work of clearing and opening up was over and the struggle for
accumulation began, again woman’s inspiration and help were needed and
still was she loyally at hand. A Mary Lyon, demanding and making
possible equal advantages of education for women as for men, and, in the
face of discouragement and incredulity, bequeathing to women the
opportunities of Holyoke.
A Dorothea Dix, insisting on the humane and rational treatment of the
insane and bringing about a reform in the lunatic asylums of the
country, making a great step forward in the tender regard for the weak
by the strong throughout the world.
A Helen Hunt Jackson, convicting the nation of a century of dishonor in
regard to the Indian.
A Lucretia Mott, gentle Quaker spirit, with sweet insistence, preaching
the abolition of slavery and the institution, in its stead, of the
brotherhood of man; her life and words breathing out in tender melody
the injunction
“Have love. Not love alone for one
But man as man thy brother call;
And scatter, like the circling sun,
Thy charities _on all_.”
And at the most trying time of what we have called the Accumulative
Period, when internecine war, originated through man’s love of gain and
his determination to subordinate national interests and black men’s
rights alike to considerations of personal profit and loss, was
drenching our country with its own best blood, who shall recount the
name and fame of the women on both sides the senseless strife,—those
uncomplaining souls with a great heart ache of their own, rigid features
and pallid cheek their ever effective flag of truce, on the battle
field, in the camp, in the hospital, binding up wounds, recording dying
whispers for absent loved ones, with tearful eyes pointing to man’s last
refuge, giving the last earthly hand clasp and performing the last
friendly office for strangers whom a great common sorrow had made kin,
while they knew that somewhere—somewhere a husband, a brother, a father,
a son, was being tended by stranger hands—or mayhap those familiar eyes
were even then being closed forever by just such another ministering
angel of mercy and love.
But why mention names? Time would fail to tell of the noble army of
women who shine like beacon lights in the otherwise sordid wilderness of
this accumulative period—prison reformers and tenement cleansers, quiet
unnoted workers in hospitals and homes, among imbeciles, among
outcasts—the sweetening, purifying antidotes for the poisons of man’s
acquisitiveness,—mollifying and soothing with the tenderness of
compassion and love the wounds and bruises caused by his overreaching
and avarice.
The desire for quick returns and large profits tempts capital ofttimes
into unsanitary, well-nigh inhuman investments,—tenement tinder boxes,
stifling, stunting, sickening alleys and pestiferous slums; regular
rents, no waiting, large percentages,—rich coffers coined out of the
life-blood of human bodies and souls. Men and women herded together like
cattle, breathing in malaria and typhus from an atmosphere seething with
moral as well as physical impurity, revelling in vice as their native
habitat and then, to drown the whisperings of their higher consciousness
and effectually to hush the yearnings and accusations within, flying to
narcotics and opiates—rum, tobacco, opium, binding hand and foot, body
and soul, till the proper image of God is transformed into a fit
associate for demons,—a besotted, enervated, idiotic wreck, or else a
monster of wickedness terrible and destructive.
These are some of the legitimate products of the unmitigated tendencies
of the wealth-producing period. But, thank Heaven, side by side with the
cold, mathematical, selfishly calculating, so-called practical and
unsentimental instinct of the business man, there comes the sympathetic
warmth and sunshine of good women, like the sweet and sweetening breezes
of spring, cleansing, purifying, soothing, inspiring, lifting the
drunkard from the gutter, the outcast from the pit. Who can estimate the
influence of these “daughters of the king,” these lend-a-hand forces, in
counteracting the selfishness of an acquisitive age?
To-day America counts her millionaires by the thousand; questions of
tariff and questions of currency are the most vital ones agitating the
public mind. In this period, when material prosperity and well earned
ease and luxury are assured facts from a national standpoint, woman’s
work and woman’s influence are needed as never before; needed to bring a
heart power into this money getting, dollar-worshipping civilization;
needed to bring a moral force into the utilitarian motives and interests
of the time; needed to stand for God and Home and Native Land _versus
gain and greed and grasping selfishness_.
There can be no doubt that this fourth centenary of America’s discovery
which we celebrate at Chicago, strikes the key-note of another important
transition in the history of this nation; and the prominence of woman in
the management of its celebration is a fitting tribute to the part she
is destined to play among the forces of the future. This is the first
congressional recognition of woman in this country, and this Board of
Lady Managers constitute the first women legally appointed by any
government to act in a national capacity. This of itself marks the dawn
of a new day.
Now the periods of discovery, of settlement, of developing resources and
accumulating wealth have passed in rapid succession. Wealth in the
nation as in the individual brings leisure, repose, reflection. The
struggle with nature is over, the struggle with ideas begins. We stand
then, it seems to me, in this last decade of the nineteenth century,
just in the portals of a new and untried movement on a higher plain and
in a grander strain than any the past has called forth. It does not
require a prophet’s eye to divine its trend and image its possibilities
from the forces we see already at work around us; nor is it hard to
guess what must be the status of woman’s work under the new regime.
In the pioneer days her role was that of a camp-follower, an additional
something to fight for and be burdened with, only repaying the anxiety
and labor she called forth by her own incomparable gifts of sympathy and
appreciative love; unable herself ordinarily to contend with the bear
and the Indian, or to take active part in clearing the wilderness and
constructing the home.
In the second or wealth producing period her work is abreast of man’s,
complementing and supplementing, counteracting excessive tendencies, and
mollifying over rigorous proclivities.
In the era now about to dawn, her sentiments must strike the key-note
and give the dominant tone. And this because of the nature of her
contribution to the world.
Her kingdom is not over physical forces. Not by might, nor by power can
she prevail. Her position must ever be inferior where strength of muscle
creates leadership. If she follows the instincts of her nature, however,
she must always stand for the conservation of those deeper moral forces
which make for the happiness of homes and the righteousness of the
country. In a reign of moral ideas she is easily queen.
There is to my mind no grander and surer prophecy of the new era and of
woman’s place in it, than the work already begun in the waning years of
the nineteenth century by the W.C.T.U. in America, an organization which
has even now reached not only national but international importance, and
seems destined to permeate and purify the whole civilized world. It is
the living embodiment of woman’s activities and woman’s ideas, and its
extent and strength rightly prefigure her increasing power as a moral
factor.
The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in
this country. In a period of itself transitional and unsettled, her
status seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the
forces which make for our civilization. She is confronted by both a
woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an
unacknowledged factor in both. While the women of the white race can
with calm assurance enter upon the work they feel by nature appointed to
do, while their men give loyal support and appreciative countenance to
their efforts, recognizing in most avenues of usefulness the propriety
and the need of woman’s distinctive co-operation, the colored woman too
often finds herself hampered and shamed by a less liberal sentiment and
a more conservative attitude on the part of those for whose opinion she
cares most. That this is not universally true I am glad to admit. There
are to be found both intensely conservative white men and exceedingly
liberal colored men. But as far as my experience goes the average man of
our race is less frequently ready to admit the actual need among the
sturdier forces of the world for woman’s help or influence. That great
social and economic questions await her interference, that she could
throw any light on problems of national import, that her intermeddling
could improve the management of school systems, or elevate the tone of
public institutions, or humanize and sanctify the far reaching influence
of prisons and reformatories and improve the treatment of lunatics and
imbeciles,—that she has a word worth hearing on mooted questions in
political economy, that she could contribute a suggestion on the
relations of labor and capital, or offer a thought on honest money and
honorable trade, I fear the majority of “Americans of the colored
variety” are not yet prepared to concede. It may be that they do not yet
see these questions in their right perspective, being absorbed in the
immediate needs of their own political complications. A good deal
depends on where we put the emphasis in this world; and our men are not
perhaps to blame if they see everything colored by the light of those
agitations in the midst of which they live and move and have their
being. The part they have had to play in American history during the
last twenty-five or thirty years has tended rather to exaggerate the
importance of mere political advantage, as well as to set a fictitious
valuation on those able to secure such advantage. It is the astute
politician, the manager who can gain preferment for himself and his
favorites, the demagogue known to stand in with the powers at the White
House and consulted on the bestowal of government plums, whom we set in
high places and denominate great. It is they who receive the hosannas of
the multitude and are regarded as leaders of the people. The thinker and
the doer, the man who solves the problem by enriching his country with
an invention worth thousands or by a thought inestimable and precious is
given neither bread nor a stone. He is too often left to die in
obscurity and neglect even if spared in his life the bitterness of
fanatical jealousies and detraction.
And yet politics, and surely American politics, is hardly a school for
great minds. Sharpening rather than deepening, it develops the faculty
of taking advantage of present emergencies rather than the insight to
distinguish between the true and the false, the lasting and the
ephemeral advantage. Highly cultivated selfishness rather than
consecrated benevolence is its passport to success. Its votaries are
never seers. At best they are but manipulators—often only jugglers. It
is conducive neither to profound statesmanship nor to the higher type of
manhood. Altruism is its _mauvais succes_ and naturally enough it is
indifferent to any factor which cannot be worked into its own immediate
aims and purposes. As woman’s influence as a political element is as yet
nil in most of the commonwealths of our republic, it is not surprising
that with those who place the emphasis on mere political capital she may
yet seem almost a nonentity so far as it concerns the solution of great
national or even racial perplexities.
There are those, however, who value the calm elevation of the thoughtful
spectator who stands aloof from the heated scramble; and, above the
turmoil and din of corruption and selfishness, can listen to the
teachings of eternal truth and righteousness. There are even those who
feel that the black man’s unjust and unlawful exclusion temporarily from
participation in the elective franchise in certain states is after all
but a lesson “in the desert” fitted to develop in him insight and
discrimination against the day of his own appointed time. One needs
occasionally to stand aside from the hum and rush of human interests and
passions to hear the voices of God. And it not unfrequently happens that
the All-loving gives a great push to certain souls to thrust them out,
as it were, from the distracting current for awhile to promote their
discipline and growth, or to enrich them by communion and reflection.
And similarly it may be woman’s privilege from her peculiar coigne of
vantage as a quiet observer, to whisper just the needed suggestion or
the almost forgotten truth. The colored woman, then, should not be
ignored because her bark is resting in the silent waters of the
sheltered cove. She is watching the movements of the contestants none
the less and is all the better qualified, perhaps, to weigh and judge
and advise because not herself in the excitement of the race. Her voice,
too, has always been heard in clear, unfaltering tones, ringing the
changes on those deeper interests which make for permanent good. She is
always sound and orthodox on questions affecting the well-being of her
race. You do not find the colored woman selling her birthright for a
mess of pottage. Nay, even after reason has retired from the contest,
she has been known to cling blindly with the instinct of a turtle dove
to those principles and policies which to her mind promise hope and
safety for children yet unborn. It is notorious that ignorant black
women in the South have actually left their husbands’ homes and
repudiated their support for what was understood by the wife to be race
disloyalty, or “voting away,” as she expresses it, the privileges of
herself and little ones.
It is largely our women in the South to-day who keep the black men solid
in the Republican party. The latter as they increase in intelligence and
power of discrimination would be more apt to divide on local issues at
any rate. They begin to see that the Grand Old Party regards the Negro’s
cause as an outgrown issue, and on Southern soil at least finds a too
intimate acquaintanceship with him a somewhat unsavory recommendation.
Then, too, their political wits have been sharpened to appreciate the
fact that it is good policy to cultivate one’s neighbors and not depend
too much on a distant friend to fight one’s home battles. But the black
woman can never forget—however lukewarm the party may to-day appear—that
it was a Republican president who struck the manacles from her own
wrists and gave the possibilities of manhood to her helpless little
ones; and to her mind a Democratic Negro is a traitor and a time-server.
Talk as much as you like of venality and manipulation in the South,
there are not many men, I can tell you, who would dare face a wife
quivering in every fiber with the consciousness that her husband is a
coward who could be paid to desert her deepest and dearest interests.
Not unfelt, then, if unproclaimed has been the work and influence of the
colored women of America. Our list of chieftains in the service, though
not long, is not inferior in strength and excellence, I dare believe, to
any similar list which this country can produce.
Among the pioneers, Frances Watkins Harper could sing with prophetic
exaltation in the darkest days, when as yet there was not a rift in the
clouds overhanging her people:
“Yes, Ethiopia shall stretch
Her bleeding hands abroad;
Her cry of agony shall reach the burning throne of God.
Redeemed from dust and freed from chains
Her sons shall lift their eyes,
From cloud-capt hills and verdant plains
Shall shouts of triumph rise.”
Among preachers of righteousness, an unanswerable silencer of cavilers
and objectors, was Sojourner Truth, that unique and rugged genius who
seemed carved out without hand or chisel from the solid mountain mass;
and in pleasing contrast, Amanda Smith, sweetest of natural singers and
pleaders in dulcet tones for the things of God and of His Christ.
Sarah Woodson Early and Martha Briggs, planting and watering in the
school room, and giving off from their matchless and irresistible
personality an impetus and inspiration which can never die so long as
there lives and breathes a remote descendant of their disciples and
friends.
Charlotte Fortin Grimke, the gentle spirit whose verses and life link
her so beautifully with America’s great Quaker poet and loving reformer.
Hallie Quinn Brown, charming reader, earnest, effective lecturer and
devoted worker of unflagging zeal and unquestioned power.
Fannie Jackson Coppin, the teacher and organizer, pre-eminent among
women of whatever country or race in constructive and executive force.
These women represent all shades of belief and as many departments of
activity; but they have one thing in common—their sympathy with the
oppressed race in America and the consecration of their several talents
in whatever line to the work of its deliverance and development.
Fifty years ago woman’s activity according to orthodox definitions was
on a pretty clearly cut “sphere,” including primarily the kitchen and
the nursery, and rescued from the barrenness of prison bars by the
womanly mania for adorning every discoverable bit of china or canvass
with forlorn looking cranes balanced idiotically on one foot. The woman
of to-day finds herself in the presence of responsibilities which ramify
through the profoundest and most varied interests of her country and
race. Not one of the issues of this plodding, toiling, sinning,
repenting, falling, aspiring humanity can afford to shut her out, or can
deny the reality of her influence. No plan for renovating society, no
scheme for purifying politics, no reform in church or in state, no
moral, social, or economic question, no movement upward or downward in
the human plane is lost on her. A man once said when told his house was
afire: “Go tell my wife; I never meddle with household affairs.” But no
woman can possibly put herself or her sex outside any of the interests
that affect humanity. All departments in the new era are to be hers, in
the sense that her interests are in all and through all; and it is
incumbent on her to keep intelligently and sympathetically _en rapport_
with all the great movements of her time, that she may know on which
side to throw the weight of her influence. She stands now at the gateway
of this new era of American civilization. In her hands must be moulded
the strength, the wit, the statesmanship, the morality, all the psychic
force, the social and economic intercourse of that era. To be alive at
such an epoch is a privilege, to be a woman then is sublime.
In this last decade of our century, changes of such moment are in
progress, such new and alluring vistas are opening out before us, such
original and radical suggestions for the adjustment of labor and
capital, of government and the governed, of the family, the church and
the state, that to be a possible factor though an infinitesimal in such
a movement is pregnant with hope and weighty with responsibility. To be
a woman in such an age carries with it a privilege and an opportunity
never implied before. But to be a woman of the Negro race in America,
and to be able to grasp the deep significance of the possibilities of
the crisis, is to have a heritage, it seems to me, unique in the ages.
In the first place, the race is young and full of the elasticity and
hopefulness of youth. All its achievements are before it. It does not
look on the masterly triumphs of nineteenth century civilization with
that _blasé_ world-weary look which characterizes the old washed out and
worn out races which have already, so to speak, seen their best days.
Said a European writer recently: “Except the Sclavonic, the Negro is the
only original and distinctive genius which has yet to come to growth—and
the feeling is to cherish and develop it.”
Everything to this race is new and strange and inspiring. There is a
quickening of its pulses and a glowing of its self-consciousness. Aha, I
can rival that! I can aspire to that! I can honor my name and vindicate
my race! Something like this, it strikes me, is the enthusiasm which
stirs the genius of young Africa in America; and the memory of past
oppression and the fact of present attempted repression only serve to
gather momentum for its irrepressible powers. Then again, a race in such
a stage of growth is peculiarly sensitive to impressions. Not the
photographer’s sensitized plate is more delicately impressionable to
outer influences than is this high strung people here on the threshold
of a career.
What a responsibility then to have the sole management of the primal
lights and shadows! Such is the colored woman’s office. She must stamp
weal or woe on the coming history of this people. May she see her
opportunity and vindicate her high prerogative.
TUTTI AD LIBITUM.
A _People_ is but the attempt of many
To rise to the completer life of one.
· · · · ·
The common _Problem_, yours, mine, every one’s
Is—not to fancy what were fair in life
Provided it could be,—but, finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to our means; a very different thing!
—_Robert Browning._
The greatest question in the world is how to give every man a man’s
share in what goes on in life—we want a freeman’s share, and that is
to think and speak and act about what concerns us all, and see
whether these fine gentlemen who undertake to govern us are doing
the best they can for us.—_Felix Holt._
HAS AMERICA A RACE PROBLEM; IF SO, HOW CAN IT BEST BE SOLVED?
There are two kinds of peace in this world. The one produced by
suppression, which is the passivity of death; the other brought about by
a proper adjustment of living, acting forces. A nation or an individual
may be at peace because all opponents have been killed or crushed; or,
nation as well as individual may have found the secret of true harmony
in the determination to live and let live.
A harmless looking man was once asked how many there were in his family.
“Ten,” he replied grimly; “my wife’s a one and I a zero.” In that family
there was harmony, to be sure, but it was the harmony of a despotism—it
was the quiet of a muzzled mouth, the smoldering peace of a volcano
crusted over.
Now I need not say that peace produced by suppression is neither natural
nor desirable. Despotism is not one of the ideas that man has copied
from nature. All through God’s universe we see eternal harmony and
symmetry as the unvarying result of the equilibrium of opposing forces.
Fair play in an equal fight is the law written in Nature’s book. And the
solitary bully with his foot on the breast of his last antagonist has no
warrant in any fact of God.
The beautiful curves described by planets and suns in their courses are
the resultant of conflicting forces. Could the centrifugal force for one
instant triumph, or should the centripetal grow weary and give up the
struggle, immeasurable disaster would ensue—earth, moon, sun would go
spinning off at a tangent or must fall helplessly into its master
sphere. The acid counterbalances and keeps in order the alkali; the
negative, the positive electrode. A proper equilibrium between a most
inflammable explosive and the supporter of combustion, gives us water,
the bland fluid that we cannot dispense with. Nay, the very air we
breathe, which seems so calm, so peaceful, is rendered innocuous only by
the constant conflict of opposing gases. Were the fiery, never-resting,
all-corroding oxygen to gain the mastery we should be burnt to cinders
in a trice. With the sluggish, inert nitrogen triumphant, we should die
of inanition.