I marvel that men who lay so little stress on the heart, by reason of
the great stress they lay upon the intellect, should use their
intellects to so little purpose in matters so important, and which
come so closely home to their business and bosoms as those we have
been discussing. I marvel that, while they see facts so distinctly,
they have so little skill to trace out causes. Many instances have
been given to show how far more unreasonable, intense, malignant,
vulgar, and venomous is the hatred of their country shown and felt by
Southern women than that evinced by Southern men. It is very commonly
said that they have done more than the men to keep alive the
rebellion. The coarseness and impropriety of their behavior have been
relatively far greater than that of the men. Has any one ever
suggested that the narrowness, the utter insufficiency of their
education, the state of almost absolute pupilage bedizened over with a
gaudy tinsel of tilt and tournament chivalry in which they have been
kept, absolutely incapacitating them for broad views, rational
thinking, or even a refined self-possession in emergencies, had
anything to do with it? In a newspaper published under the auspices of
one of our Sanitary Fairs, a contributor says: "I never saw a nurse
from any hospital, but I asked her the question if the ladies there
worked without jealousy or unkind feeling toward each other? _and I
have not found the first one who could answer 'yes' to that
question_.... I know a gentleman (a noble one, too) who urged his
daughter _not_ to go to the hospitals, 'because,' said he, 'you will
surely get into a muss: it cannot be helped; women cannot be together
without it." Is it indeed an arrangement of Divine Providence, that
women cannot act together without so much bickering, jealousy, petty
domineering, small envies, and venomous quarrels, as to make it
undesirable that they should act together at all? Is magnanimity
impossible to women? Are they incapable of exercising it towards each
other? Or may it not be that their lives have generally so little
breadth, they are so universally absorbed in limited interests, their
"sphere" has been so rigidly circumscribed to their own families, that
when they are set in wider circles, they are like spoiled children? In
the troubles that arise in female conventions and combinations, I do
not see any inherent deficiency of female organization, but every sign
of very serious deficiencies in female education.
Men make merry over the unwillingness of women to acknowledge their
increasing years; over the artifices to which they resort for the
purpose of hiding the encroachments of time; but the reluctance and
the deception are the direct harvest of men's own sowing. It is men,
and nobody else, who are chiefly to blame for the weakness and the
meanness. They have decreed what shall be coin and what counters, and
women do but acknowledge their image and superscription. Exceptions
are not innumerous, but I think every one will confess, upon a
moment's reflection, that in the general apportionment the heroines of
literature are the lovely and delightful young women, and the hatred,
envy, malice, and all uncharitableness are allotted to the old. Hetty
Sorrels are not very common, nor Mrs. Bennetts very uncommon. Why
should not women dread to be thought old, when age is tainted and
taunted? Why should they not fight off its approaches, when it is
indissolubly connected with repulsive traits? Women see themselves
prized and petted, not chiefly for those qualities which age improves,
but for those which it destroys or impairs. And as women are made by
nature to set a high value upon the good opinions of men, and are
warped by a vicious education into setting almost the sole value of
life upon them, they logically cling with the utmost tenacity to that
youth which is their main security for regard. "Youth and beauty" are
the twin deities of song and story. "Youth and beauty" are supposed to
unlock the doors of fate. It is no matter that in real life fact may
not comport with the statements of fiction. No matter that in real
life the strongest power carries the day, whether it be youthful or
aged, fair or frightful. The events of real life have but small radii,
but the ripples of romance circle out over the whole sea of
civilization, and wave succeeds wave till the impression becomes
wellnigh continuous.
(One can hardly suppress a smile, by the way, at the absurdity which
this coupling sometimes presupposes. A man will think to swell your
horror of rebel barbarities by asserting that they spared neither
youth nor beauty, as if you like to be shot any better because you are
old and ugly!)
So with tight-lacing and the new attachment of a _chiropodist_ to
fashionable families. Most men, it is true, harangue against the
former; but if masculine sentiment were really set against
tight-lacing and its results, do you think girls would long make their
dressing-maids sit up waiting their return from balls, lest an
unpractised hand should not unloose the lacings by those short and
easy stages which are necessary to prevent the shock of nature's too
sudden rebound? Or if you plead "not guilty" to this count, do you
believe that girls who have been liberally educated, taught to turn
their eyes to large prospects, large duties, and large hopes, could be
induced so to put themselves to the torture? Was a right-minded and
right-hearted loving and beloved wife, an intelligent and judicious
Christian mother, a wise and kindly woman, ever known voluntarily to
assume a strait-waistcoat? If girls were trained as every living soul
should be trained, would it be necessary to have a "professor" go the
rounds of fine houses in the morning to undo the injuries inflicted by
tight shoes on the previous evening? If a girl were sagaciously
managed, would she not have too much discrimination to suppose that,
when a poet sings of
"Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice,"
she is expected to reduce her feet to the dimensions of mice, or that,
when he announces
"That which her slender waist confined
Shall now my joyful temples bind,"
she is thinking of a slenderness produced by lashing herself to the
bedpost? Be sure a woman will never cramp her body in that way, until
society has cramped her soul and mind to still more unnatural
distortion. Lay the axe unto the root of the tree, if you wish to
accomplish anything; do not merely stand off and throw pebbles at the
fruit.
Society is unsparing in its censure of the girl who boasts of her
"offers." There are few things which men will not sooner forgive than
the revelation of their own rejected proposals. Bayard Taylor makes
Hannah Thurston recoil in disgust at Seth Wattles's hesitating
suggestion: "You,--you won't say anything about this?" "What do you
take me for?" exclaims immaculate womanhood. Why then is a girl's life
made to consist in the abundance of her suitors? It is stamped a shame
for a woman not to receive an offer, and then it is stamped a shame
for her to take away her reproach by revealing that she has received
one. Surely, she is in evil case!
I do not profess any overweening admiration for those qualities of
character which induce the exultant publication of such personal
items; but I do say that men have no right to complain. The natural
results of their own course would not be any more than accomplished,
if "offers" were published in the newspapers along with the deaths and
marriages.
If you really wish women to be magnanimous, catholic, you must grant
to them the conditions of becoming so. Just so long as their souls are
cabined, cribbed, and confined, whether in a palace or in a hovel,
with only such fresh air as a narrow crevice or casement may afford,
they will have but a stunted and unsymmetrical development. You cannot
systematically and deliberately dwarf or repress nine faculties, and
wickedly stimulate one, and that a subordinate one, and then have as
the result a perfect woman. You may force Nature, but she will have
her revenges. He that offendeth in one point, is guilty of all. The
blow that you aim at the head, not only makes the whole head sick, but
the whole heart faint. When you have brought women to the point of
writing such babble as,
"We poor women, feeble-natured,
Large of heart, in wisdom small,
Who the world's incessant battle
Cannot understand at all," &c., &c, &c.,
do you think you have laid the foundation for solid character? Lay
aside your alternate weakness and severity, your silly coddling and
your equally silly cautioning, and permit a woman to be a human being.
Let the free winds have free access to her, bringing the fragrance of
June and the frostiness of December. Fling wide open all the portals,
that the sacred soul may go in and out as God decreed. Let every power
which God has bestowed have free course to run and be glorified, and
you shall truly find before long that the pleasure of the Lord shall
prosper in the hands of women.
If the weakness and ignorance and frivolity of which I have spoken be
natural, as it is insisted, if the heaven-born instincts of women do,
as you in effect asseverate, lead women to devote themselves
exclusively to all manner of materialism and pettinesses, and to be
content with what sustenance they can find in the crumbs of love that
fall from their husbands' tables; if it is unnatural and unwomanly, as
you say it is, to have other inclinations and aspirations, and to
experience any personal or social discontent,--why do you say so much
to urge them to such devotion and content? People are not largely
given to doing unnatural things. They do not need incentives,
strenuous persuasion, labored and reiterated arguments, to induce them
to do what their hearts by creation incline them to do; nor do they
need to be held back by main force from that to which they have no
natural leaning. Nobody builds a dam to make water run down hill. No
tunnelling nor blasting of rocks is necessary to lure rivers to the
ocean. No urging and coaxing must be resorted to before the
parent-robins build a nest and gather food for their young. But the
instincts of women are as strong, the nature of women is as marked, as
those of birds, and there is no need of your counselling them to walk
in the paths which God has appointed for their feet. No. You do not
really believe what you are saying. You feel, if you do not know,--you
have a dim, instinctive sense that the life which you appoint to women
is not their natural life. It crushes and deforms their nature
continually, and continually Nature bursts out in violent resistance,
and continually with shriek and din and clamor you strive to frighten
her back into her narrow torture-house, with a success all too great.
There seems to lurk in the masculine breast an unmanly fear lest the
development of the female mind should be fatal to the superiority of
the male mind. But a superiority which must prolong its existence by
the enforcement of ignorance is of a very ignoble sort. If, to
preserve his relative position, man must, by persuasion or by law,
forbid to women opportunities for education and a field for action,
together with moral support in obtaining the one and contesting in the
other, he pays to the female mind a greater compliment, and heaps upon
his own character a greater reproach, than the highest female
attainments could do. He shows that he dares not risk a fair trial. If
she cannot rival him, the sooner she makes the attempt, and incurs the
failure, the sooner will she revert to her old position, and the
sooner will peace be restored. The very discouragement by which man
surrounds her shows that he does not believe in the original and
inherent necessity of her present position. If this counsel be of
women merely, it will come to naught of itself. You need not bring up
so much rhetoric against it. But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow
it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God.
There is another fear, equally honest, but more honorable, or rather
less dishonorable. There is a belief, apparently, that the womanly
character somehow needs the restraints of existing customs. It is
feared that a sudden rush of science to the female brain would produce
asphyxia in the female heart. It is feared that the study of
philosophy, the higher mathematics, and the ancient languages would
unsex women,--would destroy the gentleness, the tenderness, the
softness, the yieldingness, the sweet and endearing qualities which
traditionally belong to them. They would lose all the graces of their
sex, and become, say men, as one of us.
From such a fate, good Lord! deliver us. I agree most heartily with
men in the opinion, that no calamity could be more fatal to woman than
a growing likeness to men; but no cloud so big as the smallest baby's
smallest finger-nail portends it. Healthy development never can
produce unhealthy results. Nature is never at war with herself. The
good and wise and all-powerful Creator never created a faculty to be
destroyed, a faculty whose utmost cultivation, if harmonious and not
discordant, should be injurious. He made all things beautiful and
beneficial in their proper places. It is only arbitrary contraction
and expansion that produce mischief. It is the neglect of one thing
and the undue prominence given to another that destroys symmetry and
causes disaster.
There has been so little experiment made in female education, that we
must reason somewhat abstractly; yet we are not left, even in this
early stage, without witnesses.
On the 26th of May, 1863, died Mrs. O. W. Hitchcock, wife of one of
the Presidents of Amherst College. A writer, who professes to have
known her well, gives the following account of her:--
"Born in Amherst, March 8th, 1796, fitted for college and accomplished
alike in the fine arts and the exact sciences in an age when the
standard of female education was comparatively low, associated with
Dr. Hitchcock, then unknown to the public, in the instruction of
Deerfield Academy, and there the instrument of her future husband's
conversion, _filling_ to the full the office of a pastor's wife for
five years, in Conway, Massachusetts, and for the rest of her long
life sharing all her husband's labors, sorrows, joys, and honors,
while at the same time she was the centre of every private, social,
charitable, and public movement of which it was suitable for a lady to
be the centre, she passed away from us by a death as serenely
beautiful as the evening on which she died, May 26, 1863, at the age
of sixty-seven, leaving a vacancy not only in the home and the hearts
of her bereaved husband and afflicted children, but in the community
and the wide circle of her acquaintance, which can be filled by none
but Him who comforted the mourning family at Bethany. If strangers
would form some idea of what Mrs. Hitchcock was, especially as a _help
meet_ for her honored husband, and if friends would refresh their
memory of a truly 'virtuous woman,' let them read, as it were over her
still open grave, the dedication, by Dr. Hitchcock, of his 'Religion
and Geology' to his 'beloved wife.' Never did husband pay to wife a
higher or _juster_ tribute of respect and affection.
"The following is the dedication referred to. It was written in
1851:--
"'_To my beloved Wife._ Both gratitude and affection prompt me
to dedicate these Lectures to you. To your kindness and
self-denying labors I have been mainly indebted for the
ability and leisure to give any successful attention to
scientific pursuits. Early should I have sunk under the
pressure of feeble health, nervous despondency, poverty, and
blighted hopes, had not your sympathies and cheering counsels
sustained me. And during the last thirty years of professional
labors, how little could I have done in the cause of science,
had you not, in a great measure, relieved me of the cares of a
numerous family! Furthermore, while I have described
scientific facts with the pen only, how much more vividly have
they been portrayed by your pencil! And it is peculiarly
appropriate that your name should be associated with mine in
any literary effort where the theme is geology; since your
artistic skill has done more than my voice to render that
science attractive to the young men whom I have instructed. I
love especially to connect your name with an effort to defend
and illustrate that religion which I am sure is dearer to you
than everything else. I know that you would forbid this public
allusion to your labors and sacrifices, did I not send it
forth to the world before it meets your eye. But I am
unwilling to lose this opportunity of bearing a testimony
which both justice and affection urge me to give. In a world
where much is said of female deception and inconstancy, I
desire to testify that one man at least has placed implicit
confidence in woman, and has not been disappointed. Through
many checkered scenes have we passed together, both on the
land and the sea, at home and in foreign countries; and now
the voyage of life is almost ended. The ties of earthly
affection, which have so long united us in uninterrupted
harmony and happiness, will soon be sundered. But there are
ties which death cannot break; and we indulge the hope that by
them we shall be linked together and to the throne of God
through eternal ages. In life and in death I abide
"'Your affectionate husband,
"'EDWARD HITCHCOCK.'"