A great deal has been said and written in this age and country on the
subject of what is technically called _woman's rights_; and, in the
course of such agitation, many good and true things have been thought
out and made available to the bettering of her condition, besides many
foolish and impracticable, arising from a too grasping desire for a
wider and more exciting sphere of effort, as well as from a palpable
misapprehension of their own nature and their legitimate sphere, which
prevails quite extensively among women. The pioneers of the rights of
woman have done a good work, however, and may well be pardoned wherein
they have gone beyond what might be fairly and profitably demanded for
our sex. They have called the public attention to the subject, and have
enlisted the thoughts and the services of many earnest men as well as
women in their cause; thus provoking that inquiry which will eventually
lead to the finding of the whole truth concerning woman, her rights,
privileges, duties. And for this, in common with the pioneers in every
cause that has for its object the amelioration and advantage of any
class of human beings, they deserve the thanks of all. That there should
be some ultraists, who would not know where to stop in the extravagant
and unsuitable claims they urge, was to be expected. This should not
blind our eyes to the lawful claims of woman upon society, nor is it
sufficient to throw ridicule upon a movement which has, in this day,
indeed, borne its full share of obloquy from the careless, the
thoughtless, the too conservative, all of whom are alike clogs upon the
wheel of human progress.
This is not the age nor ours the people to shun the fair discussion of
any question, much less one which commends itself as of practical
importance. This American people has proved, by the calm and patient
consideration it has accorded to the advocates of woman's rights, that
it has reached that lofty point in the progress of society at which
woman is regarded as a positive quantity in the problem which society is
working out, and it marks an era in the history of the sex, prophetic of
the full enjoyment of _all_ the rights which are hers by nature, or may
be hers by favor. I think that in this country, at least, woman has been
put upon a very clear and unobstructed path, with many encouragements to
go on in the highest course of improvement of which she is capable.
There seems to be a general disposition to investigate, and to allow her
the rights she claims--rights of education, of labor, of property, of a
fair competition in any suitable field of enterprise; so that she bids
fair to become as self-supporting, independent, and intelligent as she
desires. It is true that much is still said of the jealousy and
selfishness of men, leading them to monopolize most of the sources of
profitable effort to their own use, thus cramping the sphere of woman,
and making her dependent and isolated.
Now, it is very much a question with me whether, after all, the failure,
so far, to secure these fancied rights, is not quite as much the result
of woman's backwardness and inefficiency as of man's jealous and greedy
monopoly; whether the greatest obstacle does not lie in the adverse
opinions prevailing among women themselves. According to my observation,
as fast as women have proved themselves adapted to compete with men in
any particular field, their brothers have forthwith striven to make the
path easy and pleasant for them.
But there is a natural and necessary jealousy excited when women attempt
to go out of the beaten track, and establish new conditions and
resources for themselves--a jealousy which has its source in the
instinctive feeling of civilized society, that the standard of womanhood
must not be lowered; that its safety and progressive well-being depend
upon the immaculate preservation of that pure and graceful ideal of
womanhood which every true man wishes to see guarded with a vestal
precision. And society will pause, thoughtfully to consider, before the
stamp of its approbation is affixed to any mode of development by which
that lofty ideal would suffer. Anything which tends in the least to
unsex, to unsphere woman, by so much works with a reflex influence on
man and on society, and produces in both a gradual and dangerous
deterioration. And self-preservation is the first instinct of society as
well as of the individual being. Man, and the eternal and infinite order
of the world, require that woman keep her proper place, and that she
demand nothing which, granted, would introduce confusion and disorder
among the social forces.
But it is not so much of woman's rights that I would speak. I am not
afraid but that she will possess these in due time, as fast as her
nature and true place and mission in the world come to be more fully
understood. I am far more anxious that she should come into such more
perfect understanding.
Woman has always been a puzzle, an enigma, to man. When, in the pride of
his anatomical skill, he has essayed to make her his study, thinking to
master the secret of her curious physical being, he has been forced to
stop short of his purpose, dumb and blind in the presence of that
wondrous complexity that no science of his own can master; and no
casuist has yet solved the _why_ of her equally wonderful and complex
mental and spiritual being. They have made Reason, cold, critical,
judge, the test; but the fine, delicate essence of her real being has
always eluded it. When Love seeks the solution--the large, generous
Love, that is one day to sit as the judge of all things, supreme over
purblind human Reason--then _she_ will be understood, for she will yield
to the asking of that all-seeing One. This will be when the world is
ripe for the advent of woman, who shall rule through love, the highest
rule of all. Slowly, slowly, though surely, is the world ascending,
through the wondrous secret chain of _influences_ binding her to the
moral order of the universe, to the height of this supernal law of love;
and there, in that new and holy kingdom, woman's crown and sceptre await
her.
But who shall say that a glimmer of this future royal beauty and glory
has yet dawned upon her?
If man has misunderstood woman, she has none the less misunderstood
herself. Indeed, her feet have for ages been treading debatable ground,
that has shaken beneath her through the clashings of man's ignorance and
her own vague, restless clamors and aimlessness. She has felt the
stirrings within of that real being she was created, but has never dared
to assert herself, or, to speak more truly, has only known to assert
herself in the wrong direction. False voices there have been without
number, but not even yet has true womanhood been able, in spite of its
irrepressible longings, to utter that clear, free, elevated speech that
shall yet stir the keenest pulses of the world.
As it is, the world has nearly outgrown the petty jealousy, the cool
assumption of inferiority, the flippant criticism of her weaknesses, the
insulting catering to her foibles, with which woman has been accustomed
to be treated, and which have made her either the slave, the toy, or the
ridicule of man; and it is getting to see that she is at least of as
much relative importance as man; that without her he will in vain
aspire to rise; that, by a law as infallible as that which moves and
regulates the spheres, his condition is determined by hers; that
wherever she has been a slave, he has been a tyrant, and that all
oppression and injustice practised upon her has been sure in the end to
rebound upon himself. If there is one thing more than another which, at
any given period and in any particular nation, has pointed to the true
state of society along the scale of advancement, it has been the degree
of woman's elevation; the undercurrents of history have all set steadily
and significantly in the direction of the truth, which the world has
been slow to accept and make use of, indeed, that society nears
perfection only in the proportion in which woman has been honored and
enfranchised; in which she has had opportunity and encouragement to work
and act in her own proper and lawful sphere.
Those who have gone the farthest in claiming special rights for woman
have generally based their demands upon a virtual abandonment of the
idea of _sex_, except in a physical sense. Here is a primary,
fundamental error. There is unquestionably a sex of mind, of soul, and
he who ignores or denies this is, it seems to me, studying his subject
without the key which alone will unlock it.
Another error which many of the advocates of _woman's rights_ have
fallen into, is that of assuming that those conditions are weaknesses,
disabilities, which God and nature have attested to be her crowning
glory and power. Or, rather, this second error results naturally and
most logically from the still more vital one of assuming that her sphere
is intended to be no way different from man's.
And still another, equally false and mischievous, would place her in
antagonism to man upon the question of comparative excellence and of
precedence in the scale of being.
A brief analysis of some of the points of difference between the mind
masculine and the mind feminine will show the futility of confounding
the two, or of drawing any useless or invidious comparisons. They are as
distinct in their normal action as any two things can well be. I begin,
then, by dividing our whole conscious human life into two comprehensive
departments, expressed by the generic terms, thought--feeling;
reflection--spontaneity; knowledge--emotion; perception--reception;
reason or intellect--affection or heart. The intelligent being unites
these conditions--he is supreme in but one. Man reasons--woman feels;
man analyzes--woman generalizes; man reaches his conclusions by
induction--woman seizes hers by intuition. There is just the difference,
_in kind_, between a man's mind and a woman's that there is between that
of a man of genius and a man of talent. Genius grasps the idea, and
works from it outward; talent moulds the form in which the already
created idea may be embodied. Genius is creative, comprehensive,
intuitive, all-seeing; talent is acute, one-sided, cumulative,
inductive. The men of genius will ever be found to be gifted with this
_womanly_ quality of mind--the power of seizing truth, ideas, with the
heart and soul, through love, rather than with the understanding,
through reason.
Woman understands faith, or the taking things on trust; she has no love
for that logical process of thought whereby, step by step, man delights
to prove a fact in nature or law with mathematical precision and
certainty. With the hard details and closely connected steps which make
up the body of any science, mathematical, physical, or metaphysical, she
has no patience. Her mind is not receptive of formulas or syllogisms.
She comprehends results, but is incurious as to causes. She knows what
love or benevolence means, under its triple form of charity, mercy,
magnanimity, which, like a sea, surrounds the universe; she has no idea
of law and justice, which are the eternal pillars thereof. If man feels
or loves, it is because his reason is convinced; woman's affections go
beyond reason, and without its aid, into the clear realm of ultimate
belief. This is why there are so few skeptics in religious things among
our sex. Woman's mental and spiritual constitution render belief or
faith easy and natural. She is receptive in all the parts of her being.
I conclude, therefore, that in the outer world of fact, of
demonstration, of volitions and knowledges, of tangible proofs and
causalities, of positive and logical effects of reason, of all outward
and material processes, man is supreme; while in that finer, higher,
more subtile sphere of intuitions, loves, faiths, spiritual convictions,
which overtop our actual life, and lead it up from grossness to glory,
woman is the oracle and priestess. In the basic qualities of our nature
man is stronger--woman, in those which, in grace, beauty, and sweetness,
taper nicely toward its apex.
But are the two spheres therefore at war? By no means. Are they at all
independent of each other? Are they not rather conjoined indissolubly?
It is a fatal mistake which places an antagonism between the two. There
should be between them harmony as sweet as that which moves the
concentric rings of Saturn. Untaught by the presence and inspiration of
woman, man becomes a cold, dry petrifaction, constantly obeying the
centripetal force of his being, and adoring _self_. Without his basal
firmness and strength, woman, in whom the centrifugal force is stronger,
remains a weak, vacillating, impulsive creature, feebly swayed by the
tides of emotion, lacking self-poise, and aimless and vagrant.
But teach her to reason--man to feel; open up to her the sources of
knowledge, and cause him to learn the times of the tides of affection;
cultivate her intellect and his heart, and in the healthy action and
reaction consequent upon such a balance of forces, you have the true
relationship established between the sexes, the relationship which the
Creator pronounced perfect in the beginning.
It will be seen that while I attribute to woman a certain superiority
both of nature and function, as to the highest part of the nature common
to both, I at the same time assert her inferiority in what may be called
its fundamental attributes, those which lie nearest to the constant and
successful prosecution of mundane affairs, and, consequently, I also
establish the fact of her absolute and inevitable dependence in such
sense on man. But do I thus degrade her, or in effect annul this
asserted superiority? Because man, and the strength, amplitude, and
stability of his more practical nature, form a sure basis upon which she
may rest, do I any the less make her the very crown and perfection of
God's human handiwork? Assuredly not. The truth is, if, instead of
making comparison where, from the nature of the case, comparison is
almost precluded, so great is the difference between them, I were to say
that each is the complement or counterpart of the other, and that,
alone, each is but a half sphere, and imperfectly rounded at that, I
should more nearly approach to accuracy. To make the perfect whole which
the Creator had in His idea, the two halves must be united. And so I
dignify the oldest of human institutions--marriage. I accord to it the
very perfection of wisdom, beauty, utility, adaptation. I am aware that
in so speaking I hold to an old-fashioned belief, and tread
incontinently, not only on a notion afloat among some of the
_strong-minded_ of my sex at the present day, that this institution is
nothing more nor less than an engine of selfish and despotic power on
the one hand, and of slavish subjection on the other; but on the more
moderate idea that it is not desirable for all women, nor even for a
majority. But I still think that this state of union is the most
natural, beneficent, satisfying condition possible for all of both
sexes--the condition most conducive to the highest, widest, happiest
development of the individual man or woman, especially the latter, for
it is through marriage only, through the beautiful and sacred wifehood
and motherhood which that institution guarantees in purity and holiness,
that woman's highest nature finds scope and opportunity. And I make no
exceptions. On the contrary, I should say that the exceptions which
might occur should invariably be counted as misfortunes. Not that many
good, true, noble women do not live and die unmarried. _Circumstances_,
that inflexible arbiter of human life, as it often seems, may strangely
turn into wide and unaccustomed channels the love, the devotion, the
energy, the self-sacrifice, that, in their pure, strong action, make
woman's best development, and so the world, the needy people of the
world, humanity at large, may receive the immediate benediction of it.
Let no woman who, alone it may be, goes steadfastly on her way of duty
and self-abnegation, think she has lived in vain because the special lot
of woman has been denied her. If not happiness, which comes from content
and satisfaction, yet there is something higher, diviner still, arising
from duty done and trials endured--blessedness. But such exceptions do
not, I conceive, invalidate the general fact that marriage was intended
to be the channel for the vast aggregate of human happiness and
improvement. I speak of marriage as it should be, as it might be, as it
will one day be, when men and women have acquainted themselves with the
laws, physical and spiritual, which were intended to adjust these unions
between the sexes in a harmonious manner, according to natural
sympathies and affinities; laws, infallible, inherent in the individual
constitution, and which, if understood and enforced, would obviate much
of the sin, misfortune, and misery in the earth. It is a great and
curious question, how much of the pain, suffering, and evil so rife
among men, is due to the one-sided, blindfold, inconsiderate, and
unsuitable marriages every day taking place; filling the homes of the
land with discontent, bickerings, disorder, and continual strife, from
the jostling together of antipathetic elements; cursing society with the
influences derived from character formed and nurtured in such pestilent
domestic atmospheres; and sending out thousands of unhealthy,
misorganized, wrongly educated beings, the fruit of these _dis_unions,
to work ill both to themselves and their race. The world has much yet to
learn with regard to the conditions necessary to a true and legitimate
marriage of the sexes. There are thousands of illegal unions that have
been blessed by church and magistrate, which yet carry only ban in their
train. Whether read literally or not, the old, old story of the
temptation and the fall has a significance not often dreamed of in
respect to this question of marriage. It was a disturbance of the pure
and perfect allegiance of each to the other, no less than a fall from
the intimate communion of both with the Father of spirits. And a thicker
darkness rests over the means whereby the institution of marriage may be
rescued from its degradation, and man and woman be reinstated in the
loyalty they owe to each other, than over the means by which the
creature may make himself acceptable to the offended Creator; inasmuch
as the former is left, without any special revelation, to the slow
process of thought among men, to the workings of experience and the
results of observation. And these laws are age-long in their evolutions.
But when men and women have learned to look within themselves, have
turned an intelligent eye upon the necessities of their threefold
being, and when they recognize the God-made laws regulating these
necessities, and have begun to mate themselves accordingly, the world
will have received a powerful impulse toward its promised millennial
epoch.
Such, then, being, in brief, the relation of woman to man, it is
necessary to inquire, as pertinent to my subject, not so much whether
man gives her all the rights within his own sphere which she may
beneficially claim, but whether she has yet understood the weight and
significance of her own position in the scale of being, and has
exercised all the rights consequent therefrom. To know is far easier
than to live according to knowledge. It is to be feared that women
themselves have but a poor appreciation of the ideal of true womanhood.
Oh, is it not time this ideal should be worthily understood? Has not
poor suffering humanity borne the burden of its woes long enough, and
will not woman help to lift it from the tired, stooping shoulders? For
she may. How? Simply by working out her own divinely appointed mission.
And is this not broad and absorbing enough? See what are some of its
objects of influence and endeavors. First, here are the very faintest
beginnings of intelligent existence to impress and mould--the embryos of
character to stamp. And who knows how important this moulding and
stamping may be? To go farther back still: Who knows what indelible
constitution may be, is, fixed upon the individual organism, for better,
for worse, by the authors of its life, that, if evil, no training, no
education, no work of grace, not even omnipotence, can expunge or alter?
This motherhood of woman, in its awful sanctity and mystery, in its
bearings upon the immortality of personal identity, is a fearful
dignity. Therein consists the first and chief claim of Woman to honor
and reverence. She who has been a mother has measured the profoundest as
well as the most exalted experience of which humanity is susceptible.
Let her see to it that she honor herself.
Here is the white and plastic tablet of the new-born soul. Let woman
fear and tremble to write on that, for the writing shall confront her
forever. Like the Roman Pilate, _what she has written, she has written_.
Here are the purblind human instincts to direct and culture; the
vagrant, unbridled hosts of the spontaneous emotions to be tutored and
restrained; the affections and the tastes to be trained toward the true,
the beautiful, and the good; the warring passions to be curbed and
disciplined; in short, the whole glorious domain of the heart and soul,
the moral and spiritual nature, is to be surveyed, studied, swayed by
that potential agency which woman possesses in a very eminent
degree--personal influence. By this agency, informed and vitalized by
love, she becomes the great educator in the great school of life, in the
family, in society, in the world. Women do not sufficiently appreciate
the importance of their work as the architects of character.
_Character!_ That, after all, is the man, the enduring individual, the
real _I_, to whom the Creator has said, _Live forever_! Character is
simply what education and habit make of a person, starting from the
foundation of his inherited organic idiosyncrasies. It is a result--the
work of time and countless shapings and impressings. It is not what a
man thinks of himself, nor what others think of him, but _what he really
is in the sight of God, his Maker_. This is what shall come out, at
last, from the obscurations and uncertainties of this lower atmosphere
into the clear, truthful light of eternity; shall cast off the devices,
the flimsy pretences, the temporary shows, the convenient disguises, of
this mortal life of mixed substance and shadow, and stand a bare, naked,
unclothed fact of being before itself, the universe, and God. Alas! what
multitudes of real dwarfs go out every day, 'unhouseled,' into that
searching light of eternity.
To be the builder of a fair and comely character; to chisel out a work
that shall please the eye of God Himself, in whose estimation Beauty,
being His own attribute, is a most holy thing; to see that work of
beauty take its place in the well-filled gallery of eternity, and to
know that it is your own immortal monument--is this not scope enough,
honor enough, praise and glory enough? If women would but rise to the
height of their real mission, and faithfully and earnestly assume the
rights and fulfil the duties which God has specially devolved upon them,
they would so lead man and society up to a higher point that the claims
they put forth need not be discussed for an hour; because, then, having
proved their adaptability to make good use of every lawful right,
society, which in the end always adjusts its forces properly and
instinctively, will have tacitly fallen into the necessity or the
feasibility of granting them.
Let man erect his scientific formulas, his schools of philosophy, his
structures of reason and thought; let him bid the giant forces of nature
go in harness for his schemes of improvement or aggrandizement; and by
all means let the intellect of woman be cultivated to comprehend
intelligently the marvels of man's work; let her, if she will, measure
the stellar distances, study the mechanical principles or the learned
professions, make a picture or write a book; and there have been women,
true and noble women, who have done all these, women who have proved
themselves capable of as high attainments, as keen and subtile thought
as man; but let her never for such as these abdicate her own nobler
work, neglecting the greater for the less. If a woman has a special
gift, let her exercise it; if she has a particular mission, let her work
it out. Few women, though, are of this elect class. I do not despise,
but rather encourage, natural gifts. But I would have women never forget
that it is not for what they may possibly add to the sum of human
knowledge that the world values them, primarily. _That_ some man is as
likely to do as not; but what women fail to do in their own peculiar
sphere, _no man can possibly do_.
When I aver that woman was intended to be a predominant influence in the
world through her moral and spiritual being, principally, I must not be
understood as depreciating the value to her of mere subjective
knowledge. So far from this, I believe that her means of acquiring
knowledge of all kinds should be limited only by her capacity. The more
her intellect is enlightened and disciplined, the better will she be
qualified to exert that refining, elevating influence which is expected
of her. There can be no beauty without the element of strength; there
can be no love worth the name without knowledge. Were her sense of
justice, her logical powers, her reflective faculties carefully trained
and exercised, her peculiar womanly graces of soul would shine with
tenfold lustre. I mean, simply, that knowledge is specially valuable to
her objectively--as a means, and the best means, to the highest end of
her being, which is concrete rather than abstract.
Briefly, I say, then, it is in the great departments of ethics, of
aesthetics, of religious and spiritual things, that woman is a vital
power in human life.
I have thrown out these general preliminary thoughts concerning the
nature of woman, and her relations to man and to society, chiefly with
reference to a phase of the subject which has not seemed to engage the
attention either of women themselves or of those who assume to advocate
their cause. It is the important consideration whether, in a free and
republican land, woman holds any certain and special relation toward the
Government. In other words, have American women any vital share or
interest in this grand, free Government of ours? With all the emphasis
of a profound conviction, I, answer, _Yes_. Such a touching and intimate
interest as no women ever had before in any Government under the sun.
And why?
_Because the principles embodied in and represented by it have made her
what she is, and they alone can make her what she hopes to be._
If it be true that the position of woman in society is a sure test of
its civilization, then is our American society already in the van of
progress. Nowhere else in the world is woman so free, so respected, so
obeyed, so beloved; nowhere else is the ideal of womanhood so
chivalrously worshipped and protected. In the spirit of our political
theory, that no class of society is to be regarded as permanently and
necessarily disabled from progress and elevation--to which, in our
practice, we have hitherto made but _one_ wicked and shameful
exception--and under the influence of the powerful tendency of our
system to _individualism_, woman has been allowed a freedom heretofore
unparalleled, and _onward and upward_ is still the word.
I do not claim perfection for our system. But I say we have the germs of
the healthiest national development. All that remains is to carry
forward those germs to maturity, and let them show their legitimate
results unhampered. That is what we want, what we claim. Society here is
unformed, in the rough. We lack the outward grace and polish belonging
only to old societies. We shall yet attain these, as well as some other
desirable things; but I believe that in no other country in the world is
there so much genuine, delicate, universal devotion manifested for woman
as among the Americans. Have you seen a boy of fourteen, shy, awkward,
uncouth in manner, rough in speech, but with a great, tender heart
thumping in his bosom? And did you know of the idolatrous worship he
could not wholly conceal for some fair, sweet, good girl older than
himself, a woman, even--a worship, which was not love, if love be other
than a high and tender sentiment, but which was capable of filling his
being to overflow with its glory and richness? I liken our American
chivalry to this. And it is this instinctive natural politeness of our
men toward women that, as much as anything else, keeps us from being
rude and unrefined while yet in our first adolescence.
I am aware that, hitherto, the South has laid claim to the lion's share
of this gallant spirit, as it has of many other polite and social
qualities. But we do not so readily now, as a few years ago, yield to
these Southern assumptions. We know now for just how much they stand.
And we know, too, in the better light of this hour, that it is not
possible for a very high and pure ideal of womanhood to be conceived in
the atmosphere of a system which, as slavery does, persistently, on
principle, and on a large scale, degrades a portion of the sex, no
matter how weak, poor, defenceless. Rather, the more defenceless the
greater is the wrong, the shame. I am not lauding that gallantry which
stands in polite posture in the presence of a lady, hat in hand, and
with its selectest bow and smile, and in the same breath turns to commit
the direst offences against the peace and purity of womanhood; but that
true and hearty, though simple and unostentatious, reverence for the
sex, that teaches men to regard all women as worthy of freedom, respect,
and protection, simply by virtue of their womanhood. I say not that this
chivalry is a Southern, but that it is an _American_ trait. As such I am
proud of it.
But does this high and honored place they hold in the hearts of their
countrymen devolve no corresponding responsibility upon American women?
Is it not a momentous inquiry how far they fall short of the high and
commanding standard of thought and action demanded of them in order to
meet this heavy obligation? It seems to me that the time is fully ripe
for the clearer perception of the fact, that because women are not men,
it does not follow that they are not in an important sense citizens. And
this, without any reference to the question whether they should be
permitted to vote and to legislate; though, as to the former, I do not
know of a single valid objection to the exercise of the privilege, while
there are several weighing in its favor; and as to the latter, it seems
to me that one single consideration would forever, under the present
constitution of things, debar her from a share in direct and positive
legislation. It is as follows: The central idea of all properly
constituted society, without which society would be an incoherent chaos,
and governments themselves but the impotent lords of anarchy and
misrule, is _the home_. Of the home, woman, from the very nature of the
case, is the inspiriting genius, the ever-present and ever-watchful
guardian. And the home, with its purities, its sanctities, its
retiracies, its reticences, is far removed from the noise and wranglings
of popular assemblies, the loud ambitions and selfish chicaneries of
political arenas. The very foundation, pivotal ideas of human nature
would be undermined by such publicity. The value of the home, as the
nursery of whatever is pure, lovely, holy in the human soul, rests
absolutely on the preservation of the modest purity and grace of woman.
How, then, is woman's influence as a citizen in a republican land to be
exercised, if she be excluded from positive legislation? I answer, by
the moral effect of her personal influence in the formation of mind and
character; by her work as the great educator in the home and in society.
If hers be not a moral and spiritual influence, it is none at all for
good. And of all the powers for good in a republic, this is the
strongest, most beneficent, did woman rightly comprehend the issue.
The purity, safety, and perpetuity of a free government rest,
ultimately, not so much on forms of law, on precedents, on the
ascendency of this or that party or administration, but on the
intelligence, morality, and devotion to freedom of the people. What
should woman care to legislate, when she may wield such an engine of
power as education puts into her hands; when she may mould the minds and
inspire the souls of those who are to be the future legislators; when
she may, even now, put forth a direct and immediate influence upon those
who are the legislators of the present time? For her influence on
society is twofold, direct and reflex, present and prospective; it is
the most powerful known, the most subtile and secret and determining,
viz., _personal_ influence.
To this end, therefore, that she may influence in the right direction,
women need to inform themselves, to acquire a knowledge of the
principles on which our system rests, and to become thoroughly imbued
with their spirit. This will necessitate an acquaintance with the nature
and details of our political creed, of which our women, especially, are
lamentably ignorant. How many out of every hundred, do you suppose, have
even read the Constitution, for instance? You may say that the majority
of men have never studied it either, even of the voters. I admit the
fact. There is a terrible lack of information among even men on public
subjects. But I think this: if women were to educate themselves and
their children, all whom they influence, indeed, to make these subjects
a matter of _personal interest_, instead of regarding them as foreign
matters, well enough for lawyers and politicians, perhaps, to
understand, or for those who expect to fill office, but of no manner of
importance to a person in strictly private life, this ignorance would
come to an end. This shifting of personal responsibility by the great
majority is the bane of our system. The truth is, no one, in a
republican government, can lead an absolutely private career. As one who
exercises the elective franchise, or one who influences the same, be it
man or woman, there is no dodging the responsibility of citizenship. A
better State of information on public affairs, also, will induce a
correct conception of a certain class of ideas which, more than any
others, perhaps, tend to strengthen, deepen, broaden, solidify the
mental powers--ideas of absolute law and justice. As I have before said,
the female mind is deficient in this particular.
To understand their government and institutions, then, is the first step
in the attainment of the standard demanded of American women; or, in
other words, an increase of political knowledge--a more thorough
political education.
Another step is, the enlargement and strengthening of their patriotism.
The former step, too, will conduce to this, and be its natural
consequence. I do not mean alone that loose and vagrant sentiment which
commonly passes for patriotism, which is aroused at some particular
occasion and slumbers the rest of the time; which is spasmodic,
temporary, impulsive, and devoid of principle; but that love of country
founded on knowledge and conviction; a living faith of the heart based
upon duty and principle; and which is, therefore, all-pervading,
abiding, intelligent, governing thought and action, and conforming the
life to the inner spirit. That sort of patriotism that lives as well in
peace time as in war time; that makes the heart throb as sympathetically
in behalf of country every day in the year as on the Fourth of July;
that leads us to conform our habits of life and thought to the spirit of
our institution and policy; that makes us as jealous of the honor, the
consistent greatness of our country when all men speak well of her, as
when her foes are bent upon her destruction. This _habit of mind_ is
what I mean, rather than any transient emotion of heart; an enlightened
and habitual spirit of patriotism.
I give American women all credit due them for the patriotic temper they
have evinced since this war began. I say that never have women showed
more loyalty and zeal for country than the women of the North. Let
sanitary fairs and commissions, let soldiers' aid societies from one end
of the land to the other, and in every nook and corner of it, let our
hospitals everywhere attest this heartfelt love and devotion on the part
of our women. It is a noble spectacle, and my heart thrills at the
thought of it. We have many noble ones who will stand in history along
with England's Florence Nightingale and the 'Mother of the Gracchi,'
those eternally fair and tender women, fit for the love and worship of
the race. The want is not in the feeling of patriotism, but in the
habitual principle and duty of the same. Since the war began, the fire
has not slackened. But how was it before the war, and how will it be
after it?
To prove what I say, let me dwell a moment on two or three of the most
prominent faults of our women, pronounced such by all the world. Of
these, the most mischievous and glaring, the most ruinous in thousands
of cases, is _extravagance_. Wastefulness is almost become a trait of
our society. American women, especially, are profuse and lavish of money
in dress, in equipage, in furniture, in houses, in entertainments, in
every particular of life. Everywhere this foolish and wasteful use of
money challenges the surprise and sarcasm of the observant foreign
tourist through our country. Perhaps the largeness and immensity of our
land, its resources and material, as well as the wonderful national
advance we have already made, tends to cultivate in our people a feeling
of profusion and a habit of extravagant display; but it is not in
sympathy either with our creed or our profession.
Were the money thus heedlessly expended made for them by slaves whom
they had from infancy been taught to regard as created solely to make
money for them to use and enjoy, this extravagant waste of money, while
none the less selfish and inexcusable, would appear to grow
spontaneously out of the arbitrary rule of slavery; or, if it had
descended to them by legal or ancestral inheritance, there might be some
show of reason for using it carelessly, though very small sense in so
doing. But in a land where labor is the universal law; where, if a man
makes money, he must work and sweat for its possession; when fortunes do
not arise by magic, but must be built up slowly, painfully, at the
expense of the nerve and sinew, the brain and heart of the builders, and
these builders, not slaves, but our fathers, husbands, brothers; when a
close attention to money-making is rapidly becoming a national badge,
and is in danger of eating out entirely what is of infinitely more value
than wealth--a high national integrity and conscience--and of sinking
the immaterial and intellectual in the material and sensual; in such
circumstances as these, I say, and under such temptations and dangers,
it is a sin, an unnatural crime, to squander what costs so dear.
Volumes might be written upon the frightful consequences of this
extravagance in money matters, this living too fast and beyond their
means, of which American women, especially, are guilty. Great financial
crises, in which colossal schemes burst like bubbles, and vast estates
are swallowed up like pebbles in the sea; commercial bankruptcies, in
which honorable names are bandied on the lips of common rumor, and white
reputations blackened by public suspicion; minds, that started in life
with pure and honest principles, determined to win fortune by the
straight path of rectitude, gradually growing distorted, gradually
letting go of truth, honor, uprightness, and ending by enthroning gold
in the place made vacant by the departed virtues; hearts, that were once
responsive to the fair and beautiful in life and in the universe, that
throbbed in unison with love, pity, kindness, and were wont to thrill
through and through at a noble deed or a fine thought, now pulseless and
hard as the nether millstone; souls, that once believed in God, heaven,
good, and had faith and hope in immortality, now worshipping commercial
success and its exponent, money, and living and dying with their eager
but fading eyes fixed earthward, dustward!
Oh, it is a fearful thought that woman's extravagant desires and demands
may thus kill all that is best and highest in those who should be her
nearest and dearest. Yet, if this wide-spread evil of wastefulness is to
be checked, it must be begun in the home, and by its guardian, woman.
There is a movement lately inaugurated, looking to retrenchment in the
matter of unnecessary expenditure, which, if it is to be regarded other
than as a temporary expedient, is worthy of the patriotic enthusiasm
which called it forth. I allude to the dress-reform movement made by the
loyal women of the great Northern cities. The _spirit_ of this movement
I could wish to see illustrated both during the continuance of and after
the war. It is this economical habit of mind for the sake of patriotic
principle, that I regard as a great step in the attainment of the
desired standard for American women.
Another plain fault of our women, and one which in a measure is the
cause of the fault above noticed, is the wild chase after and copying of
European fashions. We are accused of being a nation of copyists. This is
more than half true. And why we should be, I cannot understand. Are we
_never_ to have anything original, American? Are we always to be
content to be servile imitators of Europe in our art, literature,
social life, everything, except mere mechanical invention? I am thankful
that we are beginning to have an art, a literature, of our very own. Let
us also have a _fashion_, that shall be, distinctively, if not entirely,
American. There is surely enough of us, of our splendid country, our
institutions, our theories, our brave, free people, to build for
ourselves, from our own foundation, and with our own material. But
American Women have yet to inspire society with this patriotic ambition.
Not what is becoming or suitable to her, but what is _the fashion_, does
the American woman buy; not what she can afford to purchase, but what
her neighbors have, is too commonly the criterion. This constant pursuit
of Fashion, with her incessant changes, this emulation of their
neighbors in the manifold ways in which money and time can be alike
wasted, and not the necessary and sacred duties of home, the personal
attention and effort which the majority of American women have to give
to their household affairs, produce that _lack of time_ that is offered
as an excuse for the neglect of the duty of self-culture. This it is
which fritters away thought and the taste for higher things, leaving the
mind blank and nerveless except when thus superficially excited.
This duty of _self-culture_ I would notice as one of the demands of the
times upon American women in the attainment of the proposed standard. A
wide, liberal, generous self-culture, of intellect, of taste, of
conscience, for the sake of the better fulfilment of the mission to
which, as an American citizen, every woman in the land is called. We do
not begin to realize this. It is a great defect in our social system,
that, when a woman has left school and settled down in life, she
considers it the signal for her to quit all mental acquisition except
what she may gather from her desultory reading, and, henceforth, her
family and her immediate neighborhood absorb her whole soul under
ordinary circumstances. The great majority of our countrywomen thus grow
careworn, narrow-minded, self-absorbed. Now this is not right--it is not
necessary. A woman's first, most important duty is in her home; but this
need not clip the wings of her spirit, so that thought and affection
cannot go out into the great world, and feel themselves a part of its
restless, throbbing, many-sided life; brain and heart need not stagnate,
even if busy, work-a-day life does claim her first endeavors. Indeed,
the great danger to our women is not so much that they will become
trifling and frivolous, as that they will become narrow-minded and
selfish.
But these vices of extravagance and excessive devotion to fashion, of
which I have spoken, are due, largely, to a still more radical defect in
our social education. I mean its _anti-republican spirit_. This is our
crowning absurdity. We are good democrats--in theory. It is a pity that
our practice does not bear out our theory, for the sake of the homely
virtue of consistency. To a great many otherwise sensible people our
simple republican ways are distasteful, and they are apt to look with,
admiring, envious eyes on the conventional life of foreign lords, not
considering how burdened with forms it is, and full of the selfishness,
the pride and arrogance of the privileged and titled few, at the bitter
expense of the suffering, untitled many. The aping of aristocratic
pretensions has been a much-ridiculed foible of American women. It is
certain that American society needs republicanizing in all its grades.
We have widely departed from the simplicity of the early days and of the
founders of the republic, in social life, just as in our political
course we had suffered the vital essence of our organic law to become a
dead thing, and the whole machinery of the Government to work reversely
to its intention. And the cause has been the same in each case. The
spirit of a government and the theories embodying it are the reflection
of the social condition of a given age and people, so that the one will
never be of a higher order than the other; while it is, also, equally
true, that the best and most advanced political theories may be suffered
to languish in operation, or become wholly dormant, from the influence
of social causes. Thus it was that the demoralising effect of human
slavery did, up to the time of the great shock which the nation received
in the spring of 1861--a shock which galvanized it into life, and sent
the before vitiated blood coursing hotly, and, at last, healthfully
through all the veins and arteries of the national body--persistently
encroach alike upon Government and society. The slime of that serpent
was over everything in the North as well as the South, and if it did not
kill out the popular virtue and patriotism as completely here as there,
where it is intimately interwoven with the life of the people, the
difference is due to that very cause, as well as to the inextinguishable
vitality that God has conferred on the genius of human liberty, so that
when betrayed, hunted, starved, outlawed, she yet seeks some impregnable
fastness, and subsists on manna from the Divine Hand. This, then, is the
fourth step in the attainment of the true ideal of character for
American women--_the effort to renew society in the actual simplicity of
our republican institutions_. Women, American women, should hold dear as
anything in life the preservation and purity of those blessed
institutions, guaranteeing to them as they do all their eminent
privileges, and founded as they are on that emancipating genius of
Christianity, which, through every age, has pointed a finger of hope,
love, encouragement to woman as a chief instrument in the world's
promised elevation and enfranchisement.
While dwelling upon the faults of American women, I would at the same
time do full credit to their virtues. I believe that they occupy as high
a place as any women in the world, even a higher. But I trust that they
will rise to the height of the demands which the changed times and the
exigencies of the situation are pressing upon them, and will continue to
press. This war has clearly and forcibly eliminated truths and
principles which the long rule of the slave power had wellnigh eclipsed;
it has been a very spear of Ithuriel, at whose keen touch men and
principles start up in their real, not their simulated character. During
its three years of progress, the national education has been advanced
beyond computation. When it is over, things, ideas, will not go back to
the old standpoint. Then will arise the new conditions, demands,
possibilities. If there is one truth that has been unmistakably
developed by the war, it is the controlling moral power and sanction
which a free government derives from woman. And this has been shown not
only in the influence for good which the loyal women of the North have
contributed for the aid of the Government, but with equal power in the
influence for evil which the Southern women have exerted for its
destruction. I suppose it is true that this war for slavery has received
its strongest, fiercest continuing impulses from the women of the South.
Nothing could exceed the enthusiasm, the persistency, the heroic
endurance, the self-sacrifice they have manifested. Only had it been in
a good cause!
Just here let me say a word in behalf of these Southern women. There is
a disposition on the part of the Northern public, forming their opinion
from the instances of fierce spite and vindictiveness, of furious scorn
and hatred, which have been chronicled in the reports of army
correspondents and in the sensation items of the newspapers, to regard
them as little short of demons in female shape. All this is naturally
working a corresponding dislike and ill-feeling among the masses North.
To such I would say: These Southern sisters are not demons, but made of
the same flesh and blood, and passions and affections as yourselves. The
difference between you is purely one of circumstances and training, of
locality--above all, of education and institutions. It is as true that
_institutions are second nature_ as that _habit_ is.
The peculiar faults of Southern women they share with their Northern
sisters, only in a vastly enhanced degree; and besides these, they have
others, born of and nurtured by that terrible slavery system under whose
black shadow they live and die. Their idleness, their lack of neatness
and order, their dependence, their quick and sometimes cruel passions,
their unreason, their contempt of inferiors, their vanity and arrogance,
their ignorance, their lightness and superficiality, are all the
outgrowth of its diabolical influences. They are, in fact, no more idle,
thriftless, passionate, or supercilious, than Northern women would be in
similar circumstances. It is too much the habit among the unreflecting,
in judging of the Southern masses in their hostile attitude toward their
lawful Government, to give less weight than it deserves to the necessary
and inevitable tendency upon the mind and character of such an
institution as African slavery; and to let the blame be of a personal
and revengeful nature, which should fall most heavily on the sin itself,
the dire crime against God and society, against himself and his fellow
man, which the individual is all his life taught is no crime but a
positive good. This slavery is woman's peculiar curse, bearing almost
equally with its deadly, hideous weight on the white woman of the
dominant class as upon the black slave woman. And yet how deluded they
are! If that curse does come to an utter end in the South, as it surely
will, I shall hail, as one of the grandest results of its extinction,
next to the justice due the oppressed people of color, the emancipation
of the white women of that fair land, all of them, slaveholders and
non-slaveholders, from an influence too withering and deadly for
language to depict. Oh, when shall that scapegoat, slavery, with its
failures and losses and shortcomings, its frauds and sins and woes, be
sent off into the wilderness of non-existence, to be heard from
nevermore? God speed the hour!
But with all their faults, they have many and shining virtues. Though
the ideal of a Southern woman commonly received at the North and abroad,
is not true to the life, being neither so perfect nor so imperfect as
their eulogists, on the one hand, and their detractors, on the other,
would fain make it to be, there is yet much, very much, to elicit both
love and admiration in her character.
The Southern female mind is precocious, brilliant, impressible, ardent,
impulsive, fanciful. The quickness of parts of many girls of fifteen is
astonishing. I used often to think, what splendid women they would make,
with the training and facilities of our Northern home and school
education. But, as it was, they went under a cloud at seventeen,
marrying early, and either sinking into the inanition of plantation
life, or having their minds dissipated in a vain and frivolous round of
idle and selfish gayeties. I compare their intellects to a rich tropical
plant, which blossoms gorgeously and early, but rarely fruitens. The
Southern women are, for the most part, a capable but undeveloped race of
beings. With their precocity, like the exuberance of their vegetation,
and with their quick, impassioned feelings, like their storm-freighted
air, always bearing latent lightning in its bosom, they might become a
something rich, rare, and admirable; but, never bringing thought up to
the point of reflection; never learning self-control, nor the necessity
of holding passion in abeyance; never getting beyond the degrading
influence of intercourse with a race whose stolidity and servility, the
inevitable result of their condition, on the one hand, are both the
cause and effect of the habit of irresponsible power and selfish
disregard of right fostered in the ruling class, on the other--what
could be expected of them but to become splendid abortions?
There is another consideration in connection with the excessive war
spirit they have evinced, which may help to account for it. I have often
had occasion to notice the habit the educated class of Southern women
have of conversing familiarly with their male friends and relatives on
political subjects, and to contrast it with the almost total reticence
of Northern women on subjects of public interest. This, of course,
induces a more immediate and personal interest in them, and the more
intimate one's interest in a subject, the more easily enthusiasm is
aroused toward it.
Now, the very head and front, the bone and marrow of Southern politics
for more than three decades, has been--slavery, and plans for its
aggrandizement and perpetuation. _That_ has been the ulterior object of
all the past vociferations about _State rights_ and _Southern rights_.
Slavery is country, practically, with them, and as it lay at the root of
their society, and its check or its extinction would, in their false
view, overturn society itself, it was easy for the scheming, cunning
leaders of the slave faction to adroitly transfer this enthusiasm, and
to raise the watchword, which never yet among any people has been raised
in vain, _Your homes and firesides_! When ever did women hear that cry
unmoved?
When _country_, that grand idea and object of human hope, pride, and
affection, had degenerated into a section; and when a false and
miserable _institution_, from its very nature terribly intimate with the
life of society, became the most substantial feature of that section;
what wonder if the war has at last, whatever it might have been at
first, come to the complexion of a contest for home and fireside with
the masses of the people, with the majority of the Southern women?
The magnificent dreams and projects, too, of a great slave empire, that
should swallow up territory after territory, and astonish the world with
its wealth, power, and splendor, which were fused into life in the
brains of the great apostles of slavery and secession, had their
influence on minds which, like the minds of the Southern women, have a
natural, innate love for the gorgeous, the splendid, the profuse, and
showy; minds ambitious of, and accustomed to, rule, and impatient of
control; minds already glazed over with the influence of the lying
assertion, proved to their uncritical, passionate judgment by all the
sophistical arguments of which their religious and political guides were
capable, that slavery is the very best possible condition for the black
man, and the relation of master the only true and natural one for the
white. I say, I do not wonder at the Southern women so much. I pity them
infinitely. Just think what they have been educated to believe, and then
say if there is not something sadly splendid in the very spirit of
endurance, of defiance, of sacrifice, however wrong and mistaken, they
have shown. I pity them profoundly, for they are drinking to the lees
the cup of suffering, of deprivation, of humiliation, of bitter loss,
and stern retribution. And the end is not yet. Deeper chagrin and
humiliation must be theirs; more loss, more devastation, more death, and
ruin, before their proud hopes and visions are utterly crushed out of
life. Oh, are _they_ not being educated, too, as well as we of the
North?
When I think of all the grace, loveliness, and generosity of the many
Southern women I have known and loved; when I recall the admirable
qualities which distinguished them, the grace of manner, the social
tact and address, the intellectual sprightliness, the openness and
hospitality of soul, the kindliness and sympathy of heart, the Christian
gentleness and charity; I can but say to my Northern sisters, These
deluded women of the South would, in themselves, be worthy of your
esteem and love, could the demon of secession and slavery once be
exorcised. And I believe that when it is, and the poor, rent South sits
clothed and in her right mind, subdued through sheer exhaustion of
strength, and so made fit for the healthy recuperation that is one day
to begin, the cause of our beloved country, and of humanity through this
country, will have no more generous or loving supporters, ay, none so
enthusiastic and devoted as they. I glory in the anticipation of the
time when the ardent, impulsive, demonstrative South shall even lead the
colder North in the manifestation of a genuine patriotism, worthy of the
land and nation that calls it forth. We shall then have gained _a
country_, indeed, instead of being, as heretofore, several sections of a
country.
The consistent moulding of society in the spirit of our political ideas
is essential to securing us the respect of the world, and to vindicating
the principles, themselves, on which having built, they are our sole
claim to such honor and respect. As long as we fail so to do, we may be
the wonder, and we are likely to be the jest of the onlooking world, but
we never can be what we ought to be, its admired and beloved model. It
seems to me there is less danger now than formerly of our failure in
this important respect. The dangers, the expenses, the burdens, and
losses of this fearful civil war will surely create in the hearts of the
people everywhere, North and South, a revivified if not a new-born love
for, and appreciation of, republican principles, and will teach them
where the most insidious danger to them lies; not from open foes,
foreign or domestic; not from anything inherent in those free
principles; but from a cause exceedingly paradoxical: a democratic
people leaving to a party, to a section, the Government which should be
their very own; the virtue and intelligence of the nation absenting
themselves from the national councils, thus making way for corruption
and fraud to enter in an overwhelming flood; one half of the nation
rocking its conscience to sleep with the false lullaby of commercial
greatness and material prosperity, and the other, left to do the
governing, with seemingly no conscience at all, going to work with
satanic directness and acuteness, to undermine the principles thus left
without a guardian, and to inject the black blood of slavery into the
veins of the body politic, till the name _democracy_ became a misnomer
the most wretched, a sarcasm the most touching. I do not imagine we
shall ever again go back to that. It must be that, in future, the
American people will grow into the habit of demanding that an
enlightened, patriotic statesmanship shall rule, instead of an
unprincipled demagoguism. Also, that they will attend to it that better
men are sent to Washington; men chosen because they represent most
nearly the great national ideas and interests, which the people will
require shall absorb legislation rather than any sectional institution
whatever; and not because, primarily, they are the subservient idols of
this or that party. It must be that, hereafter, party will be less and
the nation more. Of course, parties will exist, necessarily; but if this
great American people, having carried on to perfect success this war
against a stupendous rebellion, and having gone through the school of
knowledge and experience it has been to them, can again settle down into
the mere political jobbery into which governmental affairs had
deteriorated before the earthquake of war stirred up the dregs of
things, it would be an instance of fruitless expenditure of means and
life, and of self-stultification, too pitiful for words--such an
instance as the world has not yet seen, thanks to the ordained
progression of the world.
When peace returns to the land once more; when the fierce fever of blood
and strife is quelled; when the vague fears and uncertainties of this
period of transition are over, and the keen pangs and bloody sweat of
the nation's new birth are all past--what will be the position of this
American people? I tremble to contemplate it. It will be much like what
I imagine the condition of a freed, redeemed soul to be, just escaped
the thraldom, perplexity, and sin of this lower life, and entered on a
purer, higher, freer plane of existence. Then comes reconstruction,
reorganization, a getting acquainted with the new order of things, and
the new duties and experiences to which it will give rise; then will be
discoveries of new truths, and new applications of old; old errors and
superstitions have been renounced, and facts and principles which have
long lain in abeyance, smothered under a weight of neglect and
unappreciation, will start into fresh magnitude. And, withal, will come
a sense of the reality and security there is in this great change, and
of infinite relief and blessedness therein, such as I suppose attends
every change from a lower to a higher condition, from darkness to light,
from cloud, mystery, and trouble, to the white air of peace and the
clear shining of the sun of knowledge.
_Then_, think of the career that lies ahead of this regenerated nation.
This war, fearful and costly as it is, was needed, to rouse men and
women to the conviction that there is something more in a people's life
than can be counted in dollars and cents; and that their strength
consists not alone in commercial superiority or material development,
but, principally, in virtue, justice, righteousness. It was needed, to
give the lie to that impious and infidel assumption of the South that
_Cotton is king_, and to prove that the God of this heaven-protected
land is a true and jealous God, who will not give his glory to Baal. It
was needed, to arrest the nation in the fearful mechanical tendency it
was assuming, whereby it was near denying the most holy and vital
principles of its being; and it was needed, to warm and quicken the
almost dead patriotism of the masses, and to educate them anew in the
high and pure sentiments they had suffered to be forgotten, and, in
forgetting which, many another ration has gone to irretrievable decay
and ruin.
I trust in God that this people have not suffered many things in vain,
and that the time is dawning when we shall be a _nation_ indeed, a
Christian nation, built upon those eternal ideas of truth, justice,
right, charity, holiness, which would make us the ideal nation of the
earth, dwelling securely under the very smile and benediction of
Jehovah.
In this time of which I speak, the people will see that to be a _nation_
we must not be merely servile imitators of Old World ideas, but must
develop our own _American ideas_ in every department of government and
society; thus, eventually, building up a national structure which shall,
which need, yield to none, but may take precedence of all.
We are too young, as yet, to have become such a nation, with its
distinctive and separate features, each clearly marked and
self-illustrating; but _not_ too young to understand the necessity of
working out our own special plan of civilization. As the American nation
did not follow the course of all others, by mounting from almost
impalpable beginnings up through successive stages to an assured
position of national influence and greatness; so need we not imitate
them in waiting for gray hairs to see ourselves possessed of a distinct
national character. As we did not have to go through the slow, age-long
process of originating, of developing ideas, principles, but took them
ready made, a legacy from the experience of all the foregoing ages; and
as our business is to apply these ideas to the problem we are set to
solve, not for ourselves alone, but for the world's peoples, for
aggregate humanity, so should we be neither laggard nor lukewarm in
fulfilling this high trust, this 'manifest destiny.' In the developing
of our special American ideas we have a great work before us--a work but
begun, as yet. There is an American art--an American literature--an
American society, as well as an American Government, to be shaped out of
the abundant material we possess, and compacted into the enduring
edifice of national renown. For what is national character, but ideas
crystallized in institutions? Until we have done this--given permanency
to our special ideas in our institutions--we are a nation in embryo; our
manhood exists only in prophecy.
To assist in this mighty work is the duty and privilege of American
women. What higher ambition could actuate their endeavors--what nobler
meed of glory win their aspirations?
O ye women, dear American sisters, whoever you are, who have offered up
your husbands, sons, brothers, lovers, on the red altar of your country,
that so that country may be rescued from the foes that seek her honor
and life; who have labored and toiled and spent your efforts in
supplying the needs of her brave defenders; whose hearts and prayers are
all for the success of our holy cause; who are glad with an infinite joy
at her successes, and who are sorry with profoundest grief at her
defeats; complete, I implore you, the sacrifice already begun, and give
to your regenerated country, in the very dawn of the new day which is to
see her start afresh upon the shining track of national glory,
yourselves, your best energies, and affections. Love liberty--love
justice--love simplicity--love truth and consistency. See to it that the
cause of republican freedom suffer not its greatest drawback from your
failure to lead society up to the point to which you have the power to
educate it. By your office as the natural leaders and educators of
society; by your mission as the friends and helpers of all who suffer;
by your high privilege as the ordained helpmate of man in the work,
under God and His truth, of evangelizing the world, and lifting it out
of its sin and sorrow; by your obligations to the glorious principles of
Christian republicanism; and by your hopes of complete ultimate
enfranchisement, I adjure you. The world has need of you, the erring,
sin-struck world. Your country, even now struggling in the throes of its
later birth, has desperate need of you. Man has need of you; already are
being woven between the long-estranged sexes new and indissoluble bonds
of union,--sympathies, beautiful, infinite, deathless; and, with a
pleased and tender smile of recognition across the continent, he hails
you _helper_! Your era dawns in sad and sombre seeming, indeed, in a
land deluged with fraternal blood; but yours are all who need, all who
sin, all who suffer. Shall the progress of humanity wait upon your
supineness, or neglect, or refusal? Or shall the era now beginning,
through you speedily culminate into the bright, perfect day of your
country's redemption, and thus lead progress and salvation throughout
the nations of the earth? Never were women so near the attainment of
woman's possibilities as we American women; never so near the
realization of that beautiful ideal which has ever shaped the dreams and
colored the visions of mankind, making Woman the brightest star of man's
love and worship.
Will she realize the dream--will she justify the worship? That is the
question that concerns her now.