That without a change of policy results in the future will be as meagre,
we greatly fear. Our life as a race is at stake. The dearest interests
of our hearts are in the scales. We must either break away from dear old
landmarks and plunge out in any line and every line that enables us to
meet the pressing need of our people, or we must ask the Church to allow
and help us, untrammelled by the prejudices and theories of individuals,
to work aggressively under her direction as we alone can, with God’s
help, for the salvation of our people.
The time is ripe for action. Self-seeking and ambition must be laid on
the altar. The battle is one of sacrifice and hardship, but our duty is
plain. We have been recipients of missionary bounty in some sort for
twenty-one years. Not even the senseless vegetable is content to be a
mere reservoir. Receiving without giving is an anomaly in nature.
Nature’s cells are all little workshops for manufacturing sunbeams, the
product to be _given out_ to earth’s inhabitants in warmth, energy,
thought, action. Inanimate creation always pays back an equivalent.
Now, _How much owest thou, my Lord?_ Will his account be overdrawn if he
call for singleness of purpose and self-sacrificing labor for your
brethren? Having passed through your drill school, will you refuse a
general’s commission even if it entail responsibility, risk and anxiety,
with possibly some adverse criticism? Is it too much to ask you to step
forward and direct the work for your race along those lines which you
know to be of first and vital importance?
Will you allow these words of Ralph Waldo Emerson? “In ordinary,” says
he, “we have a snappish criticism which watches and contradicts the
opposite party. We want the will which advances and dictates [acts].
Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself, shall not be
defended. Complaining never so loud and with never so much reason, is of
no use. What cannot stand must fall; _and the measure of our sincerity
and therefore of the respect of men is the amount of health and wealth
we will hazard in the defense of our right_.”
THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN.
In the very first year of our century, the year 1801, there appeared in
Paris a book by Silvain Marechal, entitled “Shall Woman Learn the
Alphabet.” The book proposes a law prohibiting the alphabet to women,
and quotes authorities weighty and various, to prove that the woman who
knows the alphabet has already lost part of her womanliness. The author
declares that woman can use the alphabet only as Moliere predicted they
would, in spelling out the verb _amo_; that they have no occasion to
peruse Ovid’s _Ars Amoris_, since that is already the ground and limit
of their intuitive furnishing; that Madame Guion would have been far
more adorable had she remained a beautiful ignoramus as nature made her;
that Ruth, Naomi, the Spartan woman, the Amazons, Penelope, Andromache,
Lucretia, Joan of Arc, Petrarch’s Laura, the daughters of Charlemagne,
could not spell their names; while Sappho, Aspasia, Madame de Maintenon,
and Madame de Stael could read altogether too well for their good;
finally, that if women were once permitted to read Sophocles and work
with logarithms, or to nibble at any side of the apple of knowledge,
there would be an end forever to their sewing on buttons and
embroidering slippers.
Please remember this book was published at the _beginning_ of the
Nineteenth Century. At the end of its first third, (in the year 1833)
one solitary college in America decided to admit women within its sacred
precincts, and organized what was called a “Ladies’ Course” as well as
the regular B. A. or Gentlemen’s course.
It was felt to be an experiment—a rather dangerous experiment—and was
adopted with fear and trembling by the good fathers, who looked as if
they had been caught secretly mixing explosive compounds and were
guiltily expecting every moment to see the foundations under them shaken
and rent and their fair superstructure shattered into fragments.
But the girls came, and there was no upheaval. They performed their
tasks modestly and intelligently. Once in a while one or two were found
choosing the gentlemen’s course. Still no collapse; and the dear,
careful, scrupulous, frightened old professors were just getting their
hearts out of their throats and preparing to draw one good free breath,
when they found they would have to change the names of those courses;
for there were as many ladies in the gentlemen’s course as in the
ladies’, and a distinctively Ladies’ Course, inferior in scope and aim
to the regular classical course, did not and could not exist.
Other colleges gradually fell into line, and to-day there are one
hundred and ninety-eight colleges for women, and two hundred and seven
coeducational colleges and universities in the United States alone
offering the degree of B. A. to women, and sending out yearly into the
arteries of this nation a warm, rich flood of strong, brave, active,
energetic, well-equipped, thoughtful women—women quick to see and eager
to help the needs of this needy world—women who can think as well as
feel, and who feel none the less because they think—women who are none
the less tender and true for the parchment scroll they bear in their
hands—women who have given a deeper, richer, nobler and grander meaning
to the word “womanly” than any one-sided masculine definition could ever
have suggested or inspired—women whom the world has long waited for in
pain and anguish till there should be at last added to its forces and
allowed to permeate its thought the complement of that masculine
influence which has dominated it for fourteen centuries.
Since the idea of order and subordination succumbed to barbarian brawn
and brutality in the fifth century, the civilized world has been like a
child brought up by his father. It has needed the great mother heart to
teach it to be pitiful, to love mercy, to succor the weak and care for
the lowly.
Whence came this apotheosis of greed and cruelty? Whence this sneaking
admiration we all have for bullies and prize-fighters? Whence the
self-congratulation of “dominant” races, as if “dominant” meant
“righteous” and carried with it a title to inherit the earth? Whence the
scorn of so-called weak or unwarlike races and individuals, and the very
comfortable assurance that it is their manifest destiny to be wiped out
as vermin before this advancing civilization? As if the possession of
the Christian graces of meekness, non-resistance and forgiveness, were
incompatible with a civilization professedly based on Christianity, the
religion of love! Just listen to this little bit of Barbarian brag:
“As for Far Orientals, they are not of those who will survive.
Artistic attractive people that they are, their civilization is like
their own tree flowers, beautiful blossoms destined never to bear
fruit. If these people continue in their old course, their earthly
career is closed. Just as surely as morning passes into afternoon,
so surely are these races of the Far East, if unchanged, destined to
disappear before the advancing nations of the West. Vanish, they
will, off the face of the earth, and leave our planet the eventual
possession of the dwellers where the day declines. Unless their
newly imported ideas really take root, it is from this whole world
that Japanese and Koreans, as well as Chinese, will inevitably be
excluded. Their Nirvana is already being realized; already, it has
wrapped Far Eastern Asia in its winding sheet.”—_Soul of the Far
East—P. Lowell._
Delightful reflection for “the dwellers where day declines.” A spectacle
to make the gods laugh, truly, to see the scion of an upstart race by
one sweep of his generalizing pen consigning to annihilation one-third
the inhabitants of the globe—a people whose civilization was hoary
headed before the parent elements that begot his race had advanced
beyond nebulosity.
How like Longfellow’s Iagoo, we Westerners are, to be sure! In the few
hundred years, we have had to strut across our allotted territory and
bask in the afternoon sun, we imagine we have exhausted the
possibilities of humanity. Verily, we are the people, and after us there
is none other. Our God is power; strength, our standard of excellence,
inherited from barbarian ancestors through a long line of male
progenitors, the Law Salic permitting no feminine modifications.
Says one, “The Chinaman is not popular with us, and we do not like the
Negro. It is not that the eyes of the one are set bias, and the other is
dark-skinned; but the Chinaman, the Negro is weak—_and Anglo Saxons
don’t like weakness_.”
The world of thought under the predominant man-influence, unmollified
and unrestrained by its complementary force, would become like Daniel’s
fourth beast: “dreadful and terrible, and _strong_ exceedingly;” “it had
great iron teeth; it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the
residue with the feet of it;” and the most independent of us find
ourselves ready at times to fall down and worship this incarnation of
power.
Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, a woman whom I can mention only to admire, came
near shaking my faith a few weeks ago in my theory of the thinking
woman’s mission to put in the tender and sympathetic chord in nature’s
grand symphony, and counteract, or better, harmonize the diapason of
mere strength and might.
She was dwelling on the Anglo-Saxon genius for power and his contempt
for weakness, and described a scene in San Francisco which she had
witnessed.
The incorrigible animal known as the American small-boy, had pounced
upon a simple, unoffending Chinaman, who was taking home his work, and
had emptied the beautifully laundried contents of his basket into the
ditch. “And,” said she, “when that great man stood there and blubbered
before that crowd of lawless urchins, to any one of whom he might have
taught a lesson with his two fists, _I didn’t much care_.”
This is said like a man! It grates harshly. It smacks of the worship of
the beast. It is contempt for weakness, and taken out of its setting it
seems to contradict my theory. It either shows that one of the highest
exponents of the Higher Education can be at times untrue to the
instincts I have ascribed to the thinking woman and to the contribution
she is to add to the civilized world, or else the influence she wields
upon our civilization may be potent without being necessarily and always
direct and conscious. The latter is the case. Her voice may strike a
false note, but her whole being is musical with the vibrations of human
suffering. Her tongue may parrot over the cold conceits that some man
has taught her, but her heart is aglow with sympathy and loving
kindness, and she cannot be true to her real self without giving out
these elements into the forces of the world.
No one is in any danger of imagining Mark Antony “a plain blunt man,”
nor Cassius a sincere one—whatever the speeches they may make.
As individuals, we are constantly and inevitably, whether we are
conscious of it or not, giving out our real selves into our several
little worlds, inexorably adding our own true ray to the flood of
starlight, quite independently of our professions and our masquerading;
and so in the world of thought, the influence of thinking woman far
transcends her feeble declamation and may seem at times even opposed to
it.
A visitor in Oberlin once said to the lady principal, “Have you no
rabble in Oberlin? How is it I see no police here, and yet the streets
are as quiet and orderly as if there were an officer of the law standing
on every corner.”
Mrs. Johnston replied, “Oh, yes; there are vicious persons in Oberlin
just as in other towns—_but our girls are our police_.”
With from five to ten hundred pure-minded young women threading the
streets of the village every evening unattended, vice must slink away,
like frost before the rising sun: and yet I venture to say there was not
one in a hundred of those girls who would not have run from a street
brawl as she would from a mouse, and who would not have declared she
could never stand the sight of blood and pistols.
There is, then, a real and special influence of woman. An influence
subtle and often involuntary, an influence so intimately interwoven in,
so intricately interpenetrated by the masculine influence of the time
that it is often difficult to extricate the delicate meshes and analyze
and identify the closely clinging fibers. And yet, without this
influence—so long as woman sat with bandaged eyes and manacled hands,
fast bound in the clamps of ignorance and inaction, the world of thought
moved in its orbit like the revolutions of the moon; with one face (the
man’s face) always out, so that the spectator could not distinguish
whether it was disc or sphere.
Now I claim that it is the prevalence of the Higher Education among
women, the making it a common every-day affair for women to reason and
think and express their thought, the training and stimulus which enable
and encourage women to administer to the world the bread it needs as
well as the sugar it cries for; in short it is the transmitting the
potential forces of her soul into dynamic factors that has given
symmetry and completeness to the world’s agencies. So only could it be
consummated that Mercy, the lesson she teaches, and Truth, the task man
has set himself, should meet together: that righteousness, or
_rightness_, man’s ideal,—and _peace_, its necessary ‘other half,’
should kiss each other.
We must thank the general enlightenment and independence of woman (which
we may now regard as a _fait accompli_) that both these forces are now
at work in the world, and it is fair to demand from them for the
twentieth century a higher type of civilization than any attained in the
nineteenth. Religion, science, art, economics, have all needed the
feminine flavor; and literature, the expression of what is permanent and
best in all of these, may be gauged at any time to measure the strength
of the feminine ingredient. You will not find theology consigning
infants to lakes of unquenchable fire long after women have had a chance
to grasp, master, and wield its dogmas. You will not find science
annihilating personality from the government of the Universe and making
of God an ungovernable, unintelligible, blind, often destructive
physical force; you will not find jurisprudence formulating as an axiom
the absurdity that man and wife are one, and that one the man—that the
married woman may not hold or bequeath her own property save as subject
to her husband’s direction; you will not find political economists
declaring that the only possible adjustment between laborers and
capitalists is that of selfishness and rapacity—that each must get all
he can and keep all that he gets, while the world cries _laissez faire_
and the lawyers explain, “it is the beautiful working of the law of
supply and demand;” in fine, you will not find the law of love shut out
from the affairs of men after the feminine half of the world’s truth is
completed.
Nay, put your ear now close to the pulse of the time. What is the
key-note of the literature of these days? What is the banner cry of all
the activities of the last half decade? What is the dominant seventh
which is to add richness and tone to the final cadences of this century
and lead by a grand modulation into the triumphant harmonies of the
next? Is it not compassion for the poor and unfortunate, and, as Bellamy
has expressed it, “indignant outcry against the failure of the social
machinery as it is, to ameliorate the miseries of men!” Even
Christianity is being brought to the bar of humanity and tried by the
standard of its ability to alleviate the world’s suffering and lighten
and brighten its woe. What else can be the meaning of Matthew Arnold’s
saddening protest, “We cannot do without Christianity,” cried he, “and
we cannot endure it as it is.”
When went there by an age, when so much time and thought, so much money
and labor were given to God’s poor and God’s invalids, the lowly and
unlovely, the sinning as well as the suffering—homes for inebriates and
homes for lunatics, shelter for the aged and shelter for babes,
hospitals for the sick, props and braces for the falling, reformatory
prisons and prison reformatories, all show that a “mothering” influence
from some source is leavening the nation.
Now please understand me. I do not ask you to admit that these
benefactions and virtues are the exclusive possession of women, or even
that women are their chief and only advocates. It may be a man who
formulates and makes them vocal. It may be, and often is, a man who
weeps over the wrongs and struggles for the amelioration: but that man
has imbibed those impulses from a mother rather than from a father and
is simply materializing and giving back to the world in tangible form
the ideal love and tenderness, devotion and care that have cherished and
nourished the helpless period of his own existence.
All I claim is that there is a feminine as well as a masculine side
to truth; that these are related not as inferior and superior, not
as better and worse, not as weaker and stronger, but as
complements—complements in one necessary and symmetric whole. That
as the man is more noble in reason, so the woman is more quick in
sympathy. That as he is indefatigable in pursuit of abstract truth,
so is she in caring for the interests by the way—striving tenderly
and lovingly that not one of the least of these ‘little ones’ should
perish. That while we not unfrequently see women who reason, we say,
with the coolness and precision of a man, and men as considerate of
helplessness as a woman, still there is a general consensus of
mankind that the one trait is essentially masculine and the other as
peculiarly feminine. That both are needed to be worked into the
training of children, in order that our boys may supplement their
virility by tenderness and sensibility, and our girls may round out
their gentleness by strength and self-reliance. That, as both are
alike necessary in giving symmetry to the individual, so a nation or
a race will degenerate into mere emotionalism on the one hand, or
bullyism on the other, if dominated by either exclusively; lastly,
and most emphatically, that the feminine factor can have its proper
effect only through woman’s development and education so that she
may fitly and intelligently stamp her force on the forces of her
day, and add her modicum to the riches of the world’s thought.
“For woman’s cause is man’s: they rise or sink
Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free:
For she that out of Lethe scales with man
The shining steps of nature, shares with man
His nights, his days, moves with him to one goal.
If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
How shall men grow?
* * * Let her make herself her own
To give or keep, to live and learn and be
All that not harms distinctive womanhood.
For woman is not undeveloped man
But diverse; could we make her as the man
Sweet love were slain; his dearest bond is this,
Not like to like, but like in difference.
Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in child-ward care,
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;
Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words.”
Now you will argue, perhaps, and rightly, that higher education for
women is not a modern idea, and that, if that is the means of setting
free and invigorating the long desired feminine force in the world, it
has already had a trial and should, in the past, have produced some of
these glowing effects. Sappho, the bright, sweet singer of Lesbos, “the
violet-crowned, pure, sweetly smiling Sappho” as Alcaeus calls her,
chanted her lyrics and poured forth her soul nearly six centuries before
Christ, in notes as full and free, as passionate and eloquent as did
ever Archilochus or Anacreon.
Aspasia, that earliest queen of the drawing-room, a century later
ministered to the intellectual entertainment of Socrates and the leading
wits and philosophers of her time. Indeed, to her is attributed, by the
best critics, the authorship of one of the most noted speeches ever
delivered by Pericles.
Later on, during the Renaissance period, women were professors in
mathematics, physics, metaphysics, and the classic languages in Bologna,
Pavia, Padua, and Brescia. Olympia Fulvia Morata, of Ferrara, a most
interesting character, whose magnificent library was destroyed in 1553
in the invasion of Schweinfurt by Albert of Brandenburg, had acquired a
most extensive education. It is said that this wonderful girl gave
lectures on classical subjects in her sixteenth year, and had even
before that written several very remarkable Greek and Latin poems, and
what is also to the point, she married a professor at Heidelberg, and
became a _help-meet for him_.
It is true then that the higher education for women—in fact, the highest
that the world has ever witnessed—belongs to the past; but we must
remember that it was possible, down to the middle of our own century,
only to a select few; and that the fashions and traditions of the times
were before that all against it. There were not only no stimuli to
encourage women to make the most of their powers and to welcome their
development as a helpful agency in the progress of civilization, but
their little aspirations, when they had any, were chilled and snubbed in
embryo, and any attempt at thought was received as a monstrous
usurpation of man’s prerogative.
Lessing declared that “the woman who thinks is like the man who puts on
rouge—ridiculous;” and Voltaire in his coarse, flippant way used to say,
“Ideas are like beards—women and boys have none.” Dr. Maginn remarked,
“We like to hear a few words of sense from a woman sometimes, as we do
from a parrot—they are so unexpected!” and even the pious Fenelon taught
that virgin delicacy is almost as incompatible with learning as with
vice.
That the average woman retired before these shafts of wit and ridicule
and even gloried in her ignorance is not surprising. The Abbe Choisi, it
is said, praised the Duchesse de Fontanges as being pretty as an angel
and silly as a goose, and all the young ladies of the court strove to
make up in folly what they lacked in charms. The ideal of the day was
that “women must be pretty, dress prettily, flirt prettily, and not be
too well informed;” that it was the _summum bonum_ of her earthly hopes
to have, as Thackeray puts it, “all the fellows battling to dance with
her;” that she had no God-given destiny, no soul with unquenchable
longings and inexhaustible possibilities—no work of her own to do and
give to the world—no absolute and inherent value, no duty to self,
transcending all pleasure-giving that may be demanded of a mere toy; but
that her value was purely a relative one and to be estimated as are the
fine arts—by the pleasure they give. “Woman, wine and song,” as “the
world’s best gifts to man,” were linked together in praise with as
little thought of the first saying, “What doest thou,” as that the wine
and the song should declare, “We must be about our Father’s business.”
Men believed, or pretended to believe, that the great law of self
development was obligatory on their half of the human family only; that
while it was the chief end of man to glorify God and put his five
talents to the exchangers, gaining thereby other five, it was, or ought
to be, the sole end of woman to glorify man and wrap her one decently
away in a napkin, retiring into “Hezekiah Smith’s lady during her
natural life and Hezekiah Smith’s relict on her tombstone;” that higher
education was incompatible with the shape of the female cerebrum, and
that even if it could be acquired it must inevitably unsex woman
destroying the lisping, clinging, tenderly helpless, and beautifully
dependent creatures whom men would so heroically think for and so
gallantly fight for, and giving in their stead a formidable race of blue
stockings with corkscrew ringlets and other spinster propensities.
But these are eighteenth century ideas.