a march as irresistible as the glacier moves down from the mountains.
Its front is in America,--and behind are England, France, Italy,
Prussia, and the Mohammedan countries. In all, the rights of the
laboring masses are a living force, bearing slowly and inevitably all
before it. Our war has been a marshalling of its armies, commanded by a
hard-handed, inspired man of the working-class. An intelligent American,
recently resident in Egypt, says it was affecting to notice the interest
with which the working-classes there were looking upon our late struggle
in America, and the earnestness of their wishes for the triumph of the
Union. 'It is our cause, it is for us,' they said, as said the
cotton-spinners of England and the silk-weavers of Lyons. The forces of
this mighty movement are still directed by a man from the lower orders,
the sworn foe of exclusive privileges and landed aristocracies. If Andy
Johnson is consistent with himself, with the principles which raised him
from a tailor's bench to the head of a mighty nation, he will see to it
that the work that Lincoln began is so thoroughly done, that every man
and every woman in America, of whatever race or complexion, shall have
exactly equal rights before the law, and be free to rise or fall
according to their individual intelligence, industry, and moral worth.
So long as everything is not strictly in accordance with our principles
of democracy, so long as there is in any part of the country an
aristocratic upper class who despise labor, and a laboring lower class
that is denied equal political rights, so long this grinding and discord
between the two will never cease in America. It will make trouble not
only in the South, but in the North,--trouble between all employers and
employed,--trouble in every branch and department of labor,--trouble in
every parlor and every kitchen.
"What is it that has driven every American woman out of domestic
service, when domestic service is full as well paid, is easier,
healthier, and in many cases far more agreeable, than shop and factory
work? It is, more than anything else, the influence of slavery in the
South,--its insensible influence on the minds of mistresses, giving them
false ideas of what ought to be the position and treatment of a female
citizen in domestic service, and its very marked influence on the minds
of freedom-loving Americans, causing them to choose _any_ position
rather than one which is regarded as assimilating them to slaves. It is
difficult to say what are the very worst results of a system so
altogether bad as that of slavery; but one of the worst is certainly the
utter contempt it brings on useful labor, and the consequent utter
physical and moral degradation of a large body of the whites; and this
contempt of useful labor has been constantly spreading like an infection
from the Southern to the Northern States, particularly among women, who,
as our friend here has truly said, are by our worship and exaltation of
them made peculiarly liable to take the malaria of aristocratic society.
Let anybody observe the conversation in good society for an hour or two,
and hear the tone in which servant-girls, seamstresses, mechanics, and
all who work for their living, are sometimes mentioned, and he will see,
that, while every one of the speakers professes to regard useful labor
as respectable, she is yet deeply imbued with the leaven of aristocratic
ideas.
"In the South the contempt for labor bred of slavery has so permeated
society, that we see great, coarse, vulgar _lazzaroni_ lying about in
rags and vermin, and dependent on government rations, maintaining, as
their only source of self-respect, that they never have done and never
_will_ do a stroke of useful work, in all their lives. In the North
there are, I believe, no _men_ who would make such a boast; but I think
there are many women--beautiful, fascinating _lazzaroni_ of the parlor
and boudoir--who make their boast of elegant helplessness and utter
incompetence for any of woman's duties with equal _naïveté_. The
Spartans made their slaves drunk, to teach their children the evils of
intoxication; and it seems to be the policy of a large class in the
South now to keep down and degrade the only working-class they have, for
the sake of teaching their children to despise work.
"We of the North, who know the dignity of labor, who know the value of
free and equal institutions, who have enjoyed advantages for seeing
their operation, ought, in true brotherliness, to exercise the power
given us by the present position of the people of the Southern States,
and put things thoroughly right _for_ them, well knowing, that, though
they may not like it at the moment, they will like it in the end, and
that it will bring them peace, plenty, and settled prosperity, such as
they have long envied here in the North. It is no kindness to an invalid
brother, half recovered from delirium, to leave him a knife to cut his
throat with, should he be so disposed. We should rather appeal from
Philip drunk to Philip sober, and do real kindness, trusting to the
future for our meed of gratitude.
"Giving equal political rights to all the inhabitants of the Southern
States will be their shortest way to quiet and to wealth. It will avert
what is else almost certain,--a war of races; since all experience shows
that the ballot introduces the very politest relations between the
higher and lower classes. If the right be restricted, let it be by
requirements of property and education, applying to all the population
equally.
"Meanwhile, we citizens and citizenesses of the North should remember
that Reconstruction means something more than setting things right in
the Southern States. We have saved our government and institutions, but
we have paid a fearful price for their salvation; and we ought to prove
now that they are worth the price.
"The empty chair, never to be filled,--the light gone out on its
candlestick, never on earth to be rekindled,--gallant souls that have
exhaled to heaven in slow torture and starvation,--the precious blood
that has drenched a hundred battle-fields,--all call to us with warning
voices, and tell us not to let such sacrifices be in vain. They call on
us by our clear understanding of the great principles of democratic
equality, for which our martyred brethren suffered and died, to show to
all the world that their death was no mean and useless waste, but a
glorious investment for the future of mankind.
"This war, these sufferings, these sacrifices, ought to make every
American man and woman look on himself and herself as belonging to a
royal priesthood, a peculiar people. The blood of our slain ought to be
a gulf, wide and deep as the Atlantic, dividing us from the opinions and
the practices of countries whose government and society are founded on
other and antagonistic ideas. Democratic republicanism has never yet
been perfectly worked out either in this or any other country. It is a
splendid edifice, half built, deformed by rude scaffolding, noisy with
the clink of trowels, blinding the eyes with the dust of lime, and
endangering our heads with falling brick. We make our way over heaps of
shavings and lumber to view the stately apartments,--we endanger our
necks in climbing ladders standing in the place of future staircases;
but let us not for all this cry out that the old rat-holed mansions of
former ages, with their mould, and moss, and cockroaches, are better
than this new palace. There is no lime-dust, no clink of trowels, no
rough scaffolding there, to be sure, and life goes on very quietly; but
there is the foul air of slow and sure decay.
"Republican institutions in America are in a transition state; they have
not yet separated themselves from foreign and antagonistic ideas and
traditions, derived from old countries; and the labors necessary for the
upbuilding of society are not yet so adjusted that there is mutual
pleasure and comfort in the relations of employer and employed. We still
incline to class-distinctions and aristocracies. We incline to the
scheme of dividing the world's work into two orders: first, physical
labor, which is held to be rude and vulgar, and the province of a lower
class; and second, brain labor, held to be refined and aristocratic,
and the province of a higher class. Meanwhile, the Creator, who is the
greatest of levellers, has given to every human being _both_ a physical
system, needing to be kept in order by physical labor, and an
intellectual or brain power, needing to be kept in order by brain labor.
_Work_, use, employment, is the condition of health in both; and he who
works either to the neglect of the other lives but a half-life, and is
an imperfect human being.
"The aristocracies of the Old World claim that their only labor should
be that of the brain; and they keep their physical system in order by
violent exercise, which is made genteel from the fact only that it is
not useful or productive. It would be losing caste to refresh the
muscles by handling the plough or the axe; and so foxes and hares must
be kept to be hunted, and whole counties turned into preserves, in order
that the nobility and gentry may have physical exercise in a way
befitting their station,--that is to say, in a way that produces
nothing, and does good only to themselves.
"The model republican uses his brain for the highest purposes of brain
work, and his muscles in _productive_ physical labor; and useful labor
he respects above that which is merely agreeable.
"When this equal respect for physical and mental labor shall have taken
possession of every American citizen, there will be no so-called
laboring class; there will no more be a class all muscle without brain
power to guide it, and a class all brain without muscular power to
execute. The labors of society will be lighter, because each individual
will take his part in them; they will be performed better, because no
one will be overburdened.
"In those days, Miss Jennie, it will be an easier matter to keep house,
because, housework being no longer regarded as degrading drudgery, you
will find a superior class of women ready to engage in it.
"Every young girl and woman, who in her sphere and by her example shows
that she is not ashamed of domestic labor, and that she considers the
necessary work and duties of family life as dignified and important, is
helping to bring on this good day. Louis Philippe once jestingly
remarked,--'I have this qualification for being a king in these days,
that I have blacked my own boots, and could black them again.'
"Every American ought to cultivate, as his pride and birthright, the
habit of self-helpfulness. Our command of the labors of good _employés_
in any department is liable to such interruptions, that he who has
blacked his own boots, and can do it again, is, on the whole, likely to
secure the most comfort in life.
"As to that which Mr. Ruskin pronounces to be a deep, irremediable
ulcer in society, namely, domestic service, we hold that the last
workings of pure democracy will cleanse and heal it. When right ideas
are sufficiently spread,--when everybody is self-helpful and capable of
being self-supporting,--when there is a fair start for every human being
in the race of life, and all its prizes are, without respect of persons,
to be obtained by the best runner,--when every kind of useful labor is
thoroughly respected,--then there will be a clear, just, wholesome basis
of intercourse on which employers and employed can move without
wrangling or discord.
"Renouncing all claims to superiority on the one hand, and all thought
of servility on the other, service can be rendered by fair contracts and
agreements, with that mutual respect and benevolence which every human
being owes to every other.
"But for this transition period, which is wearing out the life of so
many women, and making so many households uncomfortable, I have some
alleviating suggestions, which I shall give in my next chapter."
IV.
IS WOMAN A WORKER?
"Papa, do you see what the Evening Post says of your New-Year's article
on Reconstruction?" said Jennie, as we were all sitting in the library
after tea.
"I have not seen it."
"Well, then, the charming writer, whoever he is, takes up for us girls
and women, and maintains that no work of any sort ought to be expected
of us; that our only mission in life is to be beautiful, and to refresh
and elevate the spirits of men by being so. If I get a husband, my
mission is to be always becomingly dressed, to display most captivating
toilettes, and to be always in good spirits,--as, under the
circumstances, I always should be,--and thus 'renew his spirits' when he
comes in weary with the toils of life. Household cares are to be far
from me: they destroy my cheerfulness and injure my beauty.
"He says that the New England standard of excellence as applied to
woman has been a mistaken one; and, in consequence, though the girls are
beautiful, the matrons are faded, overworked, and uninteresting; and
that such a state of society tends to immorality, because, when wives
are no longer charming, men are open to the temptation to desert their
firesides, and get into mischief generally. He seems particularly to
complain of your calling ladies who do nothing the 'fascinating
_lazzaroni_ of the parlor and boudoir.'"
"There was too much truth back of that arrow not to wound," said
Theophilus Thoro, who was ensconced, as usual, in his dark corner,
whence he supervises our discussions.
"Come, Mr. Thoro, we won't have any of your bitter moralities," said
Jennie; "they are only to be taken as the invariable bay-leaf which
Professor Blot introduces into all his recipes for soups and stews,--a
little elegant bitterness, to be kept tastefully in the background. You
see now, papa, I should like the vocation of being beautiful. It would
just suit me to wear point-lace and jewelry, and to have life revolve
round me, as some beautiful star, and feel that I had nothing to do but
shine and refresh the spirits of all gazers, and that in this way I was
truly useful, and fulfilling the great end of my being; but alas for
this doctrine! all women have not beauty. The most of us can only hope
not to be called ill-looking, and, when we get ourselves up with care,
to look fresh and trim and agreeable; which fact interferes with the
theory."
"Well, for my part," said young Rudolph, "I go for the theory of the
beautiful. If ever I marry, it is to find an asylum for ideality. I
don't want to make a culinary marriage or a business partnership. I want
a being whom I can keep in a sphere of poetry and beauty, out of the
dust and grime of every-day life."
"Then," said Mr. Theophilus, "you must either be a rich man in your own
right, or your fair ideal must have a handsome fortune of her own."
"I never will marry a rich wife," quoth Rudolph. "My wife must be
supported by me, not I by her."
Rudolph is another of the _habitués_ of our chimney-corner, representing
the order of young knighthood in America, and his dreams and fancies, if
impracticable, are always of a kind to make every one think him a good
fellow. He who has no romantic dreams at twenty-one will be a horribly
dry peascod at fifty; therefore it is that I gaze reverently at all
Rudolph's chateaus in Spain, which want nothing to complete them except
solid earth to stand on.
"And pray," said Theophilus, "how long will it take a young lawyer or
physician, starting with no heritage but his own brain, to create a
sphere of poetry and beauty in which to keep his goddess? How much a
year will be necessary, as the English say, to _do_ this garden of Eden,
whereinto shall enter only the poetry of life?"
"I don't know. I haven't seen it near enough to consider. It is because
I know the difficulty of its attainment that I have no present thoughts
of marriage. Marriage is to me in the bluest of all blue distances,--far
off, mysterious, and dreamy as the Mountains of the Moon or sources of
the Nile. It shall come only when I have secured a fortune that shall
place my wife above all necessity of work or care."
"I desire to hear from you," said Theophilus, "when you have found the
sum that will keep a woman from care. I know of women now inhabiting
palaces, waited on at every turn by servants, with carriages, horses,
jewels, laces, cashmeres, enough for princesses, who are eaten up by
care. One lies awake all night on account of a wrinkle in the waist of
her dress; another is dying because no silk of a certain inexpressible
shade is to be found in New York; a third has had a dress sent home,
which has proved such a failure that life seems no longer worth having.
If it were not for the consolations of religion, one doesn't know what
would become of her. The fact is, that care and labor are as much
correlated to human existence as shadow is to light; there is no such
thing as excluding them from any mortal lot. You may make a canary-bird
or a goldfish live in absolute contentment without a care or labor, but
a human being you cannot. Human beings are restless and active in their
very nature, and will do something, and that something will prove a
care, a labor, and a fatigue, arrange it how you will. As long as there
is anything to be desired and not yet attained, so long its attainment
will be attempted; so long as that attainment is doubtful or difficult,
so long will there be care and anxiety. When boundless wealth releases
woman from every family care, she immediately makes herself a new set of
cares in another direction, and has just as many anxieties as the most
toilful housekeeper, only they are of a different kind. Talk of labor,
and look at the upper classes in London or in New York in the
fashionable season. Do any women work harder? To rush from crowd to
crowd all night, night after night, seeing what they are tired of,
making the agreeable over an abyss of inward yawning, crowded, jostled,
breathing hot air, and crushed in halls and stairways, without a moment
of leisure for months and months, till brain and nerve and sense reel,
and the country is longed for as a period of resuscitation and relief!
Such is the release from labor and fatigue brought by wealth. The only
thing that makes all this labor at all endurable is, that it is utterly
and entirely useless, and does no good to any one in creation; this
alone makes it genteel, and distinguishes it from the vulgar toils of a
housekeeper. These delicate creatures, who can go to three or four
parties a night for three months, would be utterly desolate if they had
to watch one night in a sick-room; and though they can exhibit any
amount of physical endurance and vigor in crowding into assembly rooms,
and breathe tainted air in an opera-house with the most martyr-like
constancy, they could not sit one half-hour in the close room where the
sister of charity spends hours in consoling the sick or aged poor."
"Mr. Theophilus is quite at home now," said Jennie; "only start him on
the track of fashionable life, and he takes the course like a hound. But
hear, now, our champion of the Evening Post:--
"'The instinct of women to seek a life of repose, their eagerness to
attain the life of elegance, does not mean contempt for labor, but it is
a confession of unfitness for labor. Women were not intended to
work,--not because work is ignoble, but because it is as disastrous to
the beauty of a woman as is friction to the bloom and softness of a
flower. Woman is to be kept in the garden of life; she is to rest, to
receive, to praise; she is to be kept from the workshop world, where
innocence is snatched with rude hands, and softness is blistered into
unsightliness or hardened into adamant. No social truth is more in need
of exposition and illustration than this one; and, above all, the people
of New England need to know it, and, better, they need to believe it.
"'It is therefore with regret that we discover Christopher Crowfield
applying so harshly, and, as we think so indiscriminatingly, the theory
of work to women, and teaching a society made up of women sacrificed in
the workshops of the state, or to the dust-pans and kitchens of the
house, that women must work, ought to work, and are dishonored if they
do not work; and that a woman committed to the drudgery of a household
is more creditably employed than when she is charming, fascinating,
irresistible, in the parlor or boudoir. The consequence of this fatal
mistake is manifest throughout New England,--in New England, where the
girls are all beautiful and the wives and mothers faded, disfigured, and
without charm or attractiveness. The moment a girl marries in New
England she is apt to become a drudge, or a lay figure on which to
exhibit the latest fashions. She never has beautiful hands, and she
would not have a beautiful face if a utilitarian society could "apply"
her face to anything but the pleasure of the eye. Her hands lose their
shape and softness after childhood, and domestic drudgery destroys her
beauty of form and softness and bloom of complexion after marriage. To
correct, or rather to break up, this despotism of household cares, or of
work, over woman, American society must be taught that women will
inevitably fade and deteriorate, unless it insures repose and comfort to
them. It must be taught that reverence for beauty is the normal
condition, while the theory of work, applied to women, is disastrous
alike to beauty and morals. Work, when it is destructive to men or
women, is forced and unjust.
"'All the great masculine or creative epochs have been distinguished by
spontaneous work on the part of men, and universal reverence and care
for beauty. The praise of work, and sacrifice of women to this great
heartless devil of work, belong only to, and are the social doctrine of,
a mechanical age and a utilitarian epoch. And if the New England idea of
social life continues to bear so cruelly on woman, we shall have a
reaction somewhat unexpected and shocking.'"
"Well now, say what you will," said Rudolph, "you have expressed my idea
of the conditions of the sex. Woman was not made to work; she was made
to be taken care of by man. All that is severe and trying, whether in
study or in practical life, is and ought to be in its very nature
essentially the work of the male sex. The value of woman is precisely
the value of those priceless works of art for which we build
museums,--which we shelter and guard as the world's choicest heritage;
and a lovely, cultivated, refined woman, thus sheltered, and guarded,
and developed, has a worth that cannot be estimated by any gross,
material standard. So I subscribe to the sentiments of Miss Jennie's
friend without scruple."
"The great trouble in settling all these society questions," said I,
"lies in the gold-washing,--the cradling I think the miners call it. If
all the quartz were in one stratum and all the gold in another, it would
save us a vast deal of trouble. In the ideas of Jennie's friend of the
Evening Post there is a line of truth and a line of falsehood so
interwoven and threaded together that it is impossible wholly to assent
or dissent. So with your ideas, Rudolph, there is a degree of truth in
them, but there is also a fallacy.
"It is a truth, that woman as a sex ought not to do the hard work of the
world, either social, intellectual, or moral. There are evidences in her
physiology that this was not intended for her, and our friend of the
Evening Post is right in saying that any country will advance more
rapidly in civilization and refinement where woman is thus sheltered
and protected. And I think, furthermore, that there is no country in the
world where women _are_ so much considered and cared for and sheltered,
in every walk of life, as in America. In England and France,--all over
the continent of Europe, in fact,--the other sex are deferential to
women only from some presumption of their social standing, or from the
fact of acquaintanceship; but among strangers, and under circumstances
where no particular rank or position can be inferred, a woman travelling
in England or France is jostled and pushed to the wall, and left to take
her own chance, precisely as if she were not a woman. Deference to
delicacy and weakness, the instinct of protection, does not appear to
characterize the masculine population of any other quarter of the world
so much as that of America. In France, _les Messieurs_ will form a
circle round the fire in the receiving-room of a railroad station, and
sit, tranquilly smoking their cigars, while ladies who do not happen to
be of their acquaintance are standing shivering at the other side of the
room. In England, if a lady is incautiously booked for an outside place
on a coach, in hope of seeing the scenery, and the day turns out
hopelessly rainy, no gentleman in the coach below ever thinks of
offering to change seats with her, though it pour torrents. In America,
the roughest backwoods steamboat or canal-boat captain always, as a
matter of course, considers himself charged with the protection of the
ladies. '_Place aux dames_' is written in the heart of many a shaggy
fellow who could not utter a French word any more than could a buffalo.
It is just as I have before said,--women are the recognized aristocracy,
the _only_ aristocracy, of America; and, so far from regarding this fact
as objectionable, it is an unceasing source of pride in my country.