Painters,
Sculptors,
Teachers of Drawing and the like,
Designers,
Engravers,
Public Singers, and
Actresses.
I am sorry to conclude these attempts at statistics with one reliable
estimate, which holds, like a nutshell, the kernel of this question of
female labor.
In 1850, there were engaged in shoemaking, in the town of Lynn, 3,729
males and 6,412 females,--nearly twice as many women as men; yet, in the
monthly payment of wages, only half as much money was paid to women as
to men. The three thousand men received seventy-five thousand dollars a
month; and the six thousand women, thirty-seven thousand dollars: that
is, the women's wages were, on the average, only one-quarter as much as
those of the men.
If we inquire into details, we may find many exceptional causes at work,
not perceptible at first sight: still this remarkable fact remains
essentially unchanged.
In my first lecture, I showed you that women were starving, and that
vice is a better paymaster than labor. I showed you the awful falsity of
the cry, "Do not let women work: we will work for them. They are too
tender, too delicate, to bide the rough usage of the world." I showed
you that they were not only working hard, but had been working at hard
and unwholesome work, not merely in this century, but in all centuries
since the world began. I showed you how man himself has turned them
back, when they have entered a well-paid career. Practically, the
command of society to the uneducated class is, "Marry, stitch, die, or
do worse."
Plenty of employments are open to them; but all are underpaid. They will
never be better paid till women of rank begin to work for money, and so
create a respect for woman's labor; and women of rank will never do this
till American men feel what all American men profess,--a proper respect
for Labor, as God's own demand upon every human soul,--and so teach
American women to feel it. How often have I heard that every woman
willing to work may find employment! The terrible reverses of 1837
taught many men in this country that they were "out of luck:" how
absurd, then, this statement with regard to women! One reason why so
many young women are attracted to the Catholic Church is, that the
Catholic Church is a good economist, and does not tolerate an idle
member. In Catholic countries,--nay, in Protestant,--the gray hood of
the Sister of Charity is as sacred as a crown.
When I think how happy human life might be, if men and women worked
freely together, I lose patience. Such marriages as I can dream
of,--where, household duties thriftily managed and speedily discharged,
the wife assumes some honorable trust, or finds a noble task for her
delicate hands; while the husband follows his under separate auspices!
Occupied with real service to men and each other, how happily would they
meet at night to discuss the hours they had lived apart, to help each
other's work by each other's wit, and to draw vital refreshment from the
caresses of their children! It is your distrust, O men! that prevents
your having such homes as poets fancy. You will not help women to form
them. The sturdy pine pushes through the tightest soil, and will grow,
though nothing more genial than a November sky bid it welcome; but
tender anemones--wind-flowers, as we call them--must be coaxed through
the loose loam sifted from thousands of autumn leaves, and tremble to
the faintest air. Yet are anemones fairer than the pine, and their
lovely blossoming a fit reward for Nature's pains. Follow Nature, and
offer the encouragement which those you love best daily need. Do it for
your own sakes; for proper employment will diffuse serenity over the
anxious faces you are too apt to see. Do not fancy that the conventions
of society can ever prevail over the will, it may be the freak, of
Nature. That stepdame is absolute. She set Hercules spinning, and sent
Joan of Arc to Orleans. She taught Mrs. John Stuart Mill political
economy, and Monsieur Malignon netting and lace-work. She enables women
to bear immense burdens, heat, cold, and frost; she sets them in the
thick of the battle even; while in South Carolina, and in the heart of
Africa, or among the Indians of the Rocky Mountains, old men croon over
forsaken babes till the milk flows in to their withered breasts.[25]
Women want work for all the reasons that men want it. When they see
this, and begin to do it faithfully, you will respect their work, and
pay them for it. We are all taught that we are the children of God; only
Mohammedans deny their women that rank: yet we are left without duties,
as if such a thing were possible,--left without work that offers any
adequate _end_ as a stimulus to diligence or ambition; and, until "Work"
becomes man's cry of inspiration, woman will never train herself to do
her work well.
It was Margaret Fuller, I think, who wrote of the Polish heroine, the
Countess Emily Plater, "_She_ is the figure I want for my frontispiece.
Short was her career. Like the Maid of Orleans, she only lived long
enough to _verify her credentials_, and then passed from a scene on
which she was probably a premature apparition." Ah! that is what all
women should do,--verify their credentials! "Say what you please," said
a young girl to her lover, as they passed out of a Woman's Convention;
"a woman that _can_ speak like Lucretia Mott, _ought_ to speak." And men
themselves cannot escape from this conviction. The duty of women,
therefore, is to inspire it by doing whatever they undertake worthily
and well; patient in waiting for opportunities, prompt to seize,
conscientious to profit by them.
The Sorbonne, which still excludes woman from its courses and colleges,
has formed a separate course, and now institutes examinations, and
distributes diplomas for women. The Committee consists of three of the
Inspectors of the University, two Catholic priests, one Protestant
clergyman, and three ladies.
A daughter of the greatest living French poet passed the examination
lately for the mere honor of it. Another girl, the daughter of one of
the highest public functionaries, passed the examinations; going through
the winter twilight every morning at five, that she might not only be
permitted to found a school on her estate, but secure the right to teach
in it. Aware that her rank would befriend her, she concealed her name
that she might owe nothing to favor. That is the right spirit. When a
majority, or even a plurality, of women are capable of it, farewell to
lecturers and lectures, to conventions, special pleadings, and the like!
The whole harvest will be open, and the laborers will come, bringing
their sheaves with them.
In receiving lately a letter from a distinguished French author,--Madame
Sirault,--I was struck by the following sentence: "Every career from
which woman is steadily repulsed by man is, by this fact alone, marked
with the seal of death. The very repulse stigmatizes it. Man may not be
conscious of what he does; but the career which is too vile for a woman
to enter has outlived all chance of reform, and must perish with its
abuses."
And, heroic as this statement may seem to you, it is a simple statement
of fact. Can man demand of woman a higher purity, a more ideal Christian
grace, than the letter of the Scripture, than the spirit of Christ,
demands of man himself?--"Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father in
heaven is also perfect."
That was the clear command laid upon the simple fishermen, upon Luke the
physician and Matthew the publican, as well as upon Mary and Martha. The
world's eyes are slowly opening to the need of a pure life in men; and
it helps to show men what they ought to be, when women knock at the
doors of their workshops, and insist on entering.
"What!" says the soldier, "must my sister follow me to the field to take
this blood-stained hand; to see me decked in the spoils of fallen men;
or hunting unprotected women like a brute beast, till they fall
senseless on the bodies of those they loved?"
"Shut her out!" cries the minister of state. "Shall my _sister_ see
these hands, dripping with blood-money, bribed by a slave power or a
party interest, signing papers that condemn children yet unborn to the
miseries of hopeless war?"
"Shut her out!" cries the advocate. "I am preparing to defend this man
for luring helpless innocence to the brink of hell, for building up a
fortune on dollars wrung from starving women, for putting a bullet
through his brother because he did not live a life purer than his own."
"Turn her out!" cries the judge. "She will see that my scales are
loaded. She heard that railroad company offer me a bribe. She caught a
whisper just now from the husband of yonder outraged woman. She will
hear the liquor dealer's counsel, and see the golden lure that South
Carolina offers when the fugitive stands at the bar. Turn her out!"
"Turn her out!" says the physician. "Shall she hear me jeer at what she
deems holy? Would you have her grow shameless also?"
"Shut her out," says the trader, "while I mark my goods! This spool of
cotton is short fifty yards: mark it two hundred. This yard of muslin
was made at Manchester: sew on the Paris tack. This shawl was woven in
France: label it Cashmere. Color that cheese with annatto, weigh down
that butter with salt, dilute that rose-water from the spring, grate up
turnip to mix with that horseradish; but turn that woman out!"
"Turn her out!" cries the priest, last of all. "Polemics and theology
have no charms for her. She will ask me why I do not do justly and love
mercy. Turn her out!"
"Turn her out!" and, in the shudder which creeps over him while he
speaks, man sees not only how tender and strong is his love for the
sister that hung on the same maternal bosom; but he sees also what the
gospel without and the gospel within demand of the son no less than the
daughter of God.
Farewell to war, to statecraft, to legal tricks, to shifts of trade;
farewell to bribery, to desecration, to idle controversy,--when woman
enters in to man's labor!
You feel the doom falling, and strive to put it off. Not because God has
made woman of a diviner nature; not because he has made her more
precious, to be kept from the rough handling of the world,--does it
shrink from her pure gaze. No; but because God himself, in balancing the
world's forces, has blended her moral nature with her mental, purposely
to check her brother's aggressiveness, and moderate his lust of gain. So
has he given to man a cooler temper, a grander deliberateness, a
strength equal to every strain, which shall repair the fault of her warm
impulses, her "nimble" action, her unfitness, casual or universal, for
long-sustained effort. But what can either of you do alone? Impulse,
tenderness, and moral promptings, grow into tawdry sentimentalism, when
shut out from their fit arena, when untrained to emulate a brother's
active life. Coolness, forethought, and strength grow into cunning,
rapacity, and tyranny, when uninfluenced by that gentler element of your
nature which God has placed by your side. Helps-meet for each other you
were ordained: why hinder and obstruct each other's pathway?
From this moment, put aside ignoble jealousy, inert sympathy, and stupid
indifference to your own moral position. Only by heartily accepting the
sweet juices and flavors of her life can you secure fragrant blossoms
and precious fruit to your own. The words are just as true when I turn
to counsel her. If ever this earth grows liker heaven, it will be when
the broad and generous sympathies prophesied by this new movement take
practical shape, and there are--
"Everywhere
Two heads in council, two beside the hearth,
Two in the tangled business of the world,
Two in the liberal offices of life,
Two plummets dropped for one, to sound the abyss
Of science, and the secrets of the mind:
Musician, painter, sculptor, critic, more:
And everywhere the broad and bounteous Earth
Shall bear a double growth of its best souls."
I have often spoken, not only in this lecture, but in almost every one I
have ever given, of the great need of conscientious, painstaking woman's
work. During the last year, Baron Toermer has been borne by
torch-light to his last home, and the mediæval artist has been mourned
as a personal friend by many a crowned head. The torches of the priests
who bore him to his grave very likely startled to the window our two
young countrywomen, who are pursuing sculpture in the Eternal City.
Little did they guess, that, in the city of Florence, there was living
at that moment a woman as able, as renowned, though, for certain
reasons, not so well known to them, as the great artist just departed. I
will close this lecture with a brief sketch of Félicie de Fauveau, for
whose woman's work no apology will ever need to be made.
Entering Florence by the Porta Romana, you find, in the Via della
Fornace, a dark-green door, which opens in to a paved court, once the
entrance to a convent. Beyond stretches a cool, quiet garden; and all
manner of birdcages and dovecotes remind you of Rosa Bonheur's fondness
for pets. Through that quiet garden, hedged with laurel and cypress, you
might have walked, but a little time ago, with a shrewd, sagacious,
life-loving French woman, an aristocrat and a Legitimist, whose eyes had
looked upon the guillotine, and who was proud of having suffered for her
faith and country. She would lead you to her small parlor, furnished
with ancient hangings, carved chairs, and gold-grounded Pre-Raphaelite
pictures of great value. Here she would introduce you to her daughter,
Félicie de Fauveau.
A forehead low and broad; soft, brown eyes; an aquiline nose; a
well-cut, well-closed mouth; a flexible, fine figure; a velvet skirt and
jacket of the color of the "dead leaf;" a velvet cap of the same, drawn
over blonde hair, cut square across the forehead, as in the picture of
Faust,--this is what you see when you look at the artist; this is what
Ary Scheffer painted and valued so, that no gold would buy the portrait
while he lived. Fire, air, and water are in that organization: the
movements of the arms are angular; but the hands are soft, white, fine,
and royal.
Born in Tuscany, she was early carried to Paris; whence she removed,
when very young, to Limoux, Bayonne, and Besançon. A great taste for
music and painting she inherited from her mother. Her studies were
profound, and among them she pursued archæology and heraldry. At
Besançon she painted in oils, but was not satisfied; and from the
workmen who carved for the churches she got her first hint towards
modelling. When her father died, she was ready to devote herself to the
support of her family. When people told her it was unbecoming, she drew
herself up: "Are you ignorant," she asked, "that an artist is a
gentlewoman?"
Benvenuto Cellini was her prototype; and to her may be attributed that
revival of a taste for mediæval art which, proceeding from Paris, has
had, of late years, so great an influence on England.
Her first work was a group called "The Abbot." Encouraged by unlimited
praise, she made a basso-relievo,--containing six figures, and
representing Christina of Sweden in the fatal galley with Monaldeschi.
This was in the last "Exposition des Beaux Arts," and received the gold
medal from Charles X. in person.
Up to 1830, the young girl remained in Paris. Her mother was so
accomplished, Félicie herself so witty and profound a talker, that a
distinguished circle gathered round them; among them, Scheffer,
Delaroche, Giraud. All manner of fine artistic experiments in modelling
and drawing were improvised about their study-table. There she executed
for Count Pourtalès a bronze lamp of singular beauty. A bivouac of
archangels, armed as knights, were represented as resting round a
watch-fire, where St. Michael stood sentinel; round the lamp, in golden
letters, _Vaillant, veillant_,--"Brave, but cautious;" beneath, a
stork's foot holds a pebble surrounded by beautiful aquatic plants.
Many models were lost on the breaking-up of her Paris studio. She was
incessantly occupied with commissions for private galleries; she was to
have modelled two doors for the Louvre, and to have superintended the
decoration of a baptistery,--when the Revolution broke up her calm and
studious life. With the celebrated daughter of the Duras Family, she
retired to La Vendée, and, virtuous and honored, made herself as active,
politically, as the reckless women of the Fronde. To this day, the
peasantry know her as the Demoiselle. For those who remember her, there
will never be another. Finally came pursuit and capture. After a long
search, the two women were dragged from the mouth of an oven. Félicie
assisted her companion to escape; was watched more closely in
consequence, and remained seven months in prison at Angers. In prison
she designed a group representing the duel of the Lord of Jarnac before
Henry II., and a monument to Louis de Bonnechose. At the close of the
seven months, she returned to her studio at Paris. But very soon the
appearance of the Duchesse de Berri in La Vendée restored hope to all
Royalist hearts, and Félicie rushed to her side.
"My opinions are dearer to me than my art," she said, and proved it by
heroic sacrifices. On the failure of this second attempt, she was exiled
by the government. In the very teeth of the authorities, she returned to
Paris, broke up her studio, and joined her mother in Florence, where
they have ever since resided, clad, not without significance, in colors
of the fallen leaf. No one but an artist can guess what loss is involved
in the sudden and forcible breaking-up of an old studio. At the very
moment when Félicie and her mother were all but starving in Florence, a
man in Paris made an almost fabulous fortune by selling walking-sticks
made from designs which she had sketched during the happy evenings of
her girlhood. The Fauveaus would not accept a dollar from the party they
had served; and Madame had as much pride as her daughter in establishing
the new studio. Félicie wrote, "We have manna, but only on condition
that we save none for the morrow."
In her studio you find no Pagan traces, only Christian art,--St.
Dorothea lifting her lovely hands for the basket of fruit an angel
brings; a Santa Reparata, perfect in terra-cotta; exquisite
mirror-frames of wood, bronze, and silver. She has executed for Count
Zichy an Hungarian costume, a collar, belt, sword, and spurs, of finest
work. The Empress of Russia has ordered from her a silver bell. It is
decorated by twenty figures, the servants of a mediæval household; who
assemble at the call of three stewards, whose figures form the handle.
Round the bell is blazoned, in Gothic letters,--
"De bon vouloir servir le maître."
"With good will to serve the master."
Beside the crowded labors of twenty-five years, Félicie has studied the
merely mechanical portions of her art, and tried to discover some old
artistic secrets. To cast a statue whole, so as to require no
after-touch of the chisel, has been her lifelong endeavor. She finally
succeeded in her St. Michael, though not till it had been recast seven
times. It is probable her experiments led the way for those by which
Crawford succeeded in casting his Beethoven. I cannot tell how many of
you have heard of Félicie de Fauveau. The fact that her works are
chiefly in private galleries and her own studio, screens her from
observation. The higher dignitaries of the church and the princes of art
are almost her only companions. She works constantly. About a year
since, the death of her devoted mother drew the veil still closer round
her daily life; but I retrace her story with honorable pride.
Félicie de Fauveau is not merely an artist. She is the first artist in
the world, in her peculiar walk. As a worker in jewels, bronze, gold,
and silver, as a designer of monuments and mediæval furniture, she
stands without approach.
"Witness that she who did these things was born
To do them; claims her license in her work."
So let all women claim it.