dead letter at the South and that only the name and support of that pet
institution are changed while the fact and essence, minus the expense
and responsibility, remain, he is quickly told to mind his own business
and informed that he is waving the bloody shirt.
Even twenty-five years after the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to
our Constitution, a man who has been most unequivocal in his outspoken
condemnation of the wrongs regularly and systematically heaped on the
oppressed race in this country, and on all even most remotely connected
with them—a man whom we had thought our staunchest friend and most noble
champion and defender—after a two weeks’ trip in Georgia and Florida
immediately gives signs of the fatal inception of the virus. Not even
the chance traveller from England or Scotland escapes. The
arch-manipulator takes him under his special watch-care and training,
uses up his stock arguments and gives object lessons with his choicest
specimens of Negro depravity and worthlessness; takes him through what,
in New York, would be called “the slums,” and would predicate there
nothing but the duty of enlightened Christians to send out their light
and emulate their Master’s aggressive labors of love; but in Georgia is
denominated “our terrible problem, which people of the North so little
understand, yet vouchsafe so much gratuitous advice about.” With an
injured air he shows the stupendous and atrocious mistake of reasoning
about these people as if they were just ordinary human beings, and
amenable to the tenets of the Gospel; and not long after the inoculation
begins to work, you hear this old-time friend of the oppressed
delivering himself something after this fashion: “Ah, well, the South
must be left to manage the Negro. She is most directly concerned and
must understand her problem better than outsiders. We must not meddle.
We must be very careful not to widen the breaches. The Negro is not
worth a feud between brothers and sisters.”
Lately a great national and international movement characteristic of
this age and country, a movement based on the inherent right of every
soul to its own highest development, I mean the movement making for
Woman’s full, free, and complete emancipation, has, after much courting,
obtained the gracious smile of the Southern woman—I beg her pardon—the
Southern _lady_.
She represents blood, and of course could not be expected to leave that
out; and firstly and foremostly she must not, in any organization she
may deign to grace with her presence, be asked to associate with “these
people who were once her slaves.”
Now the Southern woman (I may be pardoned, being one myself) was never
renowned for her reasoning powers, and it is not surprising that just a
little picking will make her logic fall to pieces even here.
In the first place she imagines that because her grandfather had slaves
who were black, all the blacks in the world of every shade and tint were
once in the position of her slaves. This is as bad as the Irishman who
was about to kill a peaceable Jew in the streets of Cork,—having just
learned that Jews slew his Redeemer. The black race constitutes
one-seventh the known population of the globe; and there are
representatives of it here as elsewhere who were never in bondage at any
time to any man,—whose blood is as blue and lineage as noble as any,
even that of the white lady of the South. That her slaves were black and
she despises her slaves, should no more argue antipathy to all dark
people and peoples, than that Guiteau, an assassin, was white, and I
hate assassins, should make me hate all persons more or less white. The
objection shows a want of clear discrimination.
The second fallacy in the objection grows out of the use of an ambiguous
middle, as the logicians would call it, or assigning a double
signification to the term “_Social equality_.”
Civility to the Negro implies social equality. I am opposed to
_associating_ with dark persons on terms of social equality. Therefore,
I abrogate civility to the Negro. This is like
Light is opposed to darkness.
Feathers are light.
_Ergo_, Feathers are opposed to darkness.
The “social equality” implied by civility to the Negro is a very
different thing from forced association with him socially. Indeed it
seems to me that the mere application of a little cold common sense
would show that uncongenial social environments could by no means be
forced on any one. I do not, and cannot be made to associate with all
dark persons, simply on the ground that I am dark; and I presume the
Southern lady can imagine some whose faces are white, with whom she
would no sooner think of chatting unreservedly than, were it possible,
with a veritable ‘darkey.’ Such things must and will always be left to
individual election. No law, human or divine, can legislate for or
against them. Like seeks like; and I am sure with the Southern lady’s
antipathies at their present temperature, she might enter ten thousand
organizations besprinkled with colored women without being any more
deflected by them than by the proximity of a stone. The social equality
scare then is all humbug, conscious or unconscious, I know not which.
And were it not too bitter a thought to utter here, I might add that the
overtures for forced association in the past history of these two races
were not made by the manacled black man, nor by _the silent and
suffering black woman_!
When I seek food in a public café or apply for first-class
accommodations on a railway train, I do so because my physical
necessities are identical with those of other human beings of like
constitution and temperament, and crave satisfaction. I go because I
want food, or I want comfort—not because I want association with those
who frequent these places; and I can see no more “social equality” in
buying lunch at the same restaurant, or riding in a common car, than
there is in paying for dry goods at the same counter or walking on the
same street.
The social equality which means forced or unbidden association would be
as much deprecated and as strenuously opposed by the circle in which I
move as by the most hide-bound Southerner in the land. Indeed I have
been more than once annoyed by the inquisitive white interviewer, who,
with spectacles on nose and pencil and note-book in hand, comes to get
some “points” about “_your people_.” My “people” are just like other
people—indeed, too like for their own good. They hate, they love, they
attract and repel, they climb or they grovel, struggle or drift, aspire
or despair, endure in hope or curse in vexation, exactly like all the
rest of unregenerate humanity. Their likes and dislikes are as strong;
their antipathies—and prejudices too I fear, are as pronounced as you
will find anywhere; and the entrance to the inner sanctuary of their
homes and hearts is as jealously guarded against profane intrusion.
What the dark man wants then is merely to live his own life, in his own
world, with his own chosen companions, in whatever of comfort, luxury,
or emoluments his talent or his money can in an impartial market secure.
Has he wealth, he does not want to be forced into inconvenient or
unsanitary sections of cities to buy a home and rear his family. Has he
art, he does not want to be cabined and cribbed into emulation with the
few who merely happen to have his complexion. His talent aspires to
study without proscription the masters of all ages and to rub against
the broadest and fullest movements of his own day.
Has he religion, he does not want to be made to feel that there is a
white Christ and a black Christ, a white Heaven and a black Heaven, a
white Gospel and a black Gospel,—but the one ideal of perfect manhood
and womanhood, the one universal longing for development and growth, the
one desire for being, and being better, the one great yearning,
aspiring, outreaching, in all the heart throbs of humanity in whatever
race or clime.
A recent episode in the Corcoran art gallery at the American capital is
to the point. A colored woman who had shown marked ability in drawing
and coloring, was advised by her teacher, himself an artist of no mean
rank, to apply for admission to the Corcoran school in order to study
the models and to secure other advantages connected with the
organization. She accordingly sent a written application accompanied by
specimens of her drawings, the usual _modus operandi_ in securing
admission.
The drawings were examined by the best critics and pronounced excellent,
and a ticket of admission was immediately issued together with a highly
complimentary reference to her work.
The next day my friend, congratulating her country and herself that at
least in the republic of art no caste existed, presented her ticket of
admission _in propria persona_. There was a little preliminary side play
in Delsarte pantomime,—aghast—incredulity—wonder; then the
superintendent told her in plain unartistic English that of course he
had not dreamed a colored person could do such work, and had he
suspected the truth he would never have issued the ticket of admission;
that, to be right frank, the ticket would have to be cancelled,—she
could under no condition be admitted to the studio.
Can it be possible that even art in America is to be tainted by this
shrivelling caste spirit? If so, what are we coming to? Can any one
conceive a Shakespeare, a Michael Angelo, or a Beethoven putting away
any fact of simple merit because the thought, or the suggestion, or the
creation emanated from a soul with an unpleasing exterior?
What is it that makes the great English bard pre-eminent as the
photographer of the human soul? Where did he learn the universal
language, so that Parthians, Medes and Elamites, and the dwellers in
Mesopotamia, in Egypt and Libya, in Crete and Arabia do hear every one
in our own tongue the wonderful revelations of this myriad mind? How did
he learn our language? Is it not that his own soul was infinitely
receptive to Nature, the dear old nurse, in all her protean forms? Did
he not catch and reveal her own secret by his sympathetic listening as
she “would constantly sing a more wonderful song or tell a more
marvellous tale” in the souls he met around him?
“Stand off! I am better than thou!” has never yet painted a true
picture, nor written a thrilling song, nor given a pulsing, a
soul-burning sermon. ’Tis only sympathy, another name for love,—that one
poor word which, as George Eliot says, “expresses so much of human
insight”—that can interpret either man or matter.
It was Shakespeare’s own all-embracing sympathy, that infinite
receptivity of his, and native, all-comprehending appreciation, which
proved a key to unlock and open every soul that came within his radius.
And _he received as much as he gave_. His own stores were infinitely
enriched thereby. For it is decreed
Man like the vine supported lives,
The strength he gains is from th’ embrace he gives.
It is only through clearing the eyes from bias and prejudice, and
becoming one with the great all pervading soul of the universe that
either art or science can
“Read what is still unread
In the manuscripts of God.”
No true artist can allow himself to be narrowed and provincialized by
deliberately shutting out any class of facts or subjects through
prejudice against externals. And American art, American science,
American literature can never be founded in truth, the universal beauty;
can never learn to speak a language intelligible in all climes and for
all ages, till this paralyzing grip of caste prejudice is loosened from
its vitals, and the healthy sympathetic eye is taught to look out on the
great universe as holding no favorites and no black beasts, but bearing
in each plainest or loveliest feature the handwriting of its God.
And this is why, as it appears to me, woman in her lately acquired
vantage ground for speaking an earnest helpful word, can do this country
no deeper and truer and more lasting good than by bending all her
energies to thus broadening, humanizing, and civilizing her native land.
“Except ye become as little children” is not a pious precept, but an
inexorable law of the universe. God’s kingdoms are all sealed to the
seedy, moss-grown mind of self-satisfied maturity. Only the little child
in spirit, the simple, receptive, educable mind can enter. Preconceived
notions, blinding prejudices, and shrivelling antipathies must be wiped
out, and the cultivable soul made a _tabula rasa_ for whatever lesson
great Nature has to teach.
This, too, is why I conceive the subject to have been unfortunately
worded which was chosen by Miss Shaw at the Woman’s Council and which
stands at the head of this chapter.
Miss Shaw is one of the most powerful of our leaders, and we feel her
voice should give no uncertain note. Woman should not, even by
inference, or for the sake of argument, seem to disparage what is weak.
For woman’s cause is the cause of the weak; and when all the weak shall
have received their due consideration, then woman will have her
“rights,” and the Indian will have his rights, and the Negro will have
his rights, and all the strong will have learned at last to deal justly,
to love mercy, and to walk humbly; and our fair land will have been
taught the secret of universal courtesy which is after all nothing but
the art, the science, and the religion of regarding one’s neighbor as
one’s self, and to do for him as we would, were conditions swapped, that
he do for us.
It cannot seem less than a blunder, whenever the exponents of a great
reform or the harbingers of a noble advance in thought and effort allow
themselves to seem distorted by a narrow view of their own aims and
principles. All prejudices, whether of race, sect or sex, class pride
and caste distinctions are the belittling inheritance and badge of snobs
and prigs.
The philosophic mind sees that its own “rights” are the rights of
humanity. That in the universe of God nothing trivial is or mean; and
the recognition it seeks is not through the robber and wild beast
adjustment of the survival of the bullies but through the universal
application ultimately of the Golden Rule.
Not unfrequently has it happened that the impetus of a mighty thought
wave has done the execution meant by its Creator in spite of the weak
and distorted perception of its human embodiment. It is not strange if
reformers, who, after all, but think God’s thoughts after him, have
often “builded more wisely than they knew;” and while fighting
consciously for only a narrow gateway for themselves, have been driven
forward by that irresistible “Power not ourselves which makes for
righteousness” to open a high road for humanity. It was so with our
sixteenth century reformers. The fathers of the Reformation had no idea
that they were inciting an insurrection of the human mind against all
domination. None would have been more shocked than they at our
nineteenth century deductions from their sixteenth century premises.
Emancipation of mind and freedom of thought would have been as appalling
to them as it was distasteful to the pope. They were right, they argued,
to rebel against Romish absolutism—because Romish preaching and Romish
practicing were wrong. They denounced popes for hacking heretics and
forthwith began themselves to roast witches. The Spanish Inquisition in
the hands of Philip and Alva was an institution of the devil; wielded by
the faithful, it would become quite another thing. The only “rights”
they were broad enough consciously to fight for was the right to
substitute the absolutism of their conceptions, their party, their
‘_ism_’ for an authority whose teaching they conceived to be corrupt and
vicious. Persecution for a belief was wrong only when the persecutors
were wrong and the persecuted right. The sacred prerogative of the
individual to decide on matters of belief they did not dream of
maintaining. Universal tolerance and its twin, universal charity, were
not conceived yet. The broad foundation stone of all human rights, the
great democratic principle “A man’s a man, _and his own sovereign_ for
a’ that” they did not dare enunciate. They were incapable of drawing up
a Declaration of Independence for humanity. The Reformation to the
Reformers meant one bundle of authoritative opinions vs. another bundle
of authoritative opinions. Justification by faith, vs. justification by
ritual. Submission to Calvin vs. submission to the Pope. English and
Germans vs. the Italians.
To our eye, viewed through a vista of three centuries, it was the death
wrestle of the principle of thought enslavement in the throttling grasp
of personal freedom; it was the great Emancipation Day of human belief,
man’s intellectual Independence Day, prefiguring and finally compelling
the world-wide enfranchisement of his body and all its activities. Not
Protestant vs. Catholic, then; not Luther vs. Leo, not Dominicans vs.
Augustinians, nor Geneva vs. Rome;—but humanity rationally free, vs. the
clamps of tradition and superstition which had manacled and muzzled it.
The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a
class,—it is the cause of human kind, the very birthright of humanity.
Now unless we are greatly mistaken the Reform of our day, known as the
Woman’s Movement, is essentially such an embodiment, if its pioneers
could only realize it, of the universal good. And specially important is
it that there be no confusion of ideas among its leaders as to its scope
and universality. All mists must be cleared from the eyes of woman if
she is to be a teacher of morals and manners: the former strikes its
roots in the individual and its training and pruning may be accomplished
by classes; but the latter is to lubricate the joints and minimize the
friction of society, and it is important and fundamental that there be
no chromatic or other aberration when the teacher is settling the point,
“Who is my neighbor?”
It is not the intelligent woman vs. the ignorant woman; nor the white
woman vs. the black, the brown, and the red,—it is not even the cause of
woman vs. man. Nay, ’tis woman’s strongest vindication for speaking that
_the world needs to hear her voice_. It would be subversive of every
human interest that the cry of one-half the human family be stifled.
Woman in stepping from the pedestal of statue-like inactivity in the
domestic shrine, and daring to think and move and speak,—to undertake to
help shape, mold, and direct the thought of her age, is merely
completing the circle of the world’s vision. Hers is every interest that
has lacked an interpreter and a defender. Her cause is linked with that
of every agony that has been dumb—every wrong that needs a voice.
It is no fault of man’s that he has not been able to see truth from her
standpoint. It does credit both to his head and heart that no greater
mistakes have been committed or even wrongs perpetrated while she sat
making tatting and snipping paper flowers. Man’s own innate chivalry and
the mutual interdependence of their interests have insured his treating
her cause, in the main at least, as his own. And he is pardonably
surprised and even a little chagrined, perhaps, to find his legislation
not considered “perfectly lovely” in every respect. But in any case his
work is only impoverished by her remaining dumb. The world has had to
limp along with the wobbling gait and one-sided hesitancy of a man with
one eye. Suddenly the bandage is removed from the other eye and the
whole body is filled with light. It sees a circle where before it saw a
segment. The darkened eye restored, every member rejoices with it.
What a travesty of its case for this eye to become plaintiff in a suit,
_Eye vs. Foot_. “There is that dull clod, the foot, allowed to roam at
will, free and untrammelled; while I, the source and medium of light,
brilliant and beautiful, am fettered in darkness and doomed to
desuetude.” The great burly black man, ignorant and gross and depraved,
is allowed to vote; while the franchise is withheld from the intelligent
and refined, the pure-minded and lofty souled white woman. Even the
untamed and untamable Indian of the prairie, who can answer nothing but
‘ugh’ to great economic and civic questions is thought by some worthy to
wield the ballot which is still denied the Puritan maid and the first
lady of Virginia.
Is not this hitching our wagon to something much lower than a star? Is
not woman’s cause broader, and deeper, and grander, than a blue stocking
debate or an aristocratic pink tea? Why should woman become plaintiff in
a suit versus the Indian, or the Negro or any other race or class who
have been crushed under the iron heel of Anglo-Saxon power and
selfishness? If the Indian has been wronged and cheated by the puissance
of this American government, it is woman’s mission to plead with her
country to cease to do evil and to pay its honest debts. If the Negro
has been deceitfully cajoled or inhumanly cuffed according to selfish
expediency or capricious antipathy, let it be woman’s mission to plead
that he be met as a man and honestly given half the road. If woman’s own
happiness has been ignored or misunderstood in our country’s legislating
for bread winners, for rum sellers, for property holders, for the family
relations, for any or all the interests that touch her vitally, let her
rest her plea, not on Indian inferiority, nor on Negro depravity, but on
the obligation of legislators to do for her as they would have others do
for them were relations reversed. Let her try to teach her country that
every interest in this world is entitled at least to a respectful
hearing, that every sentiency is worthy of its own gratification, that a
helpless cause should not be trampled down, nor a bruised reed broken;
and when the right of the individual is made sacred, when the image of
God in human form, whether in marble or in clay, whether in alabaster or
in ebony, is consecrated and inviolable, when men have been taught to
look beneath the rags and grime, the pomp and pageantry of mere
circumstance and have regard unto the celestial kernel uncontaminated at
the core,—when race, color, sex, condition, are realized to be the
accidents, not the substance of life, and consequently as not obscuring
or modifying the inalienable title to life, liberty, and pursuit of
happiness,—then is mastered the science of politeness, the art of
courteous contact, which is naught but the practical application of the
principal of benevolence, the back bone and marrow of all religion; then
woman’s lesson is taught and woman’s cause is won—not the white woman
nor the black woman nor the red woman, but the cause of every man or
woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong. The pleading of the
American woman for the right and the opportunity to employ the American
method of influencing the disposal to be made of herself, her property,
her children in civil, economic, or domestic relations is thus seen to
be based on a principle as broad as the human race and as old as human
society. Her wrongs are thus indissolubly linked with all undefended
woe, all helpless suffering, and the plenitude of her “rights” will mean
the final triumph of all right over might, the supremacy of the moral
forces of reason and justice and love in the government of the nation.
God hasten the day.
THE STATUS OF WOMAN IN AMERICA.
Just four hundred years ago an obscure dreamer and castle builder,
prosaically poor and ridiculously insistent on the reality of his
dreams, was enabled through the devotion of a noble woman to give to
civilization a magnificent continent.
What the lofty purpose of Spain’s pure-minded queen had brought to the
birth, the untiring devotion of pioneer women nourished and developed.
The dangers of wild beasts and of wilder men, the mysteries of unknown
wastes and unexplored forests, the horrors of pestilence and famine, of
exposure and loneliness, during all those years of discovery and
settlement, were braved without a murmur by women who had been most
delicately constituted and most tenderly nurtured.