weakly human, intensely feminine, and again passing the fables of
saints in heroism and self-devotion. Just what these qualities were,
and why they grew, is worth considering before--in the bustle of the
twentieth century and its elements entirely foreign to her primitive
and elevated spirit--she has passed from view and is quite forgotten.
In the cities of to-day she is an exotic. In the small towns she is
hardly indigenous. Of her many homes, from the close-knit forests
of Maine to the hot sands of Monterey, that community of villages
which was formerly New England is her habitat. She has always been
most at home in the narrow village of her forebears, where the church
and school were in simpler days, and still at times are--even to our
generation measuring only with Pactolian sands in its hour-glasses--the
powers oftenest quoted and most revered. From these sources the larger
part of herself, the part that does not live by bread alone, has been
nourished.
It was in the quiet seclusion of the white homes of these villages
that in past generations she gained her ideals of life. Such a home
imposed what to women of the world at large might be inanity. But,
with a self-limitation almost Greek, she saw within those clapboard
walls things dearest to a woman’s soul,--a pure and sober family life,
a husband’s protective spirit, the birth and growth of children,
neighborly service--keenly dear to her--for all whose lives should
come within touch of her active hands, and an old age guarded by the
devotion of those to whom she had given her activities.
To this should be added another gift of the gods which this woman ever
bore in mind with calmness--a secluded ground, shaded by hemlocks or
willows, where should stand the headstone marking her dust, over which
violets should blossom to freshening winds, and robin call to mate
in the resurrection time of spring, and in the dim corners of which
ghostly Indian pipes should rise from velvet mould to meet the summer’s
fervency.
Under such conditions and in such homes she had her growth. The
tasks that engaged her hands were many, for at all times she was
indefatigable in what Plato calls women’s work, τὰ ἔνδον. She rose
while it was yet night; she looked well to the ways of her household,
and eat not the bread of idleness. In housekeeping--which in her
conservative neighborhood and among her primary values meant, almost
up to this hour, not directing nor helping hired people in heaviest
labors, but rather all that the phrase implied in pioneer days--her
energies were spent--herself cooking; herself spinning the thread and
weaving, cutting out and sewing all family garments and household
linen; herself preserving flesh, fish, and fruits. To this she added
the making of yeast, candles, and soap for her household, their butter
and cheese--perhaps also these foods for market sale--at times their
cider, and even elderberry wine for their company, of as fine a color
and distinguished a flavor as the gooseberry which the wife of immortal
Dr. Primrose offered her guests. Abigail Adams herself testifies that
she made her own soap, in her early days at Braintree, and chopped
the wood with which she kindled her fires. In such accomplishments
she was one of a great sisterhood, thousands of whom served before
and thousands after her. These women rarely told such activities in
their letters, and rarely, too, I think, to their diaries; for their
fingers fitted a quill but awkwardly after a day with distaff or
butter-moulding.
These duties were of the external world, mainly mechanical and
routine, and they would have permitted her--an untiring materialist
in all things workable by hands--to go many ways in the wanderings
of thought, if grace, flexibility, and warmth had consorted with the
Puritan idea of beauty. She had come to be an idealist in all things
having to do with the spirit. Nevertheless, as things stood, she had
but one mental path.
The powers about her were theocratic. They held in their hands her
life and death in all physical things, and her life and death per
omnia sæcula sæculorum. They held the right to whisper approval or
to publish condemnation. Her eager, active spirit was fed by sermons
and exhortations to self-examination. Nothing else was offered. On
Sundays and at the prayer-meetings of mid-week she was warned by these
teachers, to whom everybody yielded, to whom in her childhood she
had been taught to drop a wayside courtesy, that she should ever be
examining head and heart to escape everlasting hell-fire, and that she
should endure so as to conduct her devoted life as to appease the
anger of a God as vindictive as the very ecclesiasts themselves. No
escape or reaction was possible.
The effect of all this upon a spirit so active, pliant, and
sensitive is evident. The sole way open to her was the road to
introspection--that narrow lane hedged with the trees of contemplative
life to all suffering human kind.
Even those of the community whose life duties took them out in their
world, and who were consequently more objective than women, even the
men, under such conditions, grew self-examining to the degree of a
proverb, “The bother with the Yankee is that he rubs badly at the
juncture of the soul and body.”
In such a life as this first arose the subjective characteristics of
the New England woman at which so many gibes have been written, so
many flings spoken; at which so many burly sides have shaken with
laughter ἄσβεστος. Like almost every dwarfed or distorted thing in the
active practical world, “New England subjectivity” is a result of the
shortsightedness of men, the assumption of authority of the strong over
the weak, and the wrongs they have to advance self done one another.
Nowadays, in our more objective life, this accent of the ego is
pronounced irritating. But God’s sequence is apt to be irritating.
The New England woman’s subjectivity is a result of what has been--the
enslaving by environment, the control by circumstance, of a thing
flexible, pliant, ductile--in this case a hypersensitive soul--and its
endeavor to shape itself to lines and forms men in authority dictated.
Cut off from the larger world, this woman was forced into the smaller.
Her mind must have field and exercise for its natural activity and
constructiveness. Its native expression was in the great objective
world of action and thought about action, the macrocosm; stunted and
deprived of its birthright, it turned about and fed upon its subjective
self, the microcosm.
Scattered far and wide over the granitic soil of New England there
have been the women unmarried. Through the seafaring life of the men,
through the adventures of the pioneer enchanting the hot-blooded and
daring; through the coaxing away of sturdy youthful muscle by the call
of the limitless fat lands to the west; through the siren voice of
the cities; and also through the loss of men in war--that untellable
misery--these less fortunate women--the unmarried--have in all New
England life been many. All the rounding and relaxing grace and charm
which lie between maid and man they knew only in brooding fancy. Love
might spring, but its growth was rudimentary. Their life was not
fulfilled. There were many such spinners.
These women, pertinacious at their tasks, dreamed dreams of what could
never come to be. Lacking real things, they talked much of moods and
sensations. Naturally they would have moods. Human nature will have
its confidant, and naturally they talked to one another more freely
than to their married sisters. Introspection plus introspection again.
A life vacuous in external events and interrupted by no masculine
practicality--where fluttering nerves were never counterpoised by
steady muscle--afforded every development to subjective morbidity.
And expression of their religious life granted no outlet to these
natures--no goodly work direct upon humankind. The Reformation,
whatever magnificence it accomplished for the freedom of the
intellect, denied liberty and individual choice to women. Puritanism
was the child of the Reformation. Like all religions reacting
from the degradations and abuses of the Middle Ages, for women it
discountenanced community life. Not for active ends, nor of a certainty
for contemplative, were women to hive together and live independent
lives.
In her simple home, and by making the best of spare moments, the
undirected impulse of the spinster produced penwipers for the heathen
and slippers for the dominie. But there was, through all the long years
of her life, no dignified, constructive, human expression for the
childless and husbandless woman. Because of this lack a dynamo force
for good was wasted for centuries, and tens of thousands of lives were
blighted.
In New England her theology ruled, as we have said, with an iron and
tyrannous hand. It published the axiom, and soon put it in men’s
mouths, that the only outlet for women’s activities was marriage.
No matter if truth to the loftiest ideals kept her single, a woman
unmarried, from a Garden of Eden point of view and the pronunciamento
of the average citizen, was not fulfilling the sole and only end for
which he dogmatized women were made--she was not child-bearing.
In this great spinster class, dominated by such a voice, we may
physiologically expect to find an excess of the neurotic altruistic
type, women sickened and extremists, because their nature was
unexpressed, unbalanced, and astray. They found a positive joy in
self-negation and self-sacrifice, and evidenced in the perturbations
and struggles of family life a patience, a dumb endurance, which
the humanity about them, and even that of our later day, could not
comprehend, and commonly translated into apathy or unsensitiveness. The
legendary fervor and devotion of the saints of other days pale before
their self-denying discipline.
But instead of gaining, as in the mediæval faith, the applause of
contemporaries, and, as in those earlier days, inciting veneration
and enthusiasm as a “holy person,” the modern sister lived in her
small world very generally an upper servant in a married brother’s
or sister’s family. Ibsen’s Pillar of Society, Karsten Bernick, in
speaking of the self-effacing Martha, voices in our time the then
prevailing sentiment, “You don’t suppose I let her want for anything.
Oh, no; I think I may say I am a good brother. Of course, she lives
with us and eats at our table; her salary is quite enough for her
dress, and--what can a single woman want more?... You know, in a large
house like ours, it is always well to have some steady-going person
like her whom one can put to anything that may turn up.”
Not such estimates alone, but this woman heard reference to herself in
many phrases turning upon her chastity. Her very classification in the
current vernacular was based upon her condition of sex. And at last
she witnessed for her class an economic designation, the essence of
vulgarity and the consummation of insolence--“superfluous women;” that
is, “unnecessary from being in excess of what is needed,” women who had
not taken husbands, or had lived apart from men. The phrase recalls the
use of the word “female”--meaning, “for thy more sweet understanding,”
a woman--which grew in use with the Squire Westerns of the eighteenth
century, and persisted even in decent mouths until Charles Lamb wrapped
it in the cloth of gold of his essay on Modern Gallantry, and buried it
forever from polite usage.
In another respect, also, this New England spinster grew into a being
such as the world had not seen. It is difficult of explanation.
Perhaps most easily said, it is this: she never by any motion or phrase
suggested to a man her variation from him. All over the world women do
this; unconsciously nearly always; in New England never. The expression
of the woman has there been condemned as immodest, unwomanly, and
with fierce invective; the expression of the man been lauded. Das
Ewig-Weibliche must persist without confession of its existence. In
the common conception, when among masculine comrades she should bear
herself as a sexless sort of half-being, an hermaphroditic comrade, a
weaker, unsexed creature, not markedly masculine, like her brother or
the present golfing woman, and far from positively feminine.
All her ideals were masculine; that is, all concrete and human
expression of an ideal life set before her was masculine. Her religion
was wholly masculine, and God was always “He.” Her art in its later
phases was at its height in the “Spectator” and “Tatler,” where the
smirking belles who matched the bewigged beaux of Anne’s London are
jeered at, and conviction is carried the woman reader that all her sex
expressions are if not foul, fool, and sometimes both fool and foul.
In this non-recognition of a woman’s sex, its needs and expression in
home and family life, and in the domination of masculine ideals, has
been a loss of grace, facile touch in manner, vivacity, légèreté; in
short, a want of clarity, delicacy, and feminine strength. To put the
woman’s sex aside and suppress it was to emphasize spinster life--and
increase it. It is this nullification of her sex traits that has led
the world to say the New England woman is masculine, when the truth is
she is most femininely feminine in everything but sex--where she is
most femininely and self-effacingly _it_.
It is in this narrowness, this purity, simplicity, and sanctity, in
this circumspection and misdirection, that we have the origin of the
New England woman’s subjectivity, her unconscious self-consciousness,
and that seeming hermaphroditic attitude that has attracted the
attention of the world, caused its wonder, and led to its false
judgment of her merit.
Social changes--a result of the Zeitgeist--within the last two
generations have brought a broadening of the conception of the “sphere”
of women. Puritan instincts have been dying. Rationalism has to a
degree been taking their place. While, on the other hand,--one may
say this quite apart from construing the galvanic twitchings of a
revived mediævalism in ecclesiastic and other social affairs as real
life--there have also come conceptions of the liberty and dignity of
womanhood, independent or self-dependent, beyond those which prevailed
in the nunnery world.
A popular feeling has been growing that a woman’s sphere is whatever
she can do excellently. What effect this will have on social relations
at large we cannot foresee. From such conditions another chivalry
may spring! What irony of history if on New England soil!! Possibly,
the custom that now pertains of paying women less than men for the
same work, the habit in all businesses of giving women the drudging
details,--necessary work, indeed, but that to which no reputation is
affixed,--and giving to men the broader tasks in which there is contact
with the world and the result of contact, growth, may ultimately
react, just as out of injustice and brutalities centuries ago arose a
chivalrous ideal and a knightly redresser.
The sparseness of wealth, the meagreness of material ideals, and the
frugality, simplicity, and rusticity of New England life have never
allowed a development of popular manners. Grace among the people has
been interpreted theologically; never socially. Their geniality, like
their sunshine, has always had a trace of the northeast wind--chilled
by the Labrador current of their theology. Native wit has been put
out by narrow duties. The conscience of their theology has been
instinctively for segregation, never for social amalgamation. They are
more solitary than gregarious.
We should expect, then, an abruptness of manner among those left to
develop social genius--the women--even among those travelled and
most generously educated. We should expect a degree of baldness and
uncoveredness in their social processes, which possibly might be
expressed by the polysyllable which her instructor wrote at the end
of a Harvard Annex girl’s theme to express its literary quality,
“unbuttoned”--unconsciously.
When you meet the New England woman, you see her placing you in her
social scale. That in tailor-making you God may have used a yardstick
different from the New England measure has not yet reached her
consciousness; nor that the system of weights and measures of what Sir
Leslie Stephen calls “the half-baked civilization of New England” may
not prevail in all towns and countries. Should you chance not to fit
any notch she has cut in her scale, she is apt to tell you this in a
raucous, strident voice, with a schoolma’am air in delivery of her
opinion. If she is untravelled and purely of New England surroundings,
these qualities may be accented. She is undeniably frank and
unquestionably truthful. At all times, in centuries past and to-day,
she would scorn such lies as many women amazingly tell for amusement
or petty self-defence.
It is evident that she is a good deal of a fatalist. This digression
will illustrate: If you protest your belief that so far as this world’s
estimate goes some great abilities have no fair expression, that in our
streets we jostle mute inglorious Miltons; if you say you have known
most profound and learned natures housed on a Kansas farm or in a New
Mexico cañon; nay, if you aver your faith that here in New England men
and women of genius are unnoticed because Messrs. Hue and Cry, voicing
the windier, have not appreciated larger capacities, she will pityingly
tell you that this larger talent is supposititious. If it were real,
she continues, it must have risen to sight and attracted the eye of
men. Her human knowledge is not usually deep nor her insight subtle,
and she does not know that in saying this she is contradicting the law
of literary history, that the producers of permanent intellectual
wares are often not recognized by their contemporaries, nor run
after by mammonish publishers. And at last, when you answer that the
commonest question with our humankind is nourishment for the body,
that ease and freedom from exhausting labor must forerun education,
literature, art, she retorts that here is proof she is right: if these
unrecognized worthies you instance had the gifts you name, they would
be superior to mere physical wants.
If you have longanimity, you do not drive the generality closer; you
drown your reflections in Sir Thomas Browne: “The iniquity of oblivion
blindly scattereth her poppy and deals with the memory of men without
distinction to merit of perpetuity.... Who knows whether the best of
men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot
than any that stand remembered in the known account of time?”
Her narrow fatalism, united with the conservatism and aristocratic
instincts common to all women from their retired life and ignorance
of their kind, gives the New England woman a hedged sympathy with
the proletarian struggle for freer existence. It may be lack of
comprehension rather than lack of sympathy. She would cure by
palliations, a leprosy by healing divers sores. At times you find her
extolling the changes wrought in the condition of women during the
last seventy years. She argues for the extension of education; her
conservatism admits that. She may not draw the line of her radicalism
even before enfranchisement. But the vaster field of the education of
the human race by easier social conditions, by lifting out of money
worship and egoism,--this has never been, she argues, and therefore
strenuously insists it never will be.
Her civic spirit is Bostonesque. A town’s spirit is a moral and
spiritual attitude impressed upon members of a community where events
have engendered unity of sentiment, and it commonly subordinates
individual idiosyncrasies.
The spirit Boston presents includes a habit of mind apparently
ratiocinative, but once safely housed in its ism incredulously
conservative and persistently self-righteous--lacking flexibility.
Within its limits it is as fixed as the outline of the Common. It has
externally a concession and docility. It is polite and kind--but when
its selfishness is pressing its greediness is of the usurious lender.
In our generation it is marked by lack of imagination, originality,
initiative. Having had its origin in Non-conformity, it has the habit
of seeing what it is right for others to do to keep their house
clean--pulling down its mouth when the rest of the world laughs,
square-toeing when the rest trip lightly, straight-lacing when the
other human is erring, but all the time carrying a heart under its
east-wind stays, and eyes which have had a phenomenal vision for right
and wrong doing--for others’ wrongdoing especially; yet withal holding
under its sour gravity moral impulses of such import that they have
leavened the life of our country to-day and rebuked and held in check
easier, lighter, less profound, less illuminated, less star-striking
ideals.
It is a spirit featured not unsimilarly to the Lenox landscape--safe,
serene, inviting, unable in our day to produce great crop without the
introduction of fresh material--and from like cause. A great glacier
has pressed on both human spirit and patch of earth. But the sturdy,
English bedrock of the immaterial foundation was not by the glacier of
Puritanism so smoothed, triturated, and fertilized as was Berkshire
soil by the pulverizing weight of its titanic ice flow.
This spirit is also idealistic outside its civic impulses,--referring
constantly to the remote past or future,--and in its eyes the abstract
is apt to be as real as the concrete. To this characteristic is due
not only Emersonism and Alcottism--really old Platonism interpreted
for the transcendental Yankee--but also that faith lately revivified,
infinitely vulgarized, as logically distorted as the pneuma doctrine
of the first century, and called “Christian Science.” The idealism of
Emerson foreran the dollar-gathering idealism of Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy
as the lark of spring foreruns the maple worm.
This idealism oftenest takes religious phases--as in its Puritan
origin--and in many instances in our day is content with crude
expression. Of foregone days evidence is in an incomplete list--only
twenty-five--of Brigham Young’s wives, some of whom bore such old New
England patronymics as Angell, Adams, Ross, Lawrence, Bigelow, Snow,
Folsom. May a fleeing of these women to Mormonism be explained by
their impatience and heart-sickness at their unsexing social condition
and religious spirit?--with the admitting to the great scheme of life
and action but one sex and that the one to which their theocratic
theologians belonged?
Speculations of pure philosophy this New England woman is inclined
to fear as vicious. In dialectics she rests upon the glories of
the innocuous transcendentalism of the nineteenth century forties.
Exceptions to this rule are perhaps those veraciously called “occult;”
for she will run to listen to the juggling logic and boasting rhetoric
of Swamis Alphadananda and Betadananda and Gammadananda, and cluster
about the audience-room of those dusky fakirs much as a swarm of bees
flits in May. And like the bees, she deserts cells filled with honey
for combs machine-made and wholly empty.
Illuminated by some factitious light, she will again go to unheard-of
lengths in extenuating Shelley’s relations to his wives, and in
explaining George Eliot’s marriage to her first husband. Here, and
for at least once in her life, she combats convention and reasons
upon natural grounds. “I don’t see the wickedness of Rudolph,” said
one spinster, referring to the tragedy connecting a prince of Austria
and a lady of the Vetchera family. “I don’t see why he shouldn’t have
followed his heart. But I shouldn’t dare say that to any one else in
Boston. Most of them think as I do, but they would all be shocked to
have it said.”
“Consider the broad meaning of what you say. Let this instance become
a universal law.”
“Still I believe every sensible man and woman applauds Rudolph’s
independence.”