_Aristippus._ You forget that it was Eve who first picked fruit from the
tree of knowledge.
_Diogenes._ The only use she made of it was to get the idea of dress;
and the primeval curse still clings to man, in the shape of milliners'
bills.
_Aristippus._ Nevertheless we ought to be grateful to her for her
enterprising spirit. Whatever her motives may have been, you must admit
that her move was in the right direction. Where would we be now, had the
future of the race been left to Adam alone? And if woman did turn man
out of Paradise, she has done her best ever since to make it up to him.
Every pretty girl one sees is a reminiscence of the garden of Eden.
_Diogenes._
"This mischief had not then befallen,
And more that shall befell, innumerable
Disturbances on earth through female snares."
It was an excellent fancy of the ancients to make woman the incarnation
of original sin,--the tempter and the temptation in one,--a combination
of the apple and the serpent. King David, Herod, and even the terrible
Bluebeard, might have behaved well in a world without women. It is
proverbial that there is no quarrel without a woman in it.
_Aristippus._ Because, as Steele said, there is nothing else worth
quarrelling about.
_Hipparchia._ Admirable! You remind me of the two shepherds in a
pastoral who sing in alternate strains.
"Be mine your tuneful struggle to deride."
You, Diogenes, should recollect that woman is a fact you cannot get rid
of, and that the only remedy for your complaints is to improve her
condition. And you, Aristippus, like a thousand other sentimental
conservatives, cannot hear the suggestion that woman might do something
more in this world than she is now doing without giving tongue at once:
"Woman's sphere is the home,"--"Woman's mission is to be beautiful, to
cheer, and to elevate." Suppose she has no home, and is old and ugly;
what then? I know nothing more cheering and elevating than intelligence
and efficiency; and I have never heard that either was detrimental to
beauty. Is your ideal a woman who is good for nothing?--
"Bred only and completed to the taste
Of lustful appetence, to sing, to dance,
To dress and troll the tongue and roll the eye"?
_Aristippus._ Not at all. I believe in the old Roman notion, that
woman's domestic honor and chief praise is, _Domi mansit, lanam
fecit_,--with the qualification, that _lanam_ shall not mean
worsted-work. I understand the Scriptural word "helpmeet," as applied to
wife, in the New England sense of "help." She should, above all, be a
creature not too bright and good to know how to prepare and serve up
human nature's daily food. I have never seen without emotion the epitaph
placed by a high legal dignitary in a neighboring State on the tomb of
his first wife:--
"An excellent woman and a good cook."
And when I hear an able-bodied woman in easy circumstances speak of
housekeeping as too much for her strength, or "too wearing," I set her
down very low on my list of contemptibles, and ask her, mentally, "What
the devil then are you good for?" But you and your friends, Hipparchia,
would make a world all cubes, parallelopipedons, and pyramids,--an
achromatic world, peopled with wise creatures who could demonstrate the
usefulness of all they did, and the economy of the processes by which
they did it. As there is no place in such a world for women as we know
them, you wish to create Eve over again, or rather to call forth a
female Adam. I object. Man cannot live by pure mathematics alone.
Imagination is a faculty of the mind, as much as reason. Now, women are
the imaginative side of the human race; not only imaginative themselves,
but the cause of imagination in others. I like mountains and clouds,
trees, birds, and flowers,--the raw material of poetry; but to me
handsome women are more pleasant than all of them,--they are little
poems ready made. I like their rustling dresses, their bright, graceful
ways, the "flash of swift white feet" in ball-room; even their roguish
airs and childlike affectations. And if some of them do not trim their
souls quite as much as their gowns, or perhaps venture into society with
minds naked to the verge of indecent ignorance, then I say to these,
"Talk to me only with your eyes,"--and they can be more eloquent than
any Demosthenes of your New England Athens. Women are younger than men,
and nearer to nature; they have more animal life and spirits and glee.
Their lively, frolicsome, sunshiny chatter keeps existence from growing
mouldy and stale. We have it on the authority of the wittiest of
Frenchmen, that for the purposes of pleasant, every-day life,
_L'enjouement vaut mieux que l'esprit_. If I wish to discuss a question
of political economy, or of metaphysics, I can go to men; but the art of
talking the men of to-day have lost. They either lecture, dispute, or
twaddle. A Rabbinical story relates that twelve baskets of chit-chat
fell from heaven, and that Eve secured nine while Adam was picking up
the other three. Since then, Eve seems to have obtained possession of
all.
What do you "earnest women" want? You have your own way in everything. I
cannot take up a paper without reading something about lovely, delicate,
refined females; or an item announcing that some ungallant fellow has
been turned out of an omnibus because he would not offer his seat to an
Irish lady, who had probably twice his muscular power and endurance.
_Hipparchia._ Hotel elegance, railway manners, and penny-a-liner
sentiment are alike contemptible. Do you suppose that any sensible
female cares for those second-hand phrases and vulgar civilities? This
deference you boast of is a mere habit, worn threadbare: the feeling has
died out. What does it really amount to, when, in this city, a woman,
even of my age, cannot go alone to an evening lecture or to the theatre
without the risk of an insult? English and French women have more
liberty of action than we have, although the men do not offer them their
seats on every occasion. I had rather take my chance with the crowd at a
hotel ordinary, and have more independence in daily life. The time will
come, I trust, when women will no longer be contented with the few empty
and exaggerated compliments in which men pay them off,--"Angelic
creatures!" "Poet's theme!" and so on,--stuff that springs from what
Diogenes calls the spooney view of women, and only applicable to the
young and handsome,--a very small minority. It is sad to see the
graceless, the "gone-off," and the downright elderly smirk complacently
at a few phrases which are only aimed at them in derision. The others,
too, one would think, ought to care little for adulation that fades away
with their good looks.
The supremacy of woman in this country is like that of the Mikado in
Japan,--a sovereign sacred and irresponsible, but on condition of
sitting still, and leaving the management of affairs, the real business
of life, to others. It is the same theory of government with which the
constitutionalists tormented the late Louis Philippe,--_Le roi regne et
ne gouverne pas_. He was unwilling to accept such a position, and so am
I. I cannot take a pride in insignificance and uselessness, although I
confess with shame that most women do,--the result of which is, that we
have not the kind of influence we ought to have, and that a real,
hearty, genuine respect for women does not exist. In every man's heart
there lurks a mild contempt for us, because of our ignorance of
business, politics, and practical matters generally outside of the
nursery and the milliner's shop. The best of you look upon us and our
doings as grown people look at pretty children and their plays,--with a
good-natured feeling of superiority, and a smile half pleasure and half
pity. The truth is, that men have always despised us, from the earliest
times. At first, we were mere slaves and drudges; then, playthings, if
handsome and lively,--something to be brought on with the wine at a
feast. Chivalry, which in newspaper rhetoric means devotion to women and
respect, knew little of either, when it was alive and vigorous. The
_droits de bottage et de cuissage_ alone are enough to prove that. In
our times, indeed, the savage view of woman as a slave has been softened
by civilization into housekeeper and nurse; but it still lingers in
every man's feelings. Woman's mission in his eyes is simply babies; to
which is superadded the duty of making the father comfortable. But the
high prices of living are teaching people who have never heard of
Malthus or of Mill the necessity of celibacy; and women must find
something else to do than to rock a cradle.
_Diogenes._ Yes, unlimited issues on an insufficient capital lead to
ruin. That ivy clinging to the oak view of the woman question still
finds a place in print; but in practice I think the oaks are getting
rather tired of it They find that the graceful wreaths of the ivy draw
heavily upon their substance, and they would prefer a more
self-sustaining simile.
_Hipparchia._ So much the better. I desire to see females support
themselves.
_Aristippus._ Don't say female again, Hipparchia! I hate the word used
in that sense, as much as Swift hated the word _bowels_. It is a term of
natural history. A mare is a female; so is a cow, and so is a female
dog. It would be curious to analyze the feeling that led euphuistic
donkeys to choose it as a compromise word between lady and woman.
_Hipparchia._ They must have been male donkeys. All the terms of
reproach you apply to us when you forget your chivalry manners, such as
_witch_, _shrew_, _termagant_, _slut_, and so on, were all originally
made by men for men,--at least so Archdeacon Trench tells us. You have
gradually shuffled them off upon us; and worse yet, when you wish to
describe in two words a pompous, prosing, dull-witted man, you call him
an old woman. This is not just. Old women always have some imagination;
and their gossip does not pretend to be the highest wisdom, which makes
a great difference.
_Diogenes._ True! The elderly male fossil of the Silurian age,--the age
of mollusks,--whose _habitat_ is some still-water club, or public
reading-room, where he babbles of the morning's news, is a thousand
times more tiresome than any loquacious elderly lady. We excel in this
as in everything. We beat you at your own weapons. Sewing seems to be
instinctive with women; yet tailors tell me that they are obliged to
give out their best work to men.
_Hipparchia._ Dress and want of method are two radical weaknesses women
must extirpate if they ever hope to rise from their present secondary
position. Their dress is the outward and visible sign of it,--the livery
of their lower condition. Everything about it is absurd, from the
spurious waterfall pinned to the back of their heads down to the train
that sweeps the muddy pavement. Their hair is infested with beads, bits
of lace and of ribbons, or mock jewelry. A bonnet is an epitome of
fag-ends. The poor crazy creatures in the asylum, who pick up any rag,
or wisp of straw, or scrap of tin, they may find, and wear it proudly
upon their frocks, are not a whit more absurd.
_Diogenes._ Women go to and fro like that funny little crab we saw
lately in Aquaria, who adorns his head and shoulders with bits of
sea-weed, or any other stuff within his reach, and paddles about his
tank self-satisfied and ridiculous. Women must and will trim, as spiders
spin webs, and bees make honeycombs. They even trim bathing-dresses: one
would think that nothing could redeem them from their hideousness. But
they obey a law of their being. The special aptitudes of the lower
animals are brought into play when no other reason can be given than the
necessity for discharging an accumulation of the inward energy,--a
saying of the physico-psychologists that is verified in this instance.
_Hipparchia._ A man's raiment is of plain color and of good, strong
material,--ugly if you please, but durable and serviceable; but a woman
puts on textures that cost hundreds of dollars and that a drop of water
may ruin. Then fashions change daily. The bonnet idolized yesterday is
offered up without a sigh if it refuses to adopt the new shape,--cast
into the flames, or thrown to wild Biddies to be worn to pieces.
_Diogenes._ The great M. Comte, with whose works you, Hipparchia, are no
doubt familiar, divides philosophy into the three stages of Theological,
Metaphysical, and Positive. This general theorem he completes by
particular applications,--to costume among others. In this he
distinguishes the three stages of Tattooing (including paint), Frippery,
and Clothes. Man has reached the third stage, he says; woman is in the
second, and not entirely out of the first.
_Hipparchia._ Everything about a woman's dress is uncomfortable.
Everything is pinned on and false. There is nothing real but the trouble
and the expense; and women whose love of appearances exceeds their
incomes must work hard with their own needles. But they undergo it all
without a murmur,--I may say, with pleasure.
_Diogenes._ "For 't is their nature to," as I remarked just now. Women
are compounds of plain-sewing and make-believe, daughters of Sham and of
Hem. I consider dress an epidemic disease,--a moral cholera that
originates in the worst quarters of Paris. Every ship that comes from
those regions is infected with French _trollopism_, and should be
quarantined and fumigated until every trace of the contagious novelty
has been expurgated.
_Hipparchia._ Could a stranger, ignorant of our customs, suppose it
possible that beings capable of reason would habitually go out of a
winter evening less clad by half than during the day? I say nothing of
the propriety or good taste of this fashion. When Eve ate of the apple,
she knew she was naked. I have often thought, as I looked at her dancing
daughters, that another bite would be of service to them: it might open
their eyes to their uncovered condition.
_Diogenes._ Let us put that reform down among those we mean to carry out
last; unless, indeed, the neck of age commits the fault, then, I
confess, I should like to complain to the Board of Health and have the
nuisance abated. There is nothing sadder than to look at dressy old
things, who have reached the frozen latitudes beyond fifty, and who
persist in appearing in the airy costume of the tropics. They appear to
think, as Goldsmith says, that they can conceal their age by exposing
their persons.
_Hipparchia._ Their case is hopeless, I fear: we must teach sounder
ideas on all these subjects to the young.
_Aristippus._ You have tried it already. Did not a wise woman come from
the West preaching to her sisters that one of their lost rights was, to
dress like men? What did Bloomerism amount to? A few forlorn creatures
shortened their petticoats a few inches, adopted most of the ugly in a
man's attire with none of the practical, and retained the follies of a
woman's dress without the taste. Their shoes were neither stouter nor
larger. They wore a thing on their heads more unsightly than a bonnet,
and no better a protection against sun or rain. They made their jackets
and their trouserettes of the same flimsy stuffs as before, and
sprinkled an unusual quantity of incongruous and unsuitable trimmings
over all. Luckily they have disappeared, and now are probably devoting
their energies to some other right that does less violence to woman's
nature. Do you suppose that you will be listened to when you preach from
the text, "Take no thought for your body what ye shall put on"? How many
lady free-thinkers in fashionable doctrines do you know? I see a
superfluous ribbon even in your cap, Hipparchia; and, if I mistake not,
your magisterial skirts are expanded by a wirework cage.
_Diogenes._ Men say knowledge is power; women think dress is power. Look
at a woman who is certain that she is well dressed,--"the correct
thing,"--how she walks along with stately steps, head well up, parasol
held with two fingers at the present, and skirts expanding luxuriantly
behind her,--proud, self-satisfied, conscious of being stared at and
admired. She feels like the just man made perfect,--who knows that he
has done his duty, and that the by-standers also know it and respect him
for it. Dress overgrows and smothers every other feeling in a woman's
heart. Love, marriage, children, religion, the death of friends, are
regarded as affording new and various opportunities for dress. The
becoming is the greatest good. For finery and fashion women risk
comfort, health, life, even reputation. What matter ignorance,
ill-breeding, ill-nature, if she dress well? A camel's-hair shawl, like
charity, will cover a multitude of sins. On the other hand, though she
speak French and German, and understand all onomies and ologies, and the
mysteries of housekeeping, and is treasurer of Dorcas societies,
_creches_, and dispensaries, and have not style, it profiteth her
nothing. On this great question women never have a misgiving. You may
find creatures so lost as to be castaways from fashion, but they believe
in it. The scepticism of the age has left this subject untouched.
_Hipparchia._ The same amount of thought and labor applied to useful
subjects would make them all that I desire them to be. A thorough reform
in the education of woman is necessary for this. What is their education
now? Even the girls of the richer class get next to none. They are
taught to say "How d' ye do" in two languages, and to irritate the
nervous system of their relations for some hours every day with a
piano,--the most gigantic, useless, and expensive instrument of torture
ever invented. These for serious work. A little drawing, worsted-work,
and catechism are added as accomplishments; and then at eighteen--the
age when a boy really begins his training--their education is completed,
they are told; and they are turned into the world to devote their time
and talents to trimmings, novels, and idle tittle-tattle.
_Aristippus._ There can be no objection to good gossip, or even to a
little scandal, when its teeth have been drawn. If the noblest study of
mankind is man, surely his sayings and doings cannot be improper
subjects for conversation.
_Hipparchia._ Education is not the teaching of this thing or that. It is
the training of the mind for the work of daily life. The few women of
fortune who pride themselves on their cleverness get a parrot-like
acquaintance with the contents of books, enunciate charmingly, and are
very learned on the syntax and spelling of an invitation to dinner; but
of the great topics of the day, political, social, economical,
financial, scientific, mechanical, theological, they are utterly
ignorant and careless. I know some brilliant exceptions, who show what
women might be if they chose.
The consequence of no education, no thought, no practical experiences,
and no real responsibility is, that, whenever moral questions are
disconnected with feeling, a woman's moral standard is lower than a
man's. Truth, rare in both sexes, is very rare in women; not that they
love truth less, but that usually they love exaggeration more,--truth is
so often commonplace and tiresome; they dress it up to hide its
nakedness.
_Aristippus._ What does it matter? We all understand them when they say
"Splendid!" "Shocking!" "Awful!" "Glorious!" in describing a walk or a
tea-party. We believe in the vivacity of their impressions, if not in
the accuracy of the terms they use. And besides, there are many things
pleasant to listen to, even though we know them to be false.
"When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies."
Women have such a wonderful power of secreting adjectives that they
cannot speak the truth when they try. There is no moral obliquity in the
case. It is psychical incapacity.
_Hipparchia._ Ambition in a man is the resolution to become powerful,
useful, great, rich. A woman means by ambition the desire to shine in
the society she belongs to, or perhaps to work her way into a set she
considers better. And honor and virtue are, I think, used in a different
sense.
_Diogenes._ Yes; the meaning is very much "localized."
_Hipparchia._ I admit that women have caught from the men a little of
the dissatisfied, dyspeptic philosophy of this generation. But the men
do not know what they want, and the ideas of the women are still more
vague. They only know that they would like a change of some kind. Their
imaginations are not contented with the commonplaces of every-day life.
They long for more excitement, and to get it are willing, as Punch has
it,
"To do or suffer ere they die
They know not what, they care not why."
But the "mission" must be exotic, meteoric, dazzling. Home missions
present as little attraction as bonnets that do not come from Paris. The
little opportunities for doing good that spring up about their feet are
neglected. I know so many of those gifted, enthusiastic transcendental
natures, at least in their own opinion, who cannot condescend to the
meaner duties of life,--such as being faithful to their husbands, taking
care of their children, and making themselves agreeable to their
relatives.
Then really "earnest" women, who mean to be useful to their
fellow-creatures, often do as much harm as good for the want of
practical sense. Their dear little foundlings all die of measles,
diphtheria, or scarlet-fever. They give their pet paupers a regular
allowance, which supplies them bountifully with tobacco and grog. They
quack pauperism, and increase the malady instead of curing it, because
impulses of weakness miscalled feelings are consulted, instead of the
hard, dry details of eleemosynary science; for science it is,--a branch
of political economy. Benevolence like this is only another form of the
love for excitement. Women will never take the trouble to consider the
principle of things.
_Diogenes._ I have read somewhere a definition of woman,--"An
unreasoning animal that pokes the fire on top."
_Aristippus._ Diogenes was converted to this hopeless condition of
infidelity by a little French treatise, _Le Mal qu'on dit des Femmes_. I
give him over to it. His doctrine, like unwholesome food, carries its
punishment with it. But you, Hipparchia, have pulled woman to pieces for
a purpose; and I should like to know on what practicable principle you
propose to make her over again.
_Hipparchia._ Some one said wittily,--I think it was Mrs. Howe,--"Man
carves his destiny; woman is helped to hers." Women have been kept so
long in this state of dependence, that their characters have become
dwarfed. The thirst for excitement that drives them restless from one
amusement to another, and which finds relief in the extravagances of
dress,--this passionate devotion to the frivolous and the
absurd,--spring from the want of a reasonable employment for mind and
body. My great principle is to exchange their passive condition for an
active one. I would establish schools, where girls may receive a
thorough education, such as is given to boys. In these schools, I should
insist upon mathematical training as earnestly as Plato in his Republic.
Women must be made to feel the magical power that numbers have in
regulating the mind. Once get them really to believe that twice two make
four, and can never make more or less,--once bring them to feel that a
foot always means twelve inches, and that correct measurement is
indispensable, even for seamstresses and cooks,--and the spirit of
accuracy which now passes all their understanding will be with them and
remain with them forever. Next, I should insist that the employments now
monopolized by men should be thrown open to women. Why should we be
excluded from all the well-paid trades and professions? Why should we
not hold office, "commissioned, paid, and uniformed by the state"? Do
you think it fair to limit us to scrubbing and plain-sewing as the only
means of earning a livelihood?
_Aristippus._ I admit that many occupations for which women are
admirably calculated are carried on by men, and I hope that some day a
more manly public opinion will make all such persons as ridiculous as a
male seamstress is now. I do not envy the feelings of men who can
invent, manufacture or sell baby-jumpers, dress elevators, hoop-skirts,
or those cosmetics I see "indorsed by pure and high-toned females." But
when you and your friend seek the positions of "night-patrols or
inspectors of police," you run into ultraism, the parent of all _isms_;
but, luckily a parent like Saturn, who destroys its offspring.
_Hipparchia._ Marriage is now to women what all trades and professions
are to men. Spinsters are supposed to have no chance in life,--neither
liberty of action nor of ideas. Hence, rather than not marry at all, a
woman will marry anybody; and, like Shenstone's Gratia,
"Choose to attend a monkey here
Before an ape below."
This prejudice is almost as strong and as absurd as the Mormon notion
that a woman cannot get to heaven unless she is sealed to some saint. It
has driven hundreds of women, who might have been happy single, into a
slavery for life from which there is no relief. A husband, if he find
that the connubial paradise he dreamed of turns out to be the other
place, has the world all before him where to choose; but the lady is
"cabined, cribbed,--confined" possibly: it is in the course of things.
But when new fields of employment are thrown open to women, those who
cannot marry, or who do not wish to marry, will lead useful and pleasant
lives, and cease to be "superfluous existences,--inartistic figures,
crowding the canvas of life without adequate effect." But all our
reforms centre in one great point, on which our eyes are hopefully
fixed,--I mean, the right to vote. Give women a vote, and at once they
will take a direct interest in the business of life. They will have
something to think of, and something to do. It will be the best form of
education. Mr. Lecky, in his interesting, though perhaps rather windy,
"History of Rationalism," has a passage that expresses my opinion and my
hope. "If the suffrage should ever be granted to women, it would
probably, after two or three generations, effect a complete revolution
in their habits of thought, which, by acting upon the first period of
education, would influence the whole course of opinion." Mr. Mill, it is
well known, is warmly in favor of it. He has been abundantly sneered at
in England for this crotchet, as they call it,--although it is not easy
to see why it should be ridiculous for women to vote in a country
governed by a queen.
_Aristippus._ In this I am with you. I have always thought it absurd
that the ignorant Irishman who drives the carriage of a rich widow
should have a voice in the government of the country, and that the
employer, whose money enables him to live, should have none. In Austria,
women who hold real property in their own right have the right to vote.
I would go a step further, and give the suffrage to every independent,
self-supporting widow or single woman. Wives I would exclude,--not from
the fear of adding to the stock subjects of domestic disputation,--the
usual reason given,--but because they are not independent. The same
reason should apply to daughters residing under the paternal roof. And,
in all fairness, I would extend my rule to men. I would make, not a
property, but an independence qualification. A man who lives on a dollar
a day, if he owns it or earns it, should vote; but the son who depends
upon a rich father for support, and the pauper who lives upon public
charity, should not vote. Socially, both are minors. We might even say,
that, financially, both are unweaned. Why should they not be minors
politically? This plan would really be manhood suffrage.
_Hipparchia._ Justice and wisdom are both upon our side. We must
eventually succeed; and then the emancipation of woman will be complete,
and her equality with man established. The resolution passed in our
Convention, "that a just government and a true church are alike opposed
to class and caste, whether the privileged order be feudal baron,
British lord, or American white male," ought to be true, and will be
true at a future day.
_Diogenes._ Vigorously expressed! The feudal baron, indeed, is an
extinct species, and was hardly worth mentioning, unless to adorn your
rhetoric and point your resolution. But let me tell you that the white
male can show an older and a better patent of nobility than the British
lord with whom you associate him. Is it not recorded in Genesis, that
Adam was created first, and Eve from him?--a copy only, you observe; and
a copy never comes up to the original. As Dryden has it:--
"He to God's image, she to his, was made;
So farther from the fount the stream at random strayed."
And in the same inspired history we read: "Thy desire shall be to thy
husband, and he shall rule over thee."
_Hipparchia._ Nonsense! I thought that the argument from Scripture had
died out with slavery polemics. You forget that every Eve has not an
Adam. On what ground do you ask a single woman to occupy an inferior
position? I admit that the married may sometimes do so with propriety.
_Aristippus._ On the ground of an inferiority, and of infirmities
absolutely incurable. Between the female man of your theories and the
real male man there is a great gulf you cannot pass over. A negro is a
man,--we can imagine him a brother; but no effort of philanthropic
self-abnegation can work the same miracle for a woman. When you preach
the natural equality of the sexes, you injure your cause. The facts are
too strong and too visible for you. A man can rest his claim to
superiority on brute force, if on nothing else; and force is, after all,
the ultimate basis of all government. I do not mean to underrate the
cleverness of women. The first man was overreached by Eve; and the last
woman will probably turn the head of the laggard who brings up the rear
of the human race. If a wife is only half of the scissors, as Franklin
suggests, she is often the half with the point. But feminine ability is
not of the ruling kind. You dance, for instance, better than men, if the
gymnastic capers of acrobats and tumblers can be called dancing at all;
but you cannot wield a sledge-hammer as vigorously, and your excellent
performances, numerous in literature, rarer in art, and still more rare
in science, seem to me to be mostly of the dancing rather than of the
sledge-hammer order.
But success would be your ruin. If you could establish the complete
equality you long for, your relative inferiority would become so
manifest as to be humiliating. In most of the vocations of men, women
would be as ridiculous, morally, as they are physically in men's
clothes. If a woman is nothing but a smaller man, the savage contempt
for the sex is logical. Place two races together, of which the one is
weaker, less energetic, less pugnacious than the other; and the result
will inevitably be that the strong and the fierce will make the mild and
the feeble do all their hard work. The barbarous ages would return
again. We should sit by, like the Indian, smoking the pipe of laziness,
while you were furnishing us with board, lodging, clothes, and tobacco.
The Amazons, the earliest known advocates of women's rights, saw this
point clearly; and consequently excluded men altogether from their
communities, except at their yearly camp-meetings. Men worship women for
their gentleness, affection, imagination, refinement,--for the fond,
cosey, nestling way they have with them,--for their femininity (in one
awkward word), the contrast and complement to the masculine character.
There is a sex in soul quite as much as in body. In the mythology, no
god falls in love with Minerva. A mannish woman only attracts a feminine
man. A woman's power lies in her petticoats, as Samson's strength lay in
his hair. Cut them off, and you leave her at the mercy of every brutal
Philistine, who now dares not be rude to her because she is sacred. Do
you not see that, instead of gaining something, you will lose all?--sink
into fifth-rate mannikins, with fewer opportunities,--boys in
petticoats?
_Diogenes._ And we be obliged to set our amorous eclogues to the tune of
_Formosus Pastor Corydon_?
_Aristippus._ I might quote a suggestive remark from Pepys's Diary,
namely, that the only female animal which gives a name to both sexes is
the goose. But, seriously, your chances of success are not
brilliant,--at least for the present. There are two kinds of women, both
of them excellent; but almost as distinct as diamonds and black lead,
which are both pure carbon;--one is made to be admired, the other to be
useful. The girl who wakes the poet's sigh is a very different creature
from the girl who makes his soup. You have read of the loves of the
Angels with the daughters of the Antediluvians. I sometimes think that
the diamonds can claim descent from the high-bred race that sprang from
those aristocratic relations. The late Monsieur Balzac, who handled this
subject with ingenuity, was struck by this difference. He divided woman
into two classes: woman, and the female of the order Mammalia, genus
Bimanis, species Homo. In his essays he overlooks altogether the second
class. But in it you must seek your disciples. The heaven-descended
sisters will not go with you. You may try to make them useful and
self-supporting; but you will lose your pains. They have only to show
themselves, to receive the attention and applause that a man of genius
must work a lifetime to earn. Their world is at their feet. Wealth,
power, gratified vanity, are theirs without an effort. Madame de Stael
said she would willingly give all her fame for one season of the reign
of a youthful beauty. She, it is true, was a woman; but David Hume, a
keen observer, and moderate in his statements, noticed that even a
"little miss, dressed in a new gown for a dancing-school ball, receives
as complete enjoyment as the greatest orator who triumphs in the
splendor of his eloquence, while he governs the passions and resolutions
of a numerous assembly." You ask them to give up these pleasures and
these triumphs, and to abdicate their thrones,--to become implements
instead of ornaments, and to help to bring down the high price of labor
in the present scarcity of laborers; and you offer them in exchange the
right to wear trousers, to drive an omnibus, or to wear a policeman's
uniform! Do you think that they will listen to you? No,--not even the
respectable members of the second class. The Cinderellas with no glass
slippers and no protecting fairy might join with you, if they did not
look up to the first class as their rulers and models. They feel
instinctively that the glory of the Angelidae illuminates even them; and
they all, or almost all, have a faint yet abiding and comforting hope
that some unheard-of miracle, or yet undiscovered cosmetic, may place
them among the blessed.
You cannot, my dear Hipparchia, by any process of teaching, not even by
magazine-articles, make a canary-bird into a useful barn-door fowl. It
will wear yellow feathers, and it will sing and nibble at sugar.