but from conscious need. If they do not work, they and their families
will starve. It is a necessity, and a permanent necessity. It will last
all their lives, except in the case of a few who will “come into their
property” by and by, like Mr. Toots—and their work is usually worth
about as much as his. We see this every day in the sons of rich men.
Their fathers may bring them up to work, yet the mere fact that they are
to be relieved from this compulsion within a dozen years is apt to
paralyze their active faculties. They study law or medicine, or dabble
in “business;” but they only play at the practice of their pursuits,
because there is no conscious necessity behind them. There are
exceptions, but the exceptions are remarkable men.
Now, theorize as we may, the fact at present is, that what thus
paralyzes the energies of a few young men brings the same paralysis to
many young women. Those whose parents are wealthy do not learn any
regular occupation at all. Those whose parents are poor are obliged by
necessity to learn one: yet they do not learn it as men in general learn
theirs, but only as rich young men do, as if it were something to be
followed for a time only,—till they “come into their property.” To the
rich young man the property is a landed estate or some bank-stock. To
the poor girl the prospective property is a husband. She expects to be
married; and after that her money-making occupation is gone, and a new
avocation—that of housekeeping and maternity—begins. It is no less
arduous, no less honorable; but it is different. In it her previous
special training goes for nothing; and the thought of this must diminish
her interest in the previous special training. It is only a temporary
thing, like the few years’ labor of a rich young man. There are
exceptions, but they are extraordinary.
One reason why women’s work is not at present so well paid as that of
men is because it is not ordinarily so well done, especially in the more
difficult parts. All employers, male and female, tell you this; and one
great reason why it is not so well done is because women have not, as
men have, a spring of permanent necessity to urge them on. How shall we
supply the spring? This is the question we need to answer. As yet I do
not think we have reached it. It does not seem to me to be, like the
suffrage question, one easily settled. The reader will find very
important facts and testimonies bearing upon it in Virginia Penny’s
“Cyclopædia of Female Employments.”[13]
Footnote 13:
Especially on pp. 110, 146, 235, 238, 243, 245, 247, 300, 318, 322,
367, 380.
I confess myself unable, even after a good many years of study, to solve
it fully; but a few propositions, I think, are sure, and may be taken as
axioms to begin with. The general wages of women will always depend
greatly on the amount of skill acquired by the mass of them. The mass of
women will always look forward to being married, and, when married, to
being necessarily withdrawn from the labor-market. Those who look
forward to this withdrawal will not, as a rule, concentrate themselves
upon learning their vocation as if it were for life; and, at any rate,
when they leave it, they will take their skill with them, and so lower
the average skill of the whole.
The problem, therefore, is, how to equalize wages between a sex which
works continually throughout life, driven by conscious necessity, and a
sex which habitually works with temporary expectations, looking forward
to a withdrawal from the labor-market in a few years, and which, when so
withdrawn, carries its acquired skill with it, leaving only inexperience
in its place. We all wish to solve the problem: every man would like to
have his daughters as well paid for their labor as his sons. The ballot
will help to elucidate it, no doubt, by putting woman’s political
protection, at least, into her own hands: but wholly to solve the
problem will take the wisdom of several generations; nor will it be
done, perhaps, until the greater problem of association _vs._
competition is also understood. It certainly never will be solved by
slighting the marriage-relation, or by advocating either “free love” or
celibacy for women or for men.
LXVII.
THOROUGH.
“The hopeless defect of women in all practical matters,” said a shrewd
merchant the other day, “is, that it is impossible to make them
thorough.” It was a shallow remark, and so I told him. Women are
thorough in the things which they have accepted as their sphere,—in
their housekeeping and their dress and their social observances. There
is nothing more thorough on earth than the way housework is done in a
genuine New England household. There is an exquisite thoroughness in the
way a milliner’s or a dressmaker’s work is done,—a work such as clumsy
man cannot rival, and can hardly estimate. No general plans his
campaigns or marshals his armies better than some women of society
manage the circles of which they are the centre. Day and night, winter
and summer, at city or watering-place, year in and year out, such a
woman keeps open house for her gay world. She has a perpetual series of
guests who must be fed luxuriously, and amused profusely; she talks to
them in four or five languages; at her entertainments, she notes who is
present and who absent, as carefully as Napoleon watched his soldiers;
her interchange of cards, alone, is a thing as complex as the army
muster-rolls: thus she plans, organizes, conquers, and governs. People
speak of her existence as that of a doll or a toy, when she is the most
untiring of campaigners. Grant that her aim is, after all, unworthy, and
that you pity the worn face which has to force so many smiles. No
matter: the smiles are there, and so is the success. I often wish that
the reformers would do their work as thoroughly as the women of society
do theirs.
No, there is no constitutional want of thoroughness in women. The
trouble is, that into the new work upon which they are just entering,
they have not yet brought their thoroughness to bear. They suffer and
are defrauded and are reproached, simply because they have not yet
nerved themselves to do well the things which they have asserted their
right to do. A distinguished woman, who earns perhaps the largest income
ever honestly earned by any woman off the stage, told me the other day
that she left all her business affairs to the management of others, and
did not even know how to draw a check on a bank. What a melancholy
self-exhibition was that of a clever American woman, the author of half
a dozen successful books, refusing to look her own accounts in the face
until they had got into such a tangle that not even her own referees
could disentangle them to suit her! These things show, not that women
are constitutionally wanting in thoroughness, but that it is hard to
make them carry this quality into new fields.
I wish I could possibly convey to the young women who write for advice
on literary projects something of the meaning of this word “thorough” as
applied to literary work. Scarcely any of them seem to have a conception
of it. Dash, cleverness, recklessness, impatience of revision or of
patient investigation, these are the common traits. To a person of
experience, no stupidity is so discouraging as a brilliancy that has no
roots. It brings nothing to pass; whereas a slow stupidity, if it takes
time enough, may conquer the world. Consider that for more than twenty
years the path of literature has been quite as fully open for women as
for men, in America,—the payment the same, the honor the same, the
obstacles no greater. Collegiate education has until very lately been
denied them, but how many men succeed as writers without that advantage!
Yet how little, how very little, of really good literary work has yet
been done by American women! Young girls appear one after another: each
writes a single clever story or a single sweet poem, and then disappears
forever. Look at Griswold’s “Female Poets of America,” and you are
disposed to turn back to the title-page, and see if these utterly
forgotten names do not really represent the “female poets” of some other
nation. They are forgotten, as most of the more numerous “female prose
writers” are forgotten, because they had no root. Nobody doubts that
women have cleverness enough, and enough of power of expression. If you
could open the mails, and take out the women’s letters, as somebody
says, they would prove far more graphic and entertaining than those of
the men. They would be written, too, in what Macaulay calls—speaking of
Madame d’Arblay’s early style—“true woman’s English, clear, natural, and
lively.” What they need, in order to convert this epistolary brilliancy
into literature, is to be thorough.
You cannot separate woman’s rights and her responsibilities. In all ages
of the world she has had a certain limited work to do, and has done that
well. All that is needed, when new spheres are open, is that she should
carry the same fidelity into those. If she will work as hard to shape
the children of her brain as to rear her bodily offspring, will do
intellectual work as well as she does housework, and will meet her moral
responsibilities as she meets her social engagements, then opposition
will soon disappear. The habit of thoroughness is the key to all high
success. Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well. Only those who are
faithful in a few things will rightfully be made rulers over many.
LXVIII.
LITERARY ASPIRANTS.
The brilliant Lady Ashburton used to say of herself that she had never
written a book, and knew nobody whose book she would like to have
written. This does not seem to be the ordinary state of mind among those
who write letters of inquiry to authors. If I may judge from these
letters, the yearning for a literary career is just now greater among
women than among men. Perhaps it is because of some literary successes
lately achieved by women. Perhaps it is because they have fewer outlets
for their energies. Perhaps they find more obstacles in literature than
young men find, and have, therefore, more need to write letters of
inquiry about it. It is certain that they write such letters quite
often; and ask questions that test severely the supposed omniscience of
the author’s brain,—questions bearing on logic, rhetoric, grammar, and
orthography; how to find a publisher, and how to obtain a
well-disciplined mind.
These letters may sometimes be too long or come too often for
convenience, nor is the consoling postage-stamp always remembered. But
they are of great value as giving real glimpses of American social life,
and of the present tendencies of American women. They sometimes reveal
such intellectual ardor and imagination, such modesty, and such patience
under difficulties, as to do good to the reader, whatever they may do to
the writer. They certainly suggest a few thoughts, which may as well be
expressed, once for all, in print.
Behind almost all these letters there lies a laudable desire to achieve
success. “Would you have the goodness to tell us how success can be
obtained?” How can this be answered, my dear young lady, when you leave
it to the reader to guess what your definition of success may be? For
instance, here is Mr. Mansfield Tracy Walworth, who was murdered the
other day in New York. He was at once mentioned in the newspapers as a
“celebrated author.” Never in my life having heard of him, I looked in
Hart’s “Manual of American Literature,” and there found that Mr.
Walworth’s novel of “Warwick” had a sale of seventy-five thousand
copies, and his “Delaplaine” of forty-five thousand. Is it a success to
have secured a sale like that for your books, and then to die, and have
your brother penmen ask, “Who was he?” Yet, certainly, a sale of
seventy-five thousand copies is not to be despised; and I fear I know
many youths and maidens who would willingly write novels much poorer
than “Warwick” for the sake of a circulation like that. I do not think
that Hawthorne, however, would have accepted these conditions; and he
certainly did not have this style of success.
Nor do I think he had any right to expect it. He had made his choice,
and had reason to be satisfied. The very first essential for literary
success is to decide what success means. If a young girl pines after the
success of Marion Harland and Mrs. Southworth, let her seek it. It is
possible that she may obtain it, or surpass it; and, though she might do
better, she might do far worse. It is, at any rate, a laudable aim to be
popular: popularity may be a very creditable thing, unless you pay too
high a price for it. It is a pleasant thing, and has many contingent
advantages,—balanced by this great danger, that one is apt to mistake it
for success.
“Learning hath made the most,” said old Fuller, “by those books on which
the booksellers have lost.” If this be true of learning, it is quite as
true of genius and originality. A book may be immediately popular and
also immortal, but the chances are the other way. It is more often the
case, that a great writer gradually creates the taste by which he is
enjoyed. Wordsworth in the last generation and Emerson in the present
have been striking instances of this; and authors of far less fame have
yet the same choice which they had. You can take the standard which the
book-market offers, and train yourself for that. This will, in the
present age, be sure to educate certain qualities in you,—directness,
vividness, animation, dash,—even if it leaves other qualities untrained.
Or you can make a standard of your own, and aim at that, taking your
chance of seeing the public agree with you. Very likely you may fail;
perhaps you may be wrong in your fancy, after all, and the public may be
right: if you fail, you may find it hard to bear; but, on the other
hand, you may have the inward “glory and joy” which nothing but fidelity
to an ideal standard can give. All this applies to all forms of work,
but it applies conspicuously to literature.
Instead, therefore, of offering to young writers the usual comforting
assurance, that, if they produce any thing of real merit, it will be
sure to succeed, I should caution them first to make their own
definition of success, and then act accordingly. Hawthorne succeeded in
his way, and Mr. M. T. Walworth in his way; and each of these would have
been very unreasonable if he had expected to succeed in both ways. There
is always an opening for careful and conscientious literary work; and,
by such work, many persons obtain a modest support. There are also some
great prizes to be won; but these are commonly, though not always, won
by work of a more temporary and sensational kind. Make your choice; and,
when you have got precisely what you asked for, do not complain because
you have missed what you would not take.
LXIX.
“THE CAREER OF LETTERS.”
A young girl of some talent once told me that she had devoted herself to
“the career of letters.” I found, on inquiry, that she had obtained a
situation as writer of “society” gossip for a New York newspaper. I can
hardly imagine any life that leads more directly away from any really
literary career, or any life about which it is harder to give counsel.
The work of a newspaper-correspondent, especially in the “society”
direction, is so full of trials and temptations, for one of either sex,
in our dear, inquisitive, gossiping America, that one cannot help
watching with especial solicitude all women who enter it. Their special
gifts as women are a source of danger: they are keener of observation
from the very fact of their sex, more active in curiosity, more skilful
in achieving their ends; in a world of gossip they are the queens, and
men but their subjects, hence their greater danger.
In Newport, New York, Washington, it is the same thing. The unbounded
appetite for private information about public or semi-public people
creates its own purveyors; and these, again, learn to believe with
unflinching heartiness in the work they do. I have rarely encountered a
successful correspondent of this description who had not become
thoroughly convinced that the highest desire of every human being is to
see his name in print, no matter how. Unhappily there is a great deal to
encourage this belief: I have known men to express great indignation at
an unexpected newspaper-puff, and then to send ten dollars privately to
the author. This is just the calamity of the profession, that it brings
one in contact with this class of social hypocrites; and the “personal”
correspondent gradually loses faith that there is any other class to be
found. Then there is the perilous temptation to pay off grudges in this
way, to revenge slights, by the use of a power with which few people are
safely to be trusted. In many cases, such a correspondent is simply a
child playing with poisoned arrows: he poisons others; and it is no
satisfaction to know that in time he will also poison himself, and
paralyze his own power for mischief.
There lies before me a letter written some years ago to a young lady
anxious to enter on this particular “career of letters,”—a letter from
an experienced New York journalist. He has employed, he says, hundreds
of lady correspondents, for little or no compensation; and one of his
few successful writers he thus describes: “She succeeds by pushing her
way into society, and extracting information from fashionable people and
officials and their wives.... She flatters the vain, and overawes the
weak, and gets by sheer impudence what other writers cannot.... I would
not wish you to be like her, or reduced to the necessity of doing what
she does, for any success journalism can possibly give.” And who can
help echoing this opinion? If this is one of the successful laborers,
where shall we place the unsuccessful; or, rather, is success, or
failure, the greater honor?
Personal journalism has a prominence in this country with which nothing
in any other country can be compared. What is called publicity in
England or France means the most peaceful seclusion, compared with the
glare of notoriety which an enterprising correspondent can flash out at
any time—as if by opening the bull’s-eye of a dark lantern—upon the
quietest of his contemporaries. It is essentially an American
institution, and not one of those in which we have reason to feel most
pride. It is to be observed, however, that foreigners, if in office,
take to it very readily; and it is said that no people cultivate the
reporters at Washington more assiduously than the diplomatic corps, who
like to send home the personal notices of themselves, in order to prove
to their governments that they are highly esteemed in the land to which
they are appointed. But, however it may be with them, it is certain that
many people still like to keep their public and private lives apart, and
shrink from even the inevitable eminence of fame. One of the very most
popular of American authors has said that he never, to this day, has
overcome a slight feeling of repugnance on seeing his own name in print.
LXX.
TALKING AND TAKING.
Every time a woman does any thing original or remarkable,—inventing a
rat-trap, let us say, or carving thirty-six heads on a walnut-shell,—all
observers shout applause. “There’s a woman for you, indeed! Instead of
talking about her rights, she takes them. That’s the way to do it. What
a lesson to these declaimers upon the platform!”
It does not seem to occur to these wise people that the right to talk is
itself one of the chief rights in America, and the way to reach all the
others. To talk, is to make a beginning, at any rate. To catch people
with your ideas, is more than to contrive a rat-trap; and Isotta
Nogarola, carving thirty-six empty heads, was not working in so
practical a fashion as Mary Livermore when she instructs thirty-six
hundred full ones.
It shows the good sense of the woman suffrage agitators, that they have
decided to begin with talk. In the first place, talking is the most
lucrative of all professions in America; and therefore it is the duty of
American women to secure their share of it. Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble
used to say that she read Shakspeare in public “for her bread;” and
when, after melting all hearts by a course of farewell readings, she
decided to begin reading again, she said she was doing it “for her
butter.” So long as women are often obliged to support themselves and
their children, and perhaps their husbands, by their own labor, they
have no right to work cheaply, unless driven to it. Anna Dickinson has
no right to make fifteen dollars a week by sewing, if, by stepping out
of the ranks of needle-women into the ranks of the talkers, she can make
a hundred dollars a day. Theorize as we may, the fact is, that there is
no kind of work in America which brings such sure profits as public
speaking. If women are unfitted for it, or if they “know the value of
peace and quietness,” as the hand-organ-man says, and can afford to hold
their tongues, let them do so. But if they have tongues, and like to use
them, they certainly ought to make some money by the performance.
This is the utilitarian view. And when we bring in higher objects, it is
plain that the way to get any thing in America is to talk about it.
Silence is golden, no doubt, and like other gold remains in the
bank-vaults, and does not just now circulate very freely as currency.
Even literature in America is utterly second to oratory as a means of
immediate influence. Of all sway, that of the orator is the most potent
and most perishable; and the student and the artist are apt to hold
themselves aloof from it, for this reason. But it is the one means in
America to accomplish immediate results, and women who would take their
rights must take them through talking. It is the appointed way.
Under a good old-fashioned monarchy, if a woman wished to secure any
thing for her sex, she must cajole a court, or become the mistress of a
monarch. That epoch ended with the French Revolution. When Bonaparte
wished to silence Madame de Staël, he said, “What does that woman want?
Does she want the money the government owes to her father?” When Madame
de Staël heard of it, she said, “The question is not what I want, but
what I think.” Henceforth women, like men, are to say what they think.
For all that flattery and seduction and sin, we have substituted the
simple weapon of talk. If women wish education, they must talk; if
better laws, they must talk. The one chief argument against woman
suffrage, with men, is that so few women even talk about it.
As long as talk can effect any thing, it is the duty of women to talk;
and in America, where it effects every thing, they should talk all the
time. When they have obtained, as a class, absolute equality of rights
with men, their talk on this subject may be silent, and they may accept,
if they please, that naughty masculine definition of a happy
marriage,—the union of a deaf man with a dumb woman.
LXXI.
HOW TO SPEAK IN PUBLIC.
There are other things that women wish to do, it seems, beside studying
and voting. There are a good many—if I may judge from letters that
occasionally come to me—who are taking, or wish to take, their first
lessons in public speaking. Not necessarily very much in public, or
before mixed audiences, but perhaps merely to say to a room-full of
ladies, or before the committee of a Christian Union, what they desire
to say. “How shall I make myself heard? How shall I learn to express
myself? How shall I keep my head clear? Is there any school for debate?”
And so on. My dear young lady, it does not take much wisdom, but only a
little experience, to answer some of these questions. So I am not afraid
to try.
The best school for debate is debating. So far as mere confidence and
comfort are concerned, the great thing is to gain the habit of speech,
even if one speaks badly. And the practice of an ordinary debating
society has also this advantage, that it teaches you to talk sense (lest
you be laughed at), to speak with some animation (lest your hearers go
to sleep), to think out some good arguments (because you are trying to
convince somebody), and to guard against weak reasoning or unfounded
assertion (lest your opponent trip you up). Speaking in a debating
society thus gives you the same advantage that a lawyer derives from the
presence of an opposing counsel: you learn to guard yourself at all
points. It is the absence of this check which is the great intellectual
disadvantage of the pulpit. When a lawyer says a foolish thing in an
argument, he is pretty sure to find it out; but a clergyman may go on
repeating his foolish thing for fifty years without finding it out, for
want of an opponent.