emancipates woman from the intellectual control of the priesthood and
plunges her into the midst of the doubts and questionings of sceptical
man, is of course plain enough. We feel no particular surprise when the
attendance of girls at the public classes of a Professor is denounced as
tending to "despoil woman of her native modesty, to drag her before the
public, to turn her from domestic life and duties, to puff her up with
vain and false science." It is the adhesion of woman to this view of the
case which puzzles us a little at first. We recall her aspirations after
a higher training, and her bitter contempt for the unhappy censors who
venture to remind her of certain primary truths respecting puddings and
pies.
But the same problem meets us in other halls than those of the Vatican.
Everywhere woman poses herself as a social martyr, as the victim of
conventional bonds, as reduced to intellectual torpor by the refusal of
intellectual facilities and intellectual distinctions, as excluded by
sheer masculine tyranny from the larger sphere of thought and action
which the world presents, as chained, like Prometheus, to the rock of
home by necessity and force. It is only when some amiable enthusiast is
taken in by all this admirable acting, and ventures to propose a plan
for her deliverance, that one finds how wonderfully contented, after
all, woman is with her bonds and her prison-house.
The philosopher who comes forward with his pet theory of the
enfranchisement of woman, who recognizes the necessity for loosening the
matrimonial tie, for securing to woman her property and its
responsibilities, for levelling all educational differences and
abolishing all social distinctions between the sexes, only finds himself
snubbed for his pains. He is calmly assured that home is the sphere of
woman, and the care of a family the first of woman's duties; the
domestic martyr of yesterday proves from Proverbs and the _Princess_
that marriage is the completion of woman, and that her office is but to
wed the "noble music" of her feminine nature to the "noble words" of the
nature of her spouse.
In a word, woman knows her own business a great deal better than her
friends. She does not believe in the intellectual equality which she is
always preaching about, and when M. Duruy offers it, a shriek of horror
goes up from half the mothers of France. What she does believe is that,
in seeking the educational Will-o'-the-Wisp, she may lose the solid
pudding of domestic supremacy, and domestic supremacy is worth all the
sciences in the world. Her position, as the Vatican suggests, is a
religious, not an intellectual one, and her policy lies in an alliance
with the priesthood, whose position is one with her own. So woman makes
her submission to the Papacy, and the Pope snubs M. Duruy.
It is amusing to see how limited, after all, a man's power, the power
even of the stoutest of men, is in his own house, and to watch the
simple process by which woman establishes the limitation. It consists
simply in asserting a specially religious character for her sex. She is
never tired of telling us that the sentiments and sympathies of the
feminine breast have a greater affinity for divine things than the
rougher masculine nature; that her instincts are purer, more poetic,
more refined; that her moral nature has a certain bloom upon it which
contact with the world has brushed off from ours; that while we coarser
creatures are driven to reason out our spiritual conclusions, she
arrives at them by an intuitive process reserved for the angelic nature
and her own.
And on the whole man accepts the claim. He is bribed perhaps into
allowing it by his own desire to have something at home better and purer
than himself. It is a startling thing perhaps to say, but in ninety-nine
homes out of a hundred real humility of heart is to be found in the
husband, not in the wife. The husband has very little belief in his own
religion, in his unworldliness and spirituality; but he has an immense
belief in the spirituality and the devotion of the being who fronts him
over the breakfast-table. He does not profess to understand the
character of her piety, her lore of sermons, the severity with which she
visits the household after family prayers, or the extreme interest with
which she peruses the geographical chapters of the Book of Joshua. But
his incapacity to understand it is mixed with a certain awe. He never
ventures to disturb, by "shadowed hint" of his own thoughts about the
matter, the "simple views" of his spouse. He adroitly diverts the
conversation of his dinner-table when it drifts near to the fatal
pigeons of Colenso.
Sometimes he bends to a little gentle deceit, and wins a smile of
approval by turning up at an early Litany, or by bringing home the
newest photograph of a colonial metropolitan. In one way or another he
practically acknowledges, like King Cnut, that there is a bound to his
empire. Over bonnet bills and butchers' bills he may exercise a certain
nominal control. It is possible that years of struggle might enable him
to alter by half an inch the length of his wife's skirt, if fashion had
not shortened it in the interval. But over the whole domain of moral and
religious thought and action he is absolutely powerless. Woman meets
him, if he attempts any interference, as Christian martyrs have always
met their persecutors, with outstretched neck and on her knees. She
prays for his return to better thoughts, and the whole household knows
she is praying for him. She listens to all his remonstrances, professes
obedience on every point but the one he wants, and keeps her finger all
the time on the particular page of Thomas a Kempis at which the
remonstrance found her. Before such an adversary, there is no shame in a
defeat.
It is not that on all points of moral or religious life woman professes
herself above criticism; to the criticisms of her religious teachers,
for instance, we have seen her singularly obsequious. Woman and the
priesthood in fact understand one another perfectly, and a tacit
convention forces woman to submit to censures so long as those censures
are reserved for one topic alone. To religion woman makes the sacrifice
of her dress. It is not that she seriously intends to make the slightest
amendments, or to withdraw before the exhortations of her spiritual
guide into poke bonnets and print muslins. It is a sufficient mark of
self-sacrifice if she listens patiently to a diatribe against butterfly
bonnets, trains, or crinolines, or even thanks her pastor for
describing evening costume as a "propaganda of the devil." The very
minuteness, in fact, of censures such as these, is a flattering proof of
the spiritual importance of even the most trivial details in the life of
woman.
When Father Ignatius informed mankind that the angels bent down from
heaven to weep over the flirtations of Rotten Row, the smallest child on
her pony felt her ride, and her chatter over her palings, invested with
certain celestial importance. Criticisms, too, so strictly reserved for
the outside of the platter, are an immense compliment to the inside, and
it is something to listen to half an hour of spiritual reproof, and to
be able to pass oneself triumphantly as a "Fair Soul" after all. There
is nothing revolutionary in a mere border-skirmish, which leaves the
field of woman's sway not an inch the narrower. It is another matter
when M. Duruy calls on Hermione to come down from her pedestal of
worship, and in the long run to abdicate. For equality of education
would, of course, even if it did nothing else, make mince-meat of the
spiritual pretensions of woman. It would be impossible to preserve a
domestic Papacy with a more than papal weakness for dogmatism and
infallibility, if woman is to come down into school and share the common
training of men.
If women are to be educated precisely as men are educated, they will
share the reasonings, the scepticisms, the critical doubts of men. There
will be no refuge for praying sisters in that world of "simple views"
from which they come forth at present furnished with a social and
domestic decalogue whose sacredness it is impious to doubt or to
dispute. In other words, the power which woman now exercises will simply
crumble to dust. Whether she might gain a power higher and more
beneficial to the world and to herself, is a matter which we are not now
discussing. What is perfectly certain is that such a power would not be
the power she exercises now. The moral censorship of woman over woman,
for example, would at once pass away. It rests on the belief that women
have higher moral faculties than other beings, and that their treason to
this higher form of moral humanity which is exhibited in womanhood is a
treason of deeper dye than an offence against morality itself.
An erring sister sins against something greater than goodness--she sins
against the theory of woman, against the faith that woman is a creature
who soars high above the weaknesses of man and the common nature of man.
Long ages of self-assertion have penetrated woman with the conviction of
her worth; she is the object of her own especial worship, and the sharp
stinging justice she deals out to social offenders is not merely a proof
of the spiritual nature of her rule, but the vindication of her
self-idolatry. Again, she would forfeit the peculiar influence which she
is every day exerting in a greater degree on the course of religion and
the Church. The hypothesis of a superior spiritual nature in woman lies
at the root, for instance, of the great modern institution of
sisterhoods, and of the peculiar relation which is slowly attaching his
Paula and his Eustochium to every Jerome of our day.
But the main loss of power would lie in the family itself. It would be
no longer possible to front the political dogmatist of the hearth-rug
with a social and religious dogmatism as brusque and unreasonable as his
own. The balance of power which woman has slowly built up in home would
be roughly disturbed, and new forms of social and domestic life would
emerge from the chaos of such a revolution. From sweeping changes of
this sort the very temper of woman, her innate conservatism, her want of
originative power, turns her away. It is more comfortable to bask in the
glow of Papal sunshine, to figure in Allocutions from the Vatican as
"the pure and shining light of the house, the glory of her husband, the
education of her family, a bond of peace, an emblem of piety;" and to
let Monsieur Duruy and his insidious Professors alone.
MODERN MOTHERS.
No human affection has been so passionately praised as maternal love,
and none is supposed to be so holy or so strong. Even the poetic aspect
of the instinct which inspires the young with their dearest dreams does
not rank so high as this, and neither lover's love nor conjugal love,
neither filial affection nor fraternal, comes near the sanctity or
grandeur of the maternal instinct. But all women are not equally rich in
this great gift; and, to judge by appearances, English women are at this
moment particularly poor. It may seem a harsh thing to say, but it is
none the less true--society has put maternity out of fashion, and the
nursery is nine times out of ten a place of punishment, not of pleasure,
to the modern mother.
Two points connected with this subject are of growing importance at this
present time--the one is the increasing disinclination of married women
to be mothers at all; the other, the large number of those who, being
mothers, will not, or cannot, nurse their own children. In the mad race
after pleasure and excitement now going on all through English society
the tender duties of motherhood have become simply disagreeable
restraints, and the old feeling of the blessing attending the quiver
full is exchanged for one expressive of the very reverse. With some of
the more intellectual and less instinctive sort, maternity is looked on
as a kind of degradation; and women of this stamp, sensible enough in
everything else, talk impatiently among themselves of the base
necessities laid on them by men and nature, and how hateful to them is
everything connected with their characteristic duties.
This wild revolt against nature, and specially this abhorrence of
maternity, is carried to a still greater extent by American women, with
grave national consequences resulting; but though we have not yet
reached the Transatlantic limit, the state of the feminine feeling and
physical condition among ourselves will disastrously affect the future
unless something can be done to bring our women back to a healthier tone
of mind and body. No one can object to women declining marriage
altogether in favor of a voluntary self-devotion to some project or
idea; but, when married, it is a monstrous doctrine to hold that they
are in any way degraded by the consequences, and that natural functions
are less honorable than social excitements. The world can get on without
balls and morning calls, it can get on too without amateur art and
incorrect music, but not without wives and mothers; and those times in a
nation's history when women have been social ornaments rather than
family home-stays have ever been times of national decadence and of
moral failure.
Part of this growing disinclination is due to the enormous expense
incurred now by having children. As women have ceased to take any
active share in their own housekeeping, whether in the kitchen or the
nursery, the consequence is an additional cost for service, which is a
serious item in the yearly accounts. Women who, if they lived a rational
life, could and would nurse their children, now require a wet-nurse, or
the services of an experienced woman who can "bring up by hand," as the
phrase is; women who once would have had one nursemaid now have two; and
women who, had they lived a generation ago, would have had none at all,
must in their turn have a wretched young creature without thought or
knowledge, into whose questionable care they deliver what should be the
most sacred obligation and the most jealously-guarded charge they
possess.
It is rare if, in any section of society where hired service can be had,
mothers give more than a superficial personal superintendence to nursery
or school-room--a superintendence about as thorough as their
housekeeping, and as efficient. The one set of duties is quite as
unfashionable as the other, and money is held to relieve from the
service of love as entirely as it relieves from the need of labor. And
yet, side by side with this personal relinquishment of natural duties,
has grown up, perhaps as an instinctive compensation, an amount of
attention and expensive management specially remarkable. There never was
a time when children were made of so much individual importance in the
family, yet in so little direct relation with the mother--never a time
when maternity did so little and social organization so much.
Juvenile parties; the kind of moral obligation apparently felt by all
parents to provide heated and unhealthy amusements for their boys and
girls during the holidays; extravagance in dress, following the same
extravagance among their mothers; the increasing cost of education; the
fuss and turmoil generally made over them--all render them real burdens
in a house where money is not too plentiful, and where every child that
comes is not only an additional mouth to feed and an additional body to
clothe, but a subtractor by just so much from the family fund of
pleasure.
Even where there is no lack of money, the unavoidable restraints of the
condition, for at least some months in the year, more than
counterbalance any sentimental delight to be found in maternity. For,
before all other things in life, maternity demands unselfishness in
women; and this is just the one virtue of which women have least at this
present time--just the one reason why motherhood is at a discount, and
children are regarded as inflictions instead of blessings.
Few middle-class women are content to bring up their children with the
old-fashioned simplicity of former times, and to let them share and
share alike in the family, with only so much difference in their
treatment as is required by their difference of state; fewer still are
willing to share in the labor and care that must come with children in
the easiest-going household, and so to save in the expenses by their own
work. The shabbiest little wife, with her two financial ends always
gaping and never meeting, must have her still shabbier little drudge to
wheel her perambulator, so as to give her an air of fine-ladyhood and
being too good for work; and the most indolent housekeeper, whose work
is done in half an hour, cannot find time to go into the gardens or the
square with nurse and the children, so that she may watch over them
herself and see that they are properly cared for.
In France, where it is the fashion for mother and _bonne_ to be together
both out of doors and at home, at least the children are not neglected
nor ill-treated, as is too often the case with us; and if they are
improperly managed, according to our ideas, the fault is in the system,
not in the want of maternal supervision. Here it is a very rare case
indeed when the mother accompanies the nurse and children; and those
days when she does are nursery gala-days, to be talked of and remembered
for weeks after. As they grow older, she may take them occasionally when
she visits her more intimate friends; but this is for her own pleasure,
not their good, and is quite beside the question of going with them to
see that they are properly cared for.
It is to be supposed that each mother has a profound belief in her own
nurse, and that when she condemns the neglect and harshness shown to
other children by the servants in charge, she makes a mental reservation
in favor of her own, and is very sure that nothing improper or cruel
takes place in _her_ nursery. Her children do not complain, and she
always tells them to come to her when anything is amiss; on which
negative evidence she satisfies her soul, and makes sure that all is
right, because she is too neglectful to see if anything is wrong. She
does not remember that her children do not complain because they dare
not.
Dear and beautiful as all mammas are to the small fry in the nursery,
they are always in a certain sense Junos sitting on the top of Mount
Olympus, making occasional gracious and benign descents, but practically
too far removed for useful interference; while nurse is an ever-present
power, capable of sly pinches and secret raids, as well as of more open
oppression--a power, therefore, to be propitiated, if only with the
subservience of a Yezidi, too much afraid of the Evil One to oppose him.
Wherefore nurse is propitiated, failing the protection of the glorified
creature just gone to her grand dinner in a cloud of lace and a blaze of
jewels; and the first lesson taught the youthful Christian in short
frocks or knickerbockers is not to carry tales down stairs, and by no
means to let mamma know what nurse desires should be kept secret.
A great deal of other evil, beside these sly beginnings of deceit, is
taught in the nursery; a great deal of vulgar thought, of superstitious
fear, of class coarseness. As, indeed, how must it not be when we think
of the early habits and education of the women taken into the nursery to
give the first strong indelible impressions to the young souls under
their care. Many a man with a ruined constitution, and many a woman
with shattered nerves, can trace back the beginning of their sorrow to
those neglected childish days of theirs when nurses had it all their own
way because mamma never looked below the surface, and was satisfied with
what was said instead of seeing for herself what was done. It is an odd
state of society which tolerates this transfer of a mother's holiest and
most important duty into the hands of a mere stranger, hired by the
month, and never thoroughly known.
Where the organization of the family is of the patriarchal kind--old
retainers marrying and multiplying about the central home, and carrying
on a warm personal attachment from generation to generation--this
transfer of maternal care has not such bad effects; but in our present
way of life, without love or real relationship between masters and
servants, and where service is rendered for just so much money down, and
for nothing more noble, it is a hideous system, and one that makes the
modern mother utterly inexplicable. We wonder where her mere instincts
can be, not to speak of her reason, her love, her conscience, her pride.
Pleasure and self-indulgence have indeed gained tremendous power, in
these later days, when they can thus break down the force of the
strongest law of nature, a law stronger even than that of
self-preservation.
Folly is the true capillary attraction of the moral world, and
penetrates every stratum of society; and the folly of extravagant attire
in the drawing-room is reproduced in the nursery. Not content with
bewildering men's minds, and emptying their husband's purses for the
enhancement of their own charms, women do the same by their children,
and the mother who leaves the health, and mind, and temper, and purity
of her offspring in the keeping of a hired nurse takes especial care of
the color and cut of the frocks and petticoats; and always with the same
strain after show, and the same endeavor to make a little look a mickle.
The children of five hundred a year must look like those of a thousand;
and those of a thousand must rival the _tenue_ of little lords and
ladies born in the purple; while the amount of money spent in the
tradesman-class is a matter of real amazement to those let into the
secret.
Simplicity of diet, too, is going out with simplicity of dress, with
simplicity of habits generally; and stimulants and concentrated food are
now the rule in the nursery, where they mar as many constitutions as
they make. More than one child of which we have had personal knowledge
has yielded to disease induced by too stimulating and too heating a
diet; but artificial habits demand corresponding artificiality of food,
and so the candle burns at both ends instead of one. Again, as for the
increasing inability of educated women to nurse their children, even if
desirous of doing so, that also is a bodily condition brought about by
an unwholesome and unnatural state of life. Late hours, high living,
heated blood, and vitiated atmosphere are the causes of this alarming
physical defect. But it would be too much to expect that women should
forego their pleasurable indulgences, or do anything disagreeable to
their senses, for the sake of their offspring. They are not famous for
looking far ahead on any matter, but to expect them to look beyond
themselves, and their own present generation, is to expect the great
miracle that never comes.
THE PRIESTHOOD OF WOMAN.
If the female philosophers who plead for the emancipation of their sex
would stoop from the sublimer heights of Woman's Rights to arguments of
mere human expediency, we fancy they might find some of their critics
disposed to listen in a more compliant mood. We can imagine a very good
point being made out of the simple fact of waste, by some feminine
advocate who would point out in a businesslike way how much more work
the world might get through if only woman had fair play. Waste is always
a pitiful and disagreeable thing, and the waste of whatever reserved
power may lie at present unused in the breasts of half a million of old
maids, for instance, is a thought which, with so much to be done around
us, it is somewhat uncomfortable to dwell much upon. The argument, too,
might be neatly enforced, just at present, by illustrations from a
somewhat unexpected quarter.