sentiment--in spite of the introduction into life and literature of
the love of men for women and women for men; in spite of the growth
of romantic love. You find misogynous expression among the Latins. In
early “Church Fathers,” such as St. John Chrysostom, you come upon
it in grossest form. Woman is “a necessary ill,” cried the Golden
Mouthed, “a natural temptation, a wished-for calamity, a household
danger, a deadly fascination, a bepainted evil.”
You see the sentiment in the laws of church and of kingdom. You sight
its miasm in the gloaming and murk of the Middle Ages, amid the
excesses which in shame for it chivalry affected and exalted. You read
it by the light of the awful fires that burnt women accessory to the
husband’s crime--for which their husbands were merely hanged. You see
it in Martin Luther’s injunction to Catherine von Bora that it ill
became his wife to fasten her waist in front--because independence
in women is unseemly, their dress should need an assistant for its
donning. You chance upon it in old prayers written by men, and once
publicly said by men for English queens to a God “which for the offence
of the first woman hast threatened unto all women a common, sharp, and
inevitable malediction.”
You find the sentiment in Boileau’s satire and in Pope’s “Characters.”
You open the pages of the Wizard of the North, who did for his own
generations what Heliodorus and his chaste Chariclea accomplished for
the fourth century, and you come upon Walter Scott singing in one of
his exquisite songs--
“Woman’s faith, and woman’s trust,
Write the characters in dust.”
All such sad evidences, it should be borne in mind, are but the reverse
of the fair picture with which men have regarded women. But because
there is a reverse side, and its view has entered and still enters
largely into human life, human estimates, and human fate, it should be
spoken about openly. Women and men inexperienced in the outer world of
affairs do not realize its still potent force.
As for the subject of these gibes, for ages they were silent. During
many generations, in the privacy of their apartments, the women must
have made mute protests to one another. “These things are false,” their
souls cried. But they took the readiest defence of physical weakness,
and they loved harmony. It was better to be silent than to rise in bold
proof of an untruth and meet rude force.
Iteration and dogmatic statement of women’s moral inferiority, coupled
as it often was with quoted text and priestly authority, had their
inevitable effect upon more sensitive and introspective characters; it
humiliated and unquestionably deprived many a woman of self-respect.
Still, all along there must have been a less sensitive, sturdier,
womanhood possessed of the perversive faith of Mrs. Poyser, that
“heaven made ’em to match the men,” that--
“Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free,”--
men and women rise or sink; that, in fact, the interests of the two are
inseparable and wholly identical. To broad vision misogynous expression
seems to set in antagonism forces united by all the mighty powers of
human evolution throughout millions of years, and the whole plan of God
back of that soul-unfolding.
The misogynous song and story of our forebears with momentous fall
descended and became the coarse newspaper quip which a generation
ago whetted its sting upon women--“Susan B. Anthonys”--outspoken and
seeking more freedom than social prejudices of their day allowed.
An annoying gnat, it has in these days been almost exterminated by
diffusion of the oil of fairness and better knowledge.
But even yet periodicals at times give mouth to the old misogyny.
Such an expression, nay, two, are published in otherwise admirable
pages, and with these we have to do. They are from the pen of a man
of temperament, energy, vigorous learning, and an “esurient Genie”
for books--professor of Latin in one of our great universities, where
misogynous sentiment has found expression in lectures in course and
also in more public delivery.
The first reverse phrase is of “the neurotic caterwauling of an
hysterical woman.” Cicero’s invective and pathos are said to be
perilously near that perturbance.
Now specialists in nervous difficulties have not yet determined there
is marked variation between neurotic caterwauling of hysterical women
and neurotic caterwauling of hysterical men. Cicero’s shrieks--for
Cicero was what is to-day called “virile,” “manly,” “strenuous,”
“vital”--Cicero’s would naturally approximate the men’s.
To normally tuned ears caterwaulings are as unagreeable as misogynous
whoops--waulings of men as cacophonous as waulings of women. Take
an instance in times foregone. In what is the megalomaniac whine of
Marie Bashkirtseff’s “Journal” more unagreeable than the egotistical
vanity of Lord Byron’s wails? Each of these pen people may be viewed
from another point. More generously any record--even an academic
misogyny--is of interest and value because expressing the idiosyncratic
development or human feeling of the world.
But, exactly and scientifically speaking, neurotic and hysteric
are contradictory terms. Neurotic men and women are described by
physicians as self-forgetting sensitives--zealous, executive; while the
hysterics of both sexes are supreme egotists, selfish, vain, and vague,
uncomfortable both in personal and literary contact--just like wit
at their expense. “If we knew all,” said George Eliot, who was never
hysterical, “we would not judge.” And Paul of Tarsus wrote wisely to
those of Rome, “Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou
art, that judgest.”
Science nowadays declares that the man who wears a shirt-collar cannot
be well, and equally the same analytic spirit may some day make evident
that neurosis and hysteria are legacies of a foredone generation, who
found the world out of joint and preyed upon its strength and calmness
of nerve to set things right. Humaneness and fair estimate are remedies
to-day’s dwellers upon the earth can offer, whether the neurosis and
hysteria be Latin or Saxon, men’s or indeed women’s.
The second of the phrases to which we adverted tells of “the
unauthoritative young women who make dictionaries at so much a mile.”
It has the smack of the wit of the eighteenth century--of Pope’s
studied and never-ceasing gibes at Lady Mary Wortley Montagu after
she had given him the mitten; of Dr. Johnson’s “female day” and his
rumbling thunder over “the freaks and humors and spleen and vanity of
women”--he of all men who indulge in freaks and humors and spleen and
vanity!--whose devotion to his bepainted and bedizened old wife was the
talk of their literary London.
We are apt to believe the slurs that Pope, Johnson, and their
self-applauding colaborers cast upon what they commonly termed
“females” as deterrent to their fairness, favor, and fame. The
high-noted laugh which sounded from Euphelia’s morning toilet and
helped the self-gratulation of those old beaux not infrequently grates
upon our twentieth century altruistic, neurotic sensibilities.
But to return to our lamb. An unauthoritative young woman, we suppose,
is one who is not authoritative, who has not authority. But what
confers authority? Assumption of it? Very rarely anything else--even in
the case of a college professor. We have in our blessed democracy no
Academy, no Sanhedrim, no keeper of the seal of authority--and while
we have not we keep life, strength, freedom in our veins. The young
woman “who makes dictionaries at so much a mile” may be--sometimes
is--as fitted for authority and the exercise of it as her brother.
Academic as well as popular prejudices, both springing mainly from the
masculine mind, make him a college professor, and her a nameless drudge
exercising the qualities women have gained from centuries of women’s
life--sympathetic service with belittling recognition of their work,
self-sacrifice, and infinite care and patience for detail.
Too many of our day, both of men and women, still believe with old John
Knox--to glance back even beyond Johnson and Pope--and his sixteenth
century “First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of
Women”--a fine example of hysterical shrieking in men, by the way.
With the loving estimate of Knox’s contemporary, Mr. John Davidson, we
heartily agree when he sings--
“For weill I wait that Scotland never bure,
In Scottis leid ane man mair Eloquent,
Into perswading also I am sure,
Was nane in Europe that was mair potent.
In Greik and Hebrew he was excellent,
And als in Latine toung his propernes,
Was tryit trym quhen scollers wer present.
Bot thir wer nathing till his uprichtnes.”
We admire Knox’s magnificent moral courage and the fruits of that
courage which the Scots have long enjoyed, and yet anent the “cursed
Jesabel of England,” the “cruell monstre Marie,” Knox cries: “To
promote a Woman to beare rule, superiorite, dominion, or empire ...
is repugnant to Nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to
his revealed will and approved ordinance”--just as if he, John Knox,
knew all about God’s will and Nature’s designs. What pretence, John!
But John took it upon himself to say he did. He _assumed_; and time
and events have proved that it was sheer assumption on John’s part. I
doubt, were he now here, if he would let a modest, bread-earning woman
even make dictionaries at so much a mile--nothing beyond type-writing,
surely. He would probably assume authority and shriek hysterically that
anything beyond the finger-play of type-writing is repugnant to Nature
and contrarious to God.
There was a Mrs. John Knox; there were two in fact--ribs.
“That servent faithfull servand of the Lord” took the first slip of a
girl when near his fiftieth year, long after he had left the celibate
priesthood; and the second, a lass of sixteen, when he was fifty-nine.
They took care of John, a mother-in-law helping, and with service and
money gave him leisure to write. The opinions of the dames do not
appear in their husband’s hysteria. “I use the help of my left hand,”
dictated Knox when one of these girl-wives was writing for him a letter.
With the young women we are considering there is this eternal variation
from John Knox and his hysterical kin, Celt, Saxon, or Latin--she does
not assume authority. Consequently she makes dictionaries at so much
a mile. Such word-spinning was at one time done by drudge men--men
who had failed mayhap in the church, or in law, or had distaste for
material developments or shame for manual work. Now, with women
fortified by the learning their colleges afford, it is oftenest done
by drudge women. The law of commerce prevails--women gain the task
because they will take much less a mile than men. Men offer them less
than they would dare offer a man similarly equipped.
But why should our brothers who teach sophomores at so much a year
fleer? even if the woman has got the job! Does not this arrangement
afford opportunity for a man to affix his name to her work? In
unnumbered--and concealed--instances. We all remember how in the making
of the ---- dictionary the unauthoritative woman did the work, and the
unauthoritative man wrote the introduction, and the authoritative man
affixed his name to it. We all remember that, surely. Then there is the
-- -- --; and the -- --. We do not fear to mention names, we merely
pity and do not--and we nurse pity because with Aristotle we believe
that it purifies the heart. With small knowledge of the publishing
world, I can count five such make-ups as I here indicate. In one case
an authoritative woman did her part of the work under the explicit
agreement that her name should be upon the title-page. In the end, by a
trick, in order to advertise the man’s, it appeared only in the first
edition. Yet this injustice in nowise deprived her of a heart of oak.
The commercial book-building world, as it at present stands--the place
where they write dictionaries and world’s literatures at so much a
mile--is apt to think a woman is out in its turmoil for her health, or
for sheer amusement; not for the practical reasons men are. An eminent
opinion declared the other day that they were there “to get a trousseau
or get somebody to get it for ’em.” Another exalted judgment asserted,
“The first thing they look round the office and see who there is to
marry.”
This same world exploits her labor; it pays her a small fraction
of what it pays a man engaged in the identical work; it seizes,
appropriates, and sometimes grows rich upon her ideas. It never thinks
of advancing her to large duties because of her efficiency in small.
She is “only a woman,” and with Ibsen’s great Pillar of Society the
business world thinks she should be “content to occupy a modest and
becoming position.” The capacities of women being varied, would not
large positions rightly appear modest and becoming to large capacities?
For so many centuries men have estimated a woman’s service of no money
value that it is hard, at the opening of the twentieth, to believe
it equal to even a small part of a man’s who is doing the same work.
In one late instance a woman at the identical task of editing was
paid less than one-fortieth the sum given her colaborer, a man, whose
products were at times submitted to her for revision and correction.
In such cases the men are virtually devouring the women--not quite so
openly, yet as truly, as the Tierra del Fuegians of whom Darwin tells:
when pressed in winter by hunger they choke their women with smoke and
eat them. In our instance just cited the feeding upon was less patent,
but the choking with smoke equally unconcealed.
The very work of these so-called unauthoritative women passes in
the eyes of the world uninstructed in the present artfulness of
book-making as the work of so-called authoritative men. It is therefore
authoritative.
Not in this way did the king-critic get together his dictionary.
Johnson’s work evidences his hand on every page and almost in every
paragraph. But things are changed from the good old times of individual
action. We now have literary trusts and literary monopolies. Nowadays
the duties of an editor-in-chief may be to oversee each day’s labor, to
keep a sharp eye upon the “authoritative” men and “unauthoritative”
women whose work he bargained for at so much a mile, and, when they
finish the task, to indite his name as chief worker.
Would it be reasonable to suppose that--suffering such school-child
discipline and effacement--those twentieth century writers
nourished the estimate of “booksellers” with which Michael Drayton
in the seventeenth century enlivened a letter to Drummond of
Hawthornden?--“They are a company of base knives whom I both scorn and
kick at.”
It is under such conditions as that just cited that we hear a book
spoken of as if it were a piece of iron, not a product of thought and
feeling carefully proportioned and measured; as if it were the fruit of
a day and not of prolonged thought and application; as if it could be
easily reproduced by the application of a mechanical screw; as if it
were a bar of lead instead of far-reaching wings to minister good; as
if it were a thing to step upon rather than a thing to reach to; as
if it could be cut, slashed, twisted, distorted, instead of its really
forming an organic whole with the Aristotelian breath of unity, and the
cutting or hampering of it would be performing a surgical operation
which might entirely let out its breath of life.
Until honor is stronger among human beings--that is, until the business
world is something other than a maelstrom of hell--it is unmanly and
unwomanly to gibe at the “unauthoritative” young woman writing at so
much a mile. She may be bearing heavy burdens of debt incurred by
another. She may be supporting a decrepit father or an idle brother.
She is bread-earning. Oftenest she is gentle, and, like the strapped
dog which licks the hand that lays bare his brain, she does not strike
back. But she has an inherent sense of honesty and dishonesty, and she
knows what justice is. Her knowledge of life, the residuum of her
unauthoritative literary experience, shows her the rare insight and
truth of Mr. Howells when he wrote, “There is _no_ happy life for a
woman--except as she is happy in suffering for those she loves, and in
sacrificing herself to their pleasure, their pride, and ambition. The
advantage that the world offers her--and it does not always offer her
that--is her choice in self-sacrifice.”
Ten to one--a hundred to one--the young woman is “unauthoritative”
because she is not peremptory, is not dictatorial, assumes no airs
of authority such as swelling chest and overbearing manners, is
sympathetic with another’s egotism, is altruistic, is not egotistical
with the egotism that is unwilling to cast forth its work for the
instructing and furthering of human kind unless it is accompanied by
the writer’s name--a “signed article.” She is not selfish and guarding
the ego. Individual fame seems to her view an ephemeral thing, but the
aggregate good of mankind for which she works, eternal.
The beaux of that century of Dr. Johnson’s were great in spite of
their sneers and taunts at the Clarindas and Euphelias and Fidelias,
not on account of them. We have no publication which is to our time
as the “Rambler” was to London in 1753, or the “Spectator,” “Tatler,”
and “Englishman” to Queen Anne’s earlier day. But in what we have let
us not deface any page with misogynous phrase and sentence--jeers or
expression of evil against one-half of humanity. Unsympathetic words
about women who by some individual fortune have become literary drudges
fit ill American lips--which should sing the nobility of any work that
truly helps our kind. These women go about in wind and rain; they sit
in the foul air of offices; they overcome repugnance to coarse and
familiar address; they sometimes stint their food; they are at all
times practising a close economy; with aching flesh and nerves they
often draw their Saturday evening stipend. They are of the sanest and
most human of our kind--laborers daily for their meed of wage, knowing
the sweetness of bread well earned, of work well done, and rest well
won.
Even from the diseased view of a veritable hater of their sex they have
a vast educational influence in the world at large, whether their work
is “authoritative” or “unauthoritative,” according to pronunciamento of
some one who assumes authority to call them “unauthoritative.” It must
not be forgotten--to repeat for clearness’ sake--that men laboring in
these very duties met and disputed every step the women took even in
“unauthoritative” work, using ridicule, caste distinction, and all the
means of intimidation which a power long dominant naturally possesses.
To work for lower wages alone allowed the women to gain employment.
“You harshly blame my strengthlessness and the woman-delicacy of
my body,” exclaims the Antigone of Euripides, according to another
citation of the “Florilegium,” of Stobæus named at the beginning, “but
if I am of understanding mind--that is better than a strong arm.”
Defendants whose case would otherwise go by default need this brief
plea, which their own modesty forbids their uttering, their modesty,
their busy hands and heads, and their Antigone-like love and ἀσθένεια.
They know sympathy is really as large as the world, and that room is
here for other women than those who make dictionaries at so much a mile
as well as for themselves; and for other men than neurotic caterwaulers
and hysterical shriekers like our ancient friend Knox, assuming that
the masculine is the only form of expression, that women have no
right to utter the human voice, and that certain men have up wire
connections with omniscient knowledge and Nature’s designs and God’s
will, and, standing on this pretence, are the dispensers of authority.
“If the greatest poems have not been written by women,” said our Edgar
Poe, with a clearer accent of the American spirit toward women, “it is
because, as yet, the greatest poems have not been written at all.” The
measure is large between the purple-faced zeal of John Knox and the
vivid atavism of our brilliant professor and that luminous vision of
Poe.
“THE GULLET SCIENCE”
A LOOK BACK AND AN ECONOMIC FORECAST
Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen.
ROBERT BURTON
_Sir Anthony Absolute._--It is not to be wondered at, ma’am--all this
is the natural consequence of teaching girls to read. Had I a thousand
daughters, by Heaven! I’d as soon have them taught the black art as
their alphabet!
RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN
“THE GULLET SCIENCE”
A LOOK BACK AND AN ECONOMIC FORECAST
The cook-book is not a modern product. The Iliad is the hungriest book
on earth, and it is the first of our cook-books aside from half-sacred,
half-sanitary directions to the early Aryans and Jews. It is that acme
of poetry, that most picturesque of pictures, that most historical of
histories, that most musical and delicious verse, the Iliad, which
was the first popularly to teach the cooking art--the art in its
simplicity, and not a mere handmaid to sanitation, jurisprudence, or
theology. Through the pages of that great poem blow not only the salt
winds of the Ægean Sea, but also the savor of tender kid and succulent
pig, not to mention whole hectacombs, which delighted the blessed
gods above and strengthened hungry heroes below. To this very day--its
realism is so perfect--we catch the scent of the cooking and see the
appetiteful people eat. The book is half-human, half-divine; and in its
human part the pleasures and the economic values of wholesome fare are
not left out.
No, cook-books are not modern products. They were in Greece later than
Homer. When the Greek states came to the fore in their wonderful art
and literature and the distinction of a free democracy, plain living
characterized nearly all the peoples. The Athenians were noted for
their simple diet. The Spartans were temperate to a proverb, and their
συσσίτια (public meals), later called φειδίτια (spare meals), guarded
against indulgence in eating. To be a good cook was to be banished from
Sparta.
But with the Western Greeks, the Greeks of Sicily and Southern Italy,
it was different--those people who left behind them little record
of the spirit. In Sybaris the cook who distinguished himself in
preparing a public feast--such festivals being not uncommon--received
a crown of gold and the freedom of the games. It was a citizen of that
luxury-loving town who averred, when he tasted the famous black soup,
that it was no longer a wonder the Spartans were fearless in battle,
for any one would readily die rather than live on such a diet. Among
the later Greeks the best cooks, and the best-paid cooks, came from
Sicily; and that little island grew in fame for its gluttons.
There is a Greek book--the Deipnosophistæ--Supper of the “Wise
Men--written by Athenæus--which holds for us much information about
the food and feasting of those old Hellenes. The wise men at their
supposed banquet quote, touching food and cooking, from countless
Greek authors whose works are now lost, but were still preserved in the
time of Athenæus. This, for instance, is from a poem by Philoxenus of
Cythera, who wittily and gluttonously lived at the court of Dionysius
of Syracuse, and wished for a throat three cubits long that the delight
of tasting might be drawn out.[3]