"Papa, do you see what the 'Evening Post' says of your New Year's
article on Reconstruction?" said Jenny, as we were all sitting in the
library after tea.
"I have not seen it."
"Well, then, the charming writer, whoever he is, takes up for us girls
and women, and maintains that no work of any sort ought to be expected
of us; that our only mission in life is to be beautiful, and to
refresh and elevate the spirits of men by being so. If I get a
husband, my mission is to be always becomingly dressed, to display
most captivating toilettes, and to be always in good spirits,--as,
under the circumstances, I always should be,--and thus 'renew his
spirits' when he comes in weary with the toils of life. Household
cares are to be far from me: they destroy my cheerfulness and injure
my beauty.
"He says that the New England standard of excellence as applied to
woman has been a mistaken one; and, in consequence, though the
girls are beautiful, the matrons are faded, overworked, and
uninteresting; and that such a state of society tends to immorality,
because, when wives are no longer charming, men are open to the
temptation to desert their firesides, and get into mischief generally.
He seems particularly to complain of your calling ladies who do
nothing the 'fascinating _lazzaroni_ of the parlor and boudoir.'"
"There was too much truth back of that arrow not to wound," said
Theophilus Thoro, who was ensconced, as usual, in his dark corner,
whence he supervises our discussions.
"Come, Mr. Thoro, we won't have any of your bitter moralities," said
Jenny; "they are only to be taken as the invariable bay-leaf which
Professor Blot introduces into all his recipes for soups and stews,--a
little elegant bitterness, to be kept tastefully in the background.
You see now, papa, I should like the vocation of being beautiful. It
would just suit me to wear point-lace and jewelry, and to have life
revolve round me, as some beautiful star, and feel that I had nothing
to do but shine and refresh the spirits of all gazers, and that in
this way I was truly useful, and fulfilling the great end of my being;
but alas for this doctrine! all women have not beauty. The most of us
can only hope not to be called ill-looking, and, when we get ourselves
up with care, to look fresh and trim and agreeable; which fact
interferes with the theory."
"Well, for my part," said young Rudolph, "I go for the theory of the
beautiful. If ever I marry, it is to find an asylum for ideality. I
don't want to make a culinary marriage or a business partnership. I
want a being whom I can keep in a sphere of poetry and beauty, out of
the dust and grime of every-lay life."
"Then," said Mr. Theophilus, "you must either be a rich man in your
own right, or your fair ideal must have a handsome fortune of her
own."
"I never will marry a rich wife," quoth Rudolph. "My wife must be
supported by me, not I by her."
Rudolph is another of the habitues of our chimney-corner, representing
the order of young knighthood in America, and his dreams and fancies,
if impracticable, are always of a kind to make every one think him a
good fellow. He who has no romantic dreams at twenty-one will be a
horribly dry peascod at fifty; therefore it is that I gaze reverently
at all Rudolph's chateaus in Spain, which want nothing to complete
them except solid earth to stand on.
"And pray," said Theophilus, "how long will it take a young lawyer or
physician, starting with no heritage but his own brain, to create a
sphere of poetry and beauty in which to keep his goddess? How much a
year will be necessary, as the English say, to _do_ this garden of
Eden, whereinto shall enter only the poetry of life?"
"I don't know. I haven't seen it near enough to consider. It is
because I know the difficulty of its attainment that I have no present
thoughts of marriage. Marriage is to me in the bluest of all blue
distances,--far off, mysterious, and dreamy as the Mountains of the
Moon or sources of the Nile. It shall come only when I have secured a
fortune that shall place my wife above all necessity of work or
care."
"I desire to hear from you," said Theophilus, "when you have found the
sum that will keep a woman from care. I know of women now inhabiting
palaces, waited on at every turn by servants, with carriages, horses,
jewels, laces, Cashmeres, enough for princesses, who are eaten up by
care. One lies awake all night on account of a wrinkle in the waist of
her dress; another is dying because no silk of a certain inexpressible
shade is to be found in New York; a third has had a dress sent home,
which has proved such a failure that life seems no longer worth
having. If it were not for the consolations of religion, one doesn't
know what would become of her. The fact is, that care and labor are as
much correlated to human existence as shadow is to light; there is no
such thing as excluding them from any mortal lot. You may make a
canary-bird or a gold-fish live in absolute contentment without a care
or labor, but a human being you cannot. Human beings are restless and
active in their very nature, and will do something, and that something
will prove a care, a labor, and a fatigue, arrange it how you will. As
long as there is anything to be desired and not yet attained, so long
its attainment will be attempted; so long as that attainment is
doubtful or difficult, so long will there be care and anxiety. When
boundless wealth releases woman from every family care, she
immediately makes herself a new set of cares in another direction, and
has just as many anxieties as the most toilful housekeeper, only they
are of a different kind. Talk of labor, and look at the upper classes
in London or in New York in the fashionable season. Do any women work
harder? To rush from crowd to crowd all night, night after night,
seeing what they are tired of, making the agreeable over an abyss of
inward yawning, crowded, jostled, breathing hot air, and crushed in
halls and stairways, without a moment of leisure for months and
months, till brain and nerve and sense reel, and the country is longed
for as a period of resuscitation and relief! Such is the release from
labor and fatigue brought by wealth. The only thing that makes all
this labor at all endurable is, that it is utterly and entirely
useless, and does no good to any one in creation; this alone makes it
genteel, and distinguishes it from the vulgar toils of a housekeeper.
These delicate creatures, who can go to three or four parties a night
for three months, would be utterly desolate if they had to watch one
night in a sick-room; and though they can exhibit any amount of
physical endurance and vigor in crowding into assembly rooms, and
breathe tainted air in an opera-house with the most martyr-like
constancy, they could not sit one half-hour in the close room where
the sister of charity spends hours in consoling the sick or aged
poor."
"Mr. Theophilus is quite at home now," said Jenny; "only start him on
the track of fashionable life, and he takes the course like a hound.
But hear, now, our champion of the 'Evening Post':--
"'The instinct of women to seek a life of repose, their eagerness to
attain the life of elegance, does not mean contempt for labor, but it
is a confession of unfitness for labor. Women were not intended to
work,--not because work is ignoble, but because it is as disastrous
to the beauty of a woman as is friction to the bloom and softness of a
flower. Woman is to be kept in the garden of life; she is to rest, to
receive, to praise; she is to be kept from the workshop world, where
innocence is snatched with rude hands, and softness is blistered into
unsightliness or hardened into adamant. No social truth is more in
need of exposition and illustration than this one; and, above all, the
people of New England need to know it, and, better, they need to
believe it.
"'It is therefore with regret that we discover Christopher Crowfield
applying so harshly, and, as we think so indiscriminatingly, the theory
of work to women, and teaching a society made up of women sacrificed
in the workshops of the State, or to the dustpans and kitchens of the
house, that women must work, ought to work, and are dishonored if
they do not work; and that a woman committed to the drudgery of a
household is more creditably employed than when she is charming,
fascinating, irresistible, in the parlor or boudoir. The consequence
of this fatal mistake is manifest throughout New England,--in New
England where the girls are all beautiful and the wives and mothers
faded, disfigured, and without charm or attractiveness. The moment a
girl marries, in New England, she is apt to become a drudge or a lay
figure on which to exhibit the latest fashions. She never has
beautiful hands, and she would not have a beautiful face if a
utilitarian society could "apply" her face to anything but the
pleasure of the eye. Her hands lose their shape and softness after
childhood, and domestic drudgery destroys her beauty of form and
softness and bloom of complexion after marriage. To correct, or rather
to break up, this despotism of household cares, or of work, over woman,
American society must be taught that women will inevitably fade and
deteriorate, unless it insures repose and comfort to them. It must
be taught that reverence for beauty is the normal condition, while
the theory of work, applied to women, is disastrous alike to beauty and
morals. Work, when it is destructive to men or women, is forced and
unjust.
"'All the great masculine or creative epochs have been distinguished
by spontaneous work on the part of men, and universal reverence and
care for beauty. The praise of work, and sacrifice of women to this
great heartless devil of work, belong only to, and are the social
doctrine of, a mechanical age and a utilitarian epoch. And if the New
England idea of social life continues to bear so cruelly on woman, we
shall have a reaction somewhat unexpected and shocking.'"
"Well now, say what you will," said Rudolph, "you have expressed my
idea of the conditions of the sex. Woman was not made to work; she was
made to be taken care of by man. All that is severe and trying,
whether in study or in practical life, is and ought to be in its very
nature essentially the work of the male sex. The value of woman is
precisely the value of those priceless works of art for which we build
museums,--which we shelter and guard as the world's choicest heritage;
and a lovely, cultivated, refined woman, thus sheltered, and guarded,
and developed, has a worth that cannot be estimated by any gross,
material standard. So I subscribe to the sentiments of Miss Jenny's
friend without scruple."
"The great trouble in settling all these society questions," said I,
"lies in the gold-washing--the cradling I think the miners call it. If
all the quartz were in one stratum and all the gold in another, it
would save us a vast deal of trouble. In the ideas of Jenny's friend
of the 'Evening Post' there is a line of truth and a line of falsehood
so interwoven and threaded together that it is impossible wholly to
assent or dissent. So with your ideas, Rudolph, there is a degree of
truth in them, but there is also a fallacy.
"It is a truth, that woman as a sex ought not to do the hard work of
the world, either social, intellectual, or moral. These are evidences
in her physiology that this was not intended for her, and our friend
of the 'Evening Post' is right in saying that any country will advance
more rapidly in civilization and refinement where woman is thus
sheltered and protected. And I think, furthermore, that there is no
country in the world where women _are_ so much considered and cared
for and sheltered, in every walk of life, as in America. In England
and France,--all over the continent of Europe, in fact,--the other sex
are deferential to women only from some presumption of their social
standing, or from the fact of acquaintanceship; but among strangers,
and under circumstances where no particular rank or position can be
inferred, a woman traveling in England or France is jostled and pushed
to the wall, and left to take her own chance, precisely as if she were
not a woman. Deference to delicacy and weakness, the instinct of
protection, does not appear to characterize the masculine population
of any other quarter of the world so much as that of America. In
France, _les Messieurs_ will form a circle round the fire in the
receiving-room of a railroad station, and sit, tranquilly smoking
their cigars, while ladies who do not happen to be of their
acquaintance are standing shivering at the other side of the room. In
England, if a lady is incautiously booked for an outside place on a
coach, in hope of seeing the scenery, and the day turns out hopelessly
rainy, no gentleman in the coach below ever thinks of offering to
change seats with her, though it pour torrents. In America, the
roughest backwoods steamboat or canal-boat captain always, as a matter
of course, considers himself charged with the protection of the
ladies. '_Place aux dames_' is written in the heart of many a shaggy
fellow who could not utter a French word any more than could a
buffalo. It is just as I have before said,--women are the recognized
aristocracy, the only aristocracy, of America; and, so far from
regarding this fact as objectionable, it is an unceasing source of
pride in my country.
"That kind of knightly feeling towards woman which reverences her
delicacy, her frailty, which protects and cares for her, is, I think,
the crown of manhood; and without it a man is only a rough animal. But
our fair aristocrats and their knightly defenders need to be cautioned
lest they lose their position, as many privileged orders have before
done, by an arrogant and selfish use of power.
"I have said that the vices of aristocracy are more developed among
women in America than among men, and that, while there are no men in
the Northern States who are not ashamed of living a merely idle life
of pleasure, there are many women who make a boast of helplessness and
ignorance in woman's family duties which any man would be ashamed to
make with regard to man's duties, as if such helplessness and
ignorance were a grace and a charm.
"There are women who contentedly live on, year after year, a life of
idleness, while the husband and father is straining every nerve,
growing prematurely old and gray, abridged of almost every form of
recreation or pleasure,--all that he may keep them in a state of
careless ease and festivity. It may be very fine, very generous, very
knightly, in the man who thus toils at the oar that his princesses may
enjoy their painted voyages; but what is it for the women?
"A woman is a moral being--an immortal soul--before she is a woman;
and as such she is charged by her Maker with some share of the great
burden of work which lies on the world.
"Self-denial, the bearing of the cross, are stated by Christ as
indispensable conditions to the entrance into his kingdom, and no
exception is made for man or woman. Some task, some burden, some
cross, each one must carry; and there must be something done in every
true and worthy life, not as amusement, but as duty,--not as play, but
as earnest work,--and no human being can attain to the Christian
standard without this.
"When Jesus Christ took a towel and girded himself, poured water into
a basin, and washed his disciples' feet, he performed a significant
and sacramental act, which no man or woman should ever forget. If
wealth and rank and power absolve from the services of life, then
certainly were Jesus Christ absolved, as he says: 'Ye call me Master,
and Lord. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye
also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an
example, that ye should do as I have done to you.'
"Let a man who seeks to make a terrestrial paradise for the woman of
his heart,--to absolve her from all care, from all labor, to teach her
to accept and to receive the labor of others without any attempt to
offer labor in return,--consider whether he is not thus going directly
against the fundamental idea of Christianity; taking the direct way to
make his idol selfish and exacting, to rob her of the highest and
noblest beauty of womanhood.
"In that chapter of the Bible where the relation between man and woman
is stated, it is thus said, with quaint simplicity: 'It is not good
that the man should be alone; I will make him an _help meet_ for him.'
Woman the _helper_ of man, not his toy,--not a picture, not a statue,
not a work of art, but a HELPER, a doer,--such is the view of the
Bible and the Christian religion.
"It is not necessary that women should work physically or morally to
an extent which impairs beauty. In France, where woman is harnessed
with an ass to the plough which her husband drives,--where she digs,
and wields the pick-axe,--she becomes prematurely hideous; but in
America, where woman reigns as queen in every household, she may
surely be a good and thoughtful housekeeper, she may have physical
strength exercised in lighter domestic toils, not only without
injuring her beauty, but with manifest advantage to it. Almost every
growing young girl would be the better in health, and therefore
handsomer, for two hours of active housework daily; and the habit of
usefulness thereby gained would be an equal advantage to her moral
development. The labors of modern, well-arranged houses are not in any
sense severe; they are as gentle as any kind of exercise that can be
devised, and they bring into play muscles that ought to be exercised
to be healthily developed.
"The great danger to the beauty of American women does not lie, as the
writer of the 'Post' contends, in an overworking of the physical
system which shall stunt and deform; on the contrary, American women
of the comfortable classes are in danger of a loss of physical beauty
from the entire deterioration of the muscular system for want of
exercise. Take the life of any American girl in one of our large
towns, and see what it is. We have an educational system of public
schools which for intellectual culture is a just matter of pride to
any country. From the time that the girl is seven years old, her first
thought, when she rises in the morning, is to eat her breakfast and be
off to her school. There really is no more time than enough to allow
her to make that complete toilet which every well-bred female ought to
make, and to take her morning meal before her school begins. She
returns at noon with just time to eat her dinner, and the afternoon
session begins. She comes home at night with books, slate, and lessons
enough to occupy her evening. What time is there for teaching her any
household work, for teaching her to cut or fit or sew, or to inspire
her with any taste for domestic duties? Her arms have no exercise; her
chest and lungs, and all the complex system of muscles which are to be
perfected by quick and active movement, are compressed while she bends
over book and slate and drawing-board; while the ever active brain is
kept all the while going at the top of its speed. She grows up spare,
thin, and delicate; and while the Irish girl, who sweeps the parlors,
rubs the silver, and irons the muslins, is developing a finely rounded
arm and bust, the American girl has a pair of bones at her sides, and
a bust composed of cotton padding, the work of a skillful dressmaker.
Nature, who is no respecter of persons, gives to Colleen Bawn, who
uses her arms and chest, a beauty which perishes in the gentle,
languid Edith, who does nothing but study and read."
"But is it not a fact," said Rudolph, "as stated by our friend of the
'Post,' that American matrons are perishing, and their beauty and
grace all withered, from overwork?"
"It is," said my wife; "but why? It is because they are brought up
without vigor or muscular strength, without the least practical
experience of household labor, or those means of saving it which come
by daily practice; and then, after marriage, when physically weakened
by maternity, embarrassed by the care of young children, they are
often suddenly deserted by every efficient servant, and the whole
machinery of a complicated household left in their weak, inexperienced
hands. In the country, you see a household perhaps made void some fine
morning by Biddy's sudden departure, and nobody to make the bread, or
cook the steak, or sweep the parlors, or do one of the complicated
offices of a family, and no bakery, cook-shop, or laundry to turn to
for alleviation. A lovely, refined home becomes in a few hours a
howling desolation; and then ensues a long season of breakage, waste,
distraction, as one wild Irish immigrant after another introduces the
style of Irish cottage life into an elegant dwelling.
"Now suppose I grant to the 'Evening Post' that woman ought to rest,
to be kept in the garden of life, and all that, how is this to be done
in a country where a state of things like this is the commonest of
occurrences? And is it any kindness or reverence to woman, to educate
her for such an inevitable destiny by a life of complete physical
delicacy and incapacity? Many a woman who has been brought into these
cruel circumstances would willingly exchange all her knowledge of
German and Italian, and all her graceful accomplishments, for a good
physical development, and some respectable _savoir faire_ in ordinary
life.
"Moreover, American matrons are overworked because some unaccountable
glamour leads them to continue to bring up their girls in the same
inefficient physical habits which resulted in so much misery to
themselves. Housework as they are obliged to do it, untrained,
untaught, exhausted, and in company with rude, dirty, unkempt
foreigners, seems to them a degradation which they will spare to their
daughters. The daughter goes on with her schools and accomplishments,
and leads in the family the life of an elegant little visitor during
all those years when a young girl might be gradually developing and
strengthening her muscles in healthy household work. It never occurs
to her that she can or ought to fill any of the domestic gaps into
which her mother always steps; and she comforts herself with the
thought, 'I don't know how; I can't; I haven't the strength. I can't
sweep; it blisters my hands. If I should stand at the ironing-table an
hour, I should be ill for a week. As to cooking, I don't know anything
about it.' And so, when the cook, or the chambermaid, or nurse, or all
together, vacate the premises, it is the mamma who is successively
cook, and chambermaid, and nurse; and this is the reason why matrons
fade and are overworked.
"Now, Mr. Rudolph, do you think a woman any less beautiful or
interesting because she is a fully developed physical being,--because
her muscles have been rounded and matured into strength, so that she
can meet the inevitable emergencies of life without feeling them to be
distressing hardships? If there be a competent, well-trained servant
to sweep and dust the parlor, and keep all the machinery of the house
in motion, she may very properly select her work out of the family, in
some form of benevolent helpfulness; but when the inevitable evil hour
comes, which is likely to come first or last in every American
household, is a woman any less an elegant woman because her love of
neatness, order, and beauty leads her to make vigorous personal
exertions to keep her own home undefiled? For my part, I think a
disorderly, ill-kept home, a sordid, uninviting table, has driven more
husbands from domestic life than the unattractiveness of any
overworked woman. So long as a woman makes her home harmonious and
orderly, so long as the hour of assembling around the family table is
something to be looked forward to as a comfort and a refreshment, a
man cannot see that the good house fairy, who by some magic keeps
everything so delightfully, has either a wrinkle or a gray hair."
"Besides," said I, "I must tell you, Rudolph, what you fellows of
twenty-one are slow to believe; and that is, that the kind of ideal
paradise you propose in marriage is, in the very nature of things, an
impossibility,--that the familiarities of every-day life between two
people who keep house together must and will destroy it. Suppose you
are married to Cytherea herself, and the next week attacked with a
rheumatic fever. If the tie between you is that of true and honest
love, Cytherea will put on a gingham wrapper, and with her own
sculptured hands wring out the flannels which shall relieve your
pains; and she will be no true woman if she do not prefer to do this
to employing any nurse that could be hired. True love ennobles and
dignifies the material labors of life; and homely services rendered
for love's sake have in them a poetry that is immortal.
"No true-hearted woman can find herself, in real, actual life,
unskilled and unfit to minister to the wants and sorrows of those
dearest to her, without a secret sense of degradation. The feeling of
uselessness is an extremely unpleasant one. Tom Hood, in a very
humorous paper, describes a most accomplished schoolmistress, a
teacher of all the arts and crafts which are supposed to make up fine
gentlewomen, who is stranded in a rude German inn, with her father
writhing in the anguish of a severe attack of gastric inflammation.
The helpless lady gazes on her suffering parent, longing to help him,
and thinking over all her various little store of accomplishments, not
one of which bears the remotest relation to the case. She could knit
him a bead purse, or make him a guard-chain, or work him a footstool,
or festoon him with cut tissue-paper, or sketch his likeness, or crust
him over with alum crystals, or stick him over with little rosettes of
red and white wafers; but none of these being applicable to his
present case, she sits gazing in resigned imbecility, till finally she
desperately resolves to improvise him some gruel, and, after a
laborious turn in the kitchen,--after burning her dress and blacking
her fingers,--succeeds only in bringing him a bowl of paste!
"Not unlike this might be the feeling of many an elegant and
accomplished woman, whose education has taught and practiced her in
everything that woman ought to know, except those identical ones which
fit her for the care of a home, for the comfort of a sick-room; and so
I say again that, whatever a woman may be in the way of beauty and
elegance, she must have the strength and skill of a practical worker,
or she is nothing. She is not simply to be the beautiful,--she is to
make the beautiful, and preserve it; and she who makes and she who
keeps the beautiful must be able to work, and know how to work.
Whatever offices of life are performed by women of culture and
refinement are thenceforth elevated; they cease to be mere servile
toils, and become expressions of the ideas of superior beings. If a
true lady makes even a plate of toast, in arranging a _petit souper_
for her invalid friend, she does it as a lady should. She does not
cut blundering and uneven slices; she does not burn the edges; she
does not deluge it with bad butter, and serve it cold; but she
arranges and serves all with an artistic care, with a nicety and
delicacy, which make it worth one's while to have a lady friend in
sickness.
"And I am glad to hear that Monsieur Blot is teaching classes of New
York ladies that cooking is not a vulgar kitchen toil, to be left to
blundering servants, but an elegant feminine accomplishment, better
worth a woman's learning than crochet or embroidery; and that a
well-kept culinary apartment may be so inviting and orderly that no
lady need feel her ladyhood compromised by participating in its
pleasant toils. I am glad to know that his cooking-academy is thronged
with more scholars than he can accommodate, and from ladies in the
best classes of society.
"Moreover, I am glad to see that in New Bedford, recently, a public
course of instruction in the art of bread-making has been commenced by
a lady, and that classes of the most respectable young and married
ladies in the place are attending them. These are steps in the right
direction, and show that our fair countrywomen, with the grand good
sense which is their leading characteristic, are resolved to supply
whatever in our national life is wanting.
"I do not fear that women of such sense and energy will listen to the
sophistries which would persuade them that elegant imbecility and
inefficiency are charms of cultivated womanhood or ingredients in the
poetry of life. She alone can keep the poetry and beauty of married
life who has this poetry in her soul; who with energy and discretion
can throw back and out of sight the sordid and disagreeable details
which beset all human living, and can keep in the foreground that
which is agreeable; who has enough knowledge of practical household
matters to make unskilled and rude hands minister to her cultivated
and refined tastes, and constitute her skilled brain the guide of
unskilled hands. From such a home, with such a mistress, no sirens
will seduce a man, even though the hair grow gray, and the merely
physical charms of early days gradually pass away. The enchantment
that was about her person alone in the days of courtship seems in the
course of years to have interfused and penetrated the home which she
has created, and which in every detail is only an expression of her
personality. Her thoughts, her plans, her provident care, are
everywhere; and the home attracts and holds by a thousand ties the
heart which before marriage was held by the woman alone."
V