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. And, although
public opinion is a check to legal rules on the subject, the rules
are feudal and stern. Yet the position of woman throughout history
serves as the criterion of the freedom of the people or an age. When
man shall despise that right which is founded only on might, woman
will be free and stand on an equal level with him,—a friend and not
a dependent.”[5]
Footnote 5:
Story’s Treatise on the Law of Contracts not under Seal, p. 89, § 84.
We know that the law is greatly changed and ameliorated in many places
since Story wrote this statement; but we also know how almost every one
of these changes was resisted: and who is authorized to say that the
final and equitable fulfilment is yet reached?
XXVI.
“OBEY.”
After witnessing the marriage ceremony of the Episcopal Church, the
other day, I walked down the aisle with the young rector who had
officiated. It was natural to speak of the beauty of the Church service
on an occasion like that; but, after doing this, I felt compelled to
protest against the unrighteous pledge to obey. “I hope,” I said, “to
live to see that word expunged from the Episcopal service, as it has
been from that of the Methodists.”
“Why?” he asked. “Is it because you know that they will not obey,
whatever their promise?”
“Because they ought not,” I said.
“Well,” said he, after a few moments’ reflection, and looking up
frankly, “I do not think they ought!”
Here was a young clergyman of great earnestness and self-devotion, who
included it among the sacred duties of his life to impose upon ignorant
young girls a solemn obligation, which he yet thought they ought not to
incur, and did not believe that they would keep. There could hardly be a
better illustration of the confusion in the public mind, or the manner
in which “the subjection of woman” is being outgrown, or the subtile way
in which this subjection has been interwoven with sacred ties, and
baptized “duty.”
The advocates of woman suffrage are constantly reproved for using the
terms “subjection,” “oppression,” and “slavery,” as applied to woman.
They simply commit the same sin as that committed by the original
abolitionists. They are “as harsh as truth, as uncompromising as
justice.” Of course they talk about oppression and emancipation. It is
the word _obey_ that constitutes the one, and shows the need of the
other. Whoever is pledged to obey is technically and literally a slave,
no matter how many roses surround the chains. All the more so if the
slavery is self-imposed, and surrounded by all the prescriptions of
religion. Make the marriage-tie as close as Church or State can make it;
but let it be equal, impartial. That it may be so, the word _obey_ must
be abandoned or made reciprocal. Where invariable obedience is promised,
equality is gone.
That there may be no doubt about the meaning of this word in the
marriage-covenant, the usages of nations often add symbolic
explanations. These are generally simple and brutal enough to be
understood. The Hebrew ceremony, when the bridegroom took off his
slipper and struck the bride on the neck as she crossed his threshold,
was unmistakable. As my black sergeant said, when a white prisoner
questioned his authority, and he pointed to the _chevrons_ on his
sleeve, “Dat mean guv’ment.” All these forms mean simply government
also. The ceremony of the slipper has now no recognition, except when
people fling an old shoe after the bride, which is held by antiquarians
to be the same observance. But it is all preserved and concentrated into
a single word, when the bride promises to obey.
The deepest wretchedness that has ever been put into human language, or
that has exceeded it, has grown out of that pledge. There is no misery
on earth like that of a pure and refined woman who finds herself owned,
body and soul, by a drunken, licentious, brutal man. The very fact that
she is held to obedience by a spiritual tie makes it worse.
Chattel-slavery was not so bad; for, though the master might pervert
religion for his own satisfaction, he could not impose upon the slave.
Never yet did I see a negro slave who thought it a duty to obey his
master; and therefore there was always some dream of release. But who
has not heard of some delicate and refined woman, one day of whose
torture was equivalent to years of that possible to an obtuser
frame,—who had the door of escape ready at hand for years, and yet died
a lingering death rather than pass through it; and this because she had
promised to obey!
It is said of one of the most gifted women who ever trod American
soil,—she being of English birth,—that, before she obtained the divorce
which separated her from her profligate husband, she once went for
counsel to the wife of her pastor. She unrolled before her the long
catalogue of merciless outrages to which she had been subject,
endangering finally her health, her life, and that of her children born
and to be born. When she turned at last for advice to her confessor,
with the agonized inquiry, “What is it my duty to do?”—“Do?” said the
stern adviser: “Lie down on the floor, and let your husband trample on
you if he will. That is a woman’s duty.”
The woman who gave this advice was not naturally inhuman nor heartless:
she had simply been trained in the school of obedience. The Jesuit
doctrine, that a priest should be as a corpse, _perinde ac cadaver_, in
the hands of a superior priest, is not worse. Woman has no right to
delegate, nor man to assume, a responsibility so awful. Just in
proportion as it is consistently carried out, it trains men from boyhood
into self-indulgent tyrants; and, while some women are transformed by it
to saints, others are crushed into deceitful slaves. That this was the
result of chattel-slavery, this nation has at length learned. We learn
more slowly the profounder and more subtile moral evil that follows from
the unrighteous promise to obey.
XXVII.
WOMAN IN THE CHRYSALIS.
When the bride receives the ring upon her finger, and utters—if she
utters it—the unnatural promise to obey, she fancies a poetic beauty in
the rite. Turning of her own free will from her maiden liberty, she
voluntarily takes the yoke of service upon her. This is her view; but is
this the historic fact in regard to marriage? Not at all. The pledge of
obedience—the whole theory of inequality in marriage—is simply what is
left to us of a former state of society, in which every woman, old or
young, must obey somebody. The state of tutelage, implied in such a
marriage, is merely what is left of the old theory of the “Perpetual
Tutelage of Women,” under the Roman law.
Roman law, from which our civil law is derived, has its foundation
evidently in patriarchal tradition. It recognized at first the family
only, and that family was held together by parental power (_patria
potestas_). If the father died, his powers passed to the son or
grandson, as the possible head of a new family; but these powers never
could pass to a woman, and every woman, of whatever age, must be under
somebody’s legal control. Her father dying, she was still subject
through life to her nearest male relations, or to her father’s nominees,
as her guardians. She was under perpetual guardianship, both as to
person or property. No years, no experience, could make her any thing
but a child before the law.
In Oriental countries the system was still more complete. “A man,” says
the Gentoo Code of Laws, “must keep his wife so much in subjection that
she by no means be mistress of her own action. If the wife have her own
free will, notwithstanding she be of a superior caste, she will behave
amiss.” But this authority, which still exists in India, is not merely
conjugal. The husband exerts it simply as being the wife’s legal
guardian. If the woman be unmarried or a widow, she must be as
rigorously held under some other guardianship. It is no uncommon thing
for a woman in India to be the ward of her own son. Lucretia Mott or
Florence Nightingale would there be in personal subjection to somebody.
Any man of legal age would be recognized as a fit custodian for them,
but there must be a man.
With some variation of details at different periods, the same system
prevailed essentially at Rome, down to the time when Rome became
Christian. Those who wish for particulars will find them in an admirable
chapter (the fifth) of Maine’s “Ancient Law.” At one time the husband
was held to possess the _patria potestas_, or parental power, in its
full force. By law “the woman passed _in manum viri_, that is, she
became the daughter of her husband.” All she had became his, and after
his death she was retained in the same strict tutelage by any guardians
his will might appoint. Afterwards, to soften this rigid bond, the woman
was regarded in law as being temporarily deposited by her family with
her husband; the family appointed guardians over her: and thus, between
the two tyrannies, she won a sort of independence. Then came
Christianity, and swept away the parental authority for married women,
concentrating all upon the husband. Hence our legislation bears the mark
of a double origin, and woman is half recognized as an equal and half as
a slave.
It is necessary to remember, therefore, that all the relation of
subjection in marriage is merely the residue of an unnatural system, of
which all else is long since outgrown. It would have seemed to an
ancient Roman a matter of course that a woman should, all her life long,
obey the guardians set over her person. It still seems to many people a
matter of course that she should obey her husband. To others among us,
on the contrary, both these theories of obedience seem barbarous, and
the one is merely a relic of the other.
We cannot disregard the history of the Theory of Tutelage. If we could
believe that a chrysalis is always a chrysalis, and a butterfly always a
butterfly, we could easily leave each to its appropriate sphere; but
when we see the chrysalis open, and the butterfly come half out of it,
we know that sooner or later it must spread wings, and fly. The theory
of tutelage is the chrysalis. Woman is the butterfly. Sooner or later
she will be wholly out.
XXVIII.
TWO AND TWO.
A young man of very good brains was telling me, the other day, his
dreams of his future wife. Rattling on, more in joke than in earnest, he
said, “She must be perfectly ignorant, and a bigot: she must know
nothing, and believe every thing. I should wish to have her call to me
from the adjoining room, ‘My dear, what do two and two make?’”
It did not seem to me that his demand would be so very hard to fill,
since bigotry and ignorance are to be had almost anywhere for the
asking; and, as for two and two, I should say that it had always been
the habit of women to ask that question of some man, and to rest easily
satisfied with the answer. They have generally called, as my friend
wished, from some other room, saying, “My dear, what do two and two
make?” and the husband or father or brother has answered and said, “My
dear, they make four for a man, and three for a woman.”
At any given period in the history of woman, she has adopted man’s whim
as the measure of her rights; has claimed nothing; has sweetly accepted
any thing: the law of two-and-two itself should be at his discretion. At
any given moment, so well was his interpretation received, that it stood
for absolute right. In Rome a woman, married or single, could not
testify in court; in the middle ages, and down to quite modern times,
she could not hold real estate; ten years ago she could not, in New
England, obtain a collegiate education; even now she cannot vote.
The first principles of republican government are so rehearsed and
re-rehearsed, that one would think they must become “as plain as that
two and two make four.” But we find throughout, that, as Emerson said of
another class of reasoners, “Their two is not the real two; their four
is not the real four.” We find different numerals and diverse
arithmetical rules for the two sexes; as, in some Oriental countries,
men and women speak different dialects of the same language.
In novels the hero often begins by dreaming, like my friend, of an ideal
wife, who shall be ignorant of every thing, and have only brains enough
to be bigoted. Instead of sighing, like Falstaff, “Oh for a fine young
thief, of the age of two and twenty or thereabouts!” the hero sighs for
a fine young idiot of similar age. When the hero is successful in his
search and wooing, the novelist sometimes mercifully removes the young
woman early, like David Copperfield’s Dora, she bequeathing the bereaved
husband, on her death-bed, to a woman of sense. In real life these
convenient interruptions do not commonly occur, and the foolish youth
regrets through many years that he did not select an Agnes instead.
The acute observer Stendhal says,—
“In Paris, the highest praise for a marriageable girl is to say,
‘She has great sweetness of character and the disposition of a
lamb.’ Nothing produces more impression on fools who are looking out
for wives. I think I see the interesting couple, two years after,
breakfasting together on a dull day, with three tall lackeys waiting
upon them!”
And he adds, still speaking in the interest of men,—
“Most men have a period in their career when they might do something
great, a period when nothing seems impossible. The ignorance of
women spoils for the human race this magnificent opportunity; and
love, at the utmost, in these days, only inspires a young man to
learn to ride well, or to make a judicious selection of a
tailor.”[6]
Footnote 6:
De L’Amour, par de Stendhal (Henri Beyle). Paris, 1868 [written in
1822], pp. 182, 198.
Society, however, discovers by degrees that there are conveniences in
every woman’s knowing the four rules of arithmetic for herself. Two and
two come to the same amount on a butcher’s bill, whether the order be
given by a man or a woman; and it is the same in all affairs or
investments, financial or moral. We shall one day learn that with laws,
customs, and public affairs it is even so. Once get it rooted in a
woman’s mind, that, for her, two and two make three only, and sooner or
later the accounts of the whole human race fail to balance.
XXIX.
A MODEL HOUSEHOLD.
There is an African bird called the hornbill, whose habits are in some
respects a model. The female builds her nest in a hollow tree, lays her
eggs, and broods on them. So far, so good. Then the male feels that he
must also contribute some service; so he walls up the hole closely,
giving only room for the point of the female’s bill to protrude. Until
the eggs are hatched, she is thenceforth confined to her nest, and is in
the mean time fed assiduously by her mate, who devotes himself entirely
to this object. Dr. Livingstone has seen these nests in Africa, Layard
and others in Asia, and Wallace in Sumatra.
Personally I have never seen a hornbill’s nest. The nearest approach I
ever made to it was when in Fayal I used to pass near a gloomy mansion,
of which the front windows were walled up, and only one high window was
visible in the rear, beyond the reach of eyes from any neighboring
house. In this cheerful abode, I was assured, a Portuguese lady had been
for many years confined by her jealous husband. It was long since any
neighbor had caught a glimpse of her, but it was supposed that she was
alive. There is no reason to doubt that her husband fed her well. It was
simply a case of human hornbill, with the imprisonment made perpetual.
I have more than once asked lawyers whether, in communities where the
old common law prevailed, there was any thing to prevent such an
imprisonment of a married woman; and they have always answered, “Nothing
but public opinion.” Where the husband has the legal custody of the
wife’s person, no _habeas corpus_ can avail against him. The hornbill
household is based on a strict application of the old common law. A
Hindoo household was a hornbill household: “a woman, of whatsoever age,
should never be mistress of her own actions,” said the code of Menu. An
Athenian household was a hornbill’s nest, and great was the outcry when
some Aspasia broke out of it. When Mrs. Sherman petitions Congress
against the emancipation of woman, we seem to hear the twittering of the
hornbill mother, imploring to be left inside.
Under some forms, the hornbill theory becomes respectable. There are
many peaceful families, innocent though torpid, where the only dream of
existence is to have plenty of quiet, plenty of food, and plenty of
well-fed children. For them this African household is a sufficient
model. The wife is “a home body.” The husband is “a good provider.”
These are honest people, and have a right to speak. The hornbill theory
is only dishonest when it comes—as it often comes—from women who lead
the life, not of good stay-at-home fowls, but of paroquets and
humming-birds,—who sorrowfully bemoan the active habits of enlightened
women, while they themselves
“Bear about the mockery of woe
To midnight dances and the public show.”
It is from these women, in Washington, New York, and elsewhere, that the
loudest appeal for the hornbill standard of domesticity proceeds. Put
them to the test, and give them their chicken-salad and champagne
through a hole in the wall only, and see how they like it.
But even the most honest and peaceful conservatives will one day admit
that the hornbill is not the highest model. Plato thought that “the soul
of our grandame might haply inhabit the body of a bird;” but Nature has
kindly provided various types of bird-households to suit all varieties
of taste. The bright orioles, filling the summer boughs with color and
with song, are as truly domestic in the freedom of their airy nest as
the poor hornbills who ignorantly make home into a dungeon. And
certainly each new generation of orioles, spreading their free wings
from that pendent cradle, are a happier illustration of judicious
nurture than are the uncouth little offspring of the hornbills, whom
Wallace describes as “so flabby and semi-transparent as to resemble a
bladder of jelly, furnished with head, legs, and rudimentary wings, but
with not a sign of a feather, except a few lines of points indicating
where they would come.”
XXX.
A SAFEGUARD FOR THE FAMILY.
Many German-Americans are warm friends of woman suffrage; but the
editors of “Puck,” it seems, are not. In a late number of that comic
journal, it had an unfavorable cartoon on this reform; and in a
following number,—the number, by the way, which contains that amusing
illustration of the vast seaside hotels of the future, with the cheering
announcement, “Only one mile to the barber’s shop,” and “Take the cars
to the dining-room,”—a lady comes to the rescue, and bravely defends
woman suffrage. It seems that the original cartoon depicted in the
corner a pretty family scene, representing father, mother, and children
seated happily together, with the melancholy motto, “Nevermore,
nevermore!” And when the correspondent, Mrs. Blake, very naturally asks
what this touching picture has to do with woman suffrage, Puck says, “If
the husband in our ‘pretty family scene’ should propose to vote for the
candidate who was obnoxious to his wife, would this ‘pretty family
scene’ continue to be a domestic paradise, or would it remind the
spectator of the region in which Dante spent his ‘fortnight off’?”
It is beautiful to see how much anxiety there is to preserve the family.
Every step in the modification of the old common law, whereby the wife
was, in Baron Alderson’s phrase, “the servant of her husband,” was
resisted as tending to endanger the family. That the wife should control
her own earnings, so that her husband should not have the right to
collect them in order to pay his gambling-debts, was declared by English
advocates, in the celebrated case of the Hon. Mrs. Norton, the poetess,
to imperil all the future peace of British households. Even the
liberal-minded “Punch,” about the time Girton College was founded in
England, expressed grave doubts whether the harmony of wedded unions
would not receive a blow, from the time when wives should be liable to
know more Greek than their husbands. Yet the marriage relation has
withstood these innovations. It has not been impaired, either by
separate rights, private earnings, or independent Greek: can it be
possible that a little voting will overthrow it?
The very ground on which woman suffrage is opposed by its enemies might
assuage these fears. If, as we are told, women will not take the pains
to vote except upon the strongest inducements, who has so good an
opportunity as the husband to bring those inducements to bear? and, if
so, what is the separation? Or if, as we are told, women will merely
reflect their husbands’ political opinions, why should they dispute
about them? The mere suggestion of a difference deep enough to quarrel
for, implies a real difference of convictions or interests, and
indicates that there ought to be an independent representation of each;
unless we fall back, once for all, on the common-law tradition that man
and wife are one, and that one is the husband. Either the antagonisms
which occur in politics are comparatively superficial, in which case
they would do no harm; or else they touch matters of real interest and
principle, in which case every human being has a right to independent
expression, even at a good deal of risk. In either case, the objection
falls to the ground.
We have fortunately a means of testing, with some fairness of estimate,
the probable amount of this peril. It is generally admitted,—and
certainly no German-American will deny,—that the most fruitful sources
of hostility and war in all times have been religious, not political.
All merely political antagonism, certainly all which is possible in a
republic, fades into insignificance before this more powerful dividing
influence. Yet we leave all this great explosive force in unimpeded
operation,—at any moment it may be set in action, in any one of those
“pretty family scenes” which “Puck” depicts,—while we are solemnly
warned against admitting the comparatively mild peril of a political
difference! It is like cautioning a manufacturer of dynamite against the
danger of meddling with mere edge-tools. Even with all the intensity of
feeling on religious matters, few families are seriously divided by
them; and the influence of political differences would be still more
insignificant.
The simple fact is, that there is no better basis for union than mutual
respect for each other’s opinions; and this can never be obtained
without an intelligent independence. “I would rather have a thorn in my
side than an echo,” said Emerson of friendship; and the same is true of
married life. It is the echoes, the nonentities, of whom men grow tired;
it is the women with some flavor of individuality who keep the hearts of
their husbands. This is only applying in a higher sense what
Shakspeare’s Cleopatra saw. When her handmaidens are questioning how to
hold a lover, and one says,—
“Give way to him in all: cross him in nothing,”—
Cleopatra, from the depth of an unequalled experience, retorts,—
“Thou speakest like a fool: the way to lose him!”
And what “the serpent of old Nile” said, the wives of the future, who
are to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves, may well ponder. It
takes two things different to make a union; and part of that difference
may as well lie in matters political as anywhere else.
XXXI.
WOMEN AS ECONOMISTS.