The American who sits in a street omnibus or railroad-car and sees a young
woman whose waist is pinched to a point that makes her breathing mere
panting and puffing, and whose feet are squeezed into shoes with a high
heel in the middle of the sole, which compels her to stump and hobble as
she tries to walk, should be very wary of praising the superiority of
European and American civilization to that of the East. The grade of
civilization which squeezes a waist into deformity is not, in that respect
at least, superior to that which squeezes a foot into deformity. It is in
both instances a barbarous conception alike of beauty and of the function
of woman. The squeezed waist and the squeezed foot equally assume that
distortion of the human frame may be beautiful, and that helpless idleness
is the highest sphere of woman.
But the imperfection of our Western civilization shows itself in more
serious forms involving women. The promiscuous herding of men and women
prisoners in jails, the opposition to reformatories and penitentiaries
exclusively for women, and, in general, the failure to provide, as a matter
of course, women attendants and women nurses for all women prisoners and
patients, is a signal illustration of a low tone of civilization. The most
revolting instance of this abuse was the discovery during the summer that
the patients in a woman's insane hospital in New Orleans were bathed by
male attendants.
It should not need such outrages to apprise us of the worth of the general
principle that humanity and decency require that in all public institutions
women should be employed in the care of women. A wise proposition during
the year to provide women at the police-stations for the examination of
women who are arrested failed to become law. It is hard, upon the merits of
the proposal, to understand why. Women who are arrested may be criminals,
or drunkards, or vagabonds, or insane, or witless, or sick. But whatever
the reason of the arrest, there can be no good reason whatever, in a truly
civilized community, that a woman taken under such circumstances should be
abandoned to personal search and examination by the kind of men to whom
that business is usually allotted. The surest sign of the civilization
of any community is its treatment of women, and the progress of our
civilization is shown by the constant amelioration of that condition. But
the unreasonable and even revolting circumstances of much of the public
treatment of them may wisely modify ecstasies over our vast superiority.
The squeezed waists and other tokens of the kind show that our civilization
has not yet outgrown the conception of the most meretricious epochs, that
woman exists for the delight of man, and is meant to be a kind of decorated
appendage of his life, while the men attendants and men nurses of women
prisoners and patients show a most uncivilized disregard of the just
instincts of sex. We are far from asserting that therefore the position of
women in this country is to be likened to their position in China, where
the contempt of men denied them souls, or to that among savage tribes,
where they are treated as beasts of burden. But because we are not
wallowing in the Slough of Despond, it does not follow that we are sitting
in the House Beautiful. The traveller who has climbed to the _mer de
glace_ at Chamouni, and sees the valley wide outstretched far below him,
sees also far above him the awful sunlit dome of "Sovran Blanc." Whatever
point we may have reached, there is still a higher point to gain. Nowhere
in the world are women so truly respected as here, nowhere ought they to be
more happy than in this country. But that is no reason that the New Orleans
outrage should be possible, while the same good sense and love of justice
which have removed so many barriers to fair-play for women should press on
more cheerfully than ever to remove those that remain.
(_December_, 1882)