church.
Thirdly, they need to be taught that much in their own physical
constitution, which they rebel against as handicapping them in the
struggle of life, is Nature's provision for them that no merely physical
function should press upon them as we see it do in the animal creation
at certain periods of the year, but that they should be free to serve
God, whether in the married or in the unmarried state, in quietness and
godly living.
Fourthly, above all they need definite teaching on the true nature, the
sanctity, and the beauty of marriage. It appears that the line of
progress is always a spiral, and it would seem as if we were in the
backward sweep of the spiral which looks like retrogression, but will
doubtless bring us out further up in the end. The masculine view that
marriage is the one aim and end of a woman's existence, adopted also by
some careful mothers, is now exploded. Young men are no longer led to
look upon every girl that they meet as furtively, to use a vulgarism,
"setting her cap for him," and only too ready to fling herself at his
feet. So far so good. But have we not suffered our girls to drift into
the opposite extreme? In the heyday of their bright young life, with so
many new interests and amusements open to them, in the pride of their
freedom and independence, they are no longer so inclined to marry, and
are even apt to look down upon the married state. They form so high an
ideal of the man to whom they would surrender their independence--an
ideal which they fortunately do not apply to their fathers and brothers,
whom they find it quite possible to love on a far lower and more human
level--that because a man does not fulfil this ideal, and is not a fairy
prince dowered with every possible gift, they refuse men who, though not
angels, would have made them happy as wife and mother. Would not a
little sound, sensible teaching be of great good here? Could we not
point out that, though in so vital and complex a union as the family
there must be some seat of ultimate authority, some court of final
appeal somewhere, and that the woman herself would not wish it to rest
anywhere else than in the man, if she is to respect him; yet there is no
subservience on the part of the wife in the obedience she renders, but
rather in South's grand words, "It is that of a queen to her king, who
both owns a subjection and remains a majesty"? Cannot we contend against
this falsehood of the age which seems so to underlie our modern life,
and which inclines us to look upon all obedience as a slavish
thing--that obedience which "doth preserve the stars from wrong," and
through which "the most ancient heavens are fresh and strong"; that
obedience which when absolute and implicit to the Divine will is "a
service of perfect freedom"? It is the profession which exacts
unquestionable obedience that forms the finest school for character, as
I have already pointed out. We do not hear of a Wellington or a Roberts
refusing to enter the service because they could not give up their
independence. Our military heroes at least know that it is through
discipline and obedience that they gain their real independence--the
independence of a strong character.
Again, our girls need to be taught not only that there is nothing
derogatory in the married relation to the freest and fullest
independence of character, but surely in these days of open advocacy by
some popular writers of "les unions libres" and a freedom of divorce
that comes to much the same thing, they need to be taught the sanctity
of marriage--those first principles which hitherto we have taken for
granted, but which now, like everything else, is thrown into the
crucible and brought into question. They need definite teaching as to
the true nature of marriage; that it is no mere contract to be broken or
kept according to the individual contractor's convenience--I never yet
heard of a contract for bringing into existence, not a successful
machine, but a moral and spiritual being with infinite possibilities of
weal or woe, of heaven or hell--but a sacramental union of love and
life, with sacramental grace given to those who will seek it to live
happily and endure nobly within its sacred bounds--a union so deep and
mystical that even on its physical side our great physiologists are
wholly at a loss to account for some of its effects;[34] a union of
which permanence is the very essence, as on its permanence rests the
permanence and stability of the whole fabric of our life. It can never
be treated on an individualistic basis, though that is always the
tendency with every man and woman who has ever loved. In Mrs. Humphry
Ward's words:
"That is always the way; each man imagines the matter is still for
his deciding, and he can no more decide it than he can tamper with
the fact that fire burns or water drowns. All these centuries the
human animal has fought with the human soul. And step by step the
soul has registered her victories. She has won them only by feeling
for the law and finding it--uncovering, bringing into light the
firm rocks beneath her feet. And on these rocks she rears her
landmarks--marriage, the family, the State, the Church. Neglect
them and you sink into the quagmire from which the soul of the race
has been for generations struggling to save you."[35]
Fall on this rock, stumble into unhappiness and discontent, as so many
do in marriage, and you will be broken. But be faithful to it and to the
high traditions which generations of suffering men and women have worked
out for you, and you will be broken as the bud is broken into the
blossom, as the acorn is broken into the oak--broken into a higher and
stronger life. On the other hand rebel against it, attempt to drag it
down or cast it from its place, and it will crush you, and grind some
part of your higher nature to powder. How strangely and sadly is this
shown in the case of one of our greatest writers, who thought that the
influence of her writings would far outweigh the influence of her
example, but whose name and example are now constantly used by bad men
to overcome the virtue of young educated girls struggling alone in
London, and often half starving on the miserable pittance which is all
they can earn. But still more is it shown in the life of the nation
which tampers with the laws of marriage and admits freedom of divorce.
Either such suits must be heard _in camera_ without the shame of
exposure, when divorce is so facilitated that the family and the State
rest rather on a superstructure of rickety boards than on a rock; or
they must be heard in public court and form a moral sewer laid on to the
whole nation, poisoning the deepest springs of its life, and through
that polluted life producing far more individual misery than it
endeavors to remedy in dissolving an unhappy marriage. God only knows
what I suffered when a _cause célèbre_ came on, and I felt that the
whole nation was being provided with something worse and more vitally
mischievous than the most corrupt French novel.
Deeply do I regret--and in this I think most thoughtful minds will agree
with me--that the Reformers in their inevitable rebound from the
superstitions of Rome, rejected her teaching of the sacramental nature
of marriage, which has made so many Protestant nations tend to that
freedom of divorce which is carried to so great an extent in some parts
of America, and is spreading, alas! to many of our own colonies--a
laxity fatally undermining the sanctity and stability of the family. If
marriage be not a sacrament, an outward and visible sign of an inward
and spiritual life and grace, I ask what is?
I would therefore earnestly beseech you to oppose your direct teaching
to the whole tendency of modern life, and to much of the direct teaching
of modern fiction--even of so great a novelist as George Meredith--which
inculcates the subordination of the marriage bond to what is called the
higher law of love, or rather, passion. In teaching your sons, and
especially your girls, who are far more likely to be led astray by this
specious doctrine, base marriage not on emotion, not on sentiment, but
on duty. To build upon emotion, with the unruly wills and affections of
sinful men, is to build, not upon the sand, but upon the wind. There is
but one immovable rock on which steadfast character, steadfast
relations, steadfast subordination of the lower and personal desires,
to the higher and immutable obligations and trusts and responsibilities
of life can be built--duty. When this rock has been faithfully clung
to, when in the midst of disillusionment and shattered ideals the noble
resolution has been clung to never to base personal happiness on a
broken trust or another's pain, I have over and over again known the,
most imperfect marriage prove in the end to be happy and contented.
Here again I quote some words of Mrs. Humphry Ward, which she puts into
the mouth of her hero: "No," he said with deep emphasis--"No; I have
come to think the most disappointing and hopeless marriage, nobly
borne, to be better worth having than what people call an 'ideal
passion'--if the ideal passion must be enjoyed at the expense of one of
those fundamental rules which poor human nature has worked out, with
such infinite difficulty and pain, for the protection and help of its
own weakness,"[36] I am aware that neither Mr. Grant Allen with his
"hill-top" novels, nor Mrs. Mona Caird need be taken too seriously, but
when the latter says, "There is something pathetically absurd in this
sacrifice to their children of generation after generation of grown
people,"[37] I would suggest that it would be still more pathetically
absurd to see the whole upward-striving past, the whole noble future of
the human race, sacrificed to their unruly wills and affections, their
passions and desires. If as Goldwin Smith says in his rough, incisive
way, "There is not much union of heart in marriage, I do not see that
there would be any more union of heart in adultery."
I have dwelt thus earnestly upon this point because the sooner we
realize for ourselves and our girls that any relaxation of the marriage
bond will in its disastrous consequences fall upon us, and not upon men,
the better. It is the woman who first grows old and loses her personal
attractions, while a man often preserves his beauty into extreme old
age. It is the burdened mother of a family who cannot compete in
companionship with the highly cultured young unmarried lady, with the
leisure to post herself up in the last interesting book or the newest
political movement. It is the man who is the more variable in his
affections than the woman; more constant as she is by nature, as well
as firmly anchored down by the strength of her maternal love. It is
therefore on the woman that any loosening of the permanence of the
marriage tie will chiefly fall in untold suffering. "Le mariage c'est la
justice," say the French, who have had experience enough of "les unions
libres"--justice to the wife and mother, securing her the stability of
her right to her husband's affections, the stability to her right of
maintenance after she has given up her means of support, above all, the
stability of her right to the care of her own children. If we want to
study the innate misery to women arising from the relaxation of the
married tie, or transient unions, we had better read Professor Dowden's
_Life of Shelley_--misery not the result of public stigma, for there was
no such stigma in the circle in which Shelley moved, but misery brought
about by the facts themselves, and producing state of things which
Matthew Arnold could only characterize by the untranslatable French word
"_sale_." But nearer home, one of your most brilliant writers, Mr. Henry
James, has given us an equally profitable study in his novelette, _What
Maisie Knew_, which I presume is intended as a satire on freedom of
divorce, but which again can only be characterized by the French word
"_sale_."
I confess it does fill me with sardonic laughter to find this oldest and
stalest of all experiments, this oldest and flattest of failures,
paraded as a brand new and original panacea for all the woes of our
family life,--woes which, if nobly borne, at least make "perfect through
suffering."
There is but one great rock-hewn dam successfully reared against the
lawless passions of men and women, and that is Christian marriage. It
has at least given us the Christian home, and pure family life. And
sometimes it fills me with despair to see enlightened nations, like
America and Australia, whittling away and slowly undermining this great
bulwark against the devastating sea of human passion. If only I could
feel that any poor words of mine could in any faint measure rouse
American women to set themselves against what must in the end affect the
depth and steadfastness of those family affections on which the beauty
and solidity of the national character mainly rest, I should feel indeed
I had not lived in vain.
At least I can claim that one of your greatest women, Frances Willard,
was heart and soul with me on this point.
And now to descend to lower levels. Could we not do a little more to
save our young girls from sacrificing their happiness to false ideals by
opportunely obtruding a little mature common-sense into their day
visions and their inexperienced way of looking at things? It is all very
well in the heyday of life, when existence is full of delight and home
affection, to refuse a man who could make them happy, because they don't
quite like the shape of his nose, or because he is a little untidy in
his dress, or simply because they are waiting for some impossible
demigod to whom alone they could surrender their independence. But could
we not mildly point out that darker days must come, when life will not
be all enjoyment, and that a lonely old age, with only too possible
penury to be encountered, must be taken into consideration?
God knows I am no advocate for loveless, and least of all for mercenary
marriages, but I think we want some _viâ media_ between the French
_mariage de convenance_ and our English and American method of leaving
so grave a question as marriage entirely to the whimsies and romantic
fancies of young girls. We need not go back to the old fallacy that
marriage is the aim and end of a woman's existence, and absolutely
necessary for her happiness. Some women are doubtless called to be
mothers of the race, and to do the social work which is so necessary to
our complex civilization. Some women may feel themselves called to some
literary or artistic pursuit, or some other profession, for which they
require the freedom of unmarried life. But I think I shall carry most
women with me in saying that for the ordinary woman marriage is the
happiest state, and that she rarely realizes the deepest and highest in
her nature except in wifehood and motherhood. Rarely, indeed, can any
public work that she can do for the world equal the value of that
priceless work of building up, stone by stone, the temple of a good
man's character which falls to the lot of his mother. Truly is she
called the wife, the weaver, since day and night, without hasting and
without resting, she is weaving the temple hangings, wrought about with
pomegranates and lilies, of the very shrine of his being. And if our
girls could be led to see this, at least it would overcome that
adverseness to marriage which many are now so curiously showing, and
which inevitably makes them more fastidious and fanciful in their
choice, And, on the other hand, without falling back into the old
match-making mamma, exposing her wares in the marriage market to be
knocked down to the highest bidder, might not parents recognize a little
more than they do how incumbent on them it is to make every effort to
give their daughters that free and healthy intercourse with young men
which would yield them a wider choice, and which forms the best method
for insuring a happy marriage?
At least, let us open our eyes to the fact that we are face to face with
some terrible problems with regard to the future of our girls. With safe
investments yielding less and less interest, it must become more and
more difficult to make a provision for the unmarried daughters; and if
the money is spent instead on training them to earn their own bread, we
are still met by the problem of the early superannuation of women's
labor, which rests on physical causes, and cannot therefore be removed.
This at least is no time to despise marriage, or for women of strong and
independent character to adopt an attitude which deprives the nation of
many of its noblest mothers.
But if we are to facilitate marriage, which must form, at any rate, the
main solution of the problems of the near future to which I have
alluded, if we are to prevent, or even lessen, the degradation of women,
if we are to extinguish this pit of destruction in our midst, into which
so many a fair and promising young life disappears, and which
perpetually threatens the moral and physical welfare of our own sons, if
we are to stay the seeds of moral decay in our own nation, we must be
content to revolutionize much in the order of our own life, and adopt a
lower and simpler standard of living. It is we, and not men, who set the
standard; it is we who have been guilty of the vulgar ambition of
following the last social fashion, and doing as our richer neighbors do,
until in England we have made our girls such expensive articles that
many young men simply dare not indulge in them, and are led to seek in
their luxurious clubs the comfort which they should find in a home of
their own, with all that relaxation of moral fibre which comes from club
life. Do we seriously think that we are likely successfully to contend
against the degradation of women by our Rescue Societies and our Refuges
when we are deliberately bringing about a social condition that
ministers to it? "Oh, of course," said a near relative of my own, "no
girl can marry comfortably and live in London with less than a thousand
a year." All I can answer is that if this be so, it means the
degradation of women writ large.
And have we even secured the happiness of our own daughters by this high
standard of living which prevents so many of them from marrying at all?
These unmarried girls, with no worthy object in life to call out the
noble energies that lie dormant within them, "lasting" rather than
"living,"--are they really happy? Is not Robert Louis Stevenson right
when he says that "the ideal of the stalled ox is the one ideal that
will never satisfy either man or woman"? Were not the hardships of a
smaller income and a larger life--a life that would at least satisfy a
woman's worst foe, heart hunger,--more adapted to their true nature,
their true happiness?
And to what further admirable results have we attained by this high
standard of comfort and luxury? Nature has carefully provided for the
equality of the sexes by sending rather more boys than girls into the
world, since fewer boys are reared; but we have managed to derange this
order. We have sent our boys out into the world, but we have kept our
girls at home, refusing to allow them to rough it with husbands and
brothers or to endure the least hardness. The consequence is that we
have nearly a million of surplus women in the old country, while in
America, and in our own colonies, we have a corresponding surplus of
men, with all the evil moral consequences that belong to a disproportion
between the sexes. Truly we may congratulate ourselves!
I would therefore urge that if we are really to grapple with these moral
evils, we should simplify our standard of living, and educate our girls
very differently to what, at least in England, we are doing. Culture is
good, and the more we have of it the better; it gives a woman a wider
sphere of influence, as well as more enlightened methods of using that
influence. But if dead languages are to take the place of living
service; if high mathematics are to work out a low plane of cooking and
household management; if a first class in moral science is to involve
third class performance of the moral duties involved in family life,
then I deliberately say it were better that, like Tennyson's mother, we
should be
"Not learned save in gracious household ways."
I protest with the uttermost earnestness against the care of human life,
of human health, and of human comfort being considered a lower thing and
of less importance than good scholarship; or that, when we recognize
that months and even years will have to be devoted to the attainment of
the one, the arts by which we can fulfil those great human trusts which
devolve more or less upon every woman can be practised without ever
having been learnt at all.
Do not misunderstand me. Do not think I am decrying a classical
education; and, as the daughter of a great mathematician, it is not
likely that I should underrate mathematics as a mental discipline. I am
only urging that they should be subordinated to higher and more
practical issues.
I am thankfully aware that these remarks do not apply to American women
to the same degree in which they apply to our English girls. The paucity
of domestic servants, and the consequent pressure of necessity, have
saved you from the fine lady ideal which we have adopted for our girls
and the exclusively book education into which we have almost
unconsciously drifted. You have been constrained to choose some nobler
type on which to mould your scheme of female education than that of the
tadpole, which is all head, no hands, a much active and frivolous tail.
Your girls are brought up not to consider it beneath them to take part
in the work of the house; and something of the all round capability of
American women which so strikes us is doubtless owing to their not
having incurred "this Nemesis of disproportion," and therefore to their
combining intellectual culture with practical efficiency.
Why we should have taken this fine lady ideal for our girls, when we
take such a much more practical standard for our boys, has always
puzzled me. If an excellent opening offered itself to one of our sons at
a bank, we should agree with his father in expecting him to take it,
though it would involve the drudgery of sitting in a cramped attitude on
a tall stool for hours and hours every day. Why should we accept life's
necessary drudgery for our boys and refuse it for our girls? No life
worth living can be had without drudgery,--the most brilliant as well as
the dullest. Darwin spent eight of the best years of his life in an
exhaustive investigation into the organization of a barnacle--labor
accompanied, as all intellectual work was with him, by a constant sense
of physical nausea from which he suffered, till, from sheer weariness
and disgust at the drudgery, he ends his researches in his emphatic way
with the exclamation, "D---- the barnacles!" At least a woman's
household drudgery does not end in a barnacle, or in dead coin, but in a
living and loved personality whose comfort and health it secures.
Blessed is drudgery, the homely mother of Patience, "that young and
rose-lipped cherubim," of quiet endurance, of persistency in well-doing,
of all the stablest elements of character.
Do not let us refuse to our girls the divine hardness which is the very
heart of a diviner joy and of that "fuller life" of "which our veins are
scant," nor refuse for them and for ourselves the words of life: "As the
Father hath sent Me into the world, even so send I you"; but be content
to send them into the world to love, to suffer, to endure, to live and
die for the good of others.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 34: See some curious facts given in Darwin's _Origin of
Species_.]
[Footnote 35: _David Grieve_, by Mrs. Humphry Ward, sixth edition, p.
401.]
[Footnote 36: _David Grieve_, p. 524.]
[Footnote 37: _Nineteenth Century_, May, 1892.]