the Federation idea for the woman who can afford it, and who has
always dressed well, to appear elegantly gowned at the conventions?
Inconsistency would lie in the discarding of her usual apparel for the
time being, and the substitution of plainer garments, and by so doing she
would prove conclusively that she was not really democratic.
Should Robert of Lincoln’s Quaker wife—pretty and sensible and plain and
brown—wish to change the brilliant plumage of the oriole when she flits
into her range of vision? I think not; it would not be natural or fair or
kind. And is it necessary in order to be effective in social service, in
order to be consistent, in order to reach fulness of power, that we be
so serious about it all? I like the expression which one of our ablest
women used when she spoke of working “in gay self-forgetfulness.” My
mother used to tell me that the best-dressed women were those who, having
donned their pretty clothes and satisfied themselves that they were all
right, thought no more about them, but went out into company with other
women with no more consciousness of clothes than the flowers and birds
seem to have of their colors and music. It is true that we should work
hard for what is most dear to us, but not so seriously that we cannot see
God’s beautiful sunshine and brilliant coloring of sky and field.
And so I contend, from a purely æsthetic standpoint, for the continuation
of the wearing of pretty gowns and rare jewels by the possessors of them.
Sidney Lanier, in “My Springs,” one of the poems addressed to his wife,
after speaking of the “loves” she held for everything in the great world,
says:
“And loves for all that God and man
In art and nature make or plan,
And lady-loves for spidery lace
And broideries and supple grace.
“And diamonds and the whole sweet round
Of littles that large life compound,
And love for God and God’s bare truth,
And loves for Magdalen and Ruth.”
“We are all living in a kindergarten for the blind,” said a prominent
divine at Mr. Anagnos’ beautiful institution in Boston. “Having eyes,
perhaps we do not see that best and highest life of the divine which
awaits us just beyond our ken.”
The French gown and gorgeous hat which we envy, or at best admire, may
cover a nature full of courage and healing for our secret woes, if we
were not so blind we could not see; and in our turn we might supply some
stimulus which she lacks. And the woman in the ill-fitting, home-made
gown in the corner might, possibly, bring positive blessing to both of us
and others. We each have something for the other. Have we given our share?
“Why don’t you bring some of your fine gowns up here with you?” asked
the country relatives of a rich woman. “We like to see them even if our
meeting-house and rag-carpeted sitting-rooms don’t seem just the place
for them.” A great many women feel the same way. They like to see
pretty clothes, even if they cannot wear them. So let us not worry over
this matter of dress. It will right itself. If the woman who is apt to
overdress—to whom dress is the main object in life—comes into contact
with higher-minded women, she will soon absorb a higher ideal and come
to feel that there are greater purposes than are covered by the Paris
fashion plates, and worthier subjects of contemplation and discussion
than whether to ruffle or not to ruffle the skirt. And do these not need
such help just as much as those that dwell in low places and perhaps long
ago learned to combine high thinking with plain living?
Oh, sisters, we none of us realize one another’s needs. How do we know
that she whom we have been envying as possessing everything heart could
wish, is not the most miserable of women? How do we know that the quiet,
insignificant woman in sparrow-like raiment has not exactly the help
which we are silently craving? Let us come out of our shells and see. Let
us make of life something more than a series of good times, when we have
gone forth arrayed in gorgeous attire and in search of amusement only.
Have we been of those who shirk duty by leaving it to those who like to
work, while we have acted as sponges to soak up the waters of gladness
set running by the untiring efforts of others?
Or have we, through unselfish and self-forgetting labor for the
advancement of all, grown up to a broader outlook on life, a more
tolerant eye for the shortcomings of others and a wider charity for
humanity everywhere? Only by losing ourselves do we find our best selves.
There are so many things we can do to brighten the life-path for others,
and almost without effort on our part. A kind word, a helpful suggestion,
a pleasant smile in answer to a cross look; these cost nothing, and if we
cultivate the habit we shall carry them unconsciously wherever we go; and
they often mean so much.
There is the sister who comes from a home where the most rigid economy
must be practiced, or where the children, dear as they are, wear
on overworked nerves and brain; where death has brought havoc and
desolation; where the husband is surly and penurious; where scandal
or disgrace has been, or where sorrows worse than death have brought
darkness and continual heartache. Do you think it does not matter to
such whether you give them cordial greeting, whether your presence is
like the blessed sunlight, whether your life of un-self-conscious faith
and hope beams across their way, even for a half hour? How seldom it
occurs to any of us to ask ourselves what is our real, unconscious
influence among our sisters.
Somebody has said that to be warped unconsciously by the magnetic
influence of all around is the destiny of even the greatest souls. If
this is true, how much more is it likely that we common souls shall be
swayed by outside spiritual forces. Let us see to it that we are not like
Hosea Bigelow’s character who
“Might be a marvel of easy delightfulness
If he would not sometimes leave the r out of sprightfulness.”
Let us, also, recall Dorothea’s motto in “Middlemarch”:
“I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me, that by desiring what is
perfectly good, even when we do not know what it is, and cannot do what
we would, we are a part of the divine power against evil, widening the
skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”
A good motto for us all, isn’t it?
XIII
ON THE AVERAGE WOMAN
The position of woman seems to be worrying a lot of people a great
deal nowadays. Whether she is or is not psychologically inferior to
man, whether “emancipation” is a good thing for her, whether it is
better for her to vote intelligently or stay at home and knit stockings
mechanically, whether she should be mentally and physically capable
of supporting herself or be content to be the more or less beautiful
appendage of some man; these are questions that are considered weighty
enough to fill newspapers, magazines and even books with arguments pro
and con. And woman continues to spell herself with a capital W.
Dyspeptic men and dyspeptic women with a literary tendency are rushing
into print, and both long and short-haired logicians are taking to the
platform in the vain endeavor to put woman where she belongs—although
the exact location of that place has not been clearly determined nor
concisely defined. And there is considerable doubt extant as to her
remaining there, when the learned disputants have succeeded in putting
her in the right spot. The modern woman seems to be more uncertain, coy
and hard to please than those, even, that puzzled the poet.
But the most encouraging thing about it is the position of the average
woman on these questions. The world is made up—let us devoutly thank
Heaven—of average women, and it is the sanity of these that will save
the situation. Nothing ever interested me more than the discussion at
a State Federation Convention a few years ago on this very topic. One
afternoon was given up entirely to the discussion of the position of
woman—not by experts and psychological students, but by the reading and
thinking average club women themselves. And it was indeed “happifying,”
as the good old Methodist used to say, to behold the good sense and sweet
reasonableness of these women. The erratic notions of Charlotte Perkins
Stetson Gilman, the erotic ideas of Mme. Marholm, the vagaries of Olive
Schreiner, and the dyspeptic pessimism of some of our recent novelists
all came up for consideration, and it was with pious joy that I noted
that the distorted views of woman in the economic and the domestic world
have little weight with the average woman who reads and who has fallen
into the pernicious but enjoyable habit of thinking for herself and
forming her own conclusions.
It may be that what we are told is true and not one woman
in five thousand is fit to bring up her own children, but
it looks to me as if the aforesaid average woman with a
mind-which-doesn’t-hurt-her-because-she-knows-how-to-use-it, belongs
to a class which makes a serious matter of child-study when God sends
her children. It may be that woman’s place is still at the loom and the
spindle and the mending-basket, but judging from the average woman’s
remarks she has other duties of more importance in the economic world in
these days of machinery.
Once upon a time a woman, writing for a foreign review, bewailed the
absence of serious concentrated thought among women, and advanced as the
reason therefor their gregarious habits and crowded life, and their utter
disability to apply to themselves the benefits of solitude. Women as a
class do depend on each other or upon the men of their acquaintance for
their opinions, whether on social or political themes.
And yet women are not, all of them, so absolutely without properly
correlated opinions as certain writers would have us believe. That she is
often defective in consecutive mental training derives from influences
beginning with the embryo woman in her cradle. She is tended by a nurse
who is not allowed to “turn her off” in the slightest degree. As soon
as she can talk she is provided with a nursery governess and later with
chaperones and companions, tutors and governesses, and is finally sent to
boarding-school, where she lives, moves and has her being in “her set.” A
boy may be taught to amuse himself before he walks. A boy may play alone
and his elders are only too thankful if he will. When older, a boy may go
off alone for delightful half days in the woods or follow the bent of his
nature or his own sweet will.
But the girl imbibes with her mother’s milk an indefinite idea that she
must not be alone. Whether it be the effect of injudicious nursery tales
or the early development of her social nature, she is trained with a
certain deference to that idea, and instead of a healthy, natural being,
capable of standing on her own feet, intellectually and morally, she
grows up, unavoidably, with an unconscious habit of leaning on others. Is
this solely due to the unbiased woman-nature? May it not be attributed,
as we say in New England, to her bringing up?
Sometimes she never experiences, in her sheltered and measured existence,
any lack, mental or spiritual. Sometimes, indeed, this great universe
with all its mighty forces of life and death and love and passion and
hatred, is nothing to her but a pretty background for the display of
fashions. But sooner or later comes to more women than are dreamed
of in the philosophy of the world a great crisis, a time when human
nature stands stripped of all false, meretricious pretences and the
disillusionment of life comes upon her.
“There is scarcely,” says our review writer, “one man in a thousand who
at some time in his life has not felt and indulged the impulse to step
out from the rank and file of his familiars and contemporaries, and
envisage his own nature. Not a man, worthy of the name, but has searched
for and found himself—has borne out his own convictions, and wrestled
through the long nights of his own youth with the stern-browed angel of
some revelation.”
The same thing, we venture to assert, happens to thousands of women. The
dreary time of disillusionment comes and the cutting contrast between the
real and the ideal makes itself painfully felt. Friends die, hopes are
shattered, the inexorable facts of life force themselves upon us and we
awake from the golden dreams of early life. The more delicately organized
a woman is the deeper the springs of truth in her lie, and the more is
it a necessity of her nature that, when the spell is broken, she shall
stand face to face with the inner meaning of life, that she shall search
and find herself. Long nights are spent in passionate protest, in earnest
struggling for light, in eager searching for truth. Call it morbid,
unhealthy, if you will; you do not say so of man. Many a thoughtful,
earnest woman of to-day, under whose calm demeanor no one suspects an
extinct crater, dates the development of her intellectual self from just
such battles, which resulted in the conquest of self and petty aims. The
soul-writhings of such women in books are overdrawn and unnatural. Not
one woman in a thousand would be guilty of writing such self-accusing,
self-revealing scenes; but hundreds of women readers recognize the state
of mind, and although they may not have writhed bodily all night on
the floor like some heroines of recent novels, they have bidden, after
reading of such, long forgotten ghosts to be quiet.
The secret of our late President McKinley’s strength was his mastery
over self. He had himself under thorough control. He did not fear
self-communion, for he was sanely balanced. The quality in him which
appealed the most strongly to women, of course, was his unselfish
devotion to his womenkind. His mother and his wife always stood first
in his heart, and he was the good son and ideal husband before he was
the soldier and the statesman. Some men seem to be ashamed of being true
to their women-folk; President McKinley was great enough to respect all
women and to love with a singularly unselfish devotion those belonging to
him.
How much better this world would be if there were more such characters;
if people were content to be simply true and faithful to their highest
ideals, or rather were equal to the effort of living up to them. It is
easy to lie awake at night or sit by the fire and dream of grand and
noble deeds; it is another thing to carry those ideals right out into the
workaday world and face the battles of life with them. So much depends on
the way we carry them, however; if we carry the high ideals as a burden
on our backs, they are not a success. Let us try using them as a shield.
There is one little book that I wish could be put into the hands of every
woman. And then I should demand a promise that each one should read a
chapter in it on retiring every night. It is called “The Magic Seven” and
was written by Lida A. Churchill, who has struck a helpful chord in this
little book that might go far toward transforming the world, if the world
would stop long enough to read it.
The great need among women is to acquire self-poise and to learn
self-control. This book comes nearer to teaching these than anything I
have yet seen, although, of course, it all depends on the woman herself
whether she will be calm and strong and self-reliant. As Miss Churchill
says: “God Himself cannot give you anything which you are unwilling or
unready to receive.”
Here is one of her formulas. Try it, and after saying it over every day
in the quiet of your own room, or on the car, or in the midst of crowds,
see if you are not more calm, more sure of yourself, more trustful of God:
“I am still of heart and of tongue. I invite, and I hold myself in the
attitude to receive, the Intelligence which teaches, the Love which
satisfies and protects, the Power which invincibilizes, the Peace which
blesses. I admit nothing into my life which would prevent or hinder the
greatest soul-receptivity. I wait in the silence with and for God.”
But we must not forget that it is the average woman who makes or unmakes
life for us. She may not write books, nor paint pictures, nor become
famous; but she is the home-maker—the mother of the world. And the
Average Woman will continue right along at the old stand as wife and
mother, but with an enlarged sense of outside responsibilities. She
will vote wherever the law will let her and yet mind her baby. She will
study polemics in clubs and higher mathematics all by her lonesome and
yet continue to order the dinner and, if necessary, cook it herself; and
owing to the spread of cooking schools and domestic science departments,
it will be better cooked and more daintily served than of yore.
No; let us cease to worry about ourselves or fret our souls with the
arguments of men who know next to nothing about us. Every man has his
opinion about women as a class, but in nine hundred and ninety-nine
cases out of a thousand his premises are all drawn from the women of his
own household. So that if he sets us down as weak-brained, fickle, and
vastly inferior to MAN, we can easily judge of the women of his immediate
circle, and pity him accordingly.
The nineteenth century has seen a wonderful change in the position of
woman all over the world. This remark is so trite that my pencil blushes
to record it. The twentieth century is ushering woman in as a very
decided factor in the world’s progress and will doubtless bring her
into greater activities and prominence than ever; but God instituted
woman a number of years ago, when He set certain limits to her physical
development, and He has not yet shown any decided intention of changing
her mental qualities into replicas of the biped He created a short time
previous and called man, and we shall continue to be just plain women
when all is said and done.
Not but what that greatest room in the world—the room for improvement—is
still open to us; but the fun of it is that so many more are all
the time crowding up to its doors. Women as a class are growing more
intelligent every year; realizing their own responsibilities, inside and
outside the four walls of home; learning to balance themselves and to
walk steadily along untried paths; rejoicing in this discovery of their
own mental powers and yet clinging tightly to the old family loves and
home ties.
So let us not worry ourselves over the dismal prophecies of great men as
to the position of woman. We will continue to meander along the pleasant
paths of improvement, but spell ourselves with a small w.
God made us all; may He help us to realize our limitations as well as to
develop our utmost. Selah.
XIV
ON PUBLIC DUTIES
One of Mary E. Wilkins’ delightful heroines remarks, in speaking of
certain would-be leaders of social reform in her village: “I don’t know
that I think they are so much above us as too far to one side. Sometimes
it is longitude and sometimes it is latitude that separates people.”
“This is true,” says President Roosevelt, “and the philosophy it teaches
applies quite as much to those who would reform the politics of a large
city, or, for that matter, of the whole country, as to those who would
reform the society of a hamlet.” But the active woman of to-day—and
much more the woman of to-morrow—is not in danger of separating herself
by either latitude or longitude. She is eager to help, and meets her
problems half-way with outstretched hands. She is taking hold of all
sorts of municipal matters and working against unsanitary conditions,
defective sewerage, poor drainage, impure drinking water and the practice
of making backyards, alleys and even streets the dumping-ground of those
who are too negligent, or too indolent to consider the appearance of
their immediate locality.
“The poor ye have always with you,” and as Dr. Babcock has said: “To take
care of the lower orders is essential to social safety, though the words,
‘Inasmuch as ye did it to the least of these,’ had never been spoken, and
the thought of helping humanity should be some little comfort, though the
recognition of a ‘cup of cold water’ had never been dreamed of. To help
poor children to learn to sew cannot compromise you in any way. To prick
your finger in the sewing-school and draw one little red drop, is in the
line of the world’s redemption, at least from ignorance and incapacity.”
But to this mission of woman from simply altruistic motives we can add
that divine commission entrusted to Mary at the door of the sepulchre on
that Sabbath morning nineteen hundred years ago, so that she is working
everywhere to lift little children out of degradation, to teach them, to
make of them good citizens, to abolish child-labor. And is it not true
that every woman working in a quiet way for the improvement of those in
her immediate neighborhood is manifesting the spirit of the scriptural
injunction, “Bear ye one another’s burdens”?
“The women’s clubs of the period, with their classes for intelligent
study of the great questions of the day, are creating a new political
economy,” says the Hon. Carroll D. Wright, late chief of the Bureau of
Labor Statistics in Washington, and no man in this country is better
fitted to judge of the economic conditions that attend any great
movement. One of the significant features of the club movement is that
our deepest thinkers, our most far-sighted men recognize in it one of the
great forces of the age. It is all well enough for one or two brilliant
women writers who pride themselves on belonging to no women’s clubs
whatever, to direct their powers of sarcasm against the movement and to
flippantly observe that women’s clubs are a fad, or to inveigh against
our taking ourselves seriously. We can even bear that Mr. Bok or Mr.
Cleveland should warn his readers against being led unwillingly into
public life, to the utter neglect of buttonless husbands and starving
children; these things are outside the pale of serious consideration.
What does the earnest, thinking woman who reads Drummond’s “Ascent of
Man” and Ruskin’s “Unto This Last” care? What does the woman who is
studying the great humanitarian problem of to-day—whether singly or in
classes—mind if a magazine writer who cares more for brilliancy than for
accuracy takes her to task because she takes the fact of organized effort
for bettering present conditions, and ministering to great human needs,
seriously? For men who think and read and observe what is going on in
the world to-day, men who come nearest to seeing what are the present
economic forces and whither they are tending—such men are the quickest to
recognize women as an important factor in the world’s progress, and are
the most cordial in extending a hand-clasp of sympathy and “God-speed” to
any specialized movement among us.
The day has gone by when it is fair or safe to arraign men for conditions
which hedge in a woman; by which I mean that the men of this country
are ready and willing to extend a helping hand to women who really want
anything. When the women of this country or any part of it rise up and
declare in a body that they want the ballot, for instance, they will get
it; for it is not the men who are keeping it from us. When the women of
America come forward ready for concerted action on any subject, the men
are with them as a rule. Of course this refers to mankind collectively,
not individually, and I leave it to any woman if the men of her household
are not, as a rule, quite in sympathy with her outside interests and
work. The average man sees in some measure the value of the club
movement. The thinking man and the one who sees below the surface in this
restless, changing, hopeful age goes farther and recognizes that with all
our shortcomings and superficialities we have at heart an unquenchable
desire to do our part of the world’s work; moreover, that there is a
tremendous psychological significance in the banding together of several
hundred thousand women all actuated by the same purpose, even if the
movement be slightly chaotic and not always well directed.