"What do you think of this Woman's Rights question?" said Bob
Stephens. "From some of your remarks, I apprehend that you think there
is something in it. I may be wrong, but I must confess that I have
looked with disgust on the whole movement. No man reverences women as
I do; but I reverence them _as_ women. I reverence them for those very
things in which their sex differs from ours; but when they come upon
our ground, and begin to work and fight after our manner and with our
weapons, I regard them as fearful anomalies, neither men nor women.
These Woman's Rights Conventions appear to me to have ventilated
crudities, absurdities, and blasphemies. To hear them talk about men,
one would suppose that the two sexes were natural-born enemies, and
wonder whether they ever had fathers and brothers. One would think,
upon their showing, that all men were a set of ruffians, in league
against women,--they seeming, at the same time, to forget how on their
very platforms the most constant and gallant defenders of their rights
are men. Wendell Phillips and Wentworth Higginson have put at the
service of the cause masculine training and manly vehemence, and
complacently accepted the wholesale abuse of their own sex at the
hands of their warrior sisters. One would think, were all they say of
female powers true, that our Joan-of-Arcs ought to have disdained to
fight under male captains."
"I think," said my wife, "that, in all this talk about the rights of
men, and the rights of women, and the rights of children, the world
seems to be forgetting what is quite as important, the _duties_ of men
and women and children. We all hear of our _rights_ till we forget our
_duties_; and even theology is beginning to concern itself more with
what man has a right to expect of his Creator than what the Creator
has a right to expect of man."
"You say the truth," said I; "there is danger of just this overaction;
and yet rights must be discussed; because, in order to understand the
duties we owe to any class, we must understand their rights. To know
our duties to men, women, and children, we must know what the rights
of men, women, and children justly are. As to the 'Woman's Rights
movement,' it is not peculiar to America, it is part of a great wave
in the incoming tide of modern civilization; the swell is felt no less
in Europe, but it combs over and breaks on our American shore, because
our great wide beach affords the best play for its waters; and as the
ocean waves bring with them kelp, seaweed, mud, sand, gravel, and even
putrefying debris, which lie unsightly on the shore, and yet, on the
whole, are healthful and refreshing,--so the Woman's Rights movement,
with its conventions, its speech-makings, its crudities, and
eccentricities, is nevertheless a part of a healthful and necessary
movement of the human race towards progress. This question of Woman
and her Sphere is now, perhaps, the greatest of the age. We have put
Slavery under foot, and with the downfall of Slavery the only obstacle
to the success of our great democratic experiment is overthrown, and
there seems no limit to the splendid possibilities which it may open
before the human race.
"In the reconstruction that is now coming there lies more than the
reconstruction of States and the arrangement of the machinery of
government. We need to know and feel, all of us, that, from the moment
of the death of Slavery, we parted finally from the regime and control
of all the old ideas formed under old oppressive systems of society,
and came upon a new plane of life.
"In this new life we must never forget that we are a peculiar people,
that we have to walk in paths unknown to the Old World,--paths where
its wisdom cannot guide us, where its precedents can be of little use
to us, and its criticisms, in most cases, must be wholly irrelevant.
The history of our war has shown us of how little service to us in any
important crisis the opinions and advice of the Old World can be. We
have been hurt at what seemed to us the want of sympathy, the direct
antagonism, of England. We might have been less hurt if we had
properly understood that Providence had placed us in a position so far
ahead of her ideas or power of comprehension that just judgment or
sympathy was not to be expected from her.
"As we went through our great war with no help but that of God,
obliged to disregard the misconceptions and impertinences which the
foreign press rained down upon us, so, if we are wise, we shall
continue to do. Our object must now be to make the principles on which
our government is founded permeate consistently the mass of society,
and to purge out the leaven of aristocratic and Old World ideas. So
long as there is an illogical working in our actual life, so long as
there is any class denied equal rights with other classes, so long
will there be agitation and trouble."
"Then," said my wife, "you believe that women ought to vote?"
"If the principle on which we founded our government is true, that
taxation must not exist without representation, and if women hold
property and are taxed, it follows that women should be represented in
the State by their votes, or there is an illogical working of our
government."
"But, my dear, don't you think that this will have a bad effect on the
female character?"
"Yes," said Bob, "it will make women caucus holders, political
candidates."
"It may make this of some women, just as of some men," said I. "But
all men do not take any great interest in politics; it is very
difficult to get some of the best of them to do their duty in voting,
and the same will be found true among women."
"But, after all," said Bob, "what do you gain? What will a woman's
vote be but a duplicate of that of her husband or father, or whatever
man happens to be her adviser?"
"That may be true on a variety of questions; but there are subjects
on which the vote of women would, I think, be essentially different
from that of men. On the subjects of temperance, public morals, and
education, I have no doubt that the introduction of the female vote
into legislation, in States, counties, and cities, would produce
results very different from that of men alone. There are thousands of
women who would close grog-shops, and stop the traffic in spirits,
if they had the legislative power; and it would be well for society
if they had. In fact, I think that a State can no more afford to
dispense with the vote of women in its affairs than a family.
Imagine a family where the female has no voice in the housekeeping! A
State is but a larger family, and there are many of its concerns
which, equally with those of a private household, would be bettered
by female supervision."
"But fancy women going to those horrible voting-places! It is more
than I can do myself," said Bob.
"But you forget," said I, "that they are horrible and disgusting
principally because women never go to them. All places where women are
excluded tend downward to barbarism; but the moment she is introduced,
there come in with her courtesy, cleanliness, sobriety, and order.
When a man can walk up to the ballot-box with his wife or his sister
on his arm, voting-places will be far more agreeable than now, and
the polls will not be such bear-gardens that refined men will be
constantly tempted to omit their political duties there.
"If for nothing else, I would have women vote, that the business of
voting may not be so disagreeable and intolerable to men of refinement
as it now is; and I sincerely believe that the cause of good morals,
good order, cleanliness, and public health would be a gainer not
merely by the added feminine vote, but by the added vote of a great
many excellent but too fastidious men, who are now kept from the polls
by the disagreeables they meet there.
"Do you suppose that, if women had equal representation with men in
the municipal laws of New York, its reputation for filth during the
last year would have gone so far beyond that of Cologne, or any other
city renowned for bad smells? I trow not. I believe a lady mayoress
would have brought in a dispensation of brooms and whitewash, and made
a terrible searching into dark holes and vile corners, before now.
Female New York, I have faith to believe, has yet left in her enough
of the primary instincts of womanhood to give us a clean, healthy
city, if female votes had any power to do it."
"But," said Bob, "you forget that voting would bring together all the
women of the lower classes."
"Yes; but, thanks to the instincts of their sex, they would come in
their Sunday clothes; for where is the woman that hasn't her finery,
and will not embrace every chance to show it? Biddy's parasol, and hat
with pink ribbons, would necessitate a clean shirt in Pat as much as
on Sunday. Voting would become a fete, and we should have a population
at the polls as well-dressed as at church. Such is my belief."
"I do not see," said Bob, "but you go to the full extent with our
modern female reformers."
"There are certain neglected truths, which have been held up by these
reformers, that are gradually being accepted and infused into the life
of modern society; and their recognition will help to solidify and
purify democratic institutions. They are:--
"1. The right of every woman to hold independent property.
"2. The right of every woman to receive equal pay with man for work
which she does equally well.
"3. The right of any woman to do any work for which, by her natural
organization and talent, she is peculiarly adapted.
"Under the first head, our energetic sisters have already, by the help
of their gallant male adjutants, reformed the laws of several of our
States, so that a married woman is no longer left the unprotected
legal slave of any unprincipled, drunken spendthrift who may be her
husband,--but, in case of the imbecility or improvidence of the
natural head of the family, the wife, if she have the ability, can
conduct business, make contracts, earn and retain money for the good
of the household; and I am sure no one can say that immense injustice
and cruelty are not thereby prevented.
"It is quite easy for women who have the good fortune to have just and
magnanimous husbands to say that they feel no interest in such
reforms, and that they would willingly trust their property to the man
to whom they give themselves; but they should remember that laws are
not made for the restraint of the generous and just, but of the
dishonest and base. The law which enables a married woman to hold her
own property does not forbid her to give it to the man of her heart,
if she so pleases; and it does protect many women who otherwise would
be reduced to the extremest misery. I once knew an energetic milliner
who had her shop attached four times, and a flourishing business
broken up in four different cities, because she was tracked from city
to city by a worthless spendthrift, who only waited till she had
amassed a little property in a new place to swoop down upon and carry
it off. It is to be hoped that the time is not distant when every
State will give to woman a fair chance to the ownership and use of her
own earnings and her own property.
"Under the head of the right of every woman to do any work for which
by natural organization and talent she is especially adapted, there is
a word or two to be said.
"The talents and tastes of the majority of women are naturally
domestic. The family is evidently their sphere, because in all ways
their organization fits them for that more than for anything else.
"But there are occasionally women who are exceptions to the common
law, gifted with peculiar genius and adaptations. With regard to such
women, there has never seemed to be any doubt in the verdict of
mankind that they ought to follow their nature, and that their
particular sphere was the one to which they are called. Did anybody
ever think that Mrs. Siddons and Mrs. Kemble and Ristori had better
have applied themselves sedulously to keeping house, because they were
women, and 'woman's noblest station is retreat'?
"The world has always shown a fair average of good sense in this
matter, from the days of the fair Hypatia in Alexandria, who, we are
told, gave lectures on philosophy behind a curtain, lest her charms
should distract the attention of too impressible young men, down to
those of Anna Dickinson. Mankind are not, after all, quite fools, and
seem in these cases to have a reasonable idea that exceptional talents
have exceptional laws, and make their own code of proprieties.
"Now there is no doubt that Miss Dickinson, though as relating to her
femininity she is quite as pretty and modest a young woman as any to
be found in the most sheltered circle, has yet a most exceptional
talent for public speaking, which draws crowds to hear her, and makes
lecturing for her a lucrative profession, as well as a means of
advocating just and generous sentiments, and of stimulating her own
sex to nobler purposes; and the same law which relates to Siddons and
Kemble and Ristori relates also to her.
"The doctrine of _vocations_ is a good one and a safe one. If a woman
mistakes her vocation, so much the worse for her; the world does not
suffer, but she does, and the suffering speedily puts her where she
belongs. There is not near so much danger from attempts to imitate
Anna Dickinson as there is from the more common feminine attempts to
rival the _demi-monde_ of Paris in fantastic extravagance and luxury.
"As to how a woman may determine whether she has any such vocation,
there is a story quite in point. A good Methodist elder was listening
to an ardent young mechanic who thought he had a call to throw up his
shop and go to preaching.
"'I feel,' said the young ardent, 'that I have a call to preach.'
"'Hast thou noticed whether people seem to have a call to hear thee?'
said the shrewd old man. 'I have always noticed that a true call of
the Lord may be known by this, that people have a _call_ to hear.'"
"Well," said Bob, "the most interesting question still remains: What
are to be the employments of woman? What ways are there for her to use
her talents, to earn her livelihood and support those who are dear to
her, when Providence throws that necessity upon her? This is becoming
more than ever one of the pressing questions of our age. The war has
deprived so many thousands of women of their natural protectors, that
everything must be thought of that may possibly open a way for their
self-support."
"Well, let us look over the field," said my wife. "What is there for
woman?"
"In the first place," said I, "come the professions requiring natural
genius,--authorship, painting, sculpture, with the subordinate arts of
photographing, coloring, and finishing; but when all is told, these
furnish employment to a very limited number,--almost as nothing to the
whole. Then there is teaching, which is profitable in its higher
branches, and perhaps the very pleasantest of all the callings open to
woman; but teaching is at present an overcrowded profession, the
applicants everywhere outnumbering the places. Architecture and
landscape gardening are arts every way suited to the genius of woman,
and there are enough who have the requisite mechanical skill and
mathematical education; and, though never yet thought of for the sex,
that I know of, I do not despair of seeing those who shall find in
this field a profession at once useful and elegant. When women plan
dwelling-houses, the vast body of tenements to be let in our cities
will wear a more domestic and comfortable air, and will be built more
with reference to the real wants of their inmates."
"I have thought," said Bob, "that agencies of various sorts, as
canvassing the country for the sale of books, maps, and engravings,
might properly employ a great many women. There is a large class whose
health suffers from confinement and sedentary occupations, who might,
I think, be both usefully and agreeably employed in business of this
sort, and be recruiting their health at the same time."
"Then," said my wife, "there is the medical profession."
"Yes," said I. "The world is greatly obliged to Miss Blackwell and
other noble pioneers who faced and overcame the obstacles to the
attainment of a thorough medical education by females. Thanks to them,
a new and lucrative profession is now open to educated women in
relieving the distresses of their own sex; and we may hope that in
time, through their intervention, the care of the sick may also become
the vocation of cultivated, refined, intelligent women, instead of
being left, as heretofore, to the ignorant and vulgar. The experience
of our late war has shown us what women of a high class morally and
intellectually can do in this capacity. Why should not this experience
inaugurate a new and sacred calling for refined and educated women?
Why should not NURSING become a vocation equal in dignity and in
general esteem to the medical profession, of which it is the right
hand? Why should our dearest hopes, in the hour of their greatest
peril, be committed into the hands of Sairey Gamps, when the world has
seen Florence Nightingales?"
"Yes, indeed," said my wife; "I can testify, from my own experience,
that the sufferings and dangers of the sickbed, for the want of
intelligent, educated nursing, have been dreadful. A prejudiced,
pig-headed, snuff-taking old woman, narrow-minded and vulgar, and more
confident in her own way than seven men that can render a reason,
enters your house at just the hour and moment when all your dearest
earthly hopes are brought to a crisis. She becomes absolute dictator
over your delicate, helpless wife and your frail babe,--the absolute
dictator of all in the house. If it be her sovereign will and pleasure
to enact all sorts of physiological absurdities in the premises, who
shall say her nay? 'She knows her business, she hopes!' And if it be
her edict, as it was of one of her class whom I knew, that each of her
babies shall eat four baked beans the day it is four days old, eat
them it must; and if the baby die in convulsions four days after, it
is set down as the mysterious will of an overruling Providence.
"I know and have seen women lying upon laced pillows, under silken
curtains, who have been bullied and dominated over in the hour of
their greatest helplessness by ignorant and vulgar tyrants, in a way
that would scarce be thought possible in civilized society, and
children that have been injured or done to death by the same means. A
celebrated physician told me of a babe whose eyesight was nearly
ruined by its nurse taking a fancy to wash its eyes with camphor,--'to
keep it from catching cold,' she said. I knew another infant that was
poisoned by the nurse giving it laudanum in some of those patent
nostrums which these ignorant creatures carry secretly in their
pockets, to secure quiet in their little charges. I knew one delicate
woman who never recovered from the effects of being left at her first
confinement in the hands of an ill-tempered, drinking nurse, and whose
feeble infant was neglected and abused by this woman in a way to cause
lasting injury. In the first four weeks of infancy the constitution is
peculiarly impressible; and infants of a delicate organization may, if
frightened and ill-treated, be the subjects of just such a shock to
the nervous system as in mature age comes from the sudden stroke of a
great affliction or terror. A bad nurse may affect nerves predisposed
to weakness in a manner they never will recover from. I solemnly
believe that the constitutions of more women are broken up by bad
nursing in their first confinement than by any other cause whatever.
And yet there are at the same time hundreds and thousands of women,
wanting the means of support, whose presence in a sick-room would be a
benediction. I do trust that Miss Blackwell's band of educated nurses
will not be long in coming, and that the number of such may increase
till they effect a complete revolution in this vocation. A class of
cultivated, well-trained, intelligent nurses would soon elevate the
employment of attending on the sick into the noble calling it ought to
be, and secure for it its appropriate rewards."
"There is another opening for woman," said I,--"in the world of
business. The system of commercial colleges now spreading over our
land is a new and most important development of our times. There that
large class of young men who have either no time or no inclination for
an extended classical education can learn what will fit them for that
active material life which in our broad country needs so many workers.
But the most pleasing feature of these institutions is, that the
complete course is open to women no less than to men, and women there
may acquire that knowledge of bookkeeping and accounts, and of the
forms and principles of business transactions, which will qualify them
for some of the lucrative situations hitherto monopolized by the other
sex. And the expenses of the course of instruction are so arranged as
to come within the scope of very moderate means. A fee of fifty
dollars entitles a woman to the benefit of the whole course, and she
has the privilege of attending at any hours that may suit her own
engagements and convenience."
"Then, again," said my wife, "there are the departments of millinery
and dressmaking, and the various branches of needlework, which afford
employment to thousands of women; there is typesetting, by which many
are beginning to get a living; there are the manufactures of cotton,
woolen, silk, and the numberless useful articles which employ female
hands in their fabrication,--all of them opening avenues by which,
with more or less success, a subsistence can be gained."
"Well, really," said Bob, "it would appear, after all, that there are
abundance of openings for women. What is the cause of the outcry and
distress? How is it that we hear of women starving, driven to vice and
crime by want, when so many doors of useful and profitable employment
stand open to them?"
"The question would easily be solved," said my wife, "if you could
once see the kind and class of women who thus suffer and starve.
There may be exceptions, but too large a portion of them are girls
and women who can or will do no earthly thing well,--and, what is
worse, are not willing to take the pains to be taught to do anything
well. I will describe to you one girl, and you will find in every
intelligence-office a hundred of her kind to five thoroughly trained
ones.
"Imprimis: she is rather delicate and genteel-looking, and you may
know from the arrangement of her hair just what the last mode is
of disposing of rats or waterfalls. She has a lace bonnet with
roses, a silk mantilla, a silk dress trimmed with velvet, a white
skirt with sixteen tucks and an embroidered edge, a pair of cloth
gaiters, underneath which are a pair of stockings without feet, the
only pair in her possession. She has no under-linen, and sleeps at
night in the working-clothes she wears in the day. She never seems
to have in her outfit either comb, brush, or tooth-brush of her
own,--neither needles, thread, scissors, nor pins; her money, when she
has any, being spent on more important articles, such as the lace
bonnet or silk mantilla, or the rats and waterfalls that glorify
her head. When she wishes to sew, she borrows what is needful of a
convenient next neighbor; and if she gets a place in a family as
second girl, she expects to subsist in these respects by borrowing of
the better-appointed servants, or helping herself from the family
stores.
"She expects, of course, the very highest wages, if she condescends to
live out; and by help of a trim outside appearance, and the many
vacancies that are continually occurring in households, she gets
places, where her object is to do just as little of any duty assigned
to her as possible, to hurry through her performances, put on her
fine clothes, and go a-gadding. She is on free-and-easy terms with all
the men she meets, and ready at jests and repartee, sometimes far from
seemly. Her time of service in any one place lasts indifferently from
a fortnight to two or three months, when she takes her wages, buys
her a new parasol in the latest style, and goes back to the
intelligence-office. In the different families where she has lived
she has been told a hundred times the proprieties of household
life, how to make beds, arrange rooms, wash china, glass, and
silver, and set tables; but her habitual rule is to try in each place
how small and how poor services will be accepted. When she finds
less will not do, she gives more. When the mistress follows her
constantly, and shows an energetic determination to be well served,
she shows that she can serve well; but the moment such attention
relaxes, she slides back again. She is as destructive to a house as
a fire; the very spirit of wastefulness is in her; she cracks the
china, dents the silver, stops the water-pipes with rubbish, and,
after she is gone, there is generally a sum equal to half her wages
to be expended in repairing the effects of her carelessness. And
yet there is one thing to be said for her: she is quite as careful of
her employer's things as of her own. The full amount of her mischiefs
often does not appear at once, as she is glib of tongue, adroit in
apologies, and lies with as much alertness and as little thought of
conscience as a blackbird chatters. It is difficult for people who
have been trained from childhood in the school of verities,--who
have been lectured for even the shadow of a prevarication, and shut
up in disgrace for a lie, till truth becomes a habit of their
souls,--it is very difficult for people so educated to understand how
to get on with those who never speak the truth except by mere
accident, who assert any and every thing that comes into their heads
with all the assurance and all the energy of perfect verity.
"What becomes of this girl? She finds means, by begging, borrowing,
living out, to keep herself extremely trim and airy for a certain
length of time, till the rats and waterfalls, the lace hat and
parasol, and the glib tongue, have done their work in making a fool of
some honest young mechanic who earns three dollars a day. She marries
him with no higher object than to have somebody to earn money for her
to spend. And what comes of such marriages?
"That is one ending of her career; the other is on the street, in
haunts of vice, in prison, in drunkenness, and death.
"Whence come these girls? They are as numerous as yellow butterflies
in autumn; they flutter up to cities from the country; they grow up
from mothers who ran the same sort of career before them; and the
reason why in the end they fall out of all reputable employment and
starve on poor wages is, that they become physically, mentally, and
morally incapable of rendering any service which society will think
worth paying for."
"I remember," said I, "that the head of the most celebrated
dressmaking establishment in New York, in reply to the appeals of the
needlewomen of the city for sympathy and wages, came out with
published statements to this effect: that the difficulty lay, not in
unwillingness of employers to pay what work was worth, but in finding
any work worth paying for; that she had many applicants, but among
them few who could be of real use to her; that she, in common with
everybody in this country who has any kind of serious responsibilities
to carry, was continually embarrassed for want of skilled work-people
who could take and go on with the labor of her various departments
without her constant supervision; that, out of a hundred girls, there
would not be more than five to whom she could give a dress to be made
and dismiss it from her mind as something certain to be properly
done.
"Let people individually look around their own little sphere, and ask
themselves if they know any woman really excelling in any valuable
calling or accomplishment who is suffering for want of work. All of us
know seamstresses, dressmakers, nurses, and laundresses who have made
themselves such a reputation, and are so beset and overcrowded with
work, that the whole neighborhood is constantly on its knees to them
with uplifted hands. The fine seamstress, who can cut and make
trousseaus and layettes in elegant perfection, is always engaged six
months in advance; the pet dressmaker of a neighborhood must be
engaged in May for September, and in September for May; a laundress
who sends your clothes home in nice order always has all the work that
she can do. Good work in any department is the rarest possible thing
in our American life; and it is a fact that the great majority of
workers, both in the family and out, do only tolerably well,--not so
badly that it actually cannot be borne, yet not so well as to be a
source of real, thorough satisfaction. The exceptional worker in every
neighborhood, who does things really _well_, can always set her own
price, and is always having more offering than she can possibly do.
"The trouble, then, in finding employment for women lies deeper than
the purses or consciences of the employers: it lies in the want of
education in women; the want of _education_, I say,--meaning by
education that which fits a woman for practical and profitable
employment in life, and not mere common-school learning."
"Yes," said my wife; "for it is a fact that the most troublesome and
helpless persons to provide for are often those who have a good medium
education, but no feminine habits, no industry, no practical
calculation, no muscular strength, and no knowledge of any one of
woman's peculiar duties. In the earlier days of New England, women, as
a class, had far fewer opportunities for acquiring learning, yet were
far better educated, physically and morally, than now. The high school
did not exist; at the common school they learned reading, writing, and
arithmetic, and practiced spelling; while at home they did the work of
the household. They were cheerful, bright, and active, ever on the
alert, able to do anything, from the harnessing and driving of a horse
to the finest embroidery. The daughters of New England in those days
looked the world in the face without a fear. They shunned no labor;
they were afraid of none; and they could always find their way to a
living."
"But although less instructed in school learning," said I, "they
showed no deficiency in intellectual acumen. I see no such women,
nowadays, as some I remember of that olden time,--women whose strong
minds and ever-active industry carried on reading and study side by
side with household toils.
"I remember a young lady friend of mine, attending a celebrated
boarding-school, boarded in the family of a woman who had never been
to school longer than was necessary to learn to read and write, yet
who was a perfect cyclopedia of general information. The young scholar
used to take her Chemistry and Natural Philosophy into the kitchen,
where her friend was busy with her household work, and read her
lessons to her, that she might have the benefit of her explanations;
and so, while the good lady scoured her andirons or kneaded her bread,
she lectured to her protegee on mysteries of science far beyond the
limits of the textbook. Many of the graduates of our modern high
schools would find it hard to shine in conversation on the subjects
they had studied, in the searching presence of some of these vigorous
matrons of the olden time, whose only school had been the leisure
hours gained by energy and method from their family cares."
"And in those days," said my wife, "there lived in our families a
class of American domestics, women of good sense and good powers of
reflection, who applied this sense and power of reflection to
household matters. In the early part of my married life, I myself had
American 'help'; and they were not only excellent servants, but trusty
and invaluable friends. But now, all this class of applicants for
domestic service have disappeared, I scarce know why or how. All I
know is, there is no more a Betsey or a Lois, such as used to take
domestic cares off my shoulders so completely."
"Good heavens! where are they?" cried Bob. "Where do they hide? I
would search through the world after such a prodigy!"
"The fact is," said I, "there has been a slow and gradual reaction
against household labor in America. Mothers began to feel that it was
a sort of _curse_, to be spared, if possible, to their daughters;
women began to feel that they were fortunate in proportion as they
were able to be entirely clear of family responsibilities. Then Irish
labor began to come in, simultaneously with a great advance in female
education.
"For a long while nothing was talked of, written of, thought of, in
teachers' meetings, conventions, and assemblies, but the neglected
state of female education; and the whole circle of the arts and
sciences was suddenly introduced into our free-school system, from
which needlework as gradually and quietly was suffered to drop out.
The girl who attended the primary and high school had so much study
imposed on her that she had no time for sewing or housework; and the
delighted mother was only too happy to darn her stockings and do the
housework alone, that her daughter might rise to a higher plane than
she herself had attained to. The daughter, thus educated, had, on
coming to womanhood, no solidity of muscle, no manual dexterity, no
practice or experience in domestic life; and if she were to seek a
livelihood, there remained only teaching, or some feminine trade, or
the factory."
"These factories," said my wife, "have been the ruin of hundreds and
hundreds of our once healthy farmers' daughters and others from the
country. They go there young and unprotected; they live there in great
boarding-houses, and associate with a promiscuous crowd, without even
such restraints of maternal supervision as they would have in great
boarding-schools; their bodies are enfeebled by labor often
necessarily carried on in a foul and heated atmosphere; and at the
hours when off duty, they are exposed to all the dangers of unwatched
intimacy with the other sex.
"Moreover, the factory girl learns and practices but one thing,--some
one mechanical movement, which gives no scope for invention,
ingenuity, or any other of the powers called into play by domestic
labor; so that she is in reality unfitted in every way for family
duties.
"Many times it has been my lot to try, in my family service, girls who
have left factories; and I have found them wholly useless for any of
the things which a woman ought to be good for. They knew nothing of a
house, or what ought to be done in it; they had imbibed a thorough
contempt of household labor, and looked upon it but as a _dernier
ressort_; and it was only the very lightest of its tasks that they
could even begin to think of. I remember I tried to persuade one of
these girls, the pretty daughter of a fisherman, to take some lessons
in washing and ironing. She was at that time engaged to be married to
a young mechanic, who earned something like two or three dollars a
day.
"'My child,' said I, 'you will need to understand all kinds of
housework if you are going to be married.'
"She tossed her little head,--
"'Indeed, she wasn't going to trouble herself about that.'
"'But who will get up your husband's shirts?'
"'Oh, he must put them out. I'm not going to be married to make a
slave of myself!'
"Another young factory girl, who came for table and parlor work, was
so full of airs and fine notions that it seemed as difficult to treat
with her as with a princess. She could not sweep, because it blistered
her hands, which, in fact, were long and delicate; she could not think
of putting them into hot dish-water, and for that reason preferred
washing the dishes in cold water; she required a full hour in the
morning to make her toilet; she was laced so tightly that she could
not stoop without vertigo; and her hoops were of dimensions which
seemed to render it impossible for her to wait upon table; she was
quite exhausted with the effort of ironing the table-napkins and
chamber-towels: yet she could not think of 'living out' under two
dollars a week.
"Both these girls had had a good free-school education, and could read
any amount of novels, write a tolerable letter, but had not learned
anything with sufficient accuracy to fit them for teachers. They were
pretty, and their destiny was to marry and lie a deadweight on the
hands of some honest man, and to increase, in their children, the
number of incapables."
"Well," said Bob, "what would you have? What is to be done?"
"In the first place," said I, "I would have it felt, by those who are
seeking to elevate woman, that the work is to be done, not so much by
creating for her new spheres of action as by elevating her conceptions
of that domestic vocation to which God and Nature have assigned her.
It is all very well to open to her avenues of profit and advancement
in the great outer world; but, after all, _to make and keep a home_
is, and ever must be, a woman's first glory, her highest aim. No work
of art can compare with a perfect home; the training and guiding of a
family must be recognized as the highest work a woman can perform; and
female education ought to be conducted with special reference to
this.
"Men are trained to be lawyers, to be physicians, to be mechanics, by
long and self-denying study and practice. A man cannot even make shoes
merely by going to the high school and learning reading, writing, and
mathematics; he cannot be a bookkeeper or a printer simply from
general education.
"Now women have a sphere and profession of their own,--a profession
for which they are fitted by physical organization, by their own
instincts, and to which they are directed by the pointing and manifest
finger of God,--and that sphere is _family life_. Duties to the state
and to public life they may have; but the public duties of women must
bear to their family ones the same relation that the family duties of
men bear to their public ones. The defect in the late efforts to push
on female education is, that it has been for her merely general, and
that it has left out and excluded all that is professional; and she
undertakes the essential duties of womanhood, when they do devolve on
her, without any adequate preparation."
"But is it possible for a girl to learn at school the things which fit
for her family life?" said Bob.
"Why not?" I replied. "Once it was thought impossible in school to
teach girls geometry or algebra, or the higher mathematics; it was
thought impossible to put them through collegiate courses; but it has
been done, and we see it. Women study treatises on political economy
in schools, and why should not the study of domestic economy form a
part of every school course? A young girl will stand up at the
blackboard, and draw and explain the compound blowpipe, and describe
all the processes of making oxygen and hydrogen. Why should she not
draw and explain a refrigerator as well as an air-pump? Both are to be
explained on philosophical principles. When a schoolgirl, in her
chemistry, studies the reciprocal action of acids and alkalies, what
is there to hinder the teaching her its application to the various
processes of cooking where acids and alkalies are employed? Why should
she not be led to see how effervescence and fermentation can be made
to perform their office in the preparation of light and digestible
bread? Why should she not be taught the chemical substances by which
food is often adulterated, and the test by which such adulterations
are detected? Why should she not understand the processes of
confectionery, and know how to guard against the deleterious or
poisonous elements that are introduced into children's sugar-plums and
candies? Why, when she learns the doctrine of mordants, the substances
by which different colors are set, should she not learn it with some
practical view to future life, so that she may know how to set the
color of a fading calico or restore the color of a spotted one? Why,
in short, when a girl has labored through a profound chemical work,
and listened to courses of chemical lectures, should she come to
domestic life, which presents a constant series of chemical
experiments and changes, and go blindly along as without chart or
compass, unable to tell what will take out a stain, or what will
brighten a metal, what are common poisons and what their antidotes,
and not knowing enough of the laws of caloric to understand how to
warm a house, or of the laws of atmosphere to know how to ventilate
one? Why should the preparation of food, that subtile art on which
life, health, cheerfulness, good temper, and good looks so largely
depend, forever be left in the hands of the illiterate and vulgar?
"A benevolent gentleman has lately left a large fortune for the
founding of a university for women; and the object is stated to be to
give to women who have already acquired a general education the means
of acquiring a professional one, to fit themselves for some employment
by which they may gain a livelihood.
"In this institution the women are to be instructed in bookkeeping,
stenography, telegraphing, photographing, drawing, modeling, and
various other arts; but, so far as I remember, there is no proposal to
teach domestic economy as at least _one_ of woman's professions.
"Why should there not be a professor of domestic economy in every
large female school? Why should not this professor give lectures,
first on house planning and building, illustrated by appropriate
apparatus? Why should not the pupils have presented to their
inspection models of houses planned with reference to economy, to ease
of domestic service, to warmth, to ventilation, and to architectural
appearance? Why should not the professor go on to lecture further on
house-fixtures, with models of the best mangles, washing-machines,
clothes-wringers, ranges, furnaces, and cooking-stoves, together with
drawings and apparatus illustrative of domestic hydraulics, showing
the best contrivances for bathing-rooms and the obvious principles of
plumbing, so that the pupils may have some idea how to work the
machinery of a convenient house when they have it, and to have such
conveniences introduced when wanting? If it is thought worth while to
provide at great expense apparatus for teaching the revolutions of
Saturn's moons and the precession of the equinoxes, why should there
not be some also to teach what it may greatly concern a woman's
earthly happiness to know?
"Why should not the professor lecture on home chemistry, devoting his
first lecture to bread-making? and why might not a batch of bread be
made and baked and exhibited to the class, together with specimens of
morbid anatomy in the bread line,--the sour cotton bread of the baker;
the rough, big-holed bread; the heavy, fossil bread; the bitter bread
of too much yeast,--and the causes of their defects pointed out? And
so with regard to the various articles of food,--why might not
chemical lectures be given on all of them, one after another? In
short, it would be easy to trace out a course of lectures on common
things to occupy a whole year, and for which the pupils, whenever they
come to have homes of their own, will thank the lecturer to the last
day of their life.
"Then there is no impossibility in teaching needlework, the cutting
and fitting of dresses, in female schools. The thing is done very
perfectly in English schools for the working classes. A girl trained
at one of these schools came into a family I once knew. She brought
with her a sewing-book, in which the process of making various
articles was exhibited in miniature. The several parts of a shirt
were first shown, each perfectly made, and fastened to a leaf of
the book by itself, and then the successive steps of uniting the
parts, till finally appeared a miniature model of the whole. The
sewing was done with red thread, so that every stitch might show, and
any imperfections be at once remedied. The same process was pursued
with regard to other garments, and a good general idea of cutting
and fitting them was thus given to an entire class of girls.
"In the same manner the care and nursing of young children and the
tending of the sick might be made the subject of lectures. Every woman
ought to have some general principles to guide her with regard to what
is to be done in case of the various accidents that may befall either
children or grown people, and of their lesser illnesses, and ought to
know how to prepare comforts and nourishment for the sick. Hawthorne's
satirical remarks upon the contrast between the elegant Zenobia's
conversation, and the smoky porridge she made for him when he was an
invalid, might apply to the volunteer cookery of many charming
women."
"I think," said Bob, "that your Professor of Domestic Economy would
find enough to occupy his pupils."
"In fact," said I, "were domestic economy properly honored and
properly taught, in the manner described, it would open a sphere of
employment to so many women in the home life, that we should not be
obliged to send our women out to California or the Pacific to put an
end to an anxious and aimless life.
"When domestic work is sufficiently honored to be taught as an art and
science in our boarding-schools and high-schools, then possibly it may
acquire also dignity in the eyes of our working classes, and young
girls who have to earn their own living may no longer feel degraded
in engaging in domestic service. The place of a domestic in a family
may become as respectable in their eyes as a place in a factory, in a
printing-office, in a dressmaking or millinery establishment, or
behind the counter of a shop.
"In America there is no class which will confess itself the lower
class, and a thing recommended solely for the benefit of any such
class finds no one to receive it.
"If the intelligent and cultivated look down on household work with
disdain; if they consider it as degrading, a thing to be shunned by
every possible device,--they may depend upon it that the influence of
such contempt of woman's noble duties will flow downward, producing a
like contempt in every class in life.
"Our sovereign princesses learn the doctrine of equality very quickly,
and are not going to sacrifice themselves to what is not considered
_de bon ton_ by the upper classes; and the girl with the laced hat and
parasol, without underclothes, who does her best to 'shirk' her duties
as housemaid, and is looking for marriage as an escape from work, is a
fair copy of her mistress, who married for much the same reason, who
hates housekeeping, and would rather board or do anything else than
have the care of a family. The one is about as respectable as the
other.
"When housekeeping becomes an enthusiasm, and its study and practice a
fashion, then we shall have in America that class of persons to rely
on for help in household labors who are now going to factories, to
printing-offices, to every kind of toil, forgetful of the best life
and sphere of woman."