mankind. They are not always to be relied upon for that steady
“hammering away,” which was Grant’s one method; but there is a certain
Sheridan quality about them, light-armed, audacious, quick,
irresistible. They go before the main army; their swift wits go scouting
far in advance; they are the first to scent danger, or to spy out
chances of success. Their charge is like that of a Tartar horde, or the
wild sweep of the Apaches. They are upon you from some wholly unexpected
quarter; and this respectable, systematic, well-drilled masculine force
is caught and rolled over and over in the dust, before the man knows
what has hit him. But, even if repelled and beaten off, this formidable
cavalry is unconquered: routed and in confusion to-day, it comes back
upon you to-morrow—fresh, alert, with new devices, bringing new dangers.
In dealing with it, as the French complained of the Arabs in Algiers,
“Peace is not to be purchased by victory.” And, even if all seems lost,
with what a brilliant final charge it will cover a retreat!
Decidedly, we need cavalry. In older countries, where it has been a
merely undisciplined and irregular force, it has often done mischief;
and public men, from Demosthenes down, have been lamenting that measures
which the statesman has meditated a whole year, may be overturned in a
day by a woman. Under our American government we have foolishly
attempted to leave out this arm of the service altogether; and much of
the alleged dulness of our American history has come from this attempt.
Those who have been trained in the various reforms where woman has taken
an equal part—the anti-slavery reform especially—know well how much of
the energy, the dash, the daring, of those movements, have come from
her. A revolution with a woman in it is stronger than the established
order that omits her. It is not that she is superior to man, but she is
different from man; and we can no more spare her than we could spare the
cavalry from an army.
XXI.
“THE REASON FIRM, THE TEMPERATE WILL.”
It is a part of the necessary theory of republican government, that
every class and race shall be judged by its highest types, not its
lowest. The proposition of the French revolutionary statesman, to begin
the work of purifying the world by arresting all the cowards and knaves,
is liable to the objection that it would find victims in every circle.
Republican government begins at the other end, and assumes that the
community generally has good intentions at least, and some common sense,
however it may be with individuals. Take the very quality which the
newspapers so often deny to women,—the quality of steadiness. “In fact,
men’s great objection to the entrance of the female mind into politics
is drawn from a suspicion of its unsteadiness on matters in which the
feelings could by any possibility be enlisted.” Thus says the New York
Nation. Let us consider this implied charge against women, and consider
it not by generalizing from a single instance,—“just like a woman,” as
the editors would doubtless say, if a woman had done it,—but by
observing whole classes of that sex, taken together.
These classes need some care in selection, for the plain reason that
there are comparatively few circles in which women have yet been allowed
enough freedom of scope, or have acted sufficiently on the same plane
with men, to furnish a fair estimate of their probable action, were they
enfranchised. Still there occur to me three such classes,—the
anti-slavery women, the Quaker women, and the women who conduct
philanthropic operations in our large cities. If the alleged
unsteadiness of women is to be felt in public affairs, it would have
been felt in these organizations. Has it been so felt?
Of the anti-slavery movement I can personally testify,—and I have heard
the same point fully recognized among my elders, such as Garrison,
Phillips, and Quincy,—that the women contributed their full share, if
not more than their share, to the steadiness of that movement, even in
times when the feelings were most excited, as, for instance, in
fugitive-slave cases. Who that has seen mobs practically put down, and
mayors cowed into decency, by the silent dignity of those rows of women
who sat, with their knitting, more imperturbable than the men, can read
without a smile these doubts of the “steadiness” of that sex? Again,
among Quaker women, I have asked the opinion of prominent Friends, as of
John G. Whittier, whether it has been the experience of that body that
women were more flighty and unsteady than men in their official action;
and have been uniformly answered in the negative. And finally, as to
benevolent organizations, a good test is given in the fact,—first
pointed out, I believe, by that eminently practical philanthropist, Rev.
Augustus Woodbury of Providence,—that the whole tendency has been,
during the last twenty years, to put the management, even the financial
control, of our benevolent societies, more and more into the hands of
women, and that there has never been the slightest reason to reverse
this policy. Ask the secretaries of the various boards of State
Charities, or the officers of the Social Science Associations, if they
have found reason to complain of the want of steadfast qualities in the
“weaker sex.” Why is it that the legislation of Massachusetts has
assigned the class requiring the steadiest of all supervision—the
imprisoned convicts—to “five commissioners of prisons, two of whom shall
be women”? These are the points which it would be worthy of our journals
to consider, instead of hastily generalizing from single instances. Let
us appeal from the typical woman of the editorial picture,—fickle,
unsteady, foolish,—to the nobler conception of womanhood which the poet
Wordsworth found fulfilled in his own household:—
“A being breathing thoughtful breath,
A traveller betwixt life and death;
_The reason firm, the temperate will;
Endurance, foresight, strength and skill_;
A perfect woman, nobly planned
To warn, to comfort, to command,
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of an angel light.”
XXII.
“ALLURES TO BRIGHTER WORLDS, AND LEADS THE WAY.”
When the Massachusetts House of Representatives had “School Suffrage”
under consideration, the other day, the suggestion was made by one of
the pithiest and quaintest of the speakers, that men were always better
for the society of women, and therefore ought to vote in their company.
“If all of us,” he said, “would stay away from all places where we
cannot take our wives and daughters with us, we should keep better
company than we now do.” This expresses a feeling which grows more and
more common among the better class of men, and which is the key to much
progress in the condition of women. There can be no doubt that the
increased association of the sexes in society, in school, in literature,
tends to purify these several spheres of action. Yet, when we come to
philosophize on this, there occur some perplexities on the way.
For instance, the exclusion of woman from all these spheres was in
ancient Greece almost complete; yet the leading Greek poets, as Homer
and the tragedians, are exceedingly chaste in tone, and in this respect
beyond most of the great poets of modern nations. Again no European
nation has quite so far sequestered and subordinated women as has Spain;
and yet the whole tone of Spanish literature is conspicuously grave and
decorous. This plainly indicates that race has much to do with the
matter, and that the mere admission or exclusion of women is but one
among several factors. In short, it is easy to make out a case by a
rhetorical use of the facts on one side; but, if we look at all the
facts, the matter presents greater difficulties.
Again, it is to be noted that in several countries the first women who
have taken prominent part in literature have been as bad as the men; as,
for instance, Marguerite of Navarre and Mrs. Aphra Behn. This might
indeed be explained by supposing that they had to gain entrance into
literature by accepting the dissolute standards which they found
prevailing. But it would probably be more correct to say that these
standards themselves were variable, and that their variation affected,
at certain periods, women as well as men. Marguerite of Navarre wrote
religious books as well as merry stories; and we know from Lockhart’s
Life of Scott, that ladies of high character in Edinburgh used to read
Mrs. Behn’s tales and plays aloud, at one time, with delight,—although
one of the same ladies found, in her old age, that she could not read
them to herself without blushing. Shakspeare puts coarse repartees into
the mouths of women of stainless virtue. George Sand is not considered
an unexceptionable writer; but she tells us in her autobiography that
she found among her grandmother’s papers poems and satires so indecent
that she could not read them through, and yet they bore the names of
_abbés_ and gentlemen whom she remembered in her childhood as models of
dignity and honor. Voltaire inscribes to ladies of high rank, who
doubtless regarded it as a great compliment, verses such as not even a
poet of the English “fleshly school” would now print at all. In “Poems
by Eminent Ladies,”—published in 1755 and reprinted in 1774,—there are
one or two poems as gross and disgusting as any thing in Swift; yet
their authors were thought reputable women. Allan Ramsay’s “Tea-Table
Miscellany”—a collection of English and Scottish songs—was first
published in 1724; and in his preface to the sixteenth edition the
editor attributes its great success, especially among the ladies, to the
fact that he has carefully excluded all grossness, “that the modest
voice and ear of the fair singer might meet with no affront;” and adds,
“the chief bent of all my studies being to attain their good graces.”
There is no doubt of the great popularity enjoyed by the book in all
circles; yet it contains a few songs which the most licentious newspaper
would not now publish. The inference is irresistible, from this and many
other similar facts, that the whole tone of manners and decency has very
greatly improved among the European races within a century and a half.
I suspect the truth to be, that, besides the visible influence of race
and religion, there has been an insensible and almost unconscious
improvement in each sex, with respect to these matters, as time has
passed on; and that the mutual desire to please has enabled each sex to
help the other,—the sex which is naturally the more refined taking the
lead. But I should lay more stress on this mutual influence, and less on
mere feminine superiority, than would be laid by many. It is often
claimed by teachers that co-education helps not only boys, but also
girls, to develop greater propriety of manners. When the sexes are
wholly separate, or associate on terms of entire inequality, no such
good influence occurs: the more equal the association, the better for
both parties. After all, the Divine model is to be found in the family;
and the best ingenuity cannot improve much upon it.
THE HOME.
“In respect to the powers and rights of married women, the law is by no
means abreast of the spirit of the age. Here are seen the old fossil
footprints of feudalism. The law relating to woman tends to make every
family a barony or a monarchy or a despotism, of which the husband is
the baron, king, or despot, and the wife the dependent, serf, or slave.
That this is not always the fact, is not due to the law, but to the
enlarged humanity which spurns the narrow limits of its rules. The
progress of civilization has changed the family from a barony to a
republic; but the law has not kept pace with the advance of ideas,
manners, and customs.”—W. W. STORY’s _Treatise on Contracts not under
Seal_, § 84,—third edition, p. 89.
XXIII.
WANTED—HOMES.
We see advertisements, occasionally, of “Homes for Aged Women,” and more
rarely “Homes for Aged Men.” The question sometimes suggests itself,
whether it would not be better to begin the provision earlier, and see
that homes are also provided, in some form, for the middle-aged and even
the young. The trouble is, I suppose, that as it takes two to make a
bargain, so it takes at least two to make a home; and unluckily it takes
only one to spoil it.
Madame Roland once defined marriage as an institution where one person
undertakes to provide happiness for two; and many failures are accounted
for, no doubt, by this false basis. Sometimes it is the man, more often
the woman, of whom this extravagant demand is made. There are marriages
which have proved a wreck almost wholly through the fault of the wife.
Nor is this confined to wedded homes alone. I have known a son who lived
alone, patiently and uncomplainingly, with that saddest of all
conceivable companions, a drunken mother. I have known another young man
who supported in his own home a mother and sister, both habitual
drunkards. All these were American-born, and all of respectable social
position. A home shadowed by such misery is not a home, though it might
have been a home but for the sins of women. Such instances are, however,
rare and occasional compared with the cases where the same offence in
the husband makes ruin of the home.
Then there are the cases where indolence, or selfishness, or vanity, or
the love of social excitement, in the woman, unfits her for home life.
Here we come upon ground where perhaps woman is the greater sinner. It
must be remembered, however, that against this must be balanced the
neglect produced by club-life, or by the life of society-membership, in
a man. A brilliant young married belle in London once told me that she
was glad her husband was so fond of his club, for it amused him every
night while she went to balls. “Married men do not go much into society
here,” she said, “unless they are regular flirts,—which I do not think
my husband would ever be, for he is very fond of me,—so he goes every
night to his club, and gets home about the same time that I do. It is a
very nice arrangement.” It was apparently spoken in all the fearlessness
of innocence, but I believe that it has since ended in a “separation.”
It is common to denounce club-life in our large cities as destructive of
the home. The modern club is simply a more refined substitute for the
old-fashioned tavern, and is on the whole an advance in morals as well
as manners. In our large cities a man in a certain social coterie
belongs to a club, if he can afford it, as a means of contact with his
fellows, and to have various conveniences which he cannot so
economically obtain at home. A few haunt them constantly: the many use
them occasionally. More absorbing than clubs, perhaps, are the secret
societies which have so revived among us since the war, and which
consume time so fearfully. There was a case mentioned in the newspapers
lately of a man who belonged to some twenty of these associations; and
when he died, and each wished to conduct his funeral, great was the
strife! In the small city where I write, there are seventeen secret
societies down in the directory, and I suppose as many more not so
conspicuous. I meet men who assure me that they habitually attend a
societymeeting every evening of the week except Sunday, and a church
meeting then. These are rarely men of leisure: they are usually
mechanics or business men of some kind, who are hard at work all day,
and never see their families except at meal-times. Their case is far
worse, so far as absence from home is concerned, than that of the
“club-men” of large cities; for these are often men of leisure, who, if
married, at least make home one of their lounging-places, which the
secret-society men do not.
I honestly believe that this melancholy desertion of the home is largely
due to the traditional separation between the alleged spheres of the
sexes. The theory still prevails largely, that home is the peculiar
province of the woman, that she has almost no duties out of it; and
hence, naturally enough, that the husband has almost no duties in it. If
he is amused there, let him stay there; but, as it is not his recognized
sphere of duty, he is not actually violating any duty by absenting
himself. This theory even pervades our manuals of morals, of
metaphysics, and of popular science; and it is not every public teacher
who has the manliness, having once stated it, to modify his statement,
as did the venerable President Hopkins of Williams College, when
lecturing the other day to the young ladies of Vassar.
“I would,” he said, “at this point correct my teaching in ‘The Law of
Love’ to the effect that home is peculiarly the sphere of woman, and
civil government that of man. _I now regard the home as the joint sphere
of man and woman, and the sphere of civil government more of an open
question as between the two._ It is, however, to be lamented that the
present agitation concerning the rights of woman is so much a matter of
‘rights’ rather than of ‘duties,’ as the reform of the latter would
involve the former.”
If our instructors in moral philosophy will only base their theory of
ethics as broadly as this, we shall no longer need to advertise “Homes
Wanted;” for the joint efforts of men and women will soon provide them.
XXIV.
THE ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.
Nothing throws more light on the whole history of woman than the first
illustration in Sir John Lubbock’s “Origin of Civilization.” A young
girl, almost naked, is being dragged furiously along the ground by a
party of naked savages, armed literally to the teeth, while those of
another band grasp her by the arm, and almost tear her asunder in the
effort to hold her back. These last are her brothers and her friends;
the others are—her enemies? As you please to call them. They are her
future husband and his kinsmen, who have come to aid him in his wooing.
This was the primitive rite of marriage. Vestiges of it still remain
among savage nations. And all the romance and grace of the most refined
modern marriage—the orange-blossoms, the bridal veil, the church
service, the wedding-feast—these are only the “bright consummate flower”
reared by civilization from that rough seed. All the brutal encounter is
softened into this. Nothing remains of the barbarism except the one word
“obey,” and even that is going.
Now, to say that a thing is going, is to say that it will presently be
gone. To say that any thing is changed, is to say that it is to change
further. If it never has been altered, perhaps it will not be; but a
proved alteration of an inch in a year opens the way to an indefinite
modification. The study of the glaciers, for instance, began with the
discovery that they had moved; and from that moment no one doubted that
they were moving all the time. It is the same with the position of
woman. Once open your eyes to the fact that it has changed, and who is
to predict where the matter shall end? It is sheer folly to say, “Her
relative position will always be what it has been,” when one glance at
Sir John Lubbock’s picture shows that there is no fixed “has been,” but
that her original position was long since altered and revised. Those who
still use this argument are like those who laughed at the lines of
stakes which Agassiz planted across the Aar glacier in 1840. But the
stakes settled the question, and proved the motion. _Pero si muove_:
“But it moves.”
The motion once proved, the whole range of possible progress is before
us. The amazement of that formerly “heathen Chinee” in Boston, the other
day, when he saw a woman addressing a missionary meeting; the
astonishment of all English visitors when young ladies hear classes in
geometry and Latin, in our high schools; the surprise of foreigners at
seeing the rough throng in the Cooper Institute reading-room submit to
the sway of one young woman with a crochet-needle—all these simply
testify to the fact that the stakes have moved. That they have yet been
carried half way to the end, who knows? What a step from the horrible
nuptials of those savage days to the poetic marriage of Robert Browning
and Elizabeth Barrett—the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” on one side, the
“One Word More” on the other! But who can say that the whole relation
between man and woman reached its climax there, and that where the past
has brought changes so vast the future is to add nothing? Who knows
that, when “the world’s great bridals come,” people may not look back
with pity, even on this era of the Brownings? Probably even Elizabeth
Barrett promised to obey!
At any rate, it is safe to say that each step concedes the probability
of another. Even from the naked barbarian to the veiled Oriental, from
the savage hut to the carefully enshrined harem, is a step forward. It
is another step in the spiral line of progress to the unveiled face and
comparatively free movements of the modern English or American woman.
From the kitchen to the public lecture-room, from that to the
lecture-platform, and from that again to the ballot-box,—these are far
slighter steps than those which have already lifted the savage girl of
Sir John Lubbock’s picture into the possession of the alphabet and the
dignity of a home. So easy are these future changes beside those of the
past, that to doubt their possibility is as if Agassiz, after tracing
year by year the motion of his Alpine glacier, should deny its power to
move one inch farther into the sunny valley, and there to melt
harmlessly away.
XXV.
THE LOW-WATER MARK.
We constantly see it assumed, in arguments against any step in the
elevation of woman, that her position is a thing fixed permanently by
nature, so that there can be in it no great or essential change. Every
successive modification is resisted as “a reform against nature;” and
this argument from permanence is always that appealing most strongly to
conservative minds. Let us see how the facts confirm it.
A story is going the rounds of the newspapers in regard to a Russian
peasant and his wife. For some act of disobedience the peasant took the
law into his own hands; and his mode of discipline was to tie the poor
creature naked to a post in the street, and to call on every passer-by
to strike her a blow. Not satisfied with this, he placed her on the
ground, and tied heavy weights on her limbs until one arm was broken.
When finally released, she made a complaint against him in court. The
court discharged him on the ground that he had not exceeded the legal
authority of a husband. Encouraged by this, he caused her to be arrested
in return; and the same court sentenced her to another public whipping
for disobedience.
No authority was given for this story in the newspaper where I saw it;
but it certainly did not first appear in a woman-suffrage newspaper, and
cannot therefore be a manufactured “outrage.” I use it simply to
illustrate the low-water mark at which the position of woman may rest,
in the largest Christian nation of the world. All the refinements, all
the education, all the comparative justice, of modern society, have been
gradually upheaved from some such depth as this. When the gypsies
described by Leland treat even the ground trodden upon by a woman as
impure, they simply illustrate the low plane from which all the
elevation of woman has begun. All these things show that the position of
that sex in society, so far from being a thing in itself permanent, has
been in reality the most variable of all factors in the social problem.
And this inevitably suggests the question, Are we any more sure that her
present position is finally and absolutely fixed than were those who
observed it at any previous time in the world’s history? Granting that
her condition was once at low-water mark, who is authorized to say that
it has yet reached high-tide?
It is very possible that this Russian wife, once scourged back to
submission, ended her days in the conviction, and taught to her
daughters, that such was a woman’s rightful place. When an American
woman of to-day says, “I have all the rights I want,” is she on any
surer ground? Grant that the difference is vast between the two. How do
we know that even the later condition is final, or that any thing is
final but entire equality before the laws? It is not many years since
William Story—in a legal work inspired and revised by his father, the
greatest of American jurists—wrote this indignant protest against the
injustice of the old common law:—