The street through which the women were to pass was, we found when we
reached it, already thickly lined with men, many of whom bore marks of
their fearful struggle with fire of the night before. Arms and hands
bound up in slings, and foreheads bandaged with cloths, told of the
scathing wounds that had been received in the fiery conflict. Blanched
and haggard faces and heavy eyes also told of sleepless anxiety before
and after the fire. Some of those who had been so injured as to be
unable to appear on the streets, were propped in easy chairs at the
open windows. Not to see womankind after such an unprecedented absence,
was a deprivation not to be endured. It would have been like missing
the sight of the sun after a dreary, Arctic winter.
But though all the men in the town, excepting those who were disabled
by wounds, were on the streets and squares through which the women were
to pass, there was a silence like a spell upon the vast multitude.
It was a perfectly noiseless congregation that had gathered there.
Anything like gossip or badinage were as utterly absent as they would
have been from before the altar of a cathedral. Truly there was no
place for speech in that strange concourse, and Mr. Lister and I took
our places in it without uttering a word. A feeling of solemnity akin
to awe had taken possession of me. I recalled Mr. Lister’s words when
he first told me of the parade: “The women wish man to see in a simple
panorama exactly what woman has been up to this day.”
What could the panorama be?
But I did not have long to wait. And the tense excitement of the
moment when the women appeared on the bridge, toward which all eyes
were strained, how can I describe it! It seemed for a moment to make
me dizzy. When the mist which swam before my eyes had cleared away,
the head of a majestic host had crossed the bridge, and was slowly
advancing, without noise or gesture, toward the spot where I stood.
Seen from a little distance, I remember a first vague impression that
the women had taken great liberties with the fashions that had existed
when I last saw them. I called to mind that Mr. Lister had told me
that among the other relics of what had become to them an obsolete
and withered past, the women had cast off many of the unreasoning
fetters of fashion that they had spent much earnest study and practical
experiment in their retirement in finding the most natural and comely
dress for women. I will not say that the sight of woman in any garb
would not have been thrilling under such strange circumstances as those
under which I was now about to behold her, but certainly the women who
were approaching me were dressed with a simplicity and taste such as I
had never before seen. Their comely outlines seemed invested with a new
sense of freedom of motion such as one might have who had been suddenly
released from a weary, dragging ball and chain.
But all thought of the vesture of these self-banished daughters of the
Universe vanished like a breath the instant they drew near enough for
me to note the rise and fall of their tremulous bosoms, to search their
serious faces, and to study the arrangement of their noiseless and
modest pageant. Their speechless procession was divided in a way that I
did not at first comprehend, but there was a sense of plain, critical
sincerity about it, a perception that it was intended to be a bare
exposition of simple, unvarnished truth, that sharpened my intellect
so that I was not long in perceiving its vivid meaning.
First in this strange procession came the unmarried women, or “old
maids” as they had always been called, and although there were no
upbraidings in their serious, modest eyes, the intolerable injustice
and cruelty which had been meted out by man to these patient, helpless
souls, was made as clear as the blackly vivid painting of a guilty
conscience.
“These are they,” a voice seemed to say, “whom man has for ages
taunted with a derision as contemptible and unchivalrous as the
striking of a cripple. These gentle sisters of men, who have been
by their nature ever ready to perform the kindest and most sisterly
acts for their recreant brothers, have been laughed to scorn if they
manifested the slightest desire for marriage, and bitterly mocked if
they failed. Spurred by contumely toward the only goal which man had
allowed them, they had been heartlessly derided for missing it, and
relegated to a life of coldness and contempt as cruel as the grave.
Instead of reaching a strong, brotherly arm toward these sisters, man
had added to her natural weakness the abuse of a coarse ridicule and
the unutterably grievous burden of a cruel disrespect. To this had
been added in innumerable instances, the single-handed struggle with
dire poverty.” Before these unreproaching creatures, who had suffered
such unnumerable cruelties at the hands of their natural protectors,
I felt a self-abasement that was akin to remorse. I longed to throw
myself in the dust before them, to kiss their hands and to crave
their forgiveness. Surely the woes of the “old maids” called for the
just vengeance of Heaven. And how many there were of them! Who would
have dreamed, without seeing such a panorama as this, that so large a
proportion of women were old maids, living in a state of contemptuous
abasement or humiliating sufferance? As I gazed at them, strange
and confusing questions, never before thought of, began to thrust
themselves into my mind. Had not this great mass of women social and
maternal instincts as deep and inexpugnable as any of their kind? What
sort of social system was this, then, that remorselessly crushed and
cruelly starved the strongest and most innocent desires of a great
majority of its subjects? Could it be possible that sane men and women
believed that a just Heaven looked with any complaisance upon such a
system?
A space divided the old maids from the part of the procession that
came next, and I turned with curiosity to look at the faces of the men
by whom I was surrounded. To my satisfaction, I saw plainly written
there the poignant workings of a deeply troubled conscience; I saw
there the unutterable shame of having done an unchivalrous act, and the
still heavier reproach of having done a cruel one. There was no need of
upbraiding words.
The part of the procession which next drew near seemed to be nearly as
numerous as the “old maids.” With a sudden shock, I saw that it was the
“courtesans,” or rather those who had been courtesans, for I remembered
that Woman had, by an irrevocable edict, forever banished the name and
calling of the courtesan from the earth.
But if the contemplation of the soul-wearying burdens borne by the
uncomplaining “old maids” produced in the men who gazed upon them the
compunctions of pity and remorse, the scarred and wasted wrecks of
man’s passion which now passed in long review before him, reproached
him with a poignancy ten-fold greater. These women, bearing the
ineffaceable marks of man’s ravages, had differed, it appeared, only by
an accident from those whom he esteemed pure. Dragged from the garden
of purity by man’s own perfidy, they had been doomed without hope of
forgiveness, to forever minister to his lust. Disregarding for ages the
example and spirit of the Great Teacher, man had thrust the victims
he had thus made, deeper and deeper into the blackness of a bottomless
pit. I turned away my head with a shudder from a spectacle before which
all men stood in awful condemnation!
Fully two-thirds of the procession had passed by, and the woman’s
panorama had shown nothing but unmerited contumely or ruthless
devastation. What could there be left?
It was a band of exceedingly frail and wasted women, that I next looked
upon. Feeble invalids they appeared with but a remnant of days before
them. Borne down by disease they dragged out lives of continual pain.
The ashes of hope were in their eyes, the ashes of beauty were in their
faces, and the ashes of strength were in their feeble frames. These,
it appeared, were women who had married young profligates, “to save
them.” They looked like flowers which had been hopelessly blasted by a
deadly, blighting wind. The fearful scars and moral pollution which had
been in the souls of their husbands, had been wrecked upon them to the
uttermost, and there had been no voice to protest, no sheltering arm to
interpose.
These were followed by a very small band of women who were said to have
been happily married. But the chains of these seemed in many respects
as heavy, though a little more gilded, than those of the women who had
preceded them. They appeared to have paid their all for the narrow
happiness which they enjoyed, and it had been fraught with deadly
perils, against which they had had no adequate protection. Even some
of these, it seemed, had been bartered for gold or titles, and only a
filmy legal fiction stood between them and the name and stain of the
concubine. Following them closely was the army of married women, who,
unfortunately mismated or overborne by the evils of undesired maternity
and its dire accompaniment, poverty, formed the strong rank and file of
the Great Woman’s Strike.
As I gazed upon them, a strange hallucination possessed me. It seemed
to me that I was looking, not merely at the passing procession, but
at the tender mothers of all mankind, and that, with them, I saw the
mountain of anguish, the unremembered toil, the care and undying
self-sacrifice which they had borne since the race began. What did not
man owe to woman!
In the close of the procession came the young women who were just
verging upon marriageable age, the tender and blooming maidens who were
still dallying in the primrose path of free and beautiful girlhood.
The sight of these innocent and care-free creatures would seem to
have lightened and dissipated the effect of the sight of the unabated
misery that had preceded them, but on the contrary, it immeasurably
heightened the awful effect. For these, it appeared, were the perfumed
and garlanded victims who were soon to be offered up to the fearful
Moloch who presided over woman’s destiny. “A few short years,” it
seemed to say, “and the rosy hours of youth’s unfettered dance will be
over. Then, I claim you for the three great classes into which women
are divided,--despised old maids, feeding on the social crusts thrown
from a profligate’s table; equally despised courtesans, sitting at that
table with man in wanton revelry; and married menials, propagative
drudges, meekly waiting upon that table, having no voice in the
allotment of their own destiny, and no power over their own persons.”
This voice ringing in my ears, together with the woeful procession
which had passed before my eyes, had completely daunted me. I could
bear it no longer. It was as if my conscience had been preternaturally
aroused, and had brought before my mind’s eye, in long defile, a black
array of unsuspected sins. Rapt as I had been in the contemplation of
this strange procession, I felt that I must flee from it as I would
flee from a spot where I had committed a dastardly crime. I turned in
anguish to break my way through the crowd of men, anywhere to get away
from the awful evidence of misery in the producing of which I had been
an accomplice with all men. Judge, then, of my speechless amazement, my
absolute horror, on turning, to find that there was not a man in sight.
Pierced as I had been with an agonising contrition, it still appeared
that I was more callous than the men by whom I had been surrounded.
Unable to bear the heavy reproach of their consciences, they had slunk
away one after another, till I, without knowing it, had been left
entirely alone. This discovery was too great for my nerves, weakened as
they had been by the ceaseless shocks of the past few days. My brain
whirled. I was conscious of a sudden movement toward me by some of the
women in the procession and then all was a blank.
I had fainted.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]