THE CIVIL WAR
The election of Abraham Lincoln to the chief magistracy annihilated the
last hope of peaceful solution of the vexed question of the time. Hope,
indeed, there was in few female breasts, for with deplorable unanimity
the women of our country looked forward to war as the most desirable
result of all the anger that smouldered in both sections. Secession
followed hard upon the election of Lincoln; the Southern senators and
representatives resigned their seats in the councils of the nation; and
that nation was a nation no more.
Though there were many contributing circumstances, and those of the
gravest, the women of our country had been the most influential cause of
the rupture and its immediate result of war. They had inflamed the
hearts of the men so that the few who retained some coolness of judgment
and some tolerance of spirit could make no headway against the
extremists. The women were now to bear the brunt of the hard-following
consequences of their furious enthusiasm; but, before they began to feel
those consequences in full measure, they were to enjoy a brief period of
delight: that delight which their sex ever finds in the "pomp and
circumstance of glorious war," until they learn something of its stern
realities.
When peace was formally declared impossible, the women of both sections
found congenial vent for the enthusiasm which had been so fatal to the
efforts of the peacemakers. Each side firmly believed its cause pure and
right, without the shadow of doubt being possible, and each acted from
the depths of a conviction which was as much the child of education as
of environing circumstances. All over the country there was enthusiasm
which hardly stopped short of gala merriment. The younger women of both
sides embroidered banners for their pet regiments and with their own
fair hands gave those banners into the keeping of their knights, who
swore--they did not know the difficulties of the task--to bring back
those flags unsullied by defeat. The men were eager enough to meet the
hardships and perils which they had not yet measured; but the women
surpassed even the masculine eagerness, hurrying their sons and lovers
and brothers and often husbands to the front, hardly finding time for
tears in their enthusiasm and patriotism.
For patriotism, though sometimes not easily distinguished from selfish
delight in the romance which precedes war, it was on both sides--a
patriotism which was to be sorely tried and never to fail. It was
misdirected in most cases as yet; the social functions which made
brilliant the rival capitals for a time were mistaken expressions of the
deep feeling which glowed beneath; but they had their meaning and were
promises of better things to come. From Maine to Texas there burned a
flame of patriotism such as had not been called forth in like eagerness
of display even by the days of the Revolution, and its chief expressions
were from the women of the divided land. So trivial and misdirected as
yet were the majority of its expressions that it might have been thought
shallow and unenduring; but it was to prove its intensity and depth in
other guise, and these first ebullitions were but the foam that glances
on the unsounded sea.
There was little fear of suffering on either side. Each believed that,
so good was its cause, so valiant its supporters, it must triumph within
a short space. A prominent New York journal prophesied the fall of
Richmond within three months, saying: "We spit upon a longer-deferred
justice." The South thought that Washington would be taken at one blow.
In these beliefs, which seem to us, knowing the men who were to bear the
standards of both causes, such wild folly, the women more than shared.
Northern and Southern woman alike believed with full conviction that the
men of her country were unconquerable and that God fought on her side of
the quarrel; how then could defeat or disaster come to the cause she
loved? It was impossible.
It must be admitted that in the first stages of the war the weight of
feminine enthusiasm was in the Southern scale. There was good reason for
this. At the first call of battle, the South sent forth her best and
bravest, her own most cherished sons, while the North responded more
tardily, leaving much of its work in the hands of substitutes of the
lower class and of mercenaries. The foreigners who had of late come to
our shores in such numbers had settled in the North and Northwest; and
they naturally fought rather from necessity and wish for bounty than
from patriotism. The flame was as steady in the North, but it was not so
vivid; it had not yet been blown to full fervor. Moreover, in the North
the full gravity of the task undertaken was still less recognized than
in the South. When McDowell marched upon Johnston and Beauregard at Bull
Run, carriages full of the leaders of Washington society, women as well
as men, came to make gay his camp and see the total discomfiture of the
enemy; and the flight back to the capital which followed his defeat
included many women of the upper circles, whose terrors and sufferings
were not undeserved as results of the extremes into which their
enthusiasm had misled them. This was a poor expression indeed of the
patriotism which glowed in the female breast of that day; but the time
produced a better specimen and showed how the feeling found true as well
as false vent. It was a young girl who brought to Beauregard the first
intelligence of McDowell's movement upon Manassas and enabled him to
give Johnston the warning which led to the timely juncture of their
forces and the result of the battle. The young lady had heard some
officers of the Union army discussing the projected movement while at
the table of her father in his house near Washington. Delicately
nurtured and reared as she had been, with her own hands she saddled her
horse and rode through the night, partly through camps of coarsely
jesting soldiery, partly along hardly-marked roads, amid darkness and in
loneliness, that she might serve the land she loved. It was the first of
many such services that were to be done by the women of the South, who
alone had opportunity to render them, or they had surely found many
rivals.
If the romantic aspect of war received in the North a rude shock in the
disaster of Bull Run, it was but enhanced in the South. Moreover, the
enthusiasm of the Southern woman, and particularly of the girl, found
more present and congenial vent than did that of her Northern sister.
Not only did the former frequently see the forms and even the deeds of
the leaders of her cause, but some of those leaders were calculated to
awaken enthusiasm to a degree that could not be rivalled by any of the
generals of the North. The soldiers of the Union had no Stuart, with his
gay laughter and merry jest and his floating feather to heighten the
romance of his achievements and present him as a veritable knight of
old; no Pelham with his beardless face and modest blush to make one
marvel that this laughing boy should be in battle a very genius of war
as he fought his guns against fearful odds. Custer, with his flowing
locks, might have won some hearts had the war been carried into Northern
territory; but Custer had not at his back the fame of Stuart, whose
rides around McClellan made him a hero of romance, nor had he the social
qualities that made so popular the Southern leader, while the latter's
purity of life and deep religious feeling, beneath all his frivolity of
manner, appealed with power to the finer natures of the Southern women.
He was the chosen knight, the adored hero, of Southern womanhood; and
when his feather appeared at the head of his daredevils there was
feminine rejoicing and eager welcome.
It was in the facts of the personal devotion inspired by some of their
leaders, Lee,--Jackson, and Stuart, especially,--of the proximity of
those fighting for her cause, of her presence on the scene of strife,
and of her deeper sufferings and greater call for endurance, that
explanation must be found of the indubitable phenomenon that there was
far more of enthusiasm displayed by the woman of the South than by her
of the North, at least during the first years of the war. Enthusiasm
only, not devotion to principle. That was assured in both; both gave a
deep and effective love to the cause which they held as right and just,
and for which they were willing to give their very lives if need were.
The Southern woman was called upon to make greater sacrifices, to bear
greater sufferings, than her sister of the North; but none can doubt
that the latter would have borne all these as nobly had fate called upon
her to do so. Those who know the story of Southern womanhood in those
terrible days must give to it all honor and admiration; but these must
not be granted as exclusively its right, without due sense of the
sufficient patriotism and courage displayed by Northern womanhood at the
call of country. Each gave all that she had to give; each proved that
her patriotism was not a mere name.
If among the women of the South there was more fervent enthusiasm than
among those of the North, there was also deeper hatred of the enemies of
their cause. When General Butler, as master of New Orleans, issued the
equally famous and infamous proclamation that won for him for all time
the title of "Beast Butler" among the women of the South, setting forth
that any woman who insulted on the street a Union soldier might be
treated, without redress on her part, as a woman of the town, he not
only consigned his memory to odium, but recorded the bitterness of the
feminine spirit among the conquered people. The best friend of Southern
womanhood cannot deny that this bitterness often took unjustifiable
expression. The very issuance of the proclamation proved that the ladies
of New Orleans were given to unseemly vituperation of the soldiers who
bore aloft the cause so bitterly hated by the women of the invaded land,
and in other ways and places the obligations of ladyhood and even of
femininity were too often forgotten in the impulses of hatred and wrath.
These ebullitions of the female spirit were not to be repressed by
circumstances; that spirit flamed but the more fiercely as it found
itself in danger of result. In these days of calmer judgment we know
what excuse there was among Southern women for the feeling of hatred and
bitterness; we know what it meant to ladies of delicacy and refinement
to be insulted by a brutal soldiery, too often unrepressed even by their
officers; we can understand the helpless wrath that filled the breast of
the Southern woman as she saw her dearest household possessions taken
from her or wantonly destroyed by mercenaries, as was the rule rather
than the exception when Sherman and his "bummers" went "marching through
Georgia" and forgot the rules of civilized warfare, or when Sheridan
almost fulfilled his boast that he "would make the Valley of Virginia so
barren that a crow flying over it would have to carry its own rations,"
or when Milroy and his German troops burned and harried and oppressed.
Had the operations of war been set in the North as in the South, there
would doubtless have been equal cause for hatred in that section, but
the only time that warfare was carried thither it was governed and
directed by a general who would not tolerate the modern methods of
making war upon unarmed people, and the burning of Chambersburg was the
sole act of vandalism of which the North ever had the knowledge that
comes of suffering. So the history of womanhood during the war between
the sections is largely a history of the women of the Confederacy, just
as the latent and mediate effects of that war first showed themselves
among Southern womanhood.
Indeed, after the first impulses of enthusiasm were over, the part
played in the war by the women of the North was largely confined to
endurance and sacrifice of the emotions--neither a small thing, yet only
a part of that which was borne by their Southern sisters. They gave
their dear ones uncomplainingly and even gladly and they endured
suspense and sorrow and sometimes hardship while the breadwinner was
absent on the business of his country; but of personal suffering they
knew nothing. Far be the thought of minimizing their gifts; the
thousands of bereft wives and mothers laid on the altar of their country
their greatest sacrifice, and they did this with a grand spirit of faith
and endurance that was alike beautiful and inspiring; but all that they
did in this wise was done also by the Southern women, and these bore
added pangs of suffering in the destruction of their homes, in the loss
of all their substance, and in personal peril and privation and the rest
of the woes that await womanhood in a conquered country.
Nor must it be forgotten that the Southern woman was peculiarly unfitted
by the circumstances of her nurture and training to bear the privations
which fell to her lot in such full measure. She had been reared in the
greatest luxury that this country could give; she had been from time
immemorial the spoilt child of our land, taught that there was not and
never would be need for her to raise her hand in effort or to express an
ungratified wish; she was refined and cultured and totally, as it
seemed, unfitted for rude contact with the world. Yet she forgot all
these things when the need came. The Virginia lady, when the tide of war
flowed irresistibly over her State, frequently "refugeed," to use her
own most unjustifiable and abominable vocable, into some less perilous
section of the land, where she lived the life of a peasant, doing her
own housework, mending and making the clothes worn by herself and her
children, cooking her poor meal of bacon and substituting for the
fragrant Mocha to which she had been accustomed beans whose flavor made
a mere mockery of the coffee they were intended to represent, and doing
all with a gallant cheerfulness which found its sole failure when she
thought of the sufferings of her husband and sons in the starving and
barefooted army of Lee. To this pass was she reduced, she who had lived
upon "the fat of the land," for whom had been reserved the daintiest
morsels that the land could supply, and whose hands had never known a
weightier task than some dainty embroidery. The North could show no like
evidence of patient courage, not having opportunity for its display. The
one point at which the women of the two sections met on common ground
was in the hospital service; and here the Northern woman had the
advantage in efficiency, though not in tenderness. The organization of
these matters was extremely poor in both the Union and the Confederacy;
but, because of greater facilities springing from greater command of
money, the hospital organization of the North, both field and fixed, was
far better than that of the South, which indeed could hardly be said to
have a hospital organization at all. In these hospitals worked thousands
of devoted women, and their ministrations to the wounded and dying of
both sides must not be forgotten when we reckon up the sum of the work
of American womanhood. On both sides, ladies of culture and refinement
devoted themselves to this pious work, and this was the most worthy and
lasting outlet that was found for Northern feminine enthusiasm in the
cause of the Union, and the name of Dorothea Lynde Dix, the head of the
organized force of Northern hospital nurses, will always be held in
especial honor for devotion and ability in this noble cause, as well as
in the amelioration of the condition of the indigent insane, to which
latter cause her whole life was chiefly devoted.
There were few especial heroines developed by the war; heroism was so
general when there was call for it among the women that it attracted but
little notice and won no lasting fame, even in its most remarkable
displays. There has come down to us hardly a single female name as being
especially singled out during this time for any noteworthy action.
Indeed, there was such dearth of especial women heroines that one poet
was driven, when he wished to stir the blood of his people with
enthusiasm for feminine heroism, to invent one; but the present day
wisely refuses to put any faith in the hoary legend of Barbara
Frietchie, which indeed, as given by Whittier, is full of the most
absurd improbabilities. To say nothing of the unlikelihood of
"Stonewall" Jackson ordering a platoon--it could hardly have been a
regiment--to fire at a flagstaff instead of directing someone to enter
the house and remove the objectionable object,--though even this would
have been uncharacteristic of the man who smiled and saluted when a
pretty girl laughingly flourished an American flag in his face as he
rode past her in the streets of Frederick,--the quickness of the old
lady in catching that flag as it fell from the staff, to say nothing of
her activity in getting to the window from the spot where she was
presumably sheltered from "the rifle-blast," would put a professional
juggler to shame. Then again, why Jackson should have been "riding
ahead" does not seem clear, since that is not the place for a general
while on the march, and every detail of the incident is sufficiently
unmilitary to have been, as it was, the conception of one who had never
in his life as much as smelt gunpowder. No; the legend of Barbara must
be given up, even though it deprive us of one of the few heroines of its
day.
The debatable ground "between the lines" did, however, furnish history
with some notable incidents wherein women figured as the chief
influences, even if the names of these heroines were not chronicled. For
obvious reasons, the names were not disclosed at the time of the
incidents when the respective armies alternately held the ground where
lived the women whose deeds were chronicled, and afterward these deeds
were forgotten in graver matters. One fair inhabitant of Washington in
the early days of the struggle used to give Stuart, who for a time after
the battle of Bull Run held the southern bank of the Potomac, most
valuable information by means of a cunningly devised system of signals,
executed by the raising and lowering of the window shades in her house,
which was within full sight of the Confederate pickets. For a time the
Confederacy had a regular force of female spies in the capital of their
opponents, and some of the information thus gained was of great service.
Of course the Federal government also maintained a corps of female
spies, though the name of only one of all the roll on both sides--that
of Belle Boyd--is known to fame. Belle Boyd's adventurous career during
the war doubtless produced some few results in the movement of the
armies of the South; but even she hardly did yeoman service for her
cause. In respect of espionage, the Confederacy had a decided advantage
over its enemies, for the society at Richmond, both social and official,
was made up of more constant and, therefore, better known elements than
that of the always fluctuating population of Washington. So at Richmond
it was hardly possible for a woman to seem that which she was not in the
matter of sympathy, while in the national capital the constant influx of
strangers and sojourners made the keeping of a military or political
secret a matter of the utmost difficulty.
These more military pursuits, however, are hardly creditable and little
congenial to true womanhood, and the present record does not care to
concern itself with them. There was enough of passive heroism displayed
during the time of strife to fill the onlooker with admiration for the
courage as well as the patriotism of American womanhood, and these
things are more pleasant to look upon than is professional espionage.
The display of courage and endurance was varyingly manifested in the
different parts of the country and under different conditions; but it
was constant in its spirit. The debt of the Union to its women has never
been acknowledged, perhaps because never understood. The many triumphs
of the Confederate arms on the battlefield gave rise to a strong "peace
party" in the North; and, though general history makes no mention of the
fact, there can be in the mind of one who remembers the trend and
expressions of public sentiment little doubt that it was chiefly the
women of the North who barred the way of that party to ultimate victory.
Because the most prominent expressions in matters political come from
male sources, we are apt to neglect to recognize the home influence
which is so frequently a factor in the total result that accrues from
the consequent action. It was the men who fulminated against peace, the
men who went to the polls and by their votes decided that the war must
continue until either the South had been brought back into the Union or
the cause of the latter was so hopeless that to continue the struggle
were folly; but it was in large measure the women who, by their
steadfastness of devotion to the cause, impelled the men to such action.
There will be few among those who remember the interior history of those
terrible days who will not agree in the statement that to the women of
the North was due, in great measure, the hearty affirmative response
which rose from the country to the question, "Shall the war go on?"
Southern womanhood was equally steadfast in the cause of liberty, as the
South deemed it; indeed, the Southern women, as unyielding in principle
as their Northern sisters, were yet more admirable in their constancy,
because of the conditions under which that constancy was displayed. They
were not daunted by the ruin of their homes, by the death of their loved
ones, by their own sufferings and perils. Unlike the North, the South
recognized its unpayable debt to its women, perhaps because the
evidences of that debt were so much more patent than where these were
confined to the direction and fostering of public sentiment. The
Southern chronicler of that woeful time gladly acknowledged how the
women, by their enthusiastic encouragement and their gallant loyalty,
encouraged the men and kept them to their duty if only from shame of
their displaying less constancy than the sex which was termed the
weaker. When Lee stood at bay in Petersburg, it was less upon the
bayonets of his ragged army that the Southern Confederacy was upheld in
its last struggle than upon the fiery constancy of its women. Fine as
was the spirit of that little army, which laughed at its own plight and
jestingly termed its components "Lee's Miserables," in punning allusion
to Victor Hugo's great work, then just issued in America, it was, after
all, but the reflex and expression of the spirit of the delicate ladies
of the little town, who lived unconcerned amid the clamor of bursting
shells and even held their little social gatherings in the centre of the
whirlpool of war, that the soldiers might have some recreation during
the scant hours of rest from duty. When at last the skeleton army was
driven from its defences and forced to lay down its arms at Appomattox,
it was the women of Richmond who received the news with bitterest grief
but least dismay, and faced with calmest courage the threat of the
indignities and sufferings which they feared would result from Northern
occupation. That these fears were groundless, even the baser elements of
the soldiery being in the leash of a man who believed in civilized
warfare, does not detract from the gallantry which anticipated rapine
and sack without quailing.
The surrender of Johnston's army, following hard upon that of Lee's
forces, ended the struggle, and the South was left to face the
consciousness and consequences of defeat. On none of its children did
the blow fall with such stunning force as upon its daughters. That the
South could not be conquered, that it must attain its independence, that
God fought its battles, formed the creed of every Southern woman, and
even when the end was in sight to the vision of Lee and Johnston, still
fighting desperately as their duty rather than in any hope, the women
refused to believe in such a possibility. But the possibility became a
certainty, and Rachel could do nothing but mourn for her children and
turn with what courage she might to face conditions full of threat of
the worst; nor even here did her courage falter, though her beliefs had
proved but broken reeds and her hopes had been swept away, leaving
nothing in their place. The South was a land of mourning, not of death
only, but of failure of a beloved and trusted cause. Meanwhile, the
North was a land of rejoicing; and her women, like all their sex, were
immoderate in their triumph, and did not consider, as had the soldiers
of the victorious armies, the feelings of those who had fought so long
and well. But there was scant opportunity for the display of triumph;
for the terrible blow which fell upon the whole country, South as well
as North, when Lincoln died under the hand of the assassin, changed joy
into mourning, and made of a victorious people one that tasted all the
bitterness of sorrow. Heavier calamity never visited this land; and its
effects upon the feeling of our womanhood were almost as far-reaching
and distressing as its political results. For the women of the South,
sore in defeat and unjustly holding Lincoln responsible for the sorrows
that had come upon them, openly rejoiced in his taking-off, and forgot
their womanhood in their exultation over the foul crime. It was the
spirit that awoke at John Brown's insurrection over again, though
differently directed; and it awakened a natural response in the North,
which saw in the exaltation of murder as the judgment of God a
perversity and even criminality of thought which could spring only from
innate baseness. Again there was misunderstanding; for the women of the
South, blinded by their prejudices and sufferings to the true character
and greatness of the dead man, held him in detestation and rejoiced over
his death as that of a hated foe, while they of the North, listening to
the cry of exultation that arose from their Southern sisters and
unmindful of the sources,--however false in themselves, yet bearing some
excuse, if only of madness,--which led to that demonstration of joy,
naturally held that Southern women were hardly better than human fiends
and utterly unworthy of the guise of womanhood.
The trial of those implicated in the assassination of Lincoln gave a
name to be remembered in the annals of American women, though the record
be of the saddest. That Mrs. Surratt was legally guilty of complicity in
the murder of the martyred president is at least doubtful; it may even
be questioned if she were guilty of foreseeing the crime, her part in
the conspiracy most probably ending with the plan of abduction which was
the forerunner of the murder. None the less, she suffered a shameful
death, the passions of the time being too strong for the cooler voice of
justice to be heard; and again was enacted, in minor form, the national
drama that followed upon the insurrection of John Brown. The women of
the South, if they did not go to the lengths of their Northern sisters
on the former occasion, looked upon Mrs. Surratt in the light of a
martyr to their lost cause, and so expressed themselves with a
bitterness and forgetfulness of the true nature of the case which was a
denial of their best attributes as women; and the Northern woman,
holding Mrs. Surratt to be a very devil of malignity and criminality,
could not patiently hear her name spoken with aught but horror and
detestation. So the war ended, as it began, in misunderstanding, and,
therefore, the bitterest of hatred between the two sections of a land
which was at the end of the struggle no more united than at the
beginning.
It is pleasant to turn from these manifestations of all that was worst
in American womanhood to the consideration of woman's social conditions
at the time of the expiration of the war. Even during the period of
strife there had been uplifted a new voice from the women of our land,
though as yet that voice was too feeble and too drowned in the clash of
battle to attract much attention. One of the expressions of this new
spirit which had arisen in at least a portion of our women is worthy of
note as being in some sense a pioneer. In 1864 there was issued a book
called _Woman and Her Era_, by Eliza W. Farnham. The object of the
author was to demonstrate the superiority of women over men: not
superiority in comparative sense or even for certain ends, but absolute
and unimpeachable. The leading argument of the book, as it appeared in
syllogistic form and in all its wonders of capital letters, was as
follows: "Life is exalted in proportion to the Organic and Functional
Complexity; Woman's Organism is more Complex and her Totality of
Function larger than those of any other being inhabiting our earth;
Therefore her position in the Scale of Life is the most exalted--the
Sovereign one." The minor proposition was supported by arguments which
belong to the lecture room of the anatomist. Passing in silence over
that which the lady calls the "Organic Argument," a little of that which
she terms the "Religious Argument,--wherefore, is not clear,--may be
quoted with a view to entertainment if not to profit:
"Organic Superiority is in itself proof positive of Super Organic
Superiority.... Life is the most advanced which employs, in the service
of the greatest number of powers, the most complex mechanism for the End
of Use. We are therefore prepared to find in it" [the feminine
structure] "the embodiment of a larger number of powers and higher aims
in its Use... a deeper feeling for the Ends of Use, a more abiding faith
in and loyalty to Development, as the one aim that makes life worthy of
acceptance and sweet in its passing taste, and on the other hand to see
that its failure herein is more fatal and destructive than it is in the
masculine life.... The feminine includes the masculine, transcending it
in all directions."
This is the synopsis of the major part of the argument, given in the
lady's own words; but her conclusion has a more familiar sound to our
ears. Here it is:
"The question of Rights settles itself in the true statement of
Capacities. Rights are narrowest where Capacities are fewest broadest
where they are the most numerous.... It is plain, then, as between
masculine and feminine, where the most expanded circle of Rights will be
found; and equally plain the absurdity of man, the narrower in
Capacities, assuming to define the sphere of Rights for Woman, the
broader."
Such was the trumpet-blast sent out by Miss Eliza Farnham, one of the
pioneers of the movement which took for its slogan her own cry of
"Women's Rights." The work made no stir and has long since passed to the
limbo of forgotten books, but it was undeniably suggestive and seems
worthy of being rescued, at least in name and purpose, from the oblivion
into which it passed. Absorbed in nearer if not weightier questions, the
women of that day gave scant welcome to the theories of Miss Farnham;
but the appearance of those theories, even if in rudimentary form, was
ominous, though the omen was not recognized. It was one of the first
guns of a struggle compared with which even the war which was then
raging was tame and half-hearted, and of which the end is not yet;
perhaps never will be.
For the time, however, the women of our land were concerned with
national rather than sexual questions. Indeed, the physiological
argument never took root among the theories of women when they discussed
their place in the scheme of creation; but the mental argument, the
position that women were in all mental attributes equal to men and
therefore should be possessed of equal rights, proved to be seed sown in
good ground. Time was needed for its development into the grain of
general or even partial acceptance; but it grew and was even then
growing, even if not directly under the fostering of the author of
_Woman and Her Era_.
Already there had been more than whispers of such theories. As is
usually the case, the first movements were clumsy and ill-directed and
were too radical to hope for general popularity even among those whom
they were intended to benefit. There had been among certain disgruntled
women a movement toward "dress reform"--not, however, having as its end
aesthetic or even sanitary considerations, but merely an assertion, of
strange and even ridiculous nature, of equality with the men. Even
before Miss Farnham had uttered her call to battle there had come into
existence those strange bifurcated garments called "bloomers," though
their adoption had been limited to very few indeed among the women of
our land. Moreover, nearly fifteen years prior to the appearance of Miss
Farnham's book, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had signed a
summons to the first "Woman's Rights" convention, which was held at the
home of Mrs. Stanton, at Seneca Falls, New York. On this occasion was
made the first formal claim for suffrage on the part of women; but the
movement accomplished little and was rather suggestive than effective.
The female suffragists had accomplished nothing at this time; they had
not even influenced the general thought of their sex, and such works as
that of Miss Farnham--the most radical and yet representative in its
theories and therefore selected as typical--were as few as ineffective.
The failure of the movement to spread beyond a few rabid enthusiasts was
doubtless because of its radicalness of theory; it was not content,
being in this respect like almost all new movements, to make gradual
progress, but must upset established institutions, both domestic and
political, at a blow. Therefore it won from all sensible people either
ridicule or neglect; it made no more real headway than had the sporadic
outbursts of misdirected religious enthusiasm in older times, which
indeed it greatly resembled in its methods and propagandists. Its
central theory was so overlaid by cumbering cloaks of absurdity that,
whatever might be its real attractions and merits if seen stripped of
its fantastic garb, it could but be repugnant in present guise to all
true womanhood; it was sent forth in "bloomers," as it were, and was
thus made a figure of fun and deprived of the dignity which it might
have held had its dress been simple and dignified. Yet it was
portentous, though the portent was not of the thing that was seen but of
that which was to be born of it.
Such radical "reformers" as Susan B. Anthony, with her adoption of
semi-masculine costume, just sufficiently masculine to render it
unfeminine and nothing more, or Lucretia Mott, with her impracticable
theories of "women's rights," presented in such form as to be repellent
to all the better attributes of true womanhood, could win but ridicule,
good-natured or acrimonious, as their portion; yet, in a sense, they
were the leaders of the great movement which in altered guise was to
come as a preponderant question of its day. Not in 1866, however, had
that movement taken or even promised to assume any definite shape or one
likely to win sufficient adherents to make it worthy of notice. As yet
American womanhood was content with its sphere. It still ruled the home,
and found in that rule all of "right" that it desired. It was content to
send to the polls, as to the battle, its male representatives and to
guide them by its influence into the paths which seemed best. It did not
"lift up its voice and contend in the streets"; it was quietly strong.
The close of the Civil War, then, found the outer conditions of the
American woman, speaking of them in general and not as affected by the
material results of that war, just as they had been at the beginning of
the strife. Society had indeed been rent into fragments; but the
components of that society which had flourished four years before were
unchanged in their status. Socially speaking, there had come no change
to the women of America during the period of the Civil War; yet by that
war and its results there had been created conditions that were to bear
fruit in after days.