editors what a desk _might_ be. My editorial chair shouldn't pivot;
there should be no shadow of turning about that. Gibraltar should be a
circumstance to it. The windows of my editorial den should be scraped
with a sharp knife occasionally, to take off sufficient dirt to enable
me to write legibly. I should keep my best bonnet in a bandbox under
my desk, for any sudden dress emergency, as do editors their
go-to-meetin' hat. Like them, too, I should have a small looking-glass
for--visitors! also a bottle of--"medicine" for--visitors! I don't
think I should need a safe, as the principles upon which my paper
would be conducted would render it unnecessary. My object would be to
amuse _myself_, and say just what came uppermost, not by any means to
please or edify my species. Now, I have examined all the papers that
cross my threshold, and I am very sure that I have hit on quite an
original idea.
If it stormed badly on publication day, I wouldn't send the poor
devils in my employ out with my paper, just because my subscribers
fancied they wanted it. Let 'em wait. The first fair day they'd have
it, of course. In the meantime, the printer's devil, and the
compositors, and the rest of 'em, could play chequers till the sky
cleared up.
If anybody sued me for libel, I'd--I'd whine out, "Aint you
ashamed to annoy a female? Why don't you strike one of your
own size?" I should insist on being treated with the deference
due to a woman, though in all respects I should demand the
untrammeled-seven-leagued-boots-freedom of a man. My object would be
to hit everybody smack between the eyes, when I felt like it; and when
I saw brutal retribution coming, to throw my silk apron over my head
and whimper.
I have not yet decided upon the title of my paper. Children are not
generally baptized until after they are born. Nor do I know who will
stand sponsor. All that is in the misty future. As to the price, I
should nail up a cash-box at the foot of the stairs, and people could
drop in whatever they liked. I should, by that means, not only show my
unshaken confidence in human nature, but also learn in what estimation
the general public held my services. There's nothing so dear to my
heart as spontaneity.
_A SERMON TO PLYMOUTH PULPIT._
O Mr. Beecher! that you should recommend "candy," or "sugar plums," it
is all the same, for the youngsters. That _you_ should be quoted
through the length and breadth of the land as having done so, to the
delight of these youngsters, and the candy-merchants, and the
dentists, and the doctors generally! To be _candid_, I am ashamed of
you.
Do you suppose that you are the only grandparent in the land? The only
loving, the only proud grandparent? I am a grandparent. I can love as
hard as you can. I can show just as bewildering a grandchild as you
can. It is just as hard for me to say No to that grandchild as it is
for you to say No to yours; but--excuse me--_I_ can do it. She is five
years old, but never touches candy. When she was three, a lady in an
omnibus gave her a red and white peppermint stick, and she turned to
me and asked "if it were not a pretty _toy_?" She knows now that candy
is to eat; but when it is given her, whether in my presence or not,
she says, "I am not allowed to eat candy." Meantime, she loves
beefsteak, she loves potatoes, she drinks milk and eats bread, with a
relish that candy-fed children never know. Either you are very right,
or I am very wrong. You see I am touchy on this subject, having worn
out several pens and distributed much ink in the crusade against it;
and here _you_, in the _Ledger_, right under my very nose, with one
frisk of your magic pen, cover me with indelible ignominy!
"Mr. _Beecher_ says children should have candy;" and, what is more, he
thinks they should be _bought_ to be good by it! Oh, fie!
Well, now, I reply: Mr. Beecher is a _man_. If his grandchild has the
stomach-ache, it is the _women_ of the family who will soothe it, and
bear its cries and its wakeful nights. If the little teeth prematurely
decay and ache, it is _the women_ who will accompany it to the
dentist's for the heart-rending wrench of cold iron. Mr. Beecher, in
short, decided this candy question from a _man's_ standpoint. He took
the popular side of the question with the children, who will always
shout hosanna to him for the same. But, my dear sir, the mothers who,
going home after shopping through Broadway, stop each day for the
poisonous parcel of sweets for Johnny and Susy, need restraint, not
encouragement, from you. They "can't imagine what ails Susy or Johnny,
to be so fretful" after eating it. Of course they never for a moment
suppose it to be candy. Didn't _they_ eat candy? And are they buried
yet? _I_ ask another question: What is the state of their teeth and
digestion to-day? What their powers of endurance as mothers? What, in
short, do they annually contribute to enable the fat family doctor to
ride in his carriage and live in Fifth Avenue? _That's_ what _I_ want
to know.
O Mr. Beecher! well as I like you, I don't know what to say to you;
and what makes the case more aggravating, I know I shall keep on
liking you, whatever you say. That's the worst of it, and you know it.
And I am going to send this right off to the _Ledger_ office without a
second reading, lest I should qualify it, or trim it up, or make it
more respectful because you are "a minister."
No, sir; I won't do it; I'll take example by a rampant female at a
public meeting the other night, who was scolding her husband for not
getting her a better seat. The distressed man laid his hand on her
arm, saying, "Hush! here's Fanny Fern; she will hear you." With
distended nostrils, that admirable woman replied, "I don't care for
six hundred Fanny Ferns!"
My dear sir, your hand is too well accustomed to drawing a moral, for
me to presume to do it for you in this case! Adieu.
_FEMALE CLERKS._
I have heard the objection made, by women, to female clerks in stores,
that they are less civil and attentive to their own sex than are male
clerks. I can only answer for myself, that I have never found any
reason to complain of them in this regard. In fact, I often wonder at
their patience and civility under very trying circumstances. I suppose
gallantry supplies the place of patience in male clerks. With so many
fresh, pretty, dimpled young faces to look at, a young man need not be
so very churlish, though he be not christened Job.
Female clerks, it always seemed to me, must necessarily give out first
_in their feet_. That incessant standing, from morning to night, must
be more trying to them than to men. Many women, I know, can _walk_
miles more easily than they could stand for half an hour.
After making a purchase at a store quite late in the afternoon, I said
to the young girl who waited upon me,--
"How very tired you must get of us women, day after day!"
"There is a great difference in them," she civilly replied.
"But don't your feet ache sadly?" I asked. "That always seemed to me
the most trying part of it."
She smiled as she pulled from under the seat, behind the counter, a
stool.
"I thought that mitigation of weariness was against all regulations in
stores," I replied.
"Not in _this_," was her answer. "Mr. ---- has always allowed his
female clerks to sit down when they were tired."
Now, I was so pleased at this that I should like to give that
employer's name in full on this page. Here was a man who was wise
enough, and, above all, humane enough, to look on _their_ side of the
question. In doing so, of course, he did not overlook his own. In
doing so, he may also have known that there is a point when even a
woman's india-rubber patience, may be stretched too far. He may have
known that, when soul and body gave out, and a customer came in at
that trying moment, and the "last ounce" having been "laid on the
camel's back," the article inquired for _they_ "_did not keep_!" I say
he _might_ have been keen enough to have known this. _I_ prefer to
believe, that being a good, kind-hearted man, he tried to make service
for these young girls as light as he would wish it made for his own
young daughters, were they in that position. It is very certain that,
which way soever we look at it, it is an example which other employers
would do well to follow.
It wont do the male clerks any harm to stand still; but I would be
very glad to have inaugurated this humane consideration for the young
women. I heard one of them tell a friend, the other day, that she had
to go directly to bed each evening on her return home, because her
feet and back ached so intolerably.
Another suggestion: When employers have any occasion to reprove these
young women, if they would not mortify them by doing it in the
presence and in the hearing of customers, it would not only be more
pleasant for the latter, but would be more likely to have its proper
effect on the offender. I have sometimes heard such brutal things said
by employers to a blushing young girl, whose eyes filled with tears at
her helplessness to avert it, or to reply to it, that I never could
enter the store again, for fear of a repetition of the distressing
scene, although, so far as I personally was concerned, I had nothing
to complain of.
The moral of all this is, that men in the family, and in the store
too, must look upon women in a different light from that to which they
are accustomed; before, to use a detestable phrase, but one which will
appeal most strongly to the majority, they "can get the most work out
of them." Physicians understand this. Every man is not a physician,
but he ought at least to know that backaches and headaches, and
heartaches too, are not confined to his own sex.
_BLUE MONDAY._
"Blue Monday." By this name clergymen designate the day. Preaching as
they do, two sermons on the Sabbath, sometimes three--not to mention
Sunday-school exhortations, and possible funerals and marriages; of
course, I take no account of what may have happened, on Sunday, in
_their own_ families, no more than does the outside world. "The
minister" must, like a conductor of a railroad train, be "up to
time,"--hence "Blue Monday." Flesh and blood is flesh and blood,
although covered by a surplice or a cassock, and will get _tired_,
even in a good cause. Therefore the worn-out clergyman takes Monday
for a day of rest, for truly the Sabbath is none. He wanders about and
tries to give his brains a holiday--I say _tries_, because he often
misses it by wandering into the book-stores, or going to see a
publisher, instead of taking a drive, or a ramble in the fields, or
wooing nature, who never fails to lay a healing hand on her children.
But Blue Monday does not belong exclusively to clergymen--oh, mother
of many children! as you can testify. True, you call it by another
name--"Washing-day,"--but it is all one, as far as exhaustion is its
characteristic. May the gods grant that on that day, when your
assistant in nursery-labor must often make up the deficiencies
involved in the terrible "family-wash," that no "plumber" or
"gas-fitter" send in his bill, to "rile" the good man of the house, to
exclaim against the "expenses of housekeeping," and send you into your
Babel of a nursery, with moist eyes and a heavy heart? It is poor
comfort, after you have cried it out, to try to pacify yourself by
saying, Well, he didn't _mean_ to say I'm sorry I ever was married,
yet it hurts me all the same; men are so thoughtless about such
things, and they go out after hurling such a poisoned arrow, and
forget, even if they ever knew it, that they have left it there to
rankle all day; and are quite astonished, and, perhaps, disgusted when
they come back that the good lady is not in excellent spirits, as they
are, and wonder what _she_, with a comfortable home, and nothing but
house matters to attend to, can find to worry her. Now, Mrs. Jones,
and Mrs. Jenkins, and Mrs. Smith, I'll lay a wager with each of you,
that your husbands have done that very thing, more times than you can
count, and on "Blue Monday" too.
Ah! these "chance words," and the _thick_-skinned utterers of them.
Ah! the pity that the needle is no hindrance to the bitter thoughts
they bring; but that over the little torn apron or frock, the tears of
discouragement fall; the bitterest of all--that _he_ hasn't the least
idea "he has said anything," but is, very likely, inviting some fellow
that very minute to "take a drink" with him, or to smoke a dozen
cigars more or less, spite the "expense." My dears, wipe your eyes. If
you look for consistency in the male creature, you'll need a
microscope to find it. _Your_ expenses hurt him dreadfully; when I say
yours, I mean not only your _personal_ expenses, but the _house_
expenses; for don't you see, had he staid a bachelor, he wouldn't have
had a plumber's bill to pay--and that's all your fault, because you
said "yes," when he got on his knees to implore you that he _might_
have the felicity of paying your mutual plumber's bill.
But _that_ was _then_, and _this_ is _now_!
But isn't it perfectly delicious when those men come home, after
making some such blundering speech, the innocent way, after hanging up
their hats, that they'll walk into your presence, rubbing their hands,
and fetch up standing in the middle of the room with, "Why! _what's_
the matter?" as they catch sight of their wives' lugubrious faces. I
tell you, Mr. Smith, and Mr. Jones, and Mr. Jenkins, whatsoever else
you do, _don't_ hold your _wives_ responsible for that which they are
no more to blame for than yourselves. Or if you will insist upon going
over their hearts with a cart-wheel, in this manner, have the
manliness when you come home, not to pooh-pooh the resentful tears you
have caused.
The fact is, you are but blunderers as far as women are concerned. You
are elephants trying with your huge paws to pat humming-birds. Nine
out of every ten you demolish. Only physicians understand a woman; and
they don't always act up to the light they have.
I would like to write a book on some kinds of legal murder; that is if
really _good_ people had not such moonshine notions about "delicacy."
This class are really the drags on the wheel of reform. I don't say
that sometimes it is not necessary, and even right, to drive
rough-shod right over them, if they will persist in walking in such a
narrow path; but one does it after all with regret, because they so
sincerely believe themselves to be in the "path of duty," as they call
it. Dear me! if there ever was a perverted phrase, this is one! It
makes me sick to hear it.
What do I mean by "legal murders"? Well, if a woman is knocked on the
head with a flat-iron by her husband and killed, or if arsenic is
mixed with her food, or if a bullet is sent through her brain, the law
takes cognizance of it. But what of the cruel words that just as
surely kill, by constant repetition? What of the neglect? What of the
diseased children of a pure, healthy mother? What of the ten or
twelve, even healthy children, "who come," one after another, into the
weary arms of a really good woman, who yet never knows the meaning of
the word _rest_ till the coffin-lid shuts her in from all earthly care
and pain? Is the self-sacrifice and self-abnegation all to be on one
side? Is the "weaker" always to be the stronger in this regard? I
could write flaming words about "the inscrutable Providence which has
seen fit to remove our dear sister in her youth from the bosom of her
young family," as the funeral prayer phrases it.
Providence did nothing of the sort. Poor Providence! It is astonishing
how busy people are making up bundles to lay on _His_ shoulders! I
imagine Providence meant that women, as well as men, should have a
right to their own lives. That they, equally with men, should rest
when they can go no further on the road without dying. That while the
father sits down to smoke the tobacco which "Providence" always seems
to furnish him with, although his family may not have bread to eat,
his wife should not stagger to her feet, and try to shoulder again her
family cares and expenses.
Sometimes--nay, often--in view of all this, I rejoice in regarding the
serene Mrs. Calla-Lily. _She_ goes on just like a man. When she is
tired she lies down, and stays there till she is rested, and lets the
domestic world wag. If she don't feel like talking, she reads. If the
children are noisy, she sweetly and cunningly gets out of the way, on
that convenient male pretext, "putting a letter in the post-office."
She don't "smoke," but she has her little comforts all the same, and
at the right time, although the heavens should fall, and little
Tommy's shoes give out. She looks as sleek and smooth and fair as if
she were _really_ a lily; and everybody says, "What a delightful
person she is! and how bright and charming at all times!"
Now this spectacle soothes me, after seeing the long procession of
bent, hollow-eyed, broken-spirited women who are _legally_ murdered.
I exclaim, Good! and think of the old rhyme:
"Look out for thyself,
And take care of thyself,
For nobody cares for thee."
Of course this is very "unamiable" in me, but amiability is not the
only or the best quality in the world. I have seen people without a
particle of it, as the phrase is often understood, who were the
world's real saviours; and I have seen those human oysters, "amiable"
people, till sea-sickness was not a circumstance to the condition of
my mental and moral stomach.
What a millennial world this would be, if every one were placed in the
niche for which he or she were best fitted. Now I know a capital
architect who was spoiled, when he became a minister. A dreadful mess
he makes of it working on the spiritual temple, as pastor of a country
church; whose worshippers each insist upon shaping every brick and
lath to their minds before he puts them together; and then they doubt
if his cement will do. Poor man!--I know of a merchant, helplessly
fastened to the yardstick, who should be an editor. I know of a
lawyer, who has _peace_ written all over him, and yet whose life is
one interminable fight. I know scores of bright, intelligent women,
alive to their finger-tips to everything progressive, good and noble,
whose lives, hedged in by custom and conservatism, remind me of that
suggestive picture in all our Broadway artist-windows, of the woman
with dripping hair and raiment, clinging to the fragment of rock
overhead, while the dark waters are surging round her feet. I know
little sensitive plants of children, who are no more understood by
those who are daily in their angel presence, than the Saviour was by
his crucifiers. Children who, mentally, morally, and physically, are
being tortured in their several Gethsemanes to the death; and I know
sweet and beautiful homes, where plenty, and intelligence, and
Christianity dwell, where no little child's laugh has ever been heard,
and no baby smile shall ever fill it with blessed sunshine. I know
coarse-natured men and women who curse the earth with their presence,
whose thoughts and lives are wholly base and ignoble, and yet who fill
high places; and I know heaven's own children--patient, toiling,
hopeful--sowing seeds which coarse, hurrying feet trample in the earth
as they go, little heeding the harvest which shall come after their
careless footsteps.
_Life's discipline!_ That is all we can say of it.
How any one with eyes to see all this, can doubt Immortality, and yet
bear their life from one day to another, I cannot tell. How persons
can say, in view of all these cross-purposes, I am satisfied with
_this_ life, and--had I my way--would never leave it, is indeed, a
mystery. It must be that the soul were left out of them.
But this doleful talk wont do--will it? I should not dispel
illusions--should I? Now, that last is a question I can't settle:
whether it were better, if you see a friend crossing a lovely meadow,
rejoicing in the butterflies, and flowers, and lovely odors, to warn
him that there is a ditch between him and the road, into which he will
presently fall; or to let him enjoy himself while he can, and plump
into it, without anticipatory fears? What do you think? Anyhow, it is
no harm to _wish_ you all a happy summer.
* * * * *
Would it not be well for those who report the "dress" of ladies at a
public dinner to instruct themselves in advance as to _color_? One can
always tell whether a man or a woman is the reporter, by the blunders
of the former in mistaking blue for green, lilac for rose, and black
for pink. The world moves on, to be sure, in either case; but since
reporting must be done on such infinitesimal matters, it were better
it were well done. A lady who studiously avoids flashy apparel does
not care to read in the morning paper that "she appeared in a yellow
gown trimmed with pink." Perhaps the avoidance of the "flowing bowl"
by male reporters would conduce to greater correctness of millinery
statement.
_THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT._
I do not know who writes the editorials on the "Woman Question" in its
various aspects, in our more prominent New York papers. I read them
from day to day, with real disappointment at their immaturity, their
flippancy, their total lack of manliness, and respect for, or
appreciation of, true womanhood. I say this in no spirit of
bitterness, but of real sorrow, that men stepping into the responsible
position they hold on those papers, have not better considered the
subjects of which they treat. That the writers are not known outside
the office, seems to me a very unmanly reason for their
misrepresentations. Every morning I ask, over my coffee, Have these
men mothers, sisters, wives, who so persistently misrepresent the
doings of self-respecting, self-supporting, intelligent women? Does
_Congress_ make no mistakes, that women should be expected, in their
pioneering, to have arrived at absolute perfection? Is there no heat,
in debate, on _its_ floor; no uncourteousness of language? Did not one
member, a short time since, call out there to have another member
"spanked"? Does the speaker's mallet never call to order, men selected
by their constituents, because supposed most intelligently to
represent the various local and other interests of the country? Does
the cut of a man's hair or coat injuriously or approbatively affect
his speech upon the floors? Does anybody care what color it is, or how
worn? I ask myself these questions when I read reports of
"strong-minded women's meetings," as they are sneeringly termed, which
consist mainly on the absence of a "long train" to their dresses, or
the presence of it; on the straightness of their hair, or the frizzing
of it; on the lack of ornamentation, or the redundance of it. This
mocking, Mephistopheles-dodging of the real questions at issue, behind
flimsy screens, seems to me not only most unworthy of these writers,
but most unworthy of, and prejudicial to, the prominent journals in
which they appear.
If they think that women make such grave mistakes,--mistakes
prejudicial to the great interests they seek publicly to promote, the
great wrongs they seek to right,--would it not be kinder and more
manly, courteously to point them out, if so be that they themselves
know "a more excellent way"? Among all these women, are there _none_
who are intelligent, intellectual, earnest, _and modest withal_? Have
the editors of these very papers in which these attacks appear, never
gladly employed just such, to lend grace, wit, and spirit to their own
columns, that they have only sneers and taunts for the cause they
espouse, and never a brave, kind, sympathetic recognition of their
philanthropic efforts? Is the cause so utterly Quixotic, espoused by
such women, who make their own homes bright with good cheer,
neatness, taste, and wholesome food, that they cannot gallantly extend
a manly hand after it and help them _over_ those bright thresholds,
and out into a world full of pain and misery, to lift the burden from
their less favored sisters?
If they have the misfortune not to know such women among "the
strong-minded," would it not be well to seek them out, and better
inform themselves on the subjects upon which they daily write?
The pioneer women who have bravely gone forward, and still keep
"marching on," undaunted in the face of this unmanly and ungenerous
dealing, have, doubtless, counted the cost, and will not be hindered
by it. I do not fear that; but I _do_ regret that any editor of a
prominent paper in New York should belittle it and himself, by
allowing any of his employés to keep up this boyish pop-gun firing
into the air.
The other night, I attended a lecture, the proceeds of which were to
be devoted to a charitable institution for women.