Another truth, which seems to have been forgotten, and which needs to
be newly revealed to this generation, is, that though manhood and
womanhood are two distinct things, the humanity which underlies them
is one and indivisible. We are told that God made man male and female,
but we are first told that God made man in his own image. There is no
distinction. Woman is made in God's image just as much as man; and it
is just as wicked to deface that image in her as in him. It is defaced
when her powers are crippled, and her organs enfeebled, whether it be
by turning her toes under till they touch the heels, and then
bandaging them so, or whether that process be enacted on her mind. If
a boy should stand god-like erect, in native honor clad, so should a
girl. She may not be as tall, but she may be as straight. The palm
cannot turn into an oak, and has not the smallest desire to turn into
an oak; but there is no reason why it should not be the best kind of a
palm,--and in the deserts of this world a fruitful palm cheereth the
heart of both God and man.
Read, in the light of these facts, a "sonnet" and its accompanying
comments, which I chanced to find while looking over a twelve-year-old
number of a magazine which stands among the first in America.
"The learned 'science-women' of the day, the 'deep, deep-blue
stockings' of the time, are fairly hit off in the ensuing satirical
sonnet:--
'I idolize the LADIES! They are fairies,
That spiritualize this world of ours;
From heavenly hot-beds most delightful flowers,
Or choice cream-cheeses from celestial dairies,
But learning, in its barbarous seminaries,
Gives the dear creatures many wretched hours,
And on their gossamer intellect sternly showers
SCIENCE, with all its horrid accessaries.
Now, seriously, the only things, I think,
In which young ladies should instructed be,
Are--stocking-mending, love, and cookery!--
Accomplishments that very soon will sink,
Since Fluxions now, and Sanscrit conversation,
Always form part of female education!'
"Something good in the way of inculcation may be educed from this
rather biting sonnet. If woman so far forgets her 'mission,' as it is
common to term it now-a-days, as to choose those accomplishments whose
only recommendation is that they are 'the vogue,' in preference to
acquisitions which will fit her to be a better wife and mother, she
becomes a fair subject for the shafts of the satirical censor."
Leaving "gossamer intellects" to educe whatever of good in the way of
inculcation may be found in this biting sonnet, and in the equally
mordacious remarks of the mulierivorous commentator, let me refer to
another paragraph in which popular opinion is crystallized. It is
found in a book printed and published in London, and coming to me
through several hands from the library of an English nobleman, but a
book so atrocious in its sentiments, and so feeble in its expression,
that I will not give the small impulse to its circulation which the
mention of its name might impart: "In woman, weakness itself is the
true charter of power; it is an absolute attraction, and by no means a
defect; it is the mysterious tie between the sexes, a tie as
irresistible as it is captivating, and begetting an influence peculiar
to itself." This is the fancy sketch. One of our best writers has
drawn the true portrait of such a woman: a woman "to be the idol of
her school-boy son, to be remembered in his gray old age with a
reverential tenderness as a glorified saint, but a woman also to drive
that same son to desperation in actual life by her absorption in
trifles, by her weak credulity,... by her inability to sympathize with
his ambition, to enter into his difficulties, or to share in the
faintest degree his aspirations."
"In short," proceeds the advocate of the oak-and-vine humanity, "_all
independence is unfeminine_; the more dependent that sex becomes, the
more will it be cherished."
Independence is unfeminine: what a pity that starvation and insanity
are not unfeminine also! Independence is unfeminine, but what
provision is made for dependence? Look about the world. How many men
are there, dependence on whom would be agreeable to a sensitive woman?
and what shall the women do who have nobody to be dependent on,--the
women without husbands or fathers, and the women with drunken,
thriftless, extravagant, miserly, feeble or incapable husbands or
fathers? When every woman in the country is placed above the
possibility of want, it will be time enough to talk about the sweets
of dependence; but so long as women are liable, and are actually
reduced to want, to shame, to ignominy, to starvation, and degradation
and death, through the meanness, the misconduct, or the inability of
their natural protectors, it will be well at least to connive at their
efforts to help themselves. An independent woman may be a nuisance,
but I think rather less so than an immoral woman, or an insane woman,
or a dead woman in the bottom of a canal in Lowell, or a live woman
making shirts for Milk Street merchants in Boston, at five cents
apiece. O men, you who shut your eyes to the stern and awful facts of
life, and rhapsodize over your fine-spun theories, what will you say
when the Lord maketh inquisition for blood? In that great and terrible
day that shall open the books of judgment, that shall wrest from the
earth and the sea the secrets which are in them, when the dead women
come forth from their suicidal graves, when they swarm up from under
the river-bridges, when they pour out from the gateways of hell, will
it seem to you then a wise and righteous thing that you branded
independence as unfeminine?
Apart from the bearings of this doctrine, one word as to its facts.
There are two kinds of dependence,--the one of love, the other of
necessity. Each may comprise the other, and all is well. But each may
exist without the other, and then half is ill. The first is a delight.
The second is a dread. The first is a delight,--but no more to woman
than to man, for though the matters in which they are dependent
differ, the dependence itself is mutual, and mutually dear and
precious. Nobody need enforce it by argument. It commends itself by
its own inherent sweetness. But the second is an evil, and only an
evil under the sun,--a state which no man and no woman of any spirit
will for a moment willingly endure. Dependence is a joy only where it
is a boon; other wise it is a burning torture if there is any soul to
feel.
But masculine deprecation of feminine independence is not entirely
owing to a tender regard for the preservation unimpaired of feminine
loveliness. Men think if women strike out in a career of their own,
the matter of securing and disposing of a wife may not be quite the
easy thing it is at present.
They now have things their own way. The world is all before them where
to choose. They have only to walk leisurely on, and it is O whistle
and I'll come to you, my lad. You think I put it too strongly: that is
because you are looking into the bucket. I am speaking of the
atmosphere. You have only to listen to the usual talk of usual people
in villages and cities, and to the floating literature. You are not to
take the intellectual in the one, nor the immortal in the other, for
their rills spring from deeper sources, and represent the individual.
It is the flitting, the ephemeral, the stories that Maggie Marigold
and Kittie Katnip print in the county papers; it is the talk that Mrs.
Smith and Mrs. Jones have about Nancy Briggs; it is the women in the
novels who are not the heroines,--these give the best photograph of
actual popular opinion, and these give you six women intriguing for
one man. It is not surprising that at first sight men should think it
a fine thing to have a whole bazaar of beauty to choose from, with the
market so glutted that the goods will be sold at prices to suit the
purchasers. It is not necessary to be very good or very great, to win
the prize. There is no prize to be won. It is only pick and choose.
But have men no misgivings? Is necessity the surest warrant of
adaptation? Are men conscious that their assumption is, that they are
so unattractive, and the marriage yoke so heavy, that women will not
endure either unless they are left without any other resource? Is it
pleasant to reflect that they cannot trust themselves to woo, but that
girls must be reduced to the alternative of marriage or nothing? What
pleasure can there be in a victory so easily gained? I know a man who
says the reason why he married his wife was, because she was the only
girl in the town whom he was not sure of beforehand. With nothing to
do, women are as beggars by the wayside, holding up their feeble hands
to the passer, and entreating, "We will eat our own bread and wear our
own apparel: only let us be called by thy name to take away our
reproach." Is this pleasant to think of? Does it flatter a man's
self-love? Would it not be more agreeable for a husband to suppose
that he is his wife's choice and not--Hobson's?
Let boarding-school anniversary orators and Mother's Magazine editors
trust more in nature, and make themselves easy. Providence is never at
a loss. There is not the slightest danger that marriage will fall into
disuse through the absorption of female interests in other directions.
If every girl in the world were independent, full mistress of herself,
she would not be any more disinclined to marriage than she is now. She
would not hang upon its skirts, dragging them into the mud, with such
a helpless, desperate death-clutch as now. She would not be at the
mercy of every schemer, every speculator, every unprincipled,
unscrupulous manikin, who knows no better use for angels than to wash
the dishes. She would not be such an article of traffic, such a beast
of burden, such a tame, spiritless, long-suffering, sly little
sycophant, as she too often is now. There is not one woman in a
million who would not be married, if--I borrow a phrase from the
popular, pestilent patois, but I transfigure it with its highest
meaning--if she could get a chance. How do I know? Just as I know that
the stars are now shining in the sky, though it is high noon. I never
saw a star at midday, but I know it is the nature of stars to shine in
the sky, and of the sky to hold its stars. Genius or fool, rich or
poor, beauty or the beast, if marriage were what it should be, what
God meant it to be, what even with the world's present possibilities
it might be, it would be the Elysium, the sole complete Elysium, of
woman, yes, and of man. Greatness, glory, usefulness, happiness, await
her otherwhere; but here alone all her powers, all her being, can find
full play. No condition, no character even, can quite hide the gleam
of the sacred fire; but on the household hearth it joins the warmth of
earth to the hues of heaven. Brilliant, dazzling, vivid, a beacon and
a blessing, her light may be, but only a happy home blends the
prismatic rays into a soft serene whiteness, that floods the world
with divine illumination. Without wifely and motherly love, a part of
her nature must remain unclosed,--a spring shut up, a fountain sealed;
but a thousand times better that it should remain unclosed than that
it should be rudely rent open, or opened only to be defiled. A
thousand times better that the vestal fire should burn forever on the
inner shrine than that it should be brought out to boil the pot. But
the pot must boil, you say, and so it must; but with oak-wood and
shavings, not with beaten olive-oil.
This it is that I denounce,--not the use, but the abuse, of sacred
things. I want girls to be saved from sacrilege. I do not want them to
lay open their lives to spoliation. I want every woman to fill her
heart with hopes and plans and purposes; and if a man will marry her,
let him be so strong as to break down all barriers, check the whole
flood-tide of her life, and sweep it around himself. If a woman is
worth having, she is worth winning. Jacob served seven years for
Rachel and seven more, and they seemed unto him but a few days for the
love he had to her. Shiver and scatter the wan, weak attachments that
dare to call themselves _love_. Scorn for this frothy, green whey that
stands for the wine of life! Better that girls should be pirated away
as the rough-handed Romans won their Sabine wives, than that a man
should have but to touch the tree with his cane as he walks through
the orchard, and down comes the ready-ripe fruit. In Von Fink's fiery
wooing of Lenore, I hear the right trumpet-ring: "With rifle and
bullet I have bought your stormy heart." I would have a woman marry,
not because it is the only thing that offers, but because a
magnificence sweeps by, in whose glorious sun her pale stars faint and
fade. Her soul shall be filled and fired with the heavenly radiance.
All her dross shall be consumed, and all her gold refined. She shall
go to her marriage-feast as Zenobia went to Rome, crowned with
flowers, but bound with golden chains, a conquered captive, and the
banner over her shall be love. I would have her go obedient, not to
the requirements of a false and fatal materialism, naming itself with
the names of morality and womanhood, but to the unerring instincts of
her own nature. She shall not fly to the only refuge from the vacuum
and despair of her life; but her great heart and her strong hands
shall be wrenched from their bent by the mysterious force of an
irresistible magnetism. When you have a character that can so command,
a love that can so control, you have set up on earth the pillars of
Heaven, and redemption draweth nigh.