away by zeal, says any thing disrespectful about the nursery. It is
contrary to the general tone of feeling among us, I am sure, to speak of
this priceless institution as a trivial or degrading sphere, unworthy
the emancipated woman. It is rarely that anybody speaks in this way; but
a single such utterance hurts us more than any arguments of the enemy.
For every thoughtful person sees that the cares of motherhood, though
not the whole duty of woman, are an essential part of that duty,
wherever they occur; and that no theory of womanly life is good for any
thing which undertakes to leave out the cradle. Even her
school-education is based on this fact, were it only on Stendhal’s
theory that the sons of a woman who reads Gibbon and Schiller will be
more likely to show talent than those of one who only tells her beads
and reads Mme. de Genlis. And so clearly is this understood among us,
that, when we ask for suffrage for woman, it is almost always claimed
that she needs it for the sake of her children. To secure her in her
right to them; to give her a voice in their education; to give her a
vote in the government beneath which they are to live,—these points are
seldom omitted in our statement of her claims. Any thing else would be
an error.
But there is an error at the other extreme, which is still greater. A
woman should no more merge herself in her child than in her husband. Yet
we often hear that she should do just this. What is all the public
sphere of woman, it is said,—what good can she do by all her speaking,
and writing, and action,—compared with that she does by properly
training the soul of one child? It is not easy to see the logic of this
claim.
For of what service is that child to be in the universe, except that he,
too, may write and speak and act for that which is good and true? And if
the mother foregoes all this that the child, in growing up, may simply
do what the mother has left undone, the world gains nothing. In
sacrificing her own work to her child’s, moreover, she exchanges a
present good for a prospective and merely possible one. If she does this
through overwhelming love, we can hardly blame her; but she cannot
justify it before reason and truth. Her child may die, and the service
to mankind be done by neither. Her child may grow up with talents unlike
hers, or with none at all; as the son of Howard was selfish, the son of
Chesterfield a boor, and the son of Wordsworth in the last degree
prosaic.
Or the special occasion when she might have done great good may have
passed before her boy or girl grows up to do it. If Mrs. Child had
refused to write “An Appeal for that Class of Americans called
Africans,” or Mrs. Stowe had laid aside “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” or Florence
Nightingale had declined to go to the Crimea, on the ground that a
woman’s true work was through the nursery, and they must all wait for
that, the consequence would be that these things would have remained
undone. The brave acts of the world must be done when occasion offers,
by the first brave soul who feels moved to do them, man or woman. If all
the children in all the nurseries are thereby helped to do other brave
deeds when their turn comes, so much the better. But when a great
opportunity offers for direct aid to the world, we have no right to
transfer that work to other hands—not even to the hands of our own
children. We must do the work, and train the children besides.
I am willing to admit, therefore, that the work of education, in any
form, is as great as any other work; but I fail to see why it should be
greater. Usefulness is usefulness: there is no reason why it should be
postponed from generation to generation, or why it is better to rear a
serviceable human being than to be one in person. Carry the theory
consistently out: each mother must simply rear her daughter that she in
turn may rear somebody else; from each generation the work will devolve
upon a succeeding generation, so that it will be only the last woman who
will personally do any service, except that of motherhood; and when her
time comes it will be too late for any service at all.
If it be said, “But some of these children will be men, who are
necessarily of more use than women,” I deny the necessity. If it be
said, “The children may be many, and the mother, who is but one, may
well be sacrificed,” it might be replied, that as one great act may be
worth many smaller ones, so all the numerous children and grandchildren
of a woman like Lucretia Mott may not collectively equal the usefulness
of herself alone. If she, like many women, had held it her duty to
renounce all other duties and interests from the time her motherhood
began, I think that the world, and even her children, would have lost
more than ever could have been gained by her more complete absorption in
the nursery.
The true theory seems a very simple one. The very fact that during
one-half the years of a woman’s average life she is made incapable of
child-bearing, shows that there are, even for the most prolific and
devoted mothers, duties other than the maternal. Even during the most
absorbing years of motherhood, the wisest women still try to keep up
their interest in society, in literature, in the world’s affairs—were it
only for their children’s sake. Multitudes of women will never be
mothers; and those more fortunate may find even the usefulness of their
motherhood surpassed by what they do in other ways. If maternal duties
interfere in some degree with all other functions, the same is true,
though in a far less degree, of those of a father. But there are those
who combine both spheres. The German poet Wieland claimed to be the
parent of fourteen children and forty books; and who knows by which
parentage he served the world the best?
XXXVII.
A GERMAN POINT OF VIEW.
Many Americans will remember the favorable impression made by Professor
Christlieb of Germany, when he attended the meeting of the Evangelical
Alliance in New York some four or five years ago. His writings, like his
presence, show a most liberal spirit; and perhaps no man has ever
presented the more advanced evangelical theology of Germany in so
attractive a light. Yet I heard a story of him the other day, which
either showed him in an aspect quite undesirable, or else gave a
disagreeable view of the social position of women in Germany.
The story was to the effect, that a young American student recently
called on Professor Christlieb with a letter of introduction. The
professor received him cordially, and soon entered into conversation
about the United States. He praised the natural features of the country,
and the enterprising spirit of our citizens, but expressed much
solicitude about the future of the nation. On being asked his reasons,
he frankly expressed his opinion that “the Spirit of Christ” was not
here. Being still further pressed to illustrate his meaning, he gave, as
instances of this deficiency, not the Crédit Mobilier or the Tweed
scandal, but such alarming facts as the following. He seriously
declared, that, on more than one occasion, he had heard an American
married woman say to her husband, “Dear, will you bring me my shawl?”
and the husband had brought it. He further had seen a husband return
home at evening, and enter the parlor where his wife was
sitting,—perhaps in the very best chair in the room,—and the wife not
only did not go and get his dressing-gown and slippers, but she even
remained seated, and left him to find a chair as he could. These things,
as Professor Christlieb pointed out, suggested a serious deficiency of
the Spirit of Christ in the community.
With our American habits and interpretations, it is hard to see this
matter just as the professor sees it. One would suppose, that, if there
is any meaning in the command, “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so
fulfil the law of Christ,” a little of such fulfilling might sometimes
be good for the husband, as for the wife. And though it would
undoubtedly be more pleasing to see every wife so eager to receive her
husband that she would naturally spring from her chair and run to kiss
him in the doorway, yet, where such devotion was wanting, it would be
but fair to inquire which of the two had had the more fatiguing day’s
work, and to whom the easy-chair justly belonged. The truth is, I
suppose, that the good professor’s remark indicated simply a “survival”
in his mind, or in his social circle, of a barbarous tradition, under
which the wife of a Mexican herdsman cannot eat at the table with her
“lord and master,” and the wife of a German professor must vacate the
best arm-chair at his approach.
If so, it is not to be regretted that we in this country have outgrown a
relation so unequal. Nor am I at all afraid that the great Teacher, who,
pointing to the multitude for whom he was soon to die, said of them,
“This is my brother and my sister and my mother,” would have objected to
any mutual and equal service between man and woman. If we assume that
two human beings have immortal souls, there can be no want of dignity to
either in serving the other. The greater equality of woman in America
seems to be, on this reasoning, a proof of the presence, not the
absence, of the spirit of Christ; nor does Dr. Christlieb seem to me
quite worthy of the beautiful name he bears, if he feels otherwise.
But, if it is really true that a German professor has to cross the
Atlantic to witness a phenomenon so very simple as that of a lover-like
husband bringing a shawl for his wife, I should say, Let the immigration
from Germany be encouraged as much as possible, in order that even the
most learned immigrants may discover something new.
XXXVIII.
CHILDLESS WOMEN.
It has not always been regarded as a thing creditable to woman, that she
was the mother of the human race. On the contrary, the fact was often
mentioned, in the Middle Ages, as a distinct proof of inferiority. The
question was discussed in the mediæval Council of Maçon, and the
position taken that woman was no more entitled to rank as human, because
she brought forth men, than the garden-earth could take rank with the
fruit and flowers it bore. The same view was revived by a Latin writer
of 1595, on the thesis “_Mulieres non homines esse_,” a French
translation of which essay was printed under the title of “_Paradoxe sur
les femmes_,” in 1766. Napoleon Bonaparte used the same image, carrying
it almost as far:—
“Woman is given to man that she may bear children. Woman is our
property; we are not hers: because she produces children for us; we do
not yield any to her: she is therefore our possession, as the fruit-tree
is that of the gardener.”
Even the fact of parentage, therefore, has been adroitly converted into
a ground of inferiority for women; and this is ostensibly the reason why
lineage has been reckoned, almost everywhere, through the male line
only, ignoring the female; just as, in tracing the seed of some rare
fruit, the gardener takes no genealogical account of the garden where it
grew. The view is now seldom expressed in full force: the remnant of it
is to be found in the lingering impression, that, at any rate, a woman
who is not a mother is of no account; as worthless as a fruitless garden
or a barren fruit-tree. Created only for a certain object, she is of
course valueless unless that object be fulfilled.
But the race must have fathers as well as mothers; and, if we look for
evidence of public service in great men, it certainly does not always
lie in leaving children to the republic. On the contrary, the rule has
rather seemed to be, that the most eminent men have left their bequest
of service in any form rather than in that of a great family. Recent
inquiries into the matter have brought out some remarkable facts in this
regard.
As a rule, there exist no living descendants in the male line from the
great authors, artists, statesmen, soldiers, of England. It is stated
that there is not one such descendant of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser,
Butler, Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Goldsmith, Scott, Byron, or Moore; not one
of Drake, Cromwell, Monk, Marlborough, Peterborough, or Nelson; not one
of Strafford, Ormond, or Clarendon; not one of Addison, Swift, or
Johnson; not one of Walpole, Bolingbroke, Chatham, Pitt, Fox, Burke,
Grattan, or Canning; not one of Bacon, Locke, Newton, or Davy; not one
of Hume, Gibbon, or Macaulay; not one of Hogarth or Reynolds; not one of
Garrick, John Kemble, or Edmund Kean. It would be easy to make a similar
American list, beginning with Washington, of whom it was said that
“Providence made him childless that his country might call him Father.”
Now, however we may regret that these great men have left little or no
posterity, it does not occur to any one as affording any serious
drawback upon their service to their nation. Certainly it does not occur
to us that they would have been more useful had they left children to
the world, but rendered it no other service. Lord Bacon says that “he
that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are
impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit to the public, have
proceeded from unmarried or childless men; which, both in affection and
means, have married and endowed the public.” And this is the view
generally accepted,—that the public is in such cases rather the gainer
than the loser, and has no right to complain.
Since, therefore, every child must have a father and a mother both, and
neither will alone suffice, why should we thus heap gratitude on men who
from preference or from necessity have remained childless, and yet
habitually treat women as if they could render no service to their
country except by giving it children? If it be folly and shame, as I
think, to belittle and decry the dignity and worth of motherhood, as
some are said to do, it is no less folly, and shame quite as great, to
deny the grand and patriotic service of many women who have died and
left no children among their mourners. Plato puts into the mouth of a
woman,—the eloquent Diotima, in the “Banquet,”—that, after all, we are
more grateful to Homer and Hesiod for the children of their brain than
if they had left human offspring.
XXXIX.
THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO MOTHERS.
From the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals we have now
advanced to a similar society for the benefit of children. When shall we
have a movement for the prevention of cruelty to mothers?
A Rhode Island lady, who had never taken any interest in the woman
suffrage movement, came to me in great indignation the other day, asking
if it was true that under Rhode Island laws a husband might, by his last
will, bequeath his child away from its mother, so that she might, if the
guardian chose, never see it again. I said that it was undoubtedly true,
and that such were still the laws in many States of the Union.
“But,” she said, “it is an outrage. The husband may have been one of the
weakest or worst men in the world; he may have persecuted his wife and
children; he may have made the will in a moment of anger, and have
neglected to alter it. At any rate, he is dead, and the mother is
living. The guardian whom he appoints may turn out a very malicious man,
and may take pleasure in torturing the mother; or he may bring up the
children in a way their mother thinks ruinous for them. Why do not all
the mothers cry out against such a law?”
“I wish they would,” I said. “I have been trying a good many years to
make them even understand what the law is; but they do not. People who
do not vote pay no attention to the laws, until they suffer from them.”
She went away protesting that she, at least, would not hold her tongue
on the subject, and I hope she will not. The actual text of the law is
as follows:—
“Every person authorized by law to make a will, except married
women, shall have a right to appoint by his will a guardian or
guardians for his children during their minority.”[8]
Footnote 8:
Gen. Statutes R. I., chap. 154, sect. 1.
There is not associated with this, in the statute, the slightest clause
in favor of the mother; nor any thing which could limit the power of the
guardian by requiring deference to her wishes, although he could, in
case of gross neglect or abuse, be removed by the court, and another
guardian appointed. There is not a line of positive law to protect the
mother. Now, in a case of absolute wrong, a single sentence of law is
worth all the chivalrous courtesy this side of the Middle Ages.
It is idle to say that such laws are not executed. They are executed. I
have had letters, too agonizing to print, expressing the sufferings of
mothers under laws like these. There lies before me a letter,—not from
Rhode Island,—written by a widowed mother who suffers daily tortures,
even while in possession of her child, at the knowledge that it is not
legally hers, but held only by the temporary permission of the guardian
appointed under her husband’s will. “I beg you,” she says, “to take this
will to the hill-top, and urge law-makers in our next Legislature to
free the State record from the shameful story that no mother can control
her child unless it is born out of wedlock.”
“From the moment,” she says, “when the will was read to me, I have made
no effort to set it aside. I wait till God reveals his plans, so far as
my own condition is concerned. But out of my keen comprehension of this
great wrong, notwithstanding my submission for myself, my whole soul is
stirred,—for my child, who is a little woman; for all women, that the
laws may be changed which subject a true woman, a devoted wife, a
faithful mother, to such mental agonies as I have endured, and shall
endure till I die.”
In a later letter she says, “I now have his [the guardian’s] solemn
promise that he will not remove her from my control. To some extent my
sufferings are allayed; and yet never, till she arrives at the age of
twenty-one, shall I fully trust.” I wish that mothers who dwell in
sheltered and happy homes would try to bring to their minds the
condition of a mother whose possession of her only child rests upon the
“promise” of a comparative stranger. We should get beyond the
meaningless cry, “I have all the rights I want,” if mothers could only
remember that among these rights, in most States of the Union, the right
of a widowed mother to her child is not included.
By strenuous effort, the law on this point has in Massachusetts been
gradually amended, till it now stands thus: The father is authorized to
appoint a guardian by will; but the powers of this guardian do not
entitle him to take the child from the mother.
“The guardian of a minor ... shall have the custody and tuition of
his ward; and the care and management of all his estate, except that
the father of the minor, if living, and in case of his death the
mother, they being respectively competent to transact their own
business, shall be entitled to the custody of the person of the
minor and the care of his education.”[9]
Footnote 9:
Public Statutes, chap. 139, sect. 4.
Down to 1870 the cruel words “while she remains unmarried” followed the
word “mother” in the above law. Until that time, the mother if remarried
had no claim to the custody of her child, in case the guardian wished
otherwise; and a very painful scene once took place in a Boston
court-room, where children were forced away from their mother by the
officers, under this statute; in spite of her tears and theirs; and this
when no sort of personal charge had been made against her. This could
not now happen in Massachusetts, but it might still happen in some other
States. It is true that men are almost always better than their laws;
but, while a bad law remains on the statute-book, it gives to any
unscrupulous man the power to be as bad as the law.
SOCIETY.
“Place the sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and a severe
morality gives that essential charm to woman which educates all that is
delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing, breeds courtesy and learning,
conversation and wit, in her rough mate; so that I have thought a
sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good
women.”—EMERSON: _Society and Solitude_, p. 21.
XL.
FOAM AND CURRENT.
Sometimes, on the beach at Newport, I look at the gayly dressed ladies
in their phaëtons, and then at the foam which trembles on the breaking
wave, or lies palpitating in creamy masses on the beach. It is as pretty
as they, as light, as fresh, as delicate, as changing; and no doubt the
graceful foam, if it thinks at all, fancies that it is the chief
consummate product of the ocean, and that the main end of the vast
currents of the mighty deep is to yield a few glittering bubbles like
those. At least, this seems to me what many of the fair ladies think.
Here is a nation in which the most momentous social and political
experiment ever tried by man is being worked out, day by day. There is
something oceanlike in the way in which the great currents of life,
race, religion, temperament, are here chafing with each other, safe from
the storms through which all monarchical countries may yet have to pass.
As these great currents heave, there are tossed up in every
watering-place and every city in America, as on an ocean-beach, certain
pretty bubbles of foam; and each spot, we may suppose, counts its own
bubbles brighter than those of its neighbors, and christens them
“society.”
It is an unceasing wonder to a thoughtful person, at any such resort, to
see the unconscious way in which fashionable society accepts the foam,
and ignores the currents. You hear people talk of “a position in
society,” “the influential circles in society,” as if the position they
mean were not liable to be shifted in a day; as if the essential
influences in America were not mainly to be sought outside the world of
fashion. In other countries it is very different. The circle of social
caste, whose centre you touch in London, radiates to the shores of the
island; the upper class controls, not merely fashion, but government; it
rules in country as well as city; genius and wealth are but its
tributaries. Wherever it is not so, it is because England is so far
Americanized. But in America the social prestige of the cities is
nothing in the country; it is a matter of the pavement, of a three-mile
radius.
Go to the farthest borders of England: there are still the “county
families,” and you meet servants in livery. On the other hand, in a
little village in Northern New Hampshire, my friend was visited in the
evening by the landlady, who said that several of their “most
fashionable ladies” had happened in, and she would like to exhibit to
them her guest’s bonnet. Then the different cities ignore each other:
the rulers of select circles in New York find themselves nobodies in
Washington, while a Washington social passport counts for as little in
New York. Boston and Philadelphia affect to ignore both; and St. Louis
and San Francisco have their own standards. The utmost social prestige
in America is local, provincial, a matter of the square inch: it is as
if the foam of each particular beach along the seacoast were to call
itself “society.”
There is something pathetic, therefore, in the unwearied pains taken by
ambitious women to establish a place in some little, local, transitory
domain, to “bring out” their daughters for exhibition on a given
evening, to form a circle for them, to marry them well. A dozen years
hence the millionnaires whose notice they seek may be paupers, or these
ladies may be dwelling in some other city, where the visiting cards will
bear wholly different names. How idle to attempt to transport into
American life the social traditions and delusions which require monarchy
and primogeniture, and a standing army, to keep them up—and which cannot
hold their own in England, even with the aid of these!
Every woman, like every man, has a natural desire for influence; and if
this instinct yearns, as it often should yearn, to take in more than her
own family, she must seek it somewhere outside. I know women who bring
to bear on the building-up of a frivolous social circle—frivolous,
because it is not really brilliant, but only showy; not really gay, but
only bored—talent and energy enough to influence the mind and thought of
the nation, if only employed in some effective way. Who are the women of
real influence in America? They are the school-teachers, through whose
hands each successive American generation has to pass; they are those
wives of public men who share their husbands’ labor, and help mould
their work; they are those women, who, through their personal eloquence
or through the press, are distinctly influencing the American people in
its growth. The influence of such women is felt for good or for evil in
every page they print, every newspaper-column they fill: the individual
women may be unworthy their posts, but it is they who have got hold of
the lever, and gone the right way to work. As American society is
constituted, the largest “social success” that can be attained here is
trivial and local; and you have to “make believe very hard,” like that
other imaginary Marchioness, to find in it any career worth mentioning.
That is the foam, but these other women are dealing with the main
currents.
XLI.
“IN SOCIETY.”