I have been accustomed to connect with reports of this kind some
honorable mention of distinguished women obscure or recently dead. I
cannot do this at any length, after a pause of so many years; but a few
names must be mentioned, a few facts recorded.
I had occasion, some years ago, to commemorate the services of Maria
Sybilla Merian, painter, engraver, linguist, and traveller, who
published, at Amsterdam, two volumes of engravings of insects and sixty
magnificent plates, illustrating the metamorphoses of the insects of
Surinam. I did not, at that time, know that some of her statements had
been held open to suspicion. In the first place, she asserted, that a
certain fly, the Fulgoria Lantanaria, emitted so much light, that she
could read her books by its aid; still further, that one of the large
spiders, called Mygale, entered the nests of the humming-bird in
Surinam, sucked its eggs, and snared the birds. To all the contention
which arose over these statements, Madame Merian could oppose only her
word. Men who knew that her statements in regard to Europe were
indisputable decided that her word could not be taken in Asia. A very
common folly; but two hundred years have passed, 1866 arrives, and her
justification with it. An English traveller, named Bates, has recently
rescued quite large finches from the Mygale, and poisoned himself with
its saliva, in preparing them for his cabinet.
I do not know how many years Madam Baring, the mother of the great
banker, has been dead. It is only recently that I have heard, that to
her prudence, activity, and business habits, the family attribute the
sure foundation of their fortunes. Matthew Baring came to Larkbeare,
near Exeter, from Bremen. His wife superintended, in his day, the long
rows of "burlers," or women who picked over the woollen cloth he made.
Her sons, John and Francis, sought a wider field for the fortune their
father left, but did not forget to erect a monument to their mother's
industry.
About a year since, Eliza W. Farnham laid down her weary head. I did not
know her, nor did I sympathize in her theories. They were sustained by
her imagination rather than her reason; by her impulses rather than any
practical judgment. No moral superiority can justly be conferred on
either sex of a being possessed of intellect and conscience. God has
conferred no such superiority; yet I gladly name Mrs. Farnham here as a
woman whose life--a bitter disappointment to herself--was useful to all
women, and whose books, published since her death, show a marvellous
mental range.
During the last year, Madame Charles Lemonnier died in Paris. She
devoted her life to the professional education of women. For six years
she found it so difficult to raise the necessary funds, that she had to
content herself with sending her pupils to institutions in Germany. In
1862 the Society for the Professional Instruction of Women was at last
constituted, and opened a school in the Rue de Perle. Two other schools
have since been opened,--one in the Rue de Val Sainte Catherine; the
other, in the Rue Roche. The morning is occupied in these schools with
general studies; the afternoon, with industrial drawing, wood-engraving,
the making-up of garments, linen, &c. She died after initiating a
thoroughly successful work.
In July, 1865, there died at Corfu a Dr. Barry, attached to the medical
staff of the British army. He was remarkable for skill, firmness,
decision, and great rapidity in difficult operations. He had entered the
army in 1813, and had served in all quarters of the globe, with such
distinction as to ensure promotion without interest. He was clever and
agreeable, but excessively plain, weak in stature, and with a squeaking
voice which provoked ridicule. He had an irritable temper, and answered
some jesting on the topic by calling out the offender, and shooting him
through the lungs. In 1840 he was made medical inspector, and
transferred from the Cape to Malta. He went from Malta to Corfu; and,
when the English Government ceded the Ionian Islands to Greece, resigned
his position in the army, and remained at Corfu. There he died last
summer, forbidding, with his latest breath, any interference with his
remains. The women who attended him regarded this request with the
shameless indifference now so common; and unable to believe, that an
officer, who had been forty-five years in the British service, had
received a diploma, fought a duel, and been celebrated as a brilliant
operator, was not only a woman, but at some period in her life a
_mother_; they called in a medical commission to establish these facts.
A sad, sad picture, which those of us who inquire into the fortunes of
women can readily understand.
Last November deprived us of Mrs. Gaskell and Fredrika Bremer, of whom a
fuller record will be found in the body of this work.
In Paris recently died Mrs. Severn Newton. She was the daughter of the
artist Severn, the friend of Keats, who is now British Consul at Rome.
About five years since, she married Charles Newton, Superintendent of
Greek Antiquities at the British Museum. She was a person in whom power
and delicacy were singularly blended. Ary Scheffer was accustomed to
hold up her work as a model for his pupils. Her renderings of classic
sculpture were so true that they were termed translations; and she had
recently devoted herself to oil painting with great success. She died of
brain fever at the early age of thirty-three, one of the most honored of
female English artists.
The common sense of society accepts the need of education for women. It
begs that they may be permitted to earn their bread; but let society
once grant the suffrage to woman, and she will take care of her own
interests. She will found colleges, distribute opportunities, and
protect vocations.
Education must, in time, earn independence for most women. Independence,
taxed and made a citizen of, will insist, in the course of years, upon
its suffrage; but whoso will help to reverse the process, and grant
suffrage, so that woman may herself indicate what education she wishes
to receive, and what labor she wishes to perform, will speed the process
by scores of years.
It was pleasant to see four hundred young women, of the highest health,
the best breeding, of good social standing, and abundant means,
blossoming like so many tulips, at Vassar,--we must add, also, of good
ability, and more than average education; for only good scholars could
pass the rigid examination required of those who enter. It was pleasant
to see, that between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two, when society
offers its greatest allurements, four hundred wealthy girls could be
found, ready to devote themselves in seclusion, and without even the
stimulus existing at Oberlin or Antioch, to higher things. And then, if
the want of public sympathy makes it a painful work to be always pushing
the interests of women, such teachers and officers as one finds at
Vassar compensate one for any amount of struggle. Miss Hannah Lyman, who
is now the principal; Miss Mitchell, the astronomer; Dr. Avery, the
resident physician; and Miss Powell, the professor of gymnastics,--it
is only necessary to name to Eastern ears: but, besides these women,
Vassar employs twenty others, in whom it would be hard to find a fault,
and some of whom, we were glad to see, had taken their degree at
Oberlin. Going westward to Antioch, it was pleasant to find other women
who had taken their degrees, and were now teaching Greek and Latin. One
of the graduates, employed as a teacher of mathematics, had won her own
education in the college by teaching one year,--sometimes in distant
district-schools,--and studying the next. At Oberlin, the picture was
still more inspiring: for Oberlin has, I suppose, more pupils than any
college in the land, if we except Michigan University; and one-half of
them are girls and women. The practical working of this college is
beautiful to see. It has been fortunate in the magnificent faith
communicated to it by Dr. Finney. Most of the women who were its early
students, and stamped its character, so that no scandal dared invade its
borders, are now the wives of its professors, and many of them are still
engaged in teaching. Mrs. Dascomb, who is the wife of the professor of
chemistry, has been with the college from the beginning: she is as fine
a person for her position, as lady-principal, as Miss Lyman; yet how
differently have the two been trained! Mrs. Dascomb, by isolation,
persecution, contact with the rudest elements in Western life, yet
keeping, through all, a noble faith in manhood and womanhood; Miss
Lyman, starting from the most distinguished social circle in
Northampton, holding a high place among what Dr. Holmes would call the
"Brahmins" of Montreal, and finally polished by a European tour, and
holding control with a power as imperceptible as it is firm. At
Milwaukee, beside Dr. Ross, to whose ten years of successful practice I
have alluded, I found another physician, in happy partnership with one
of the _brothers_ of the craft, a Dr. Glass. He has lately moved from
Minnesota to Wisconsin, where he has been several years in partnership
with Miss Fairchild, and testifies that he has never seen her superior
as a practical physician. Here, also, a young lady, of one of the best
families, has lately opened a hair-dresser's store. Dr. Ross gives her
sweet sympathy and cheer; but, as a proof that the world still needs
converting, she has had a good deal of that insolence to subdue which
pains just as much as if it were _worth_ minding. Any thing like the
number of female lecturers which I heard of in Illinois, I had never
imagined. The medical women are readily accepted in most places, even
without proper vouchers; and it is astonishing, how far common sense
contrives to supply the place of education. But the want of vouchers is
a serious evil, which must soon be met. In Chicago I heard wonderful
stories of the business capacity of certain women. One lady, very well
known on Michigan Avenue, brought one hundred thousand dollars' worth of
Chicago City bonds to Boston and New York, and safely sold them for her
husband. A farmer's wife, from the centre of the State, came up, while I
was there, to speculate in corn. She said her husband had lost money
several years in succession, and now _she_ was going to try. By her
first speculation, she made five thousand dollars; and this she put into
competent hands, for re-investment. It gained her twenty thousand
dollars. The Chicago merchants thought that she would go on speculating
until she lost it all; but I do not. I think our Pleasant-street
Hospital has proved that women are more cautious than men, and are
willing to bear a good deal of obloquy rather than permit rash ventures
to be made.
In the country, everywhere, I heard charming anecdotes of the vigor and
self-sacrifice women showed in the early settlement of the States.
It happened one spring, that, when the ice broke up on the Fox River, a
terrible storm of wind and sleet and rain came with it. Not a man in the
State, however great the emergency, would have thought that he could
cross. In this state of things, a woman was taken in childbirth, some
two or three miles from the ferry. Just as the ferry-woman was going to
bed, in the "outer darkness" of that terrible storm, she heard her name
shouted from the opposite bank. She listened, and a grievous story was
shouted across. She went to the stable and saddled her mare, and, all
alone, forded the stream: the floating ice, heaped into walls, struck
the sides of the faithful beast, and tore the woman's skirt to tatters.
Now and then a flash of lightning showed her what progress she had made.
At last, she struggled to the bank, and gave the needful help. Nobody
ever asked how she got back. On the grass about Elgin, a whole ship's
load died of cholera, nearly forty years ago. All the neighborhood stood
back in dread; but I saw one aged woman, who closed the eyes of nine,
and received the foreign blessing, which she felt, although she could
not understand. In Quincy, I found two ladies just establishing a high
school for girls, whom I have previously mentioned as having pushed
through the endowment, for women, of the State University at Lawrence,
and having opened a class in modelling in clay, under Professor Volkers.
At the Cooper Institute I found more women at work than ever before, and
to better advantage. A large class had just been formed to color
photographs on glass, porcelain, and paper. Under such circumstances, we
need not be disheartened because an ignorant woman, in a man's costume,
has found the way to attract some attention in Europe and some contempt
from Tom Hughes. Neither need it dismay us that the "Boston Advertiser"
thinks the Equal-Rights meetings, in New York, have not been largely
attended. There are those who want the suffrage, who do not care to
encourage women to offer themselves for Congress before public opinion
can accept them, and who are sufficiently disgusted by what looks like a
mannish coalition with Democrats, to keep away from public meetings.
Meanwhile, the women of Parma clamor for the right to vote for Victor
Emanuel. A freedwoman, Charlotte Scott, proposes a monument, on behalf
of her emancipated race, to President Lincoln; and the noble
inspiration of Harriet Hosmer carries out the thought.
But the very things we turn from force the necessary issues on the
world. Wise action would never have brought the recent debate in
Congress; nor prudent measures have secured thirty votes for Mrs.
Stanton, and nine senatorial ballots for female suffrage. Once agitated
in these quarters, the matter draws nearer to a final test.
"Ride on! the prize is near."