NEEDS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN IN THIS AGE.

IF one-tenth of the efforts which women now make to fill their time

with amusements, or to gratify outward ambition, were devoted to

personal improvement, and to the cultivation of high-toned

friendships with each other, it would do more than any thing else to

enrich and embellish their lives, and to crown them with contentment.

Their characters would thus be elevated, their hearts warmed, their

minds stored, their manners refined, and kindness and courtesy

infused into their intercourse.

Nothing else will ever add to society the freshness, variety, and

stimulant charm, the noble truths and aspirations, the ingenuous,

co-operating affections, whose absence at present makes it often so

deceitful and repulsive, so barren and wearisome. The relish of

existence is destroyed, the glory of the universe darkened, to

multitudes of tender and highsouled persons, by the loathsome

insincerity and treachery, the frivolous fickleness, the petty

suspicions and envies, and the incompetent judgments, which they are

constantly meeting. These superficial and miserable vices of common

society disenchant the soul, and dry up the springs of love and hope.

They are fatal to that magnanimous wisdom and that trustful sympathy

which compose at once the brightest ornaments of our nature, and the

costliest treasures of experience. Ah, if, in place of them, we could

everywhere meet the honest hand, the open heart, the serious mind,

the frank voice, the upward eye, the emulous and helpful soul largely

endowed with knowledge and reverence! Then one would never be

troubled with that frightfully depressing feeling--the feeling that

there is nothing worth living for. Verily, the most dismal of all

deaths is to die from lack of a sufficient motive for living. And is

it not to be feared that many in our age die this death?

The true remedy for the fierce, shallow war of society, or its faded

and jaded hollowness, is to be found in generous friendships,

begotten by a common pursuit of the holiest ends of existence. In the

nurture of these relations, by every law of fitness and want, it

belongs to women to take the lead. The realm of the affections, with

its imperious exactions and its imperial largesses, is theirs.

Certainly no right or privilege should be withheld from women; but

they ought to be careful not to mistake dangers or defects or vices

for rights and privileges. It is simple blindness to fail to see that

the distinctively feminine sphere of action is domestic life, and the

inner life--not the brawling mart and caucus. The freedom and

education of woman should be so enlarged that she can include, in

intelligence and sympathy, all the interests of mankind. But, in

action, we would rather coax men to withdraw from the gladiatorial

strifes and shows of the world, than goad women to enter them.

And yet this statement needs qualification. There is much to be said

on the other side. Woman is still generally regarded, on account of

the transmitted opinions and usages of the past, as a mere appendage

to man. The truth of the greatest importance to be considered is,

that the element of humanity, not the element of sex, is the supreme

fact by which the question should be determined. Seen from the point

of view of absolute morality, man is no more a child of God and an

heir of the eternal universe, than woman. She has a personal destiny

of her own to fulfil, irrespective of him, just as much as he has

one, irrespective of her "The most important duty of woman," it has

been said, "is to perfect man." Why so? No one would say that the

most important duty of man is to perfect woman. And yet, why is it

not just as much his duty to be her servant, as it is her duty to be

his servant? It is a remnant of barbaric prejudice, preserved from

the ages of brute force, which makes the difference in the estimate.

The first duty of every human being is self-perfection. The ideal of

marriage is the mutual perfection of both parties. In its truest

idea, marriage is an institution for the perfecting of the race, by

the perfecting of individual men and women through their co-operating

intelligence and affection. To limit its end to the perfecting of the

man alone, is the highest stretch of masculine arrogance. Is it not a

just inference, that, if woman is as completely a human unit as man,

she has an equal right with him to the use of every means of self-

development in the fulfilment of her destiny? The foremost claim to

be made in behalf of women, therefore, is liberty, as untrammelled a

choice of occupation and mode of life, as free a range of

individuality and spiritual fruition, as is granted to men. But would

this really be an advance, or a retrogression? Many maintain that it

would be subversive of the genuine progress of civilization, to

abandon the prejudices and throw down the bars which have hitherto

restrained women from a full share in the chosen avocations and

ambitions of men. All improvement is marked, they say, by an increase

of differences, greater separation and complexity of offices.

Therefore, to efface or lessen the social distinctions between the

sexes would be to reverse the order of development. Auguste Comte,

who felt a strong interest in this subject, and had a deep insight

into some of its data, says, "All history assures us, that, with the

growth of society, the peculiar features of each sex have become not

less but more distinct. Woman may persuade, advise, judge; but she

should not command. By rivalry in the selfish pursuits of life,

mutual affection between the sexes would be corrupted at its source.

There is a visible tendency towards the removal of women, wherever it

is possible, from all industrial occupations. Christianity has taken

from them the priestly functions they held under Polytheism. With the

decline of the principle of caste, they are more rigidly excluded

from royalty and every kind of political authority. Thus their life,

instead of becoming independent of the Family, is becoming more

concentrated in it. That Man should provide for Woman is a law of the

human race--a law connected with the essentially domestic character of

female life." There is a larger admixture of error in the foregoing

representation, than is usual with this deep and original thinker on

social ethics. It is true that differences increase with the progress

of society; it is also true that similarity increases. There is both

a minuter subdivision of functions, and a wider freedom of choice in

the selection of their functions by individuals. In the rudest state,

the relative condition and mode of life of whole classes are rigidly

fixed by their birth or by arbitrary violence. As science and art are

developed, and wealth accumulated, the varieties of industry and of

social rank are largely multiplied; liberty of choice is extended,

and facility of change is increased. Once there was a royal caste, a

priestly caste, a warrior caste, a servile caste; determined by

blood, and unalterable. These invidious castes are now, for the most

part, broken down, and their several functions comparatively open to

all who, observing the conditions, choose to fulfil them. The most

prevalent and obstinate of caste distinctions is that of sex; the

monopoly by man of public action, power, and honor; the exclusion of

one-half of our race from what men regard as the highest social

prerogatives, an exclusion which was no deliberate act, but a natural

result of historic causes. Dr. Hedge says, with the clear vigor

characteristic of his admirable mind, "As to the charge of exclusion,

I think it would be quite as correct to say that women have combined

to exclude men from the kitchen, the laundry, the nursery, as that

men have combined to exclude women from the army or the navy, or the

bar or the pulpit, or the broker's board. I suppose the assignment of

either sex to the class of occupations which society, as now

constituted, respectively devolves upon them came about in the

beginning as naturally as the difference in costume which has always

divided male and female. A sense of fitness, of natural affinity,

determined each in its several way. There was no compulsion of the

weaker by the stronger, and no formal allotment. Each following its

own instincts arrived where it is. A tacit agreement settled this

point as it has so many others of the social economy. Nor would any

discontent with the present arrangement have arisen; had the family

life kept pace with the growth of society." This exclusive usurpation

of the public life by man--or rather, as we should say, this natural

development and division--so organized by immemorial usage as to have

become a second nature in both parties, is at last beginning to

reveal its injustice, and to give way. In savage life, woman is

little more than a bearer of burdens, a slave, and a drudge; as

coarse as man, and lower in rank and treatment. The man fishes,

hunts, fights, plays, rests; putting every repulsive task exclusively

on the woman. It is the brute right of the stronger, which very

slowly yields to the refining influence of reflective sympathy.

With each successive advance of society, it is not true that the

distinction of sex becomes more definite and more important; but it

is true that the distinctive feeling of men towards women becomes

less a feeling of scorn and authority--more a feeling of deference and

homage. Woman is as distinct from man in the grossest barbarism as in

the finest civility: only, in that, she is the degraded servant of

his senses; in this, the honored companion of his soul. If, with the

progress of society, the sphere of feminine life becomes more

domestic, inward, individual, so also does that of man. His ideal

life constantly encroaches more on his active life; his physical

energies become less predominant, and his moral sympathies stronger.

Woman begins by being totally distinct from man in personality and

estate, totally subjected to him in service. She goes on, with the

improvement of civilization, to be ever freer from his authority,

nearer his equal in status, more closely blended with him in

personality and moral pursuits. They are not master and servant; but

equals, responsible to one another for mutual perfection, each

responsible to God for personal perfection. While, therefore, to

efface the intrinsic characteristics of the sexes would undoubtedly

be a retrograde step, it is an impossible step, which no one proposes

to take. It is proposed merely to efface those factitious

characteristics, whose removal will clear away barriers and secure

the more rapid improvement of all, by blending their culture, their

liberty, and their worship--showing us men and women as equal units of

humanity in its personal ends, but dependent co-adjutors in its

social means.

The common destiny of a woman, as a representative of humanity, is

the same as that of a man; namely, the perfect development of her

being in the knowledge of truth, and in the practice of virtue and

piety. Her peculiar destiny is wifehood and maternity. But if she

declines this peculiar destiny of her sex, or it is denied her, still

her common human destiny remains unforfeited; and she has as clear a

right to the unrestricted use of every means of fulfilling it as she

could have if she were a man.

The good wife and mother fulfils a beautiful and a sublime office--the

fittest and the happiest office she can fulfil. If her domestic cares

occupy and satisfy her faculties, it is a fortunate adjustment; and

it is right that her husband should relieve her of the duty of

providing for her subsistence. But what shall be said of those

millions of women who are not wives and mothers; who have no adequate

domestic life--no genial private occupation or support?

Multitudes of women have too much self respect to be desirous of

being supported in idleness by men; too much genius and ambition to

be content with spending their lives in trifles; and too much

devotedness not to burn to be doing their share in the relief of

humanity, the work and progress of the world. If these were all happy

wives and mothers, that might be best. But denied that function, and

being what they are, why should not all the provinces of public labor

and usefullness, which they are capable of occupying, be freely open

to them? What else is it save prejudice that applauds a woman dancing

a ballet or performing an opera, but shrinks with disgust from one

delivering an oration, preaching a sermon, or casting a vote? Why is

it less womanly to prescribe as a physician than to tend as a nurse?

If a woman have a calling to medicine, divinity, law, literature,

art, instruction, trade, or honorable handicraft, it is hard to see

any reason why she should not have a fair chance of pursuing it.

Of course, such must ever be the exceptional callings of women; but

in proportion as those not otherwise more satisfactorily employed

enter into them, we must believe that the burden on men, instead of

being aggravated by the new competition, will be shared, and thus

lightened, and the best interests of society receive impulse. Is it

not, then, a sound claim which demands for women a full initiation

into all the noble realms and interests of humanity? Slavery and

ignorance engender worse vices and more hopeless degradation than can

result from the exposures of freedom and knowledge. Besides, freedom

and knowledge are the guides to every form of nobleness. They alone

can fit women truly to exert their most sacred prerogatives. Those

who have enjoyed the best means of knowing the truth say, that the

Harems of the East are the hot-beds of every wicked quality whose

seeds slumber in the heart of woman. Surrounded by rivals;

incessantly watched by those cunning and merciless monsters, the

eunuchs; knowing nothing of science, art, literature, or industry--

they must be devoured by animal passion, by love of intrigue and

deception, by jealousy, envy, and hatred. The true remedy for the

melancholy stagnation or the frightful effervescence of their

existence is not indeed to call them forth into a contest with men

for the notice of society and the prizes of the world; but to give

them their liberty, remanding them to their own consciences and the

social sanctions of the great laws of right and wrong, to educate

them to the highest point in every department of knowledge and

sentiment, and to throw open to them the boundless field of private

and public moral influence, with a fair chance for the achievement of

happiness.

Therefore, while as perfect an education, and as absolute a liberty,

are claimed for women as for men, they are to be adjured to remember

that their conscious aims should be wisdom, goodness, spiritual

force, delicacy, and harmony, with the consequent moral influence and

contentment; and not the trophies of power, or the publicities of

fame. And precisely the same duty holds with regard to men.

The effort to attain the highest graces of character, instead of

plunging recklessly into the selfish ways of the world, is as truly

obligatory for man as for woman.

Brazen impudence, unprincipled greed, ignorance, cruelty, are vices

in him too; modesty, patience, obedience, cleanliness, and

aspiration, are virtues in him too. If those vices were to receive a

new development, these virtues a new check, by setting before women

the higher industries and prizes of society, it would be an immense

evil. But is it not probable that such a course will do more to

elevate than to degrade, by a larger diffusion of the moral

stimulants and restraints of life more closely assimilating the sexes

in their diversity, interchanging their respective traits for mutual

advantage, and speeding them forward in the common race? The two most

pronounced feminine characteristics are tenderness and purity;

masculine, courage and knowledge. Humanity will not be perfected,

either in individual character or social destiny, by the greater

separate enhancement of these in the sexes, but only by their

balanced diffusion in both, making the women wise and courageous, the

men tender and pure.

It is necessary to see more clearly the grounds on which women, as a

class, have hitherto been excluded from public activity and

authority, in order properly to understand the justice or the

injustice of that exclusion. And, in studying the origin of customs

and opinions now prevalent, it is as much our right to do it with

freedom, as it is our duty to do it with reverence. Many persons

forget that the highest question is, what ought to be? and not, What

has been or is? Usages frequently endure after their utility has

ceased, after their propriety has gone. The true ideal of human

conduct is not to be seen in the imperfections of the past, but to be

constructed from the perfections of the future. The fact that a thing

has always been, is an historic justification of it for bygone time,

but not a moral justification of it for coming time. This requires

intrinsic and enduring reasons--reasons of right and use. While the

exclusion of women from public life has been natural in the ages

behind us, it is a distinct inquiry whether such an exclusion be

either obligatory or expedient now.

History demonstrates that the male sex has greater muscular strength,

with its natural accompaniments, than the female. The more

differentiated and largely supplied nervous structure, connected with

the offices of maternity, detracts so much from the amount of force

furnished for the muscles and the will. In the rudeness of the

primitive state, it is an unavoidable result of the superior muscular

power of man that woman is his subject. But the more pronounced

nervous system of woman gives her certain spiritual advantages. Her

greater sensibility, her greater seclusion, with its relative

stimulus of solitude and meditation; the closer endearments of

maternity--develop her affections in a higher degree than his. Hence

arises a tendency to refinement, elevation, influence, on her part--a

tendency, to which, in proportion to his moral susceptibility, he

responds with sympathy, respect, and veneration. Every step of social

progress has been marked by a softening of the tyranny of man and a

lifting of the position of woman--an approximation towards an equal

companionship. First the tool of his will, next the toy of his

pleasure, then the minister of his vanity, she is at last to become

the free sharer of his life, the friend of his mind and heart. In the

first of these stages, no question of right was consciously raised:

the brute preponderance of strength decided all. In the last stage,

there will be no question in debate, no exercise of executive

authority on either side; all being settled by a spontaneous harmony

of privileges and renunciations on both sides. But in the

intermediate stages, covering the whole historic period thus far, man

has sought to justify himself in monopolizing authority.

The first argument of the master was the argument, prompted by the

unneutralized selfish instincts, that the mere possession of power to

rule, gives the right to rule. Muscular superiority is, by intrinsic

fitness and necessity, divinely installed to reign. Woman, as "the

weaker vessel," must obey. Such a mode of thought was unavoidable,

and had its legitimate ages of sway. But no moralist would dream of

adopting it, after the conscience has advanced to the stage of

general principles, has risen into the region of disinterested

sympathy or justice. No one would now consciously employ this

argument to maintain the subjection of women; yet in multitudes,

below the stratum of their conscious thoughts, it blindly upholds

that subjection. A single consideration is enough to show the logical

absurdity of the assumption. If men are entitled to the exclusive

enjoyment of political privileges, simply because they have more

physical might, then, by the same principle, among men themselves,

the weak should be subject to the strong. But the very purpose of

law, the moral essence of civilization, is to rectify the natural

domination of strength, and bring all before a common standard.

The argument from intellectual inferiority is as vacant as that from

muscular inferiority. In the first place, it is an open question

whether women, as a whole, are inferior in mind to men. Many

intelligent judges firmly believe, that, taken as a whole, they are

superior. Cornelius Agrippa wrote a book in 1509, entitled "The

Nobility of the Female Sex, and the Superiority of Woman over Man."

Lucretia Marinella published a book at Venice, in 1601, undertaking

to prove the superiority of her sex to the other. A book entitled "La

Femme Genereuse," an attempt to demonstrate "that the women are more

noble, more polite, more courageous, more knowing, more virtuous, and

better managers than the men," was published at Paris, in 1643.

Madame Guillaume also published at Paris, in 1665, a work called "Les

Dames Illustres," devoted to the proof of the proposition that the

female sex surpasses the masculine in all kinds of valuable

qualifications. Mrs. Farnham devotes her book "Woman and her Era,"

published in New York in 1864, to the support of the same thesis,

with new arguments and illustrations. That woman is intellectually

superior to man, was likewise the opinion of Schopenhauer, an

exceedingly strong and independent thinker. The supreme examples of

genius have indeed been furnished by men; but this is no disproof of

the opinion, that the average height and quickness of feminine

mentality are above the masculine average.

Granting, however, that women have less spiritual force than men,

they certainly have greater fineness. Their smaller volume of power

is compensated by their greater delicacy and tact, their more

sensitive moral capacity: the power of self-sacrifice is surely

higher than the power of self-assertion. The examples of queens, from

Semiramis to Domna, from Zenobia to Catherine; of philosophers and

scholars, like Theano, Hypatia, and Olympia Morata; of founders of

orders and institutions, organizers and leaders of great enterprises,

like Clara and Chantal; of actresses, like Siddons; of singers, like

Malibran; of scientists, like Somerville; of heroines, like Charlotte

Corday and Joan of Arc; of mystic prophetesses, like Kriidener; of

religious thinkers, like Sarah Hennell; of novelists, like Madame

Dudevant and Marian Evans; of artists, teachers, martyrs, saints--a

host whose faces shine on us out of history, have abundantly

vindicated for their sex, so far as force of will, intellect,

imagination, and passion is concerned, the right of eminent domain in

the whole empire of human experience. Besides, admitting the courage,

knowledge, skill, and energy of average men to be greater than those

of average women, the difference in their respective opportunities

and training would go far towards explaining it. Women, as a class,

have been excluded from a thousand lists and stimulants, under whose

influences men have been sedulously educated. And, finally, even if

we confess the hopeless inferiority of woman to man in some of the

highest departments of action, that is no reason for denying her the

chance to go as far as she can. If her mental victories must be lower

and narrower than his, still she should enjoy the stimulus of the

struggle, as one means of aiding the fulfilment of her human destiny.

Because one can do more than another, shall he compel the other to do

nothing?

When the untenableness of muscular or mental power, as a ground for

holding women in an inferior position, becomes obvious, the next

support man conceives for his exclusive appropriation of authority,

is the belief that he is exclusively the representative and

vicegerent of God on earth; that woman is placed in subordination to

him by the direct command of God. In the Hindu law we read, "The

husband of a woman is her deity;" and in the Ramayana, "A husband is

the god of his consort." The New Testament says, "Man is the head of

the woman, but the head of the man is God;" "Man is the glory of God,

but woman is the glory of man. For the man is not of the woman, but

the woman of the man." The Apostle likewise declares, "I suffer not a

woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in

silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve." This position of the

Apostle was based on the Hebrew account of the creation of the first

woman from the rib of the first man, and of the sentence of God upon

her in consequence of her sin in eating the apple: "Thou shalt be

subject to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." Few persons

have a conception of the extent to which this representation has

moulded the opinions and feelings of the Christian world. The origin

of the view is obvious: the desire of the stronger for homage, and

the willingness of the weaker to reflect that desire in their

conduct. Is it a sound view? or is it a fallacy and a superstition?

or is it a mixture of truth and error?

For those who believe in the infallibility of every word of

Scripture, the subject is taken out of the province of natural

reason, conscience, and expediency; and there is nothing to be said.

They hold by the current tradition as the explicit will of God. But,

at the present day, there is an increasing proportion of persons who

look on the Hebrew narrative of the origin and earliest experience of

our race in the garden of Eden, as a legend, similar to kindred

narratives in other literatures. They are led, by teachings of

philosophy and science which they cannot resist, to the conclusion,

that the Almighty did not produce the human species by an arbitrary

and wholly exceptional interposition; but created them just as he did

the other species--through a law of development. It seems to them

incredible, that man and woman were made separately, in succession,

the latter exclusively for the former. They are obliged to suppose

that man and woman were created simultaneously--the differentiation of

sex having gone on in the lower types for incomputable ages, causing

humanity to appear in its earliest rise as male and female. So,

instead of saying, "The man was not made for the woman, but the woman

for the man," they would affirm, "The man and the woman were equally

made for each other, to advance hand in hand to perfection." Those

who assume this scientific point of view, will see that the question

of the rights of woman, and her true relation to man, is to be

decided purely by a philosophical mastery of the expediency and

inexpediency, the essential right and wrong, in the facts of the

case. The question of the eligibility of woman to public life and

political prerogatives has nothing to do with her comparative

personal weakness; nothing to do with any supposed rule, given in an

ancient revelation; nothing to do with any supposition that man was

the first to be created and the second to sin, woman the second to be

created and the first to sin. Did priority of creation confer

authority to govern, then man should obey the lower animals; for they

were made before he was. Even Apostolic logic sometimes limps. The

question can be understood only by a correct perception of the will

of God, as indicated in the nature and destiny of progressive

humanity composed of male and female.

What, then, is the will of God, so indicated? Regarded as the two

halves of humanity, men and women are alike and equal. Their

unlikeness, when regarded as male and female, cannot destroy this

primary and fundamental equality, or vitiate any of the rights it

involves. Consequently, whatever belongs to humanity proper, belongs

equally to men and to women. Woman has an equal claim with man to

every thing permanently connected with the fulfilment of the human

destiny; that is, the full and harmonious exercise of the faculties

of human nature. The division into male and female, affecting not

their equality of rights, merely gives special fitnesses and duties

to each. Unquestionably, the higher nervous development and maternal

offices of woman relatively fit her for tenderness and domesticity:

the coarser muscular development and adventurousness of man

relatively fit him for hardihood and publicity. But this can furnish

no ground for subjecting one, and enthroning the other. It is a

reason for their equal co-operation in assimilating each other's best

qualities for their mutual and common perfection. Every thing that is

good should be granted to both: whatever is evil should not be sought

by either.

The true social desideratum at last is, not that women, equally with

men, assume the exercise of authority; but that men, equally with

women, forego the exercise of authority. The genuine perfection of

humanity, instead of being the enforced obedience of one half to the

other half, is the spontaneous obedience of both halves to the law of

God. The incomplete statement of Paul, "I suffer not a woman to usurp

authority," is supplemented by the far deeper word of Christ, "Ye

know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them,

and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall

not be so among you: whosoever will be great among you, let him be

your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your

servant." This is the ideal of the future--that man shall no more have

authority to command than woman, everybody doing right voluntarily,

under the intrinsic sway of morality. Politics is the reign of force

by legislative sanctions: morality is the reign of affection by

social sanctions. The latter is pre-eminently the sphere of woman. Is

it her sole sphere, or is she also called to enter the other sphere?

One thing is clear; namely, that it is unjust for the laws to

discriminate against women on account of their actual exclusion from

political power. They ought to have the same legal rights as men to

earn, hold, and control property. Since they have the same interest

as man in the laws they live under, they are entitled, in some way,

either by their own voice or through others, to the same

consideration in the framing and execution of those laws.

Shall we go still further, and say that they ought to take an equal

part with men in the caucus, at the ballot-box, in the senate, at the

bar, on the bench, and elsewhere? If universal suffrage be the true

theory of government, then, logically, women are entitled to vote;

because they, equally with men, represent humanity. Every asserted

disqualification, on the ground of ignorance or preoccupation, is

sophistical; because the same plea would disqualify four-fifths of

the men too. If a government of all by all be the true theory, it is

a wrong to exclude women. If they are not fully qualified, they ought

to become qualified; and the only way to qualify them is to confess

their claim and begin their education. Either all should vote, or

merely those who are fitted: if merely those who are fitted, then

thousands of men would be shut out, thousands of women admitted.

The plea for the admission of women to political activity is often

met by the assertion, that they do not themselves wish it; that the

best women revolt with profound distaste from every thing of the

sort. But is this distaste a veracious instinct? or is it a

prejudice, owing to the ideal of feminine character and life, which

they have been educated to admire? Men have coveted a monopoly of

executive power, and held up passive obedience as the fittest type of

womanliness. Women, as a general rule, partake the prejudices, and

like to flatter the vanity, of the stronger sex. The question is not,

What do women desire? but, What ought they to desire? What is right

and best for them? The question must not be decided by any thing

extrinsic or accidental, any prejudices or fortuitous associations.

Every measure of intrinsic justice should be sustained despite of the

incidental evils which may be feared. The opinion that women would be

demoralized by voting, is no reason for withholding that right from

them, if it be a right. To become egotistic, clamorous, corrupt, and

brazen, is not a necessary accompaniment of political life; but is

the personal fault of those who become so, and just as much a vice in

men as in women, just as good a reason for recalling those from the

ballot-box, as for withholding these. There is no incompatibility

between the different realms of duty or of privilege.

What would be the effect of female voting? The physical womanliness

of woman essentially consists in wifehood and maternity. This, of

course, cannot be changed by any enlargement of her domain of

interests and activities. Her moral womanliness consists in modesty

and self-denial, the preponderance of disinterestedness over egotism.

Now, is there any real likelihood that the assumption by women of the

elective franchise, with its accompaniments, will destroy this type

of womanhood, universally acknowledged as the ideal of womanly beauty

and excellence? Is it not too well established in the authority of

the most cultivated souls, to be so easily shaken? It is the true

type, which, developed out of the historic progress in social

conditions, cannot be lost, but must be more confirmed and glorified

by the continued action, in the future, of the same causes which have

already produced it. Not the destruction of the most exalted moral

type of feminine character, rather its extension to masculine

character, is what is to be looked for in the changes of the future.

The greater the number of types of character exhibited to the public,

and the greater the facility of comparison between them, the more

sharply defined, and the more clearly recognized, will the best one

be. Will not a pure and noble woman, eminently fitted by her wisdom

and virtues for social influence, entering the political arena, set

an example there, adapted to make men revere her, assimilate to her,

and become themselves more modest, self-sacrificing, and

incorruptible? On the other hand, when she is unfitted and unworthy,

will not the reflection, in her, of their own vices of exasperated

rivalry, pride, and tyranny, appear doubly detestable? Then the

ideal, so far from being injured, would rather be improved--manly

responsibilities making the women less timid and foolish, contact

with womanly sentiment making the men less coarse and reckless. How

well this conclusion is sustained by sound probabilities, deserves to

be carefully weighed. No one should dogmatize on it.

In determining how far, if at all, women had best enter into the

sphere of public life, and take part in the functions of government,

there remains another consideration, which will be decisive with many

minds. It is drawn from the difference between those things which are

in themselves good, and therefore enduring parts of human life, and

those things which are merely provisional means to good--means

necessitated by existing evils, but destined gradually to lessen, and

finally to pass away. Were political government an intrinsic and

permanent end, an essential good of humanity, all, or at least all

who are qualified, should share in it; because every human being has

a right to a portion in every thing which is indispensable to the

completion of the human destiny. Liberty, culture, and work are

intrinsic and eternal elements of the human lot: women, therefore,

have as clear a claim to these as men. But government is not a good

in itself, is not an end. It is an evil attendant on human

wickedness, a means devised to prevent severer evils; an element of

decreasing proportions and of temporary duration. It is an artifice

which we wish to see lessen as fast as is safe, and to disappear as

soon as is possible.

Take the example of war. War is an evil, a transient incident in the

fortunes of humanity; therefore the fewer who take part in it, the

better. Women, being out of it, had best keep out of it. No one

desires to have women become soldiers. Mental and physical labor

will, as long as the world lasts, be a necessary part of the

experience of humanity; therefore men and women properly have a joint

heritage in its exactions and its privileges. But government is a

passing phase in the evolution of the social system: when men are

perfected, it will vanish in spontaneous obedience. War or crude

violence universally governed in the primitive society. Little by

little, this barbaric reign of force was encroached upon and

superseded by politics, the forms of statesmanship and legislation.

Then, little by little, the realm and rule of politics began to

shrink before the increasing sway of conscience, reason, and

sympathy, the personal law of justice and love, the intrinsic motives

appropriated by the private heart from society and religion. As war

has been narrowing and receding before politics, politics in turn

must narrow and recede before morality. The less need a nation has of

governmental interference for the securing of justice, the better off

that nation is. The smaller the number of persons engaged in working

that political mechanism, which is never productive, but merely

regulative, the better it would seem to be for the people. We do not

desire ever to see a woman occupy the office of a hangman, nor of a

prosecuting attorney, nor yet of an electioneering politician;

because, these being transient accompaniments of an imperfect

society, the desideratum is to have concentrated on them the interest

and energy of the smallest number competent to secure the needful

results of order. He who believes that a universal devotion to

politics would most speedily achieve the end of politics, namely, the

supersedure of its whole machinery by the arrival at a self-

rectifying observance of the conditions of private and public

welfare--must advocate the bestowment of legislative and other public

functions on women. Let all take part in voting and governing, for

the sake of more quickly reaching the time when none shall vote or

govern, but every one be a law unto himself. On the contrary, he who

believes that a universal rush into public life, forensic

controversy, party and personal rivalry, would exasperate the

interest, and prolong the dominion, of politics, must earnestly

recommend women to abstain from the struggle. Whatever logical right

they may have, he will think it best that they abandon that right,

and devote their zeal to the sphere of morality, whose elements are

the eternal concern of all humankind. A wider outbreak of plots and

cabals, an enlargement of the chase for notoriety and the scramble

for office, a more virulent division of neighbors and of families, a

new lease for the spirit of ambition and partisanship, would be an

evil of the deadliest fatality. Being out of politics, which is the

transient sphere of some, is it not best that woman keep out of it,

and devote herself to morality, which is the permanent sphere of all?

Here is furnished an honorable ground on which she may be, not shut

out of, but excused from, the province of government.

What is the ideal of perfect society? Is it a state where there is a

universal contention for notice, power, and honor? Then let women

enter that contest now. Is it a state where each is content with the

personal fruition of his own powers, in harmony with the same

enjoyment by all others? Then let women, by setting such an example

of abstinence from the public realm of politics, draw men also to

their true happiness, in "the realm of home and morals."

Turning from the authority of history to the authority of moral

science, there is no reason for the enslavement of woman to man. This

is not yet fully seen, because the historic type of woman as pure

subject, of man as pure sovereign, has sunk so deeply into the

imagination of both sexes. The Gentoo Code declared, "A woman ought

to burn herself alive on the funeral pyre of her husband." Body and

soul, she was a mere appendage to him. The Mosaic Code declared a

woman unclean eighty days after bearing a female child, but only

forty days after bearing a male child. One of the laws of Solon

forbade the Greek fathers and brothers from selling their daughters

and sisters as slaves; showing that such an infamous custom had been

prevalent. The passage of thousands of years had brought a degree of

physical emancipation to woman; but she still remained mentally

servile, when Catharine Parr said to her husband, Henry VII, "Your

majesty doth know right well, neither I myself am ignorant, what

great imperfection, by our first creation, is allotted to us women,

to be appointed as inferior and subject unto man as our head; and

that, as God made man in his own likeness, even so hath he made woman

of man, by whom she is to be governed." This type of unquestioning

subjection and obedience is depicted by Chaucer, after Boccaccio, in

his "Griselda," and by Tennyson in his "Enid." The husbands of these

most lovely and womanly of women try their temper, and their

subjectedness, by the most capricious, and the most cruel, tests.

They submit to every thing with unmurmuring sweetness and humility.

The true lesson of these charming stories is, that an inexhaustible

self-abnegation and obedience forms the most heavenly trait and power

of human nature. But it is a perversion to limit the application to

woman. Moral excellence is the same in man as in woman. It is an

outrage to make that meek submission to wrong, which shows so

divinely in her, a duty; and it is equally an outrage to make that

autocratic authority of man over woman, which he so complacently

assumes, a right. The progressive emancipation of woman, revealed in

history, will go on until she ceases to be, in any sense, "a mere

appendage of man," and they become mutually as independent as they

are mutually dependent.

It is very curious to study the extremes of dishonor and of honor, in

which women, as such, have been held, at different periods, under

various social conditions. In the Oriental world, in consequence of

the character fostered in them by despotism, they have always been

regarded by men with complacent condescension as toys, or with

distrust and scorn as vicious inferiors. In the Classic world, they

were always treated as far inferior to the other sex, and held up in

literature in the most odious light. Euripides was surnamed the

woman-hater, from the scorn with which he depicts the sex. The

comedies of Aristophanes are mercilessly sarcastic, in their

portrayals of women: his "Ecclesia" might be taken for a freshly

painted ironical picture of the "Woman's-rights Movement" of to-day.

And what a frightful picture of the Roman women Juvenal paints in his

"Sixth Satire "! In the Christian world, the pagan type of woman,

thought of as lower and wickeder than man, bore, for a long period,

an aggravated form, imparted by an intense theological dogma. The

theologians taught that woman--by the seduction of Adam and the

introduction of original sin, which led to the crucifixion of Christ--

was the guiltiest and worst of human beings, the Temptress of Man and

the Murderess of God. Hear how Tertullian raged against her: "She

should always be veiled, clothed in mourning and in rags; that the

eye may see in her a penitent, drowned in tears, and atoning for the

sin of having ruined the human race. Woman! thou art the gateway of

Satan."

The condition of women in the East has been unfavorably affected by

polygamy, despotism, stagnant ignorance, their close confinement, and

the profound sensual element in their religion. Yet there are

exceptions to the rule there as well as elsewhere. It was a woman who

recited the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments" to the Sultan. Oriental

literature boasts many shining names of women. We have a pleasing

introduction to some of them in Garcia de Tassy's essay on "The

Female Poets of India." Ruckert's "Hamiisa," a collection of Arabic

poetry, contains specimens from fifty-five female poets of Arabia.

The genius of the Mohammedan saint, Rabia, has been given to fame by

her wonderful sayings, translated into many modern tongues. In spite

of these examples, however, the superiority of the condition of

Western women over Eastern is not only incontestable, but, as a

whole, incomparable.

The difference of the character of Jesus from that of Mohammed, and

the difference of the spirit which they showed in their personal

relations with women, would legitimate just the difference now

existing in the condition of women, respectively in Christian and

Mohammedan lands. Passing over other more notorious incidents, one

anecdote will illustrate this statement. After the battle of Bedr, a

Jewess of Medina, named Asma, wrote some satirical couplets against

Mohammed. Omeir, at dead of night, instigated by the prophet, crept

into the apartment where Asma, surrounded by her children, lay

asleep. Feeling stealthily with his hand, he removed her infant from

her breast, and plunged his sword into her bosom with such force that

it went through her back. The next morning, at prayers in the Mosque,

Mohammed said, "Hast thou slain the daughter of Marwan?" "Yes; but is

there cause of fear for what I have done?" The implacable prophet

replied, "None whatever: two goats will not knock their heads

together for it."

Lamartine says of the Armenians, with whom he was intimate at

Damascus, "I could not turn my eyes from these beautiful and graceful

women. Our visits and conversations were everywhere prolonged; and I

found them as amiable as they were lovely. The customs of Europe, the

dress and ways of the women of the West, were our chief topics. They

did not seem to envy the lives of our women; and, on observing the

grace, the amiability, the simplicity, the serenity of mind and heart

which they preserved in the seclusion of their domestic life, it

would be difficult to say what they could envy in our women of the

world, who, in the turmoil of society, waste in a few years their

beauty, their minds, and their health." And yet, allowing the utmost

for this greater calm and contentment, our women would lose a boon,

standing quite alone in its immense value, if they were to give up

that liberty which is so fast gaining them a full share in every real

privilege enjoyed by men. Christian women mingle on equal terms in

our social, literary, patriotic, and religious festivals. Hindu or

Mohammedan ladies are condemned merely to look in, through windows

grated with bamboo slats, on the preaching of the priests, and on the

banquets of their husbands. Perhaps our ignorance as to the facts,

and our prejudices as to the principle, exaggerate the actual evils

of polygamy in Asia. The most trustworthy travellers there testify

that not one man in ten can afford to maintain more than one wife;

and that not one in ten, of those who can afford it, will venture on

the trial, if they have a child by the first. Besides, the dreadful

mortality of wives in many parts of America--owing to excessive worry,

household drudgery, and rapid child-bearing--amounts to polygamy, only

it is successive instead of simultaneous.

But one privilege European and American women have, which they cannot

easily over-estimate; namely, their exemption from the irresponsible

despotism still exercised over a majority of their sisters. The whole

force of public opinion and of civil law is pledged for their

protection. In his travels in Khasmir, published in 1844, Vigne

relates this horrid incident, which happened within his own

knowledge. Mihan Singh, governor of Kabul, had a favorite wife, the

mother of his only son, who was accused of an intrigue. Her son,

fearing the worst, dashed his turban on the ground before his father--

the most imploring act an Oriental can use--and knelt, bareheaded, at

his feet. But the enraged husband was inexorable, and caused his

hapless wife to be baked alive. What a breadth of progress separates

us from the state of society in which such a deed could be done

openly, and without illegality, by a ruler! Can any woman be too

grateful that she stands on this side of that breadth instead of on

the other side? It is to be feared that her sex is not always mindful

enough of the duty of those who are free to be bravely sincere and

true. Deceit is proper to the slave. Liberty imposes frankness. The

Asiatic woman carefully covers her face, but leaves her legs naked,

and considers her European sister shameless in reversing this custom,

There are, however, more impenetrable veils than those outwardly put

on. When we compare the simplicity of the primitive ages of the East

with the guileful art and hardened worldliness of the fashionable

society of the West, we are tempted to think, that the more woman has

bared her face, the more she has masked her mind.

Truth requires us to qualify the view of the social condition of

women which we derive from the comic poets, from the later Greek

writers in general, and from the biting epigrams on women preserved

in the Greek Anthology. That qualification may be drawn from the

history of Sappho. The consenting conclusions of the best critical

scholars of recent times--as may be seen in such works as Smith's

"Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography" and Miller's "Literature of

Ancient Greece,"--have cleared her name from the foul aspersions

thrown on it by the authors of a subsequent age, who interpreted her

life and works by the unclean standards of their own. "Not a line in

her fragments, rightly understood, can cast a cloud on her fair

fame." In her time, sensual and sentimental love were not distinctly

separated; and she expressed her passionate but pure sentiments with

a simple freedom and fervor afterwards grossly misconceived. It is to

a friend of her own sex that Sappho writes, "Equal to the gods seems

to me the man who sits opposite to thee, and watches thy sweet mouth

and charming smile. While I look at thee, my heart loses its force,

my tongue ceases to speak, a subtile fire glides through my veins,

and a rushing sound fills my ears." This mixture of feelings, this

carrying on of friendships between men, or between women, in the

language of passionate love, without the implication of any thing

corrupt, was a feature of the Greek character, unknown to nations of

a poorer and colder temperament. It seems, as is set forth by Miller,

in the fourth book of his "Dorians," that, in Lesbos, and some other

parts of Greece, female societies were formed, each under the lead of

some woman of distinguished genius, for the cultivation of poesy,

music, refinement and grace of manners, and the other elegant arts.

Girls were sent from distant cities, and even from foreign lands, to

be educated in these societies. Sappho was the head of one of them.

She calls her house, "The House of the Servant of the Muses." She

formed ardent friendships with many of her pupils. It is these

friendships which she celebrates in most of her poems. They reveal

the varied, affectionate intercourse sometimes known by the women of

classic Greece in their private apartments. The fragments which have

reached our day preserve, as the names of the choicest friends of

Sappho, Telesilla, Megara, Athis, Mnasidica; Anactoria, of Miletus;

Gongyla, of Colophon; Eunica, of Salamis; and Damophila, of

Pamphylia. The animosity of her allusions to her rivals, Gorgo and

Andromeda, shows that she could hate as vigorously as she loved, and

reminds us of the title of Middleton's tragedy, "Women, beware

Women!"

In the world of modern civilization, the tendency is in the opposite

direction from that of the Oriental, Classic, and early Christian

worlds. It expresses reverence for woman as a moral superior. But the

chivalrous impulse to exalt woman above man is as mistaken as the

impulse to degrade her beneath him. Humanity is worshipful only as it

exhibits worshipful attributes; and these attributes have the same

rank, wherever they appear. A woman deserves to be honored above a

man only as she has more than he of the highest qualities of

humanity. The moment she demands precedence, the crown crumbles from

her brows in fragments of dark decay. This lesson is finely taught in

the ancient Hindu epic, the "Mahilbhiirata." As Radhika walked with

Krishna, her soul was elated with pride, and she thought herself

better than he; and she said, "O my beloved! I am weary, and I pray

you to carry me upon your shoulders." Krishna sat down and smiled,

and beckoned to her to mount. But, when she stretched forth her hand,

he vanished from her sight; and she remained alone, with outstretched

hand. Then Radhika wept bitterly.

The superiority ascribed to woman by fine minds in our era--a trait

conspicuous, when we look from Tibullus to Frauenlob, from Pindar to

Patmore--is often supposed to be her due, on account of some quality

inherent in her mere femineity. It should be seen to be a consequence

of the purer representation of goodness in her, by virtue of her

personal renunciation of the struggle for precedence. Her mission is

to set the example, and diffuse the spirit, of contented goodness--

goodness contenting itself with the universal growth of goodness. In

what way can she ever fulfil this mission, except by attracting man

likewise to withdraw from the selfish battle for social distinction,

and devote himself to the private attainment of personal perfection,

and the public benefaction of his race? The chivalric transference of

authority from man to woman is a striking instance of the propensity

of human nature to oscillate from one extreme to the other.

Some of the champions of the "rights of women," in our day,

apparently commit the error of inverting the real desideratum, which

is, to make men renounce and love like the finest women--not to make

women exact and fight like the coarsest men. They act as if they

thought men were both better and better off than women, and were to

be taken as models by them. But our hope lies in the saint, not in

the amazon. Woman, as seen in the Mary who sat at the feet of Christ,

brings a heavenly ministration to rescue man from every thing

discordant: woman, as seen in the Penthesilea who fought Achilles,

offers man but a perverted reflection of himself.

The common belief, that human life began in a paradisal state, is a

sentimental and mischievous error. The cradles of civilization are

full of murder. First, for a period of unknown duration, raged the

strife for precedence in physical power and its grossest symbols. In

civilized nations, this strife is now, for the most part, reduced to

boys and pugilists, who are always eager to try each other's

strength, and to crow above a thrown antagonist. Next came the strife

for precedence in social power, and its finer symbols of rank,

wealth, position, and fame. This strife may be traced in every record

of the past and present; is far more extensive, seductive, and

tenacious than the former; and has been left behind, as yet, only by

the saintliest exemplars of our race. The third period, the ideal

period which we now await, is one in which there shall be no strife

among mankind for comparative superiority over each other; but, in

place of it, a universal co-operating struggle for intrinsic personal

worth, a constant advancement in gaining the real prizes of being.

Then the wretched experiences of hate and jealousy, with their

thousandfold sins and pains, will rapidly lessen. There will be no

motives for envy and opposition, since the aims of men will be alike;

and the gain of each, so far from being a loss to the rest, will be a

gain to all. Let there be no strife for precedence, and all society

must be the wiser, purer, and happier for every spiritual gain made

by any member of it. Ambitious rivalry is wretchedness, and sure to

end in sickening disappointment. Disinterested aspiration, equally to

women and to men, is the benign mother of happiness.

We read in the Norse mythology, that the gods tied Loki, the

impersonation of the evil principle, to three sharp rocks, and hung a

snake over him in such a way, that its venom should drip on his face.

But, in this dreadful case, there was one who did not forsake him.

His wife Sigyn sat close by his head, and held a bowl to catch the

torturing drops. As often as the bowl was full, she emptied it with

the utmost haste; because, during that time, the drops struck on his

face, and made him scream with agony. Her patience in holding the

bowl, and her speed in emptying it, never failed. It is a forcible

emblem of the ministration of woman to man. But, for man to impose a

service of this nature on woman as her duty, is a cruel arrogance and

wrong. The voluntary spirit of such a service teaches the one lesson

which man himself needs to learn for his own salvation.

The laborious life of a statesman, a merchant, a banker, or a

mechanic, is not rewarded by tender emotions, but by power, applause,

or money. The heart of such a man, too often, gradually ossifies,

becomes insensible to those fine and noble fruitions which

imperatively demand leisure, and a steady lucid sensibility. The hard

devotions of an external utility devour the riches of the

imagination, and destroy the overflow of the affections. But the

woman, who, shielded from the harsh frictions of the world, makes her

soul a pure and still mirror of every form of celestial truth and

good, may well be an inspiring prophetess for those who reverence and

love her. Such a woman is, in some degree, a living representative of

that star-girt face of the Virgin Mary which the medieval Church

lifted into the night, and floated above the boiling nationalities of

Europe. A Poppiea drawn by mules shod with gold, five hundred asses

kept to supply her with baths of milk for the softening of her skin--

is the enemy--and disgrace of both sexes. The true type and glory of

the one sex, the admiration and salvation of the other, are displayed

in such an example as that of the last hours of Madame Roland, who,

riding in the death-cart to the guillotine, with an infirm and aged

man who was broken down with terror and grief, devoted herself with

heroic benevolence to comfort and sustain him. In order to spare him

the double agony of seeing her execution previous to his own, with a

sublime abnegation she refused the offered privilege of being the

first victim, soothed and supported the trembling old man, saw him

perish, then calmly bared her neck to the knife.

In one of De Tocqueville's letters to the illustrious Madame

Swetchine occurs a passage marked by rare insight and weight. The

noble writer urges that the clergy, without teaching special

political doctrines, ought to instill into their hearers certain

grand sentiments and loyalties, such as the feeling that every man

belongs more to collective humanity than he does to himself. He then

adds this impressive testimony: "During my somewhat long experience

of public life, nothing has struck me more than the influence of

women in developing public spirit--an influence the greater because

indirect. I do not hesitate to say, that they give to every nation a

moral temperament, which is shown in its politics. A hundred times I

have seen weak men becoming of real political value, because they had

by their side women who supported them, not by advice as to

particulars, but by fortifying their feelings, and directing their

ambition. More frequently, I must confess, I have seen the domestic

influence gradually transforming a man, naturally noble and generous,

into a cowardly, commonplace, selfish office-seeker, thinking of

public affairs merely as a means of making himself comfortable; and

this, simply by daily contact with a well-conducted woman, a faithful

wife, an excellent mother, from whose mind the grand notion of public

duty was entirely absent."

The hardening exposures, the gnawing jealousies, of overmuch

fashionable society, with its shallow and bitter emulations, do far

more to contract and sour the spirit of woman, to falsify and deprave

her heart, to belittle and spoil her mind, to degrade and veneer her

character, than any professional career can well be supposed to do.

It cannot be doubted, that many a woman, who displays herself, as

good as naked, in brilliant drawing-room assemblies, spends half her

existence in the frivolity of crowded dinners, suppers, and balls, is

more corrupted and bronzed than she could be by studying medicine,

theology, jurisprudence, or political economy, and taking a zealous

part in the affairs of her country. Let not the greater and nearer

evil be neglected in a prejudiced imagination of a lesser and remoter

one. Where do you find an exterior of politeness covering an interior

of indifference or guile? a flaming demonstrativeness in front of a

soul of ice? a beautiful show of nobleness and happiness, with a

haggard reality of weariness and woe underneath? In the glare and

fuss of society. And where do you find, purely shielded behind

manners all frost, a heart all celestial fire? under conditions of

unpretending simplicity, an experience ever fresh and serene, full of

joy and dignity, and endlessly progressive? In those who lead lives

of quiet sincerity and humility, consecrated to choice studies and

chosen friends. What sweet charm or commanding grandeur or satisfying

worth can be looked for in persons, the highest palpitations of whose

hearts are raised by the touches of pride, money, and vanity? More

patience, sincerity, studious seclusion, meditative consecration, and

steady sympathy are the foremost want of our age.

The two arts of letter-writing and conversation, invaluable both as

instruments of pleasure and of culture, seem to be dying out before

the encroachment of innumerable trifles, absorbing amusements,

tyrannical egotisms, and that pernicious flood of ephemeral

literature, whose varieties are daily spawned upon all tables. The

long, careful letters, full of thought, full of true personal

interest and earnest general sentiment, so common two or three

generations ago, are all but unknown now. There is no time left for

them.

Conversation, too, has become the ghost of what it was. Where are the

famous talkers now? Where are the circles in which conversation is

carried on as the loftiest and richest of the social arts? The

sustained comparison of views, interchange and discussion of

opinions, accumulation of knowledge, argument, wit, sympathy, on

themes of intense interest and solemn import, once so common in

cultivated society, where all listened while each successively spoke,

have given way before the telegraph, the newspaper, the pamphlet, the

book, the platform, the swift diffusion of all information and the

incessant hurry of everybody. Letter-writing is an indirect exchange

of thoughts. Conversation is a personal exchange of life. The obvious

decline of the former is a great loss; the notorious decline of the

latter is a greater loss.

There is no way in which those women who are able to give the tone

and set the fashion in society, can do so much good as by endeavoring

to reinstate conversation, and to teach in every company the

nobleness of leisure and attention, that each one who speaks shall be

inspired to the fullest training of his best powers by the listening

expectation of the rest. No one can talk well amidst a rude jabber of

voices, or a perpetual succession of interruptions. Subtile thought,

sacred sentiment, eloquent emotion, and artistic speech, are coy:

they must have the encouragement of respectful audience. Conversation

becomes the crowning art and luxury of life, the most completely

satisfying of all employments, when groups of friends regularly meet,

under the rules of gracious breeding, with leisure, with confidence

in each other, with no jealous ambitions, no intolerant partisanship,

but with catholic purposes of improvement. Instead of such meetings

of choice friends, we now have mobs of people, drawn together by

every sort of factitious motive--crowds who crush each other's

dresses, desperately bow and smirk at each other; exchange

intolerable commonplaces, with unmeaning conventionality; affect to

listen to music, which no one can hear or would care for if he could

hear; mix all their buzzing voices in one oceanic roar; or, when

there is room, break up into whispering knots; then charge together

upon the supper-table, as if it were a fortress to be taken by storm,

and are unspeakably relieved when the assembly is over. As company is

held in fashionable society now, the talk is not tenaciously kept to

important themes, for ends of conviction, culture, light, or joy, but

is a hodge-podge of trifles, an incoherent succession of unconsidered

remarks. Each one speaks with his neighbor, regardless of all the

rest of the guests, as if it were an evil to be silent, or an

absurdity to expect that anybody could say any thing worth being

listened to by all. Some one has said, with much piquancy, "Lectures

are soliloquies reared on the ruins of conversation." Madame Mole

suggestively remarks, "At the Hotel Rambouillet conversation was the

all-sufficient amusement: we hear of neither cards nor music; for,

wizen the habit of changing all thoughts and sentiments into words

has become natural and easy, it offers so great a variety in itself

that society needs no other. That form of talk alone can be called

conversation in which what we really think and feel is called out,

and flows the quicker from the pleasure of seeing it excite thoughts

and feelings in others."

Those who, now-a-days, have a reputation as good talkers are rather

declaimers, haranguers, orators, than conversers. True

conversationalists seem to be nearly obsolete; because our social

gatherings, whether in the drawing-room or at the table, do not

furnish the needed conditions. To shine as a talker, one must

override others by sheer vociferation and monopoly, treading his way

amidst insincere applause and general dislike, over the injured self-

love of every one present, to the throne of monologue. Such a

condition is equally incompatible with what is best in character, in

manners, and in personal communion.

For the revival of conversation, an improvement of character is

necessary--a purification and deepening of the interior life. It grows

out of friendship and the fervor of noble interests. And to these the

fickleness and thinness of soul attendant on ignorance and

selfishness, as well as on miscellaneous dissipation, are fatal.

For sparks electric only strike

On souls electrical alike;

The flash of intellect expires

Unless it meet congenial fires.

There can be no deep and enduring union of human beings without

truthfullness, earnestness, aspiration. It is glorious for people to

meet who ascend to meet. For social conquests, as well as for private

content, the aggrandizement of individual character and experience is

the mightiest talisman. As with the increase of esteem and confidence

the spiritual veils are lifted, one by one, the person itself charms

because the soul is seen, and seen to be divine. Even in those

examples where beauty is the hook, grace is the bait, and virtue the

line, with which hearts are caught. When we see wisdom and goodness

the guests of another's eyes, love becomes the guest of our own. The

great evil of an excessive devotion to society and fashion is the

mechanical hollowness and insincerity it breeds--an evil as fatal to

happiness as it is to virtue. Economy of force is the governing

standard with those who are too constantly in contact with the world,

too much given to the spirit of crowded company and fashion.

Conscientious truthfullness, earnest discrimination, and a behavior

honestly adapted to the facts of feeling and duty, are too expensive,

would quickly drain to death the fop, the self-seeker, and the

coquette. Accordingly, indifference is the shield of polite society,

and affectation is the valve of artificial characters; but sincerity

of soul is the first charm of manners, and extent of sympathy is the

proper measure of happiness. The soul, dried and hardened by the heat

and wear of crowds, or exhausted by dissipation, measures its success

by how much it can exclude, how much it despises, how much it can

save; but the glory of youth, the joy of genius, the height and charm

of life, is the exuberance of the expenditure of force they can

afford. Their standard of success is how much their sympathies can

include, how much they can revere and love and serve. It is

littleness and misery to make a private hoard of the good of the

universe. The amount it lavishes measures the wealth of the rich and

happy soul. That will be a blessed day when we make our social

parties not for the purpose of ostentation or luxury, not to give

dinners or suppers in return for those to which we have been invited,

not to secure acquaintances who will aid in gratifying our external

ambition, but simply to enjoy the society of friends whom we honor

and love, to enhance our interior life by sincere spiritual

intercourse, the reflection of minds and hearts. Wherever human

beings meet, the bazaar of Fate stands open.

Another duty, closely allied with the foregoing, and especially

incumbent on the finest and highest women, is to improve the common

standard of good manners. This is a region of influence of momentous

importance, and for which the most honored and beloved women have a

pre-eminent adaptation by their beauty, grace, docility, and

sympathetic ease of self-sacrifice. To associate with a quick-witted

woman is an education. The last words of Madame Pompadour, addressed

to her withdrawing confessor, just before her final breath, were,

"Wait a moment, father; and we will go out together." In a democratic

age and country like ours, many causes are at work to lower the

average standard of manners by generating universal self-assertion,

arrogance, and irreverence. As compared with the gracious type of

chivalric manners exhibited in the best specimens of three or four

centuries ago, it must be confessed that sweetness of dignity,

abundance of courtesy, gentleness, magnanimity, have suffered badly.

No gentle and lofty mind can turn from the reading of Digby's "Broad

Stone of Honor" to that of Thackeray's "Book of Snobs," without deep

pain. Here is a field of influence superlatively fitted for the

activity of women, and worthy of the aspirations of the most favored

and admirable representatives of the sex. Opinions may ascend; but

manners descend.

The chief source of complacency to petty natures is in contemplating

the weaknesses of their superiors. Pride nourishes itself by gazing

on inferiors, and heightening the contrast. But the true habit of

virtue is to stoop graciously, to lift inferiors towards itself, and

to look reverentially on the merits of superiors, lifting itself with

aspiring docility towards them.

Among the people of the present age, there is no need of teaching the

lessons of social scorn or envy; but there is need of teaching the

lessons of disinterested reverence and aspiration. It must therefore

be a profitable service to hold up for the contemplation and study of

women the examples of the noble sway, the delightful charm exerted by

such women as the grand Duchess Louise of Weimar, Madame Récamier,

Madame Swetchine, or the Duchess of Orleans. Each one of these

deserves the homage of being patterned after:

For she was of that better clay

That treads not oft this earthly stage:

Such charmed spirits lose their way,

But once or twice into an age.

They seemed to shed dignity, wisdom, virtue, repose, and bliss around

them wherever they moved, and to put all persons in their debt by the

boons unconsciously emitted from their being and their manners. We

cannot hold too constant or too worshipful communion with such

characters: it is equally a culture and an enjoyment. The secret of

their divine skill is not flattery, but deferential treatment. They

take for granted, that their friends have noble qualities and

admirable aims, and treat them accordingly, with a respectful

attention which heightens the self-respect of its recipients. Neglect

is insolent, and contempt is injurious. He who suffers them is hurt

and lowered. One blessed magic there is, as guileless as it is

supreme. This charm, this witchcraft, is a sincere and honoring

attention.

Woman can more keenly than man "taste the pure enjoyment that results

from the mere growth and exercise of good feelings." Who so well as

she knows how much more true pleasure there is in one peaceful moment

of modest goodness than in all the excitement that waits on the gaudy

game of ambition? She is never so happy, as when doing most and

asking least.

The Duchess de Duras wrote to a friend, "Madame de Montcalm has been

sick: she is eaten up by politics: they are her vulture." To man,

genius is an instrument, which he must use to achieve triumphs: to

woman, it is a load, which she must transmute into blessings. Thus

far in human history, it has been much easier for the most gifted of

our race to be unhappy than to be happy; because happiness is an

equilibrium of inner powers and outer conditions, and the most

extraordinary gifts are surest to destroy or prevent that adjustment.

The divine remedy is self-sacrifice, self-detachment, and the

attuning of the soul by the laws of the ideal world, the perfect

state of society.

Poor and feeble souls exact most from the world. Rich and soaring

souls have a self-sufficing modesty, which, in its own exuberance,

asks but little from others. The lark, when, at sunrise, she rises,

singing, above our sight, shows that it was not from lack of power to

climb, that she made the humble choice to build her nest in the

grass. Here lies the most elect office of woman--to attract and train

men to the sober and blissful ends of wisdom and love, and withdraw

their passions from the wretched ends of folly, on which so many

waste their lives, in ploughing the air, sowing the sea, and trying

to catch the wind with a net. The redemption of the worst men will be

effected when they make voluntary acquisition of what the best women

possess by instinct, and spontaneously exhibit; namely, that

disinterested love of goodness, which is willing to give all and ask

nothing. Happy is he, and he alone safely happy, who gives affection

to his fellows, as the sun gives light to the creation. It receives

not directly back from single objects what it gives them; but, from

the whole, all that it radiates is returned. It is so with the good

man and his race. Persons may not return the reverence and love he

lavishes, but humanity will. For what is his total feeling towards

the collective individuals that constitute his race, except the

glorified reverberation from humanity, back into his experience, of

what his own soul has sent forth?

The call of woman, in this age, then, is not to be a brawling

politician, clamoring for her share in the authorities and honors of

the world, launching jokes, sarcasms, and sneers to the right and the

left. Clearly, her genuine work, beyond the family circle, is to set

an example of modest devotion to personal improvement and the social

weal. Sir Philip Sidney describes a horseman who "stirred the bridle

so gently, that it did rather distil virtue than use violence." That

is, in some sense, a type of the proper power of woman. It is her

heavenly mission to influence by yielding, rule by obeying, conquer

by surrender, and put the crowning grace of joy and glory on her sex

by ministering to the hurts and wants of humanity. Kindled by her

example, and compensated by her smile, man will aspire to complete

his highest destiny. Her destiny will be fulfilled with his, and in

it; his in hers, and with it. They cannot be really separated; since

woman as the inspirer and rewarder of man, in the most intense action

at the top of society, moulds him by her ideal of him reflected in

his imagination. Womanhood is by no means to be personified in the

exclusive aspect of a nurse; but as artist, teacher, law-giver,

queen, as well. The just personification of womanhood must include

the total aspects and offices of humanity. She has as good a claim as

man to them all. But let no hasty advocate insist on adding to the

totality of true and permanent features in that personification, any

of those vicious, accidental, and temporary features incident to the

imperfect stages through which humanity has been passing, and is

still passing, in its progressive evolution.

There is one respect, not often thought of, in which the various

ethnic pantheons, from those of the rawest barbarism to those of the

most intellectual civilization, possess deep interest and

instructiveness. Their leading personages, gods and goddesses, reveal

to us the chief types of human character from which they were

created. The heavens and hells of mythology are the higher and lower

reflections, or upward and downward echoes, of the earth; and the

supernatural beings who people them are idealizations of men and

women, more or less richly draped with attributes suggested by the

phenomena of the universe. The groups of feminine figures furnished

by mythology, therefore, afford a most striking exhibition of the

typical groups of women which must have been known in the

mythological ages of the world. Conceived in this way, with what

thoughtfullness we should contemplate the Graces, the Muses, the

Furies, the Fates, Nemesis, Vesta, Fortuna, Diana, Eris, Ceres, the

majestic port of Juno, the frosty splendor of Minerva, the melting

charm of Venus, the snaky horror of Medusa, Egvptian Isis, throned

among the stars, and Scandinavian Hela, crouching in her grisly

house!

It is a characteristic of satirists, in every age, that they class

women together, as if they were all alike. Every fair view of the

subject shows how false such a conclusion is. There is more

freshness, subtilty, spontaneity, variety, in womanly characters than

in manly. Their range, between the extremes of the demure and the

hoydenish, is greater. The feminine types, Helen and Penelope, or

Clytemnestra and Antigone, are as distinct as the masculine types,

Agamemnon and Ulysses, or OEdipus and Philoctetes. The injustice of

the vulgar saying, "It is just like a woman," implying that there are

no differences among women, makes one indignant. Have we not seen

women to whom death seems an indignity--looking, in every feature and

glance, as immortal as Pallas Athene? And have we not seen women

whose hideous shape and fiendish spirit suggested an alliance with

antediluvian monsters? Is there not a Volumnia, as chaste as that

star seen in winter dawns shivering on the cold forehead of the

morning? And is there not a Messalina, who would receive embraces in

a bath of blood? Is there not a Fulvia, who takes the head of the

murdered Cicero in her hands, and tears his dumb tongue with her

bodkin? And are there not a Saint Elizabeth and a Lady Godiva,

capable of supernal deeds of self-denial and heroism for the sake of

blessing the poor? The personality of any one of the best

representatives of womanhood is as vivid and delicate as though

moulded from a sensitive leaf instead of clay; yet of such strength

as to be rich in frankness and courage, and sublime in patience. In

fact, the distinction of woman is as much greater than that of men

psychologically as it is physiologically. But her choicest vocation

must always lie in the domestic range of the personal relations, and

throughout the heights and depths of the spiritual life. Let her

become there all that the capacities of human nature prophesy, and

man will rapidly be perfected everywhere else.

The number of claimants contending for the prizes of society

increases. The facility of a shallow and momentary success become

greater; but the difficulty and rareness of a substantial and

enduring triumph grow in a higher ratio. The arena is crowded; the

battle is vulgar; the sufferings of the contestants are extreme; the

rewards sought are uncertain and disappointing. How quickly, in our

day, notoriety ends; and what a poor cheat it is! The passionate

aspirant for fame, as described so finely by Michelet, stands beside

the unknown sea of futurity, picks up a shell, lifts it to his ear,

and listens to a slight noise, in which he fancies he hears the

murmur of his own name! For solid dignity or pure contentment, no

life can compare with the one devoted to intrinsic personal ends, the

achievement of knowledge, harmony, and piety. Not the warrior,

Ambition, not the giant, Legislation, but the little child, Love, is

to lead in the golden age. She is the best woman who does most to

hasten the inauguration of that divine Child.

Thoughtful observers agree, that the most ominous characteristic of

the present age is, its complication of interests, its doubts, its

weariness, its frittering multiplicity of indulgences, cares, and

obligations. The best individual remedy for this evil is friendship.

Affectionate communion with a trusted and confiding friend, more than

any other experience, appeases the misgivings of conscience,

satisfies the vague searches of the mind, and gives peace to the

eternal cravings of our gregarious nature.

If ever the cry of the horse-leech shall cease to be the painful

language of the heart, it will be when, the longings of the heart no

longer baffled by the vacancies or the irritating rivalries of a

vapid and jealous society, all human beings developed enough to need,

and noble enough to deserve, shall also be fortunate enough to

possess, true friends with whom they may commune in unity of spirit

and mirrored doubleness of life. Gratified affection is the true

fruition of a spiritual existence. To hope and fear in the being of

another first gives us the fulfilled consciousness of our own.