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COMMON SENSE ABOUT WOMEN
BY
THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
BOSTON
LEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK
CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM
1882
COPYRIGHT, 1881,
BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON.
_All rights reserved._
=To=
=My Little Daughter Margaret.=
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAGE
=Physiology= 5
I. TOO MUCH NATURAL HISTORY 7
II. DARWIN, HUXLEY, AND BUCKLE 11
III. WHICH IS THE STRONGER? 16
IV. THE SPIRIT OF SMALL TYRANNY 18
V. “THE NOBLE SEX” 21
VI. PHYSIOLOGICAL CROAKING 24
VII. THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR GRANDMOTHERS 28
VIII. THE PHYSIQUE OF AMERICAN WOMEN 33
IX. “VERY MUCH FATIGUED” 37
X. THE LIMITATIONS OF SEX 40
=Temperament= 43
XI. THE INVISIBLE LADY 45
XII. SACRED OBSCURITY 49
XIII. “OUR TRIALS” 52
XIV. VIRTUES IN COMMON 55
XV. INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 60
XVI. ANGELIC SUPERIORITY 63
XVII. VICARIOUS HONORS 66
XVIII. THE GOSPEL OF HUMILIATION 69
XIX. “CELERY AND CHERUBS” 73
XX. THE NEED OF CAVALRY 77
XXI. “THE REASON FIRM, THE TEMPERATE WILL” 80
XXII. “ALLURES TO BRIGHTER WORLDS, AND LEADS THE WAY” 83
=The Home= 87
XXIII. WANTED—HOMES 89
XXIV. THE ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION 93
XXV. THE LOW-WATER MARK 96
XXVI. “OBEY” 99
XXVII. WOMAN IN THE CHRYSALIS 103
XXVIII. TWO AND TWO 106
XXIX. A MODEL HOUSEHOLD 109
XXX. A SAFEGUARD FOR THE FAMILY 112
XXXI. WOMEN AS ECONOMISTS 116
XXXII. GREATER INCLUDES LESS 120
XXXIII. A CO-PARTNERSHIP 123
XXXIV. “ONE RESPONSIBLE HEAD” 127
XXXV. ASKING FOR MONEY 131
XXXVI. WOMANHOOD AND MOTHERHOOD 135
XXXVII. A GERMAN POINT OF VIEW 139
XXXVIII. CHILDLESS WOMEN 142
XXXIX. THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO MOTHERS 145
=Society= 149
XL. FOAM AND CURRENT 151
XLI. “IN SOCIETY” 155
XLII. THE BATTLE OF THE CARDS 159
XLIII. SOME WORKING-WOMEN 163
XLIV. THE EMPIRE OF MANNERS 167
XLV. “GIRLSTEROUSNESS” 171
XLVI. ARE WOMEN NATURAL ARISTOCRATS? 175
XLVII. MRS. BLANK’S DAUGHTERS 178
XLVIII. THE EUROPEAN PLAN 181
XLIX. “FEATHERSES” 185
L. SOME MAN-MILLINERY 189
LI. SUBLIME PRINCES IN DISTRESS 192
=Education= 197
LII. “EXPERIMENTS” 199
LIII. INTELLECTUAL CINDERELLAS 203
LIV. FOREIGN EDUCATION 207
LV. TEACHING THE TEACHERS 210
LVI. “CUPID-AND-PSYCHOLOGY” 213
LVII. MEDICAL SCIENCE FOR WOMEN 216
LVIII. SEWING IN SCHOOLS 219
LIX. CASH PREMIUMS FOR STUDY 223
LX. MENTAL HORTICULTURE 226
=Employment= 231
LXI. “SEXUAL DIFFERENCE OF EMPLOYMENT” 233
LXII. THE USE OF ONE’S FEET 237
LXIII. MISS INGELOW’S PROBLEM 240
LXIV. SELF-SUPPORT 245
LXV. SELF-SUPPORTING WIVES 248
LXVI. THE PROBLEM OF WAGES 251
LXVII. THOROUGH 255
LXVIII. LITERARY ASPIRANTS 259
LXIX. “THE CAREER OF LETTERS” 263
LXX. TALKING AND TAKING 266
LXXI. HOW TO SPEAK IN PUBLIC 269
=Principles of Government= 273
LXXII. WE THE PEOPLE 275
LXXIII. THE USE OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 278
LXXIV. THE TRADITIONS OF THE FATHERS 281
LXXV. SOME OLD-FASHIONED PRINCIPLES 285
LXXVI. FOUNDED ON A ROCK 288
LXXVII. “THE GOOD OF THE GOVERNED” 292
LXXVIII. RULING AT SECOND-HAND 296
LXXIX. “TOO MANY VOTERS ALREADY” 299
=Suffrage= 303
LXXX. DRAWING THE LINE 305
LXXXI. FOR SELF-PROTECTION 309
LXXXII. WOMANLY STATESMANSHIP 312
LXXXIII. TOO MUCH PREDICTION 316
LXXXIV. FIRST-CLASS CARRIAGES 320
LXXXV. EDUCATION VIA SUFFRAGE 324
LXXXVI. “OFF WITH HER HEAD!” 328
LXXXVII. FOLLOW YOUR LEADERS 331
LXXXVIII. HOW TO MAKE WOMEN UNDERSTAND POLITICS. 335
LXXXIX. “INFERIOR TO MAN, AND NEAR TO ANGELS” 339
=Objections to Suffrage= 343
XC. THE FACT OF SEX 345
XCI. HOW WILL IT RESULT? 349
XCII. “I HAVE ALL THE RIGHTS I WANT” 352
XCIII. “SENSE ENOUGH TO VOTE” 356
XCIV. AN INFELICITOUS EPITHET 359
XCV. THE ROB ROY THEORY 363
XCVI. THE VOTES OF NON-COMBATANTS 368
XCVII. “MANNERS REPEAL LAWS” 372
XCVIII. KILKENNY ARGUMENTS 375
XCIX. WOMEN AND PRIESTS 379
C. THE ROMAN CATHOLIC BUGBEAR 382
CI. DANGEROUS VOTERS 386
CII. HOW WOMEN WILL LEGISLATE 389
CIII. WARNED IN TIME 393
CIV. INDIVIDUALS VS. CLASSES 396
CV. DEFEATS BEFORE VICTORIES 400
PHYSIOLOGY.
“Allein, bevor und nachdem man Mutter ist, ist Man ein Mensch; die
mütterliche Bestimmung aber, oder gar die eheliche, kann nicht die
menschliche überwiegen oder ersetzen, sondern sie muss das Mittel, nicht
der Zweck derselben sein.”— J.P.F. RICHTER: _Levana_, § 89.
“But, before and after being a mother, one is a human being; and neither
the motherly nor the wifely destination can overbalance or replace the
human, but must become its means, not its end.”
COMMON SENSE ABOUT WOMEN.
I.
TOO MUCH NATURAL HISTORY.
Lord Melbourne, speaking of the fine ladies in London who were fond of
talking about their ailments, used to complain that they gave him too
much of their natural history. There are a good many writers—usually
men—who, with the best intentions, discuss woman as if she had merely a
physical organization, and as if she existed only for one object, the
production and rearing of children. Against this some protest may well
be made.
Doubtless there are few things more important to a community than the
health of its women. The Sandwich-Island proverb says:—
“If strong is the frame of the mother,
The son will give laws to the people.”
And, in nations where all men give laws, all men need mothers of strong
frames.
Moreover, there is no harm in admitting that all the rules of
organization are imperative; that soul and body, whether of man or
woman, are made in harmony, so that each part of our nature must accept
the limitations of the other. A man’s soul may yearn to the stars; but
so long as the body cannot jump so high, he must accept the body’s veto.
It is the same with any veto interposed in advance by the physical
structure of woman. Nobody objects to this general principle. It is only
when clerical gentlemen or physiological gentlemen undertake to go a
step farther, and put in that veto on their own responsibility, that it
is necessary to say, “Hands off, gentlemen! Precisely because women are
women, they, not you, are to settle that question.”
One or two points are clear. Every specialist is liable to overrate his
own specialty; and the man who thinks of woman only as a wife and mother
is apt to forget, that, before she was either of these, she was a human
being. “Women, as such,” says an able writer, “are constituted for
purposes of maternity and the continuation of mankind.” Undoubtedly, and
so were men, as such, constituted for paternity. But very much depends
on what relative importance we assign to the phrase, “as such.” Even an
essay so careful, so moderate, and so free from coarseness, as that here
quoted, suggests, after all, a slight one-sidedness,—perhaps a natural
re-action from the one-sidedness of those injudicious reformers who
allow themselves to speak slightingly of “the merely animal function of
child-bearing.” Higher than either—wiser than both put together—is that
noble statement with which Jean Paul begins his fine essay on the
education of girls in “Levana.” “Before being a wife or mother, one is a
human being; and neither motherly nor wifely destination can overbalance
or replace the human, but must become its means, not end. As above the
poet, the painter, or the hero, so above the mother, does the human
being rise pre-eminent.”
Here is sure anchorage. We can hold to this. And, fortunately, all the
analogies of nature sustain this position. Throughout nature the laws of
sex rule everywhere; but they rule a kingdom of their own, always
subordinate to the greater kingdom of the vital functions. Every
creature, male or female, finds in its sexual relations only a
subordinate part of its existence. The need of food, the need of
exercise, the joy of living, these come first, and absorb the bulk of
its life, whether the individual be male or female. This _Antiope_
butterfly, that flits at this moment past my window,—the first of the
season,—spends almost all its existence in a form where the distinction
of sex lies dormant: a few days, I might almost say a few hours,
comprise its whole sexual consciousness, and the majority of its race
die before reaching that epoch. The law of sex is written absolutely
through the whole insect world. Yet everywhere it is written as a
secondary and subordinate law. The life which is common to the sexes is
the principal life; the life which each sex leads, “as such,” is a minor
and subordinate thing.
The same rule pervades nature. Two riders pass down the street before my
window. One rides a horse, the other a mare. The animals were perhaps
foaled in the same stable, of the same progenitors. They have been
reared alike, fed alike, trained alike, ridden alike; they need the same
exercise, the same grooming; nine tenths of their existence are the
same, and only the other tenth is different. Their whole organization is
marked by the distinction of sex: but, though the marking is
ineffaceable, the distinction is not the first or most important fact.
If this be true of the lower animals, it is far more true of the higher.
The mental and moral laws of the universe touch us first and chiefly as
human beings. We eat our breakfasts as human beings, not as men and
women; and it is the same with nine tenths of our interests and duties
in life. In legislating or philosophizing for woman, we must neither
forget that she has an organization distinct from that of man, nor must
we exaggerate the fact. Not “first the womanly and then the human,” but
first the human and then the womanly, is to be the order of her
training.
II.
DARWIN, HUXLEY, AND BUCKLE.
When any woman, old or young, asks the question, Which among all modern
books ought I to read first? the answer is plain. She should read
Buckle’s lecture before the Royal Institution upon “The Influence of
Woman on the Progress of Knowledge.” It is one of two papers contained
in a thin volume called “Essays by Henry Thomas Buckle.” As a means
whereby a woman may become convinced that her sex has a place in the
intellectual universe, this little essay is almost indispensable.
Nothing else takes its place.
Darwin and Huxley seem to make woman simply a lesser man, weaker in body
and mind,—an affectionate and docile animal, of inferior grade. That
there is any aim in the distinction of the sexes, beyond the
perpetuation of the race, is nowhere recognized by them, so far as I
know. That there is any thing in the intellectual sphere to correspond
to the physical difference; that here also the sexes are equal yet
diverse, and the natural completion and complement of the other,—this
neither Huxley nor Darwin explicitly recognizes. And with the utmost
admiration for their great teachings in other ways, I must think that
here they are open to the suspicion of narrowness.
Huxley wrote in “The Reader,” in 1864, a short paper called
“Emancipation—Black and White,” in which, while taking generous ground
in behalf of the legal and political position of woman, he yet does it
pityingly, _de haut en bas_, as for a creature hopelessly inferior, and
so heavily weighted already by her sex, that she should be spared all
further trials. Speaking through an imaginary critic, who seems to
represent himself, he denies “even the natural equality of the sexes,”
and declares “that in every excellent character, whether mental or
physical, the average woman is inferior to the average man, in the sense
of having that character less in quantity and lower in quality.” Finally
he goes so far as “to defend the startling paradox that even in physical
beauty, man is the superior.” He admits that for a brief period of early
youth the case may be doubtful, but claims that after thirty the
superior beauty of man is unquestionable. Thus reasons Huxley; the whole
essay being included in his volume of “Lay Sermons, Addresses, and
Reviews.”[1]
Footnote 1:
Pp. 22, 23, Am. ed.
Darwin’s best statements on the subject may be found in his “Descent of
Man.”[2] He is, as usual, more moderate and guarded than Huxley. He
says, for instance: “It is generally admitted that with women the powers
of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more
strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are
characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower
state of civilization.” Then he passes to the usual assertion that man
has thus far attained to a higher eminence than woman. “If two lists
were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting,
sculpture, music,—comprising composition and performance,—history,
science, and philosophy, with half a dozen names under each subject, the
two lists would not bear comparison.” But the obvious answer, that
nearly every name on his list, upon the masculine side, would probably
be taken from periods when woman was excluded from any fair
competition,—this he does not seem to recognize at all. Darwin, of all
men, must admit that superior merit generally arrives later, not
earlier, on the scene; and the question for him to answer is, not
whether woman equalled man in the first stages of the intellectual
“struggle for life,” but whether she is not gaining on him now.@
Footnote 2:
II., 311, Am. Ed.
If, in spite of man’s enormous advantage in the start, woman has already
overtaken his very best performances in several of the highest
intellectual departments,—as, for instance, prose fiction and dramatic
representation,—then it is mere dogmatism in Mr. Darwin to deny that she
may yet do the same in other departments. We in this generation have
actually seen this success achieved by Rachel and Ristori in the one
art, by “George Sand” and “George Eliot” in the other. Woman is, then,
visibly gaining on man, in the sphere of intellect; and, if so, Mr.
Darwin, at least, must accept the inevitable inference.
But this is arguing the question on the superficial facts merely. Buckle
goes deeper, and looks to principles. That superior quickness of women,
which Darwin dismisses so lightly as something belonging to savage
epochs, is to Buckle the sign of a quality which he holds essential, not
only to literature and art, but to science itself. Go among ignorant
women, he says, and you will find them more quick and intelligent than
equally ignorant men. A woman will usually tell you the way in the
street more readily than a man can; a woman can always understand a
foreigner more easily; and Dr. Currie says in his letters, that when a
laborer and his wife came to consult him, he always got all the
information from the wife. Buckle illustrates this at some length, and
points out that a woman’s mind is by its nature deductive and quick; a
man’s mind, inductive and slow; that each has its value, and that
science profoundly needs both.
“I will endeavor,” he says, “to establish two propositions. First, that
women naturally prefer the deductive method to the inductive. Secondly,
that women, by encouraging in men deductive habits of thought, have
rendered an immense though unconscious service to the progress of
science, by preventing scientific investigators from being as
exclusively inductive as they would otherwise be.”
Then he shows that the most important scientific discoveries of modern
times—as of the law of gravitation by Newton, the law of the forms of
crystals by Haüy, and the metamorphosis of plants by Goethe—were all
essentially the results of that _a priori_ or deductive method, “which,
during the last two centuries, Englishmen have unwisely despised.” They
were all the work, in a manner, of the imagination,—of the intuitive or
womanly quality of mind. And nothing can be finer or truer than the
words in which Buckle predicts the benefits that are to come from the
intellectual union of the sexes for the work of the future. “In that
field which we and our posterity have yet to traverse, I firmly believe
that the imagination will effect quite as much as the understanding. Our
poetry will have to re-enforce our logic, and we must feel quite as much
as we must argue. Let us, then, hope that the imaginative and emotional
minds of one sex will continue to accelerate the great progress by
acting upon and improving the colder and harder minds of the other sex.
By this coalition, by this union of different faculties, different
tastes, and different methods, we shall go on our way with the greater
ease.”
III.
WHICH IS THE STRONGER?
What is strength,—the brute hardness of iron, or the more delicate
strength of steel? Which is the stronger,—the physical frame that can
strike the harder blow, or that which can endure the greater strain and
yet last longer? “Man can lift a heavier weight,” says a writer on
physiology, “but woman can watch more enduringly at the bedside of her
sick child.” The strain upon the system of all women who have borne and
reared children is as great in its way as that upon the system of the
carpenter or the woodchopper; and the power to endure it is as properly
to be called strength.
Again, which is the stronger in the domain of will,—the man who carries
his points by energy and command, or the woman who carries hers by
patience and persuasion? the man in the household who leads and decides,
or the woman who foresees, guards, manages? the mother of the family,
who puts the commas and semicolons in her children’s lives, as Jean Paul
Richter says, or the father who puts in the colons and periods? It may
be hard to say which type of strength is the more to be admired, but it
is clear that they are both genuine types.
One grows tired of hearing young men who can do nothing but row, or
swing dumb-bells, and are thrown wholly “off their training” by the loss
of a night’s sleep, speak contemptuously of the physical weakness of a
woman who can watch with a sick person half a dozen nights together. It
is absurd to hear a man who is prostrated by a single reverse in
business speak of being “encumbered” with a wife who can perhaps alter
the habits of a lifetime more easily than he can abandon his half-dollar
cigars. It is amusing to read the criticisms of languid and graceful
masculine essayists on the want of vigorous intellect in the sex that
wrote “Aurora Leigh” and “Middlemarch” and “Consuelo.”
It may be that a man’s strength is not a woman’s, or a woman’s strength
that of a man. I am arguing for equivalence, not identity. The greater
part played in the phenomena of woman’s strength by sensibility and
impulse and variations and tears—this does not affect the matter. What I
have never been able to see is, that woman as such is, in the long-run
and tried by all the tests, a weaker being than man. And it would seem
that any man, in proportion as he lives longer and sees more of life,
must have the conceit taken out of him by actual contact with some
woman—be she mother, sister, wife, daughter, or friend—who is not only
as strong as himself in all substantial regards, but it may be, on the
whole, a little stronger.
IV.
THE SPIRIT OF SMALL TYRANNY.
When Mr. John Smauker and the Bath footmen invited Sam Weller to their
“swarry,” consisting of a boiled leg of mutton, each guest had some
expression of contempt and wrath for the humble little greengrocer who
served them,—“in the true spirit,” Dickens says, “of the very smallest
tyranny.” The very fact that they were subject to being ordered about in
their own persons gave them a peculiar delight in issuing tyrannical
orders to others: just as sophomores in college torment freshmen because
other sophomores once teased the present tormentors themselves; and
Irishmen denounce the Chinese for underbidding them in the labor-market,
precisely as they were themselves denounced by native-born Americans
thirty years ago. So it has sometimes seemed to me that the men whose
own positions and claims are really least commanding are those who hold
most resolutely that women should be kept in their proper place of
subordination.
A friend of mine maintains the theory that men large and strong in
person are constitutionally inclined to do justice to women, as fearing
no competition from them in the way of bodily strength; but that small
and weak men are apt to be vehemently opposed to any thing like equality
in the sexes. He quotes in defence of his theory the big soldier in
London who justified himself for allowing his little wife to chastise
him, on the ground that it pleased her and did not hurt him; and on the
other hand cites the extreme domestic tyranny of the dwarf Quilp. He
declares that in any difficult excursion among woods and mountains, the
guides and the able-bodied men are often willing to have women join the
party, while it is sure to be opposed by those who doubt their own
strength or are reluctant to display their weakness. It is not necessary
to go so far as my friend goes; but many will remember some fact of this
kind, making such theories appear not quite so absurd as at first.
Thus it seems from the “Life and Letters” of Sydney Dobell, the English
poet, that he was opposed both to woman suffrage and woman authorship,
believing the movement for the former to be a “blundering on to the
perdition of womanhood.” It appears that against all authorship by women
his convictions yearly grew stronger, he regarding it as “an error and
an anomaly.” It seems quite in accordance with my friend’s theory to
hear, after this, that Sydney Dobell was slight in person and a
life-long invalid; nor is it surprising, on the same theory, that his
poetry took no deep root, and that it will not be likely to survive
long, except perhaps in his weird ballad of “Ravelston.” But he
represents a large class of masculine intellects, of secondary and
mediocre quality, whose opinions on this subject are not so much
opinions as instinctive prejudices against a competitor who may turn out
their superior. Whether they know it, or not, their aversion to the
authorship of women is very much like the conviction of a weak
pedestrian, that women are not naturally fitted to take long walks; or
the opinion of a man whose own accounts are in a muddle, that his wife
is constitutionally unfitted to understand business.
It is a pity to praise either sex at the expense of the other. The
social inequality of the sexes was not produced so much by the voluntary
tyranny of man, as by his great practical advantage at the outset; human
history necessarily beginning with a period when physical strength was
sole ruler. It is unnecessary, too, to consider in how many cases women
may have justified this distrust; and may have made themselves as
obnoxious as Horace Walpole’s maids of honor, whose coachman left his
savings to his son on condition that he should never marry a maid of
honor. But it is safe to say that on the whole the feeling of contempt
for women, and the love to exercise arbitrary power over them, is the
survival of a crude impulse which the world is outgrowing, and which is
in general least obvious in the manliest men. That clear and able
English writer, Walter Bagehot, well describes “the contempt for
physical weakness and for women which marks early society. The
non-combatant population is sure to fare ill during the ages of combat.
But these defects, too, are cured or lessened; women have now marvellous
means of winning their way in the world; and mind without muscle has far
greater force than muscle without mind.”[3]
Footnote 3:
Physics and Politics, p. 79.
V.
“THE NOBLE SEX.”
A highly educated American woman of my acquaintance once employed a
French tutor in Paris, to assist her in teaching Latin to her little
grandson. The Frenchman brought with him a Latin grammar, written in his
own language, with which my friend was quite pleased, until she came to
a passage relating to the masculine gender in nouns, and claiming
grammatical precedence for it on the ground that the male sex is the
noble sex,—”_le sexe noble_.” “Upon that,” she said, “I burst forth in
indignation, and the poor teacher soon retired. But I do not believe,”
she added, “that the Frenchman has the slightest conception, up to this
moment, of what I could find in that phrase to displease me.”
I do not suppose he could. From the time when the Salic Law set French
women aside from the royal succession, on the ground that the kingdom of
France was “too noble to be ruled by a woman,” the claim of nobility has
been all on one side. The State has strengthened the Church in this
theory, the Church has strengthened the State; and the result of all is,
that French grammarians follow both these high authorities. When even
the good Père Hyacinthe teaches, through the New York Independent, that
the husband is to direct the conscience of his wife, precisely as the
father directs that of his child, what higher philosophy can you expect
of any Frenchman than to maintain the claims of “_le sexe noble_”?
We see the consequence, even among the most heterodox Frenchmen.
Rejecting all other precedents and authorities, the poor Communists
still held to this. Consider, for instance, this translation of a
marriage-contract under the Commune, which lately came to light in a
trial reported in the “Gazette des Tribunaux:”—
FRENCH REPUBLIC.
The citizen Anet, son of Jean Louis Anet, and the _citoyenne_ Maria
Saint; she engaged to follow the said citizen everywhere and to love
him always.—ANET. MARIA SAINT.
Witnessed by the under-mentioned citizen and _citoyenne_.—FOURIER.
LAROCHE.
PARIS, April 22, 1871.
What a comfortable arrangement is this! Poor _citoyenne_ Maria Saint,
even when all human laws have suspended their action, still holds by her
grammar, still must annex herself to _le sexe noble_. She still must
follow citizen Anet as the feminine pronoun follows the masculine, or as
a verb agrees with its nominative case in number and in person. But with
what a lordly freedom from all obligation does citizen Anet,
representative of this nobility of sex, accept the allegiance! The
citizeness may “follow him,” certainly,—so long as she is not in the
way,—and she must “love him always;” but he is not bound. Why should he
be? It would be quite ungrammatical.
Yet, after all is said and done, there is a brutal honesty in this frank
subordination of the woman according to the grammar. It has the same
merit with the old Russian marriage-consecration: “Here, wolf, take thy
lamb,” which at least put the thing clearly, and made no nonsense about
it. I do not know that anywhere in France the wedding ritual is now so
severely simple as that, but I know that in some rural villages of that
country the bride is still married in a mourning-gown. I should think
she would be.
VI.
PHYSIOLOGICAL CROAKING.
A very old man once came to King Agis of Sparta, to lament over the
degeneracy of the times. The king replied, “What you say must be true;
for I remember that when I was a boy, I heard my father say that when he
was a boy, he heard my grandfather say the same thing.”
It is a sufficient answer to most of the croakers, that doubtless the
same things have been said in every generation since the beginning of
recorded time. Till within twenty years, for instance, it has been the
accepted theory, that civilized society lost in vigor what it gained in
refinement. This is now generally admitted to be a delusion growing out
of the fact that civilization keeps alive many who would have died under
barbarism. These feebler persons enter into the average, and keep down
the apparent health of the community; but it is the triumph of
civilization that they exist at all. I am inclined to think, that when
we come to compare the nineteenth century with the seventeenth, as
regards the health of women and the size of families, we shall find much
the same result.
We look around us, and see many invalid or childless women. We say the
Pilgrim mothers were not like these. We cheat ourselves by this
perpetual worship of the pioneer grandmother. How the young bachelors,
who write dashing articles in the newspapers, denounce their “nervous”
sisters, for instance, and belabor them with cruel memories of their
ancestors! “The great-grandmother of this helpless creature, very
likely, was a pioneer in the woods; reared a family of twelve or
thirteen children; spun, scrubbed, wove, and cooked; lived to
eighty-five, with iron muscles, a broad chest and keen, clear eyes.” But
no one can study the genealogies of our older New England families
without noticing how many of the aunts and sisters and daughters of this
imaginary Amazon died young. I think there may be the same difference
between the households of to-day and the Puritan households that there
is confessedly between the American families and the Irish: fewer
children are born, but more survive.
And is it so sure that the families are diminishing, even as respects
the number of children born? This is a simple question of arithmetic,
for which the materials are being rapidly accumulated by the students of
family history. Let each person take the lines of descent which are
nearest to himself, to begin with, and compare the number of children
born in successive generations. I have, for instance, two such tables at
hand, representing two of the oldest New England families, which meet in
the same family of children in this generation.
FIRST TABLE.
CHILDREN
First generation (emigrated 1629) 9
Second generation 7
Third generation 7
Fourth generation 8
Fifth generation 7
Sixth generation 10
——
Average 8
SECOND TABLE.
CHILDREN
First generation (emigrated 1636) 10
Second generation 7
Third generation 14
Fourth generation 7
Fifth generation 6
Sixth generation 4
Seventh generation 10
——
Average 8.29
It will be seen that the last generation exhibits the largest family in
the first line, and almost the largest—much beyond the average—in the
other.
Now, when we consider the great change in all the habits of living,
since the Puritan days, and all the vicissitudes to which a single line
is exposed,—a whole household being sometimes destroyed by a single
hereditary disease,—this is certainly a fair exhibit. These two
genealogies were taken at random, because they happened to be nearest at
hand. But I suspect any extended examination of genealogies, either of
the Puritan families of New England, or the Dutch families of New York,
would show much the same result. Some of the descendants of the old
Stuyvesant race, for instance, exhibit in this generation a physical
vigor which it is impossible that the doughty governor himself could
have surpassed.
There are undoubtedly many moral and physiological sins committed,
tending to shorten and weaken life; but the progress of knowledge more
than counterbalances them. No man of middle age can look at a class of
students from our older colleges without seeing them to be physically
superior to the same number of college boys taken twenty-five years ago.
The organization of girls being far more delicate and complicated, the
same reform reaches them more promptly, but it reaches them at last. The
little girls of the present day eat better food, wear more healthful
clothing, and breathe more fresh air, than their mothers did. The
introduction of india-rubber boots and waterproof cloaks alone has given
a fresh lease of life to multitudes of women, who otherwise would have
been kept housed whenever there was so much as a sprinkling of rain.
It is desirable, certainly, to venerate our grandmothers; but I am
inclined to think, on the whole, that their great-granddaughters will be
the best.
VII.
THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR GRANDMOTHERS.
Every young woman of the present generation, so soon as she ventures to
have a headache or a set of nerves, is immediately confronted by
indignant critics with her grandmother. If the grandmother is living,
the fact of her existence is appealed to: if there is only a departed
grandmother to remember, the maiden is confronted with a ghost. That
ghost is endowed with as many excellences as those with which Miss
Betsey Trotwood endowed the niece that never had been born; and, as
David Copperfield was reproached with the virtues of his unborn sister
who “would never have run away,” so that granddaughter with the headache
is reproached with the ghostly perfections of her grandmother, who never
had a headache—or, if she had, it is luckily forgotten. It is necessary
to ask, sometimes, what was really the truth about our grandmothers?
Were they such models of bodily perfection as is usually claimed?
If we look at the early colonial days, we are at once met by the fact,
that although families were then often larger than is now common, yet
this phenomenon was by no means universal, and was balanced by a good
many childless homes. Of this any one can satisfy himself by looking
over any family history; and he can also satisfy himself of the
fact,—first pointed out, I believe, by Mrs. Dall,—that third and fourth
marriages were then obviously and unquestionably more common than now.
The inference would seem to be, that there is a little illusion about
the health of those days, as there is about the health of savage races.
In both cases, it is not so much that the average health is greater
under less highly civilized conditions, but that these conditions kill
off the weak, and leave only the strong. Modern civilized society, on
the other hand, preserves the health of many men and women—and permits
them to marry, and become parents—who under, the severities of savage
life or of pioneer life would have died, and given way to others.
On this I will not dwell; because these good ladies were not strictly
our grandmothers, being farther removed. But of those who were our
grandmothers,—the women of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary
epochs,—we happen to have very definite physiological observations
recorded; not very flattering, it is true, but frank and searching. What
these good women are in the imagination of their descendants, we know.
Mrs. Stowe describes them as “the race of strong, hardy, cheerful girls
that used to grow up in country places, and made the bright, neat New
England kitchens of olden times;” and adds, “This race of women, pride
of olden time, is daily lessening; and in their stead come the fragile,
easily-fatigued, languid girls of a modern age, drilled in
book-learning, ignorant of common things.”
What, now, was the testimony of those who saw our grandmothers in the
flesh? As it happens, there were a good many foreigners, generally
Frenchmen, who came to visit the new Republic during the presidency of
Washington. Let us take, for instance, the testimony of the two
following.
The Abbé Robin was a chaplain in Rochambeau’s army during the
Revolution, and wrote thus in regard to the American ladies in his
“Nouveau Voyage dans l’Amérique Septentrionale,” published in 1782:—
“They are tall and well-proportioned; their features are generally
regular; their complexions are generally fair and without color....
At twenty years of age the women have no longer the freshness of
youth. At thirty-five or forty they are wrinkled and decrepit. The
men are almost as premature.”
Again: The Chevalier Louis Félix de Beaujour lived in the United States
from 1804 to 1814, as consul-general and _chargé d’affaires_; and wrote
a book, immediately after, which was translated into English under the
title, “A Sketch of the United States at the Commencement of the Present
Century.” In this he thus describes American women:—
“The women have more of that delicate beauty which belongs to their
sex, and in general have finer features and more expression in their
physiognomy. Their stature is usually tall, and nearly all are
possessed of a light and airy shape,—the breast high, a fine head,
and their color of a dazzling whiteness. Let us imagine, under this
brilliant form, the most modest demeanor, a chaste and virginal air,
accompanied by those single and unaffected graces which flow from
artless nature, and we may have an idea of their beauty; but this
beauty fades and passes in a moment. At the age of twenty-five their
form changes, and at thirty the whole of their charms have
disappeared.”
These statements bring out a class of facts, which, as it seems to me,
are singularly ignored by some of our physiologists. They indicate that
the modification of the American type began early, and was, as a rule,
due to causes antedating the fashions or studies of the present day.
Here are our grandmothers and great-grandmothers as they were actually
seen by the eyes of impartial or even flattering critics. These critics
were not Englishmen, accustomed to a robust and ruddy type of women, but
Frenchmen, used to a type more like the American. They were not mere
hasty travellers; for the one lived here ten years, and the other was
stationed for some time at Newport, R.I., in a healthy locality, noted
in those days for the beauty of its women. Yet we find it their verdict
upon these grandmothers of nearly a hundred years ago, that they showed
the same delicate beauty, the same slenderness, the same pallor, the
same fragility, the same early decline, with which their granddaughters
are now reproached.
In some respects, probably, the physical habits of the grandmothers were
better: but an examination of their portraits will satisfy any one that
they laced more tightly than their descendants, and wore their dresses
lower in the neck; and as for their diet, we have the testimony of
another French traveller, Volney, who was in America from 1795 to 1798,
that “if a premium were offered for a regimen most destructive to the
teeth, the stomach, and the health in general, none could be devised
more efficacious for these ends than that in use among this people.” And
he goes on to give particulars, showing a far worse condition in respect
to cookery and diet than now prevails in any decent American society.
We have therefore strong evidence that the essential change in the
American type was effected in the last century, not in this. Dr. E. H.
Clarke says, “A century does not afford a period long enough for the
production of great changes. That length of time could not transform the
sturdy German _fräulein_ and robust English damsel into the fragile
American miss.” And yet it is pretty clear that the first century and a
half of our colonial life had done just this for our grandmothers. And,
if so, our physiologists ought to conform their theories to the facts.
VIII.
THE PHYSIQUE OF AMERICAN WOMEN.
I was talking the other day with a New York physician, long retired from
practice, who after an absence of a dozen years in Europe has returned
within a year to this country. He volunteered the remark, that nothing
had so impressed him since his return as the improved health of
Americans. He said that his wife had been equally struck with it; and
that they had noticed it especially among the inhabitants of cities,
among the more cultivated classes, and in particular among women.
It so happened, that within twenty-four hours almost precisely the same
remark was made to me by another gentleman of unusually cosmopolitan
experience, and past middle age. He further fortified himself by a
similar assertion made him by Charles Dickens, in comparing his second
visit to this country with his first. In answer to an inquiry as to what
points of difference had most impressed him, Dickens said, “Your people,
especially the women, look better fed than formerly.”
It is possible that in all these cases the witnesses may have been led
to exaggerate the original evil, while absent from the country, and so
may have felt some undue re-action on their arrival. One of my
informants went so far as to say that he was confident that among his
circle of friends in Boston and in London a dinnerparty of half a dozen
Americans would outweigh an English party of the same number. Granting
this to be too bold a statement, and granting the unscientific nature of
all these assertions, they still indicate a probability of their own
truth until refuted by facts or balanced by similar impressions on the
other side. They are further corroborated by the surprise expressed by
Huxley and some other recent Englishmen at finding us a race more
substantial than they had supposed.
The truth seems to be, that Nature is endeavoring to take a new
departure in the American, and to produce a race more finely organized,
more sensitive, more pliable, and of more nervous energy, than the races
of Northern Europe; that this change of type involves some risk to
health in the process, but promises greater results whenever the new
type shall be established. I am confident that there has been within the
last twenty years a great improvement in the physical habits of the more
cultivated classes, at least, in this country,—better food, better air,
better habits as to bathing and exercise. The great increase of athletic
games; the greatly increased proportion of seaside and mountain life in
summer; the thicker shoes and boots of women and little girls,
permitting them to go out more freely in all weathers—these are among
the permanent gains. The increased habit of dining late, and of taking
only a lunch at noon, is of itself an enormous gain to the professional
and mercantile classes, because it secures time for eating and for
digestion. Even the furnaces in houses, which seemed at first so
destructive to the very breath of life, turn out to have given a new
lease to it; and open fires are being rapidly re-introduced as a
provision for enjoyment and health, when the main body of the house has
been tempered by the furnace. There has been, furthermore, a decided
improvement in the bread of the community, and a very general
introduction of other farinaceous food. All this has happened within my
own memory, and gives _a priori_ probability to the alleged improvement
in physical condition within twenty years.
And, if these reasonings are still insufficient on the one side, it must
be remembered that the facts of the census are almost equally inadequate
when quoted on the other. If, for instance, all the young people of a
New Hampshire village take a fancy to remove to Wisconsin, it does not
show that the race is dying out because their children swell the
birth-rate of Wisconsin instead of New Hampshire. If in a given city the
births among the foreign-born population are twice as many in proportion
as among the American, we have not the whole story until we learn
whether the deaths are not twice as many also. If so, the inference is,
that the same recklessness brought the children into the world, and sent
them out of it; and no physiological inference whatever can be drawn. It
was clearly established by the medical commission of the Boston Board of
Health, a few years ago, that “the general mortality of the foreign
element is much greater than that of the native element of our
population.” “This is found to be the case,” they add, “throughout the
United States as well as in Boston.”
So far as I can judge, all our physiological tendencies are favorable
rather than otherwise: and the transplantation of the English race seems
now likely to end in no deterioration, but in a type more finely
organized, and more comprehensive and cosmopolitan; and this without
loss of health, of longevity, or of physical size and weight. And, if
this is to hold true, it must be true not only of men, but of women.
IX.
“VERY MUCH FATIGUED.”
The newspapers say that the Wyoming ladies, after their first trial of
jury-duty, looked very much fatigued. Well, why not?
Is it not the privilege of their sex to be fatigued? Is it not commonly
said to be one of their most becoming traits? “The strength of womanhood
lies in its weakness,” and so on; and, if emancipation does not destroy
this lovely debility, it is not so bad, after all. If a graceful languor
is desirable, then the more of it the better. Instead of the women’s
coming out of the jury-box like Amazons, they simply came out so many
tired women. They were not spoiled into strength, but “very much
fatigued.”
In London or New York, now, this fatigue might have come from six hours
of piano-practice, from a day’s shopping, from a night’s “German.” Then
the fatigue would be held to be charming and womanly. But to aid in
deciding on the guilt or innocence of a fellow-creature, perhaps a
fellow-woman,—is that the only pursuit in which fatigue becomes
disreputable?
Consider at any rate that in Wyoming Territory these more genteel and
feminine forms of fatigue are as yet rare. Pianos are doubtless scarce;
in the shops whiskey is the only thing not scarce; “Germans” are
uncommon, except in the shape of wandering miners who are looking for
other shafts than those of Cupid. Thus cut off from city frivolities,
may not the Wyoming ladies be allowed for a while to tire themselves
with something useful? Let them have their court duties until good
society and “feminine” amusements arrive. Let them at least be
serviceable till they can be ornamental—as the English member of
Parliament declared that until a man knew which way his interest went,
he was justified in temporarily voting according to his conscience.
“Very much fatigued?” How does jury-duty affect men? Is there any thing
against which they so fight and struggle? It is recognized by the
universal masculine heart as the greatest bore known under civilization.
There is nothing which a man will not do in preference. He will go to
church twice on a Sunday, he will abjure tobacco for a week, he will
over-state his property to the assessor, he will speak respectfully of
Congress, he will go without a daily newspaper, he will do any
self-devoted and unmasculine thing—if you will only contrive in some way
to leave him off the jury-list. If these things are done in the dry
tree, what shall be done in the green? That which experienced men hate
with this consummation of all hatred, shall inexperienced women endure
without fatigue? It is wrong to claim for them such unspeakable
superiority.
Look at a jury of men when they re-appear in court after a long
detention on a difficult case. What a set of woe-begone wretches they
are! What weary eyes, what unkempt hair, what drooping and dilapidated
paper collars! Not all the tin wash-basins and soap, not all the
crackers and cheese, provided by the gentlemanly sheriff, enable them to
look any thing but “very much fatigued.” Shall women look more forlorn
than these men? No: so long as women are women, they will contrive
during the most arduous jury duties to “do up” their hair, they will
come provided with unseen relays of fresh cuffs and collars, and out of
the most unpromising court-room arrangements they will concoct their cup
of tea. Who has not noticed how much better a railway detention or a
prolonged trip on a steamboat is borne, in appearance at least, by the
women than the men? Fatigued! How did the jury-men look? Probably the
jury-women, when they bade his Honor the Judge good-morning, looked
incomparably fresher than their companions.
At any rate, when we think what things women endured that they might
nurse our sick soldiers, how they had to spend day and night where they
might possibly inhale tobacco, probably would hear swearing, and
certainly must brave dirt; when we think that they did these things, and
were only “very much fatigued,”—why should we fear to risk them in a
court-room? Where there is wrong to be righted, innocence to be
vindicated, and guilt to be wisely dealt with,—there make room for
woman, and she will not shrink from the fatigue. “For thee, fair
justice! welcome all,” as Sir William Blackstone remarked, when he
stopped being a poet and began to be a lawyer.
X.
THE LIMITATIONS OF SEX
Are there any inevitable limitations of sex?