THE CONVENTICLE OF THE STRONG-MINDED.
Her strong toils of grace.
SHAKSPEARE.
Take we a glimpse now of another interior scene in the strange,
mingled life of the great metropolis. In a bare and meanly-furnished
but roomy parlor of a house in Tenth Street, near Tompkins Square, we
find assembled, on one summer’s afternoon, a group of females. There
are perhaps ten of them in all. The characteristic which first strikes
the eye, on glancing around this group, is the strange angularity of
lines presented everywhere, in faces, figures, and attitudes, except
when contrasted with an uncouth and squabby _embonpoint_, which
seemed equally at variance with the physical harmonies, supposed to
be characteristic of the sex. What all this meant, you could not
comprehend at first glance; but the impression was, of something “out
of joint.” Where, or what, it was impossible to conjecture. Some sat
with their bonnets on, which had a Quakerish cut about them, though
not strictly orthodox. Some, conscious of fine hair, had tossed their
bonnets on the floor or chairs, as the case might be. There was,
in a word, a prevailing atmosphere of steadfast and devil-may-care
belligerence—a seeming, on brow, in hand, and foot, that, demurely
restrained, as it certainly was, unconsciously led you to feel that a
slow and simultaneous unbuttoning of the cuffs of sleeves, a deliberate
rolling up of the same, and a dazzling development of lean, taut
tendons, corrugated muscles, and swollen veins, would be the most
natural movement conceivable. Not that this bellicose sentiment, by
any means, seemed to have found its proper antagonism in the forms
and personalities then and there presented; but that you felt, in
the vacant reach and persistent abstraction of the expression, that
the foe, at whom they gazed through the infinite of space, was not an
Individuality, but an Essence,—a world-devouring element of Evil, with
which they warred.
And warriors indeed they seemed—we should say Amazons—wielding, not the
weapons of carnal strife, but those mightier arms with which the Spirit
doth, at times, endow our race. As for the war they waged, whatever
might be the power with whom they were engaged, it seemed to have been
a protracted and a desperate one; for, verily, judging from the harsh
lines that seamed the faces of those present, one would imagine them to
be “rich only in large hurts!”
There were young women present who were clearly under twenty; whose
foreheads, when they elevated their eyebrows, were wrinkled and
parchment-like as any
“Painful warrior famoused for fight.”
Why this unnatural wilting? would be the certain question of the
cool observer. What fearful wrongs have these women suffered? What
“contagious blastments?” Is the wicked world arraigned against them for
no just cause? Has it combined its respiring masses into one large,
simultaneous breath of volcanic cursings, to be wreaked upon their
unoffending heads alone? To be sure,
“Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt;”
and can it be that these, too, are “innocents?” It is true, physiology
teaches that, when women wither prematurely, acquire an unnatural
sharpness of feature, become
“Beated and chapped with tanned antiquity,”
before they have seen years enough for the bloom of the life of true
maturity to have freshened on their cheeks and foreheads, there must be
some cause for it. Common sense teaches, too, that that cause is most
likely to be, originally, rather a physical than a spiritual one—that
mental aberration, dogged and sullen moods, one-ideaed abstractions, a
general peevishness and fretful discontent, a suspicious unbelief in
the warm-blooded genialities, and much enduring sympathies of those
around them, whose lives are intact—or, in other words, who have held
themselves, in health, through nature, near to God—must have its source
in some evil not entirely foreign to themselves.
Ask the wise physician why are these things so? He will answer, God has
so ordered this material universe, that, while we live in it, we must
conform to its laws; that, however powerful our spiritual entity, our
relations to this life must, to be happy, be normal.
But this is prosing. It may, or it may not, account, in part, for the
combative and generally corrugated aspect of this conventicle of the
“strong-minded,” to which we have been introduced. Now let us listen!
She to whom the place of presiding Pythoness seemed to have been, by
general understanding, assigned, now solemnly arose, amidst a sudden
pause of shrill-tongued clatter. She was very tall—nearly six feet.
Her straight figure would have seemed voluptuously rounded, but that
the loose-folded and wilted oval of her face suggested that the plump
bust, with its close, manly jacket of black velvet, buttoned down in
front, might owe something of its elastic seeming roundness to those
conventionalities, _à la modiste_, and otherwise, against which her
principles most vehemently protested. Her flaxen hair emulated the
classic tie of any Venus of them all, on the back part of the head;
while the effulgence of sunny curls flooded the very crow’s-feet in the
corners of her great, cold, dead, grey eyes.
She shook her curls slightly, and spoke:—
“My sisters, we have come together this afternoon, not to talk about
abstractions of right and wrong to our sex; for, upon all these
elementary subjects, our minds are fully made up—all those inductive
processes of which the human intellect is capable, our minds have
already passed through. Our opinions are irrevocably formed, our
conclusions absolute! Woman is oppressed by man. She is denied her
just rights. She is taxed, yet denied the privilege of representation.
She is a slave, without the privileges of slavery! for, in the old
slave-states, the possession of twenty, or thirty, or forty slaves
gives to their master the faintly-representative privilege of an
additional vote, while, to our tyrants, though each may hold, in
reality, a dozen wives, the law grants nothing! Leaving us, in fact,
not even the ‘shadow of a shade’ of a social or civil existence! We
are thus reduced to a condition of insignificance, in relation to the
active affairs of life and the world, that we have determined to be,
both incongruous and insufferable.
“Man, our time-out-of-mind despot, has determined to reduce us to,
and hold us within, the sphere of mere wet-nurses to his insolent
and bifurcate progeny;—we must, forsooth, spawn for him, and then
dedicate our lives to educating his procreative vices into what he
calls manhood! We are wearied with the dull, stale, commonplace of
nursery-slops, and of the fractious squallings of our embryo tyrants!
Man must learn to nurse his own monsters, and we will nurse ours! We
have declared our independence of his tyranny; our great object is to
displace him from his seat of power! For six thousand years he has been
our despot—our ruthless and unscrupulous tyrant! We have therefore a
settlement to make with him—a long arrearage of accounts to be rendered.
“But we are weak, while he is strong! He possesses the physical force,
and all the guarantees of precedence since time began, while we have
only our own weaknesses to fall back upon—what they, in their surfeited
rhythm, style ‘witching graces,’ and ‘nameless charms!’
“Well, we must use these against our obese foe as best we may. We
must clip the claws and teeth of the lion, at any rate; and, in
consideration that the whole World of Past and Present is arraigned
against us, we must accept as our motto, that of the only man who ever
deserved to be a woman, Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits,
“‘The end justifies the means.’”
A small noise—a scarcely sensible “teetering” of pedal extremities
upon the thin carpet, followed this “stern demonstration” of “woman’s
rights,” from the accepted Priestess of the conventicle; when various
exclamations arose from different parts of the room, such as—
“Right! right! End justifies the means, in dealing with the brutes!”
“They give us no quarter, and we will give them none!”
“Nurse their brats, forsooth!”
“We must circumvent them as we can, to obtain our ‘rights!’”
“Yes! yes! All stratagems are fair in love and war!”
Suddenly sprang to her feet a very emphatic, stout woman, straight
and thick-set, with soiled cap, coarse, stubby, grayish hair, sparse,
silvery bristles on her chin, gray, savage eyes, and large fists,
which she brought down with a crash upon the frail chair-back which
constituted the bulwark of her position. In a voice of creaking bass,
she exclaimed—
“The sister is right—they are our oppressors; but it is because we have
been cowards enough to yield them the supremacy; it is nothing but our
own cowardice that is to blame. Man knows, as well as any other animal,
on which side his bread is buttered; we have only got to learn him what
and where his place is, and he will keep it. When I first married,
I had some trouble with my Jonas; but I soon taught him that he had
better be back again in the whale’s belly, than employed in trenching
upon my ‘woman’s rights!’ (A general disposition to laugh, which was,
however, frowned down by the dignified Priestess.)
“It is true, my sisters; we have only to assert our rights, and take
them! Man will never dare to rebel, if we are resolute. Overwhelm
him with our strength—make him feel his littleness beside us,
and he will slink into any hole to hide. I am myself in creed a
non-resistant—(suppressed laughter.) I do not believe in pummelling
truth into man; forced conversions do not last, and should not. But
I will tell you what sort of conversions I do believe in; they are
spiritual. Bow, bend, aye, break his spirit to your will, and then he
is yours; instead of being slave to him, he is your slave. This is what
we want. When he can be reduced to obedience, then he will be happy;
for when he has accepted us as his spiritual guides, and no longer
dreams of lifting his thoughts in rebellion, then will he always go
right. They themselves are for ever confessing, that without us, as
mothers, they would never—the greatest of them—arrive at any thing;
that they owe it all to us—all their greatness, all their goodness. Let
us take the hint, and hold the spiritual birch over them always, and
they will ever remain obedient, for their own good.”
This speech was received with very general approbation; though,
that all did not recognise it as orthodox, became immediately
apparent. A tall, thin, cadaverous-looking lady, with excessively
black hair, and eyes that literally glistered as she rose—the huge
ear-rings and multifarious trinkets about her person quivering with
excitement—exclaimed, in a shrill voice—
“It is false! it is not true that we desire to make slaves of man.
We are opposed to slavery—to slavery of all sorts; and, although man
deserves, on account of his oppressions of the poor negro, to be made a
slave of, if human slavery were to be tolerated, yet we desire rather
to return good for evil; and all we ask is equality in the Senate, in
the Presidential chair, on the bench of justice, in the counting-house
and workshop. We want our rights; our right to marriage as a mere
civil contract—our right to choose with whom we shall enter into that
contract, whether colored or white man, and our right to annul that
contract when it pleases us. What kind of freedom is it, when, if I
choose to marry a man of color, no matter how noble he may be, I am
to be mobbed and driven out of the society of my race; while, if I am
so unfortunate as to marry a white man, who turns out to be a brute
and tyrant, as he is most like to do, and attempt to rid myself of
the horrid incubus, by leaving him, or by suing him for a divorce, I
am equally mobbed by the hue-and-cry, and banished from society as an
outlaw? We want our rights in marriage—we want equality. I can—”
Here the speaker was interrupted by a voice marvellously flute-like and
lingering in its intonations:
“‘At which, like unbacked colts, they pricked their ears,
Advanced their eyelids, lifted up their noses,
As they smelt music.’”
And cold shoulders were simultaneously turned upon the dark-haired and
be-jewelled orator of amalgamation.
The dulcet-toned interrogator, who, to the surprise of all eyes,
appeared a squabby, cottony, pale-eyed, thick-lipped, lymphatic-looking
personage, who wore a wig clumsily, and had no vestige of hair upon
brow or violet eyelids, proceeded, in mellifluous phrase—
“We did not come here to talk about private grievances. The sister who
speaks so fiercely of our rights, in regard to marriage, had better
have had a little experience on the subject. She is, I should judge,
considerably the rise of forty, and has never yet been married; not
even to one of the dark-browed children of Ham, towards whom she
exhibits so decided a leaning. Now, I have been married six times
already—(great sensation,)—and to white men, and gentlemen, at that;
and consider myself, therefore, qualified to speak of marriage.
Marriage is a great blessing; let her try it when she gets a chance,
and she will find it so! (much bristling and fidgeting, the dark-haired
woman looking daggers.) It isn’t marriage that is the great evil,
against which we have to fight—nor it isn’t the slavery of the colored
race, either. It is the slavery of our own race, of our own kith and
kin, of our own blood and complexion. It is the emancipation of our
own fathers, sons, and brothers, from the barbarous penalties of
the penal code. Our erring fathers, sons, and brothers; it is their
cause, my sisters, it is their cause we are called upon to vindicate.
According to our brutal laws, one little frailty, to which we all
may be subject,—one little slip, which any, the purest of us may
make—subjects man to solitary incarceration for life, in which he is
cut off from all loving communion with our sex; or to the horrible
penalty of death by the rope! This, my beloved sisters, is the crying
evil of the day; and man, cruel man, is in favor of such inflictions.
We must soften his flinty heart, through our charms. It is our duty, it
is our mission, to effect amelioration in favor of the erring classes.
We are all erring; and in how much are we better than they?—except,
that through our cunning, and in our cowardice, we have as yet escaped
penalties which, under the same measure of justice, might as well have
been visited upon us. I have visited the penitentiaries and prisons of
many States, that I might carry consolation to the shorn and manacled
children of oppression. I tell you that I have seen among them gods,
whose shattered armor gleamed in light! I have seen Apollo, with his
winged heel chained to a round-shot! I have witnessed more glorious
effulg—”
“Hiss-s-s-s!” “Nonsense!”
“It was Mercury, the god of thieves, you saw with the round-shot at his
heels!” said an oily voice; and, as all eyes turned in that direction,
the forehead of the speaker flushed crimson while she proceeded—
“It is not man at all; it is we who shut ourselves up in tight frocks,
who make hooks-and-eyes our jailors, and ribs of whalebone our
strait-jackets! Let us first free ourselves physically, give our lungs
and hearts room to play, and then we may talk about open battle with
man for our rights. But, as it is, to speak thus, is nonsense. We are
weak, while man is strong; we must fight him with other weapons than
open force. While he laughs at our pretensions, let us, too, laugh
at his foibles, and govern him through them. It was to consult, as
to some consistent and uniform system, by which we should be enabled
to accomplish this result, that we came together this afternoon. It
has been well said, that our motto should be, ‘The end justifies the
means.’ To the weak and the determined, this is a sacred creed, and
we should go forth with it in our hearts, and act upon it in all our
relations towards men. It should be our business to get possession of
them, body and soul. We need their influence, to advance our views, to
obtain our rights. We should be all things to all men; should believe
in the Bible, in Fourier, in Swedenborg, in Joe Smith, or Mahomet,
if necessary, so that the influence be gained. We must seek out
everywhere men who hold places of power and public influence, and win
them—not to our cause, for that would be hopeless—but to ourselves;
and through ourselves to our cause. We must not scruple as to the
means; for ‘the end justifies the means.’ We must find, by whatever
stratagem, art, or intrigue, that may be available, the assailable
points in the characters of those who may be of use to us, and secure
them, at whatever risk of reputation; for, as we will secretly sustain
each other, we will at once dignify ourselves and our cause into
the position of martyrdom, and be able to take shelter behind the
omnipotent cry of persecution. There we are safe.”
“Good!” “Good!” “Right!” “Right!” “Just the thing!” burst from all
sides of the room; while the weather-beaten face,—that is, the
forehead,—of the lithe, glib speaker flushed with momentary exultation,
while she continued, with still greater emphasis—
“Thus banded, my sisters, if we are firm, faithful, and enduring, we
may conquer the world. There is never a period when there is more than
a dozen men who wield its destinies. There are nearly a dozen of us
here present, and there are other spirits that I know, resolute and
strong enough, to be our associates; let us resolve, then, to govern
those who govern; and the romantic fragments of the life of a Lola
Montes will have been firmly conjoined in the fact of a governing
dynasty, the sceptre of which shall be upheld by woman.”
Storms of applause, during which the plain, Quakerish-looking speaker
subsided into her seat. As she did so, there might have been observed,
under the flush of exultation which mantled her brow, a singular
obliquity of the left eye! Ha! Etherial!