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On this I will not dwell; because these good ladies were not strictly our grandmothers, being farther removed. But of those who were our grandmothers,--the women of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary epochs,--we happen to have very definite physiological observations recorded; not very flattering, it is true, but frank and searching. What these good women are in the imagination of their descendants, we know. Mrs. Stowe describes them as "the race of strong, hardy, cheerful girls that used to grow up in country places, and made the bright, neat New England kitchens of olden times;" and adds, "This race of women, pride of olden time, is daily lessening; and in their stead come the fragile, easily-fatigued, languid girls of a modern age, drilled in book-learning, ignorant of common things."

What, now, was the testimony of those who saw our grandmothers in the flesh? As it happens, there were a good many foreigners, generally Frenchmen, who came to visit the new Republic during the presidency of Washington. Let us take, for instance, the testimony of the two following.

The Abb? Robin was a chaplain in Rochambeau's army during the Revolution, and wrote thus in regard to the American ladies in his "Nouveau Voyage dans l'Am?rique Septentrionale," published in 1782:--

"They are tall and well-proportioned; their features are generally regular; their complexions are generally fair and without color.... At twenty years of age the women have no longer the freshness of youth. At thirty-five or forty they are wrinkled and decrepit. The men are almost as premature."

"The women have more of that delicate beauty which belongs to their sex, and in general have finer features and more expression in their physiognomy. Their stature is usually tall, and nearly all are possessed of a light and airy shape,--the breast high, a fine head, and their color of a dazzling whiteness. Let us imagine, under this brilliant form, the most modest demeanor, a chaste and virginal air, accompanied by those single and unaffected graces which flow from artless nature, and we may have an idea of their beauty; but this beauty fades and passes in a moment. At the age of twenty-five their form changes, and at thirty the whole of their charms have disappeared."

In some respects, probably, the physical habits of the grandmothers were better: but an examination of their portraits will satisfy any one that they laced more tightly than their descendants, and wore their dresses lower in the neck; and as for their diet, we have the testimony of another French traveller, Volney, who was in America from 1795 to 1798, that "if a premium were offered for a regimen most destructive to the teeth, the stomach, and the health in general, none could be devised more efficacious for these ends than that in use among this people." And he goes on to give particulars, showing a far worse condition in respect to cookery and diet than now prevails in any decent American society.

I was talking the other day with a New York physician, long retired from practice, who after an absence of a dozen years in Europe has returned within a year to this country. He volunteered the remark, that nothing had so impressed him since his return as the improved health of Americans. He said that his wife had been equally struck with it; and that they had noticed it especially among the inhabitants of cities, among the more cultivated classes, and in particular among women.

It so happened, that within twenty-four hours almost precisely the same remark was made to me by another gentleman of unusually cosmopolitan experience, and past middle age. He further fortified himself by a similar assertion made him by Charles Dickens, in comparing his second visit to this country with his first. In answer to an inquiry as to what points of difference had most impressed him, Dickens said, "Your people, especially the women, look better fed than formerly."

It is possible that in all these cases the witnesses may have been led to exaggerate the original evil, while absent from the country, and so may have felt some undue re-action on their arrival. One of my informants went so far as to say that he was confident that among his circle of friends in Boston and in London a dinnerparty of half a dozen Americans would outweigh an English party of the same number. Granting this to be too bold a statement, and granting the unscientific nature of all these assertions, they still indicate a probability of their own truth until refuted by facts or balanced by similar impressions on the other side. They are further corroborated by the surprise expressed by Huxley and some other recent Englishmen at finding us a race more substantial than they had supposed.

And, if these reasonings are still insufficient on the one side, it must be remembered that the facts of the census are almost equally inadequate when quoted on the other. If, for instance, all the young people of a New Hampshire village take a fancy to remove to Wisconsin, it does not show that the race is dying out because their children swell the birth-rate of Wisconsin instead of New Hampshire. If in a given city the births among the foreign-born population are twice as many in proportion as among the American, we have not the whole story until we learn whether the deaths are not twice as many also. If so, the inference is, that the same recklessness brought the children into the world, and sent them out of it; and no physiological inference whatever can be drawn. It was clearly established by the medical commission of the Boston Board of Health, a few years ago, that "the general mortality of the foreign element is much greater than that of the native element of our population." "This is found to be the case," they add, "throughout the United States as well as in Boston."

So far as I can judge, all our physiological tendencies are favorable rather than otherwise: and the transplantation of the English race seems now likely to end in no deterioration, but in a type more finely organized, and more comprehensive and cosmopolitan; and this without loss of health, of longevity, or of physical size and weight. And, if this is to hold true, it must be true not only of men, but of women.

The newspapers say that the Wyoming ladies, after their first trial of jury-duty, looked very much fatigued. Well, why not?

Is it not the privilege of their sex to be fatigued? Is it not commonly said to be one of their most becoming traits? "The strength of womanhood lies in its weakness," and so on; and, if emancipation does not destroy this lovely debility, it is not so bad, after all. If a graceful languor is desirable, then the more of it the better. Instead of the women's coming out of the jury-box like Amazons, they simply came out so many tired women. They were not spoiled into strength, but "very much fatigued."

In London or New York, now, this fatigue might have come from six hours of piano-practice, from a day's shopping, from a night's "German." Then the fatigue would be held to be charming and womanly. But to aid in deciding on the guilt or innocence of a fellow-creature, perhaps a fellow-woman,--is that the only pursuit in which fatigue becomes disreputable?

Consider at any rate that in Wyoming Territory these more genteel and feminine forms of fatigue are as yet rare. Pianos are doubtless scarce; in the shops whiskey is the only thing not scarce; "Germans" are uncommon, except in the shape of wandering miners who are looking for other shafts than those of Cupid. Thus cut off from city frivolities, may not the Wyoming ladies be allowed for a while to tire themselves with something useful? Let them have their court duties until good society and "feminine" amusements arrive. Let them at least be serviceable till they can be ornamental--as the English member of Parliament declared that until a man knew which way his interest went, he was justified in temporarily voting according to his conscience.

"Very much fatigued?" How does jury-duty affect men? Is there any thing against which they so fight and struggle? It is recognized by the universal masculine heart as the greatest bore known under civilization. There is nothing which a man will not do in preference. He will go to church twice on a Sunday, he will abjure tobacco for a week, he will over-state his property to the assessor, he will speak respectfully of Congress, he will go without a daily newspaper, he will do any self-devoted and unmasculine thing--if you will only contrive in some way to leave him off the jury-list. If these things are done in the dry tree, what shall be done in the green? That which experienced men hate with this consummation of all hatred, shall inexperienced women endure without fatigue? It is wrong to claim for them such unspeakable superiority.

Look at a jury of men when they re-appear in court after a long detention on a difficult case. What a set of woe-begone wretches they are! What weary eyes, what unkempt hair, what drooping and dilapidated paper collars! Not all the tin wash-basins and soap, not all the crackers and cheese, provided by the gentlemanly sheriff, enable them to look any thing but "very much fatigued." Shall women look more forlorn than these men? No: so long as women are women, they will contrive during the most arduous jury duties to "do up" their hair, they will come provided with unseen relays of fresh cuffs and collars, and out of the most unpromising court-room arrangements they will concoct their cup of tea. Who has not noticed how much better a railway detention or a prolonged trip on a steamboat is borne, in appearance at least, by the women than the men? Fatigued! How did the jury-men look? Probably the jury-women, when they bade his Honor the Judge good-morning, looked incomparably fresher than their companions.

At any rate, when we think what things women endured that they might nurse our sick soldiers, how they had to spend day and night where they might possibly inhale tobacco, probably would hear swearing, and certainly must brave dirt; when we think that they did these things, and were only "very much fatigued,"--why should we fear to risk them in a court-room? Where there is wrong to be righted, innocence to be vindicated, and guilt to be wisely dealt with,--there make room for woman, and she will not shrink from the fatigue. "For thee, fair justice! welcome all," as Sir William Blackstone remarked, when he stopped being a poet and began to be a lawyer.

Are there any inevitable limitations of sex?

Some reformers, apparently, think that there are not, and that the best way to help woman is to deny the fact of limitations. But I think the great majority of reformers would take a different ground, and would say that the two sexes are mutually limited by nature. They would doubtless add that this very fact is an argument for the enfranchisement of woman: for, if woman is a mere duplicate of man, man can represent her; but if she has traits of her own, absolutely distinct from his, then he cannot represent her, and she must have a voice and a vote of her own.

To this last body of believers I belong. I think that all legal or conventional obstacles should be removed, which debar woman from determining for herself, as freely as man determines, what the real limitations of sex are, and what the merely conventional restriction. But, when all is said and done, there is no doubt that plenty of limitations will remain on both sides.

That man has his limitations, is clear. No matter how finely organized a man may be, how sympathetic, how tender, how loving, there is yet a barrier, never to be passed, that separates the most precious part of the woman's kingdom from him. All the wondrous world of motherhood, with its unspeakable delights, its holy of holies, remains forever unknown by him; he may gaze, but never enter. That halo of pure devotion, which makes a Madonna out of so many a poor and ignorant woman, can never touch his brow. Many a man loves children more than many a woman: but, after all, it is not he who has borne them; to that peculiar sacredness of experience he can never arrive. But never mind whether the loss be a great one or a small one: it is distinctly a limitation; and to every loving mother it is a limitation so important that she would be unable to weigh all the privileges and powers of manhood against this peculiar possession of her child.

Now, if this be true, and if man be thus distinctly limited by the mere fact of sex, can the woman complain that she also should have some natural limitations? Grant that she should have no unnecessary restrictions; and that the course of human progress is constantly setting aside, as needless, point after point that was once held essential. Still, if she finds--as she undoubtedly will find--that natural barriers and hindrances remain at last, and that she can no more do man's whole work in the world than he can do hers, why should she complain? If he can accept his limitations, she must be prepared also to accept hers.

Some of our physiological reformers declare that a girl will be perfectly healthy if she can only be sensibly dressed, and can "have just as much out-door exercise as the boys, and of the same sort, if she choose it." But I have observed that matter a good deal, and have watched the effect of boyish exercise on a good many girls; and I am satisfied that so far from being safely turned loose, as boys can be, they need, for physical health, the constant supervision of wise mothers. Otherwise the very exposure that only hardens the boy may make the girl an invalid for life. The danger comes from a greater sensitiveness of structure,--not weakness, properly so called, since it gives, in certain ways, more power of endurance,--a greater sensitiveness which runs through all a woman's career, and is the expensive price she pays for the divine destiny of motherhood. It is another natural limitation.

No wise person believes in any "reform against Nature," or that we can get beyond the laws of Nature. If I believed the limitations of sex to be inconsistent with woman suffrage for instance, I should oppose this; but I do not see why a woman cannot form political opinions by her baby's cradle, as well as her husband in his workshop, while her very love for the child commits her to an interest in good government. Our duty is to remove all the artificial restrictions we can. That done, it will not be hard for man or woman to acquiesce in the natural limitations.

TEMPERAMENT.

"Virtue in man and woman is the same."

The Invisible Lady, as advertised in all our cities a good many years ago, was a mysterious individual who remained unseen, and had apparently no human organs except a brain and a tongue. You asked questions of her, and she made intelligent answers; but where she was, you could no more discover than you could find the man inside the Automaton Chess-Player. Was she intended as a satire on womankind, or as a sincere representation of what womankind should be? To many men, doubtless, she would have seemed the ideal of her sex, could only her brain and tongue have disappeared like the rest of her faculties. Such men would have liked her almost as well as that other mysterious personage on the London sign-board, labelled "The Good Woman," and represented by a female figure without a head.

In the Azores I found that each peasant family endeavored to secure for one or more of its daughters the pride and glory of living unseen. The other sisters, secure in innocence, tended cattle on lonely mountain-sides, or toiled bare-legged up the steep ascents, their heads crowned with orange-baskets. The chosen sister was taught to read, to embroider, and to dwell indoors; if she went out it was only under escort, and with her face buried in a hood of almost incredible size, affording only a glimpse of the poor pale cheeks, so unlike the rosy vigor of the damsels on the mountain-side. The girls, I was told, did not covet this privilege of seclusion; but let us be genteel, or die.

Now all that is left of the Invisible Lady among ourselves is only the remnant of this absurd tradition. In the seaside town where I write, ladies usually go veiled in the streets, and so general is the practice that little girls often veil their dolls. They all suppose it to be done for complexion or for ornament; just as people still hang straps on the backs of their carriages, not knowing that it is a relic of the days when footmen stood there and held on. But the veil represents a tradition of seclusion, whether we know it or not; and the dread of hearing a woman speak in public, or of seeing a woman vote, represents precisely the same tradition. It is entitled to no less respect, and no more.

Like all traditions, it finds something in human nature to which to attach itself. Early girlhood, like early boyhood, needs to be guarded and sheltered, that it may mature unharmed. It is monstrous to make this an excuse for keeping a woman, any more than a man, in a condition of perpetual subordination and seclusion. The young lover wishes to lock up his angel in a little world of her own, where none may intrude. The harem and the seraglio are simply the embodiment of this desire. But the maturer man, and the maturer race, have found that the beloved being should be something more.

After this discovery is made, the theory of the Invisible Lady disappears. It is less of a shock to an American to hear a woman speak in public than it is to an Oriental to see her show her face in public at all. Once open the door of the harem, and she has the freedom of the house: the house includes the front door, and the street is but a prolonged doorstep. With the freedom of the street comes inevitably a free access to the platform, the tribunal, and the pulpit. You might as well try to stop the air in its escape from a punctured balloon, as to try, when woman is once out of the harem, to put her back there. Ceasing to be an Invisible Lady, she must become a visible force: there is no middle ground. There is no danger that she will not be anchored to the cradle, when cradle there is; but it will be by an elastic cable, that will leave her as free to think and vote as to pray. No woman is less a mother because she cares for all the concerns of the world into which her child is born. It was John Quincy Adams who said, defending the political petitions of the women of Plymouth, that "women are not only justified, but exhibit the most exalted virtue, when they do depart from the domestic circle, and enter on the concerns of their country, of humanity, and of their God."

It is a great source of strength and advantage to reformers, that there are always men preserved to be living examples of this good old Oriental doctrine of "sacred obscurity." Just as Mr. Darwin needs for the demonstration of his theory that the lower orders of creation should still be present in visible form for purposes of comparison, so every reformer needs to fortify his position by showing examples of the original attitude from which society has been gradually emerging. If there had been no Oriental seclusion, many things in the present position of woman would be inexplicable. But when we point to that; when we show that even in the more enlightened Eastern countries it is still held indecorous to allude to the feminine members of a man's family; when we see among the Christian nations of Southern Europe many lingering traits of this same habit of seclusion; and when we find an archdeacon of the English Church still clinging to the theory, even while exhibiting his mother's family letters to the whole world,--we more easily understand the course of development.

These re-assertions of the Oriental theory are simply reversions, as a naturalist would say, to the original type. They are instances of "atavism," like the occasional appearance of six fingers on one hand in a family where the great-great-grandfather happened to possess that ornament. Such instances can always be found, when one takes the pains to look for them. Thus a critic, discussing in the Atlantic Monthly Mr. Mahaffy's book on "Social Life in Greece," is surprised that this writer should quote, in proof of the degradation of woman in Athens, the remark attributed to Pericles, "That woman is best who is least spoken of among men, whether for good or for evil." "In our opinion," adds the reviewer, "that remark was wise then, and is wise now." The Oriental theory is not then, it seems, extinct; and we are spared the pains of proving that it ever existed.

If this theory be true, how falsely has the admiration of mankind been given! If the most obscure woman is best, the most conspicuous must undoubtedly be worst. Tried by this standard, how unworthy must have been Elizabeth Barrett Browning, how reprehensible must be Dorothea Dix, what a model of all that is discreditable is Rosa Bonheur, what a crowning instance of human depravity is Florence Nightingale! Yet how consoling the thought, that, while these disreputable persons were thus wasting their substance in the riotous performance of what the world weakly styled good deeds, there were always women who saw the folly of such efforts, women who by steady devotion to eating, drinking, and sleeping continued to keep themselves in sacred obscurity, and to prove themselves the ornaments of their sex, inasmuch as no human being ever had occasion to mention their names!

But alas for human inconsistency! As for this inverse-ratio theory,--this theory of virtue so exalted that it has never been known or felt or mentioned among men,--it is to be observed that those who hold it are the first to desert it when stirred by an immediate occasion. Just as a slaveholder, in the old times, after demonstrating to you that freedom was a curse to the negro, would instantly turn round, and inflict this greatest of all curses on some slave who had saved his life; so, I fear, would one of these philosophers, if he were profoundly impressed with any great action done by a woman, give the lie to all his theories, and celebrate her fame. In spite of all his fine principles, if he happened to be rescued from drowning by Grace Darling, he would put her name in the newspaper; if he were tended in hospital by Clara Barton, he would sound her praise; and, if his mother wrote as good letters as did Mrs. Trench, he would probably print them to the extent of five hundred pages, as the archdeacon did, and all his gospel of silence would exhale itself in a single sigh of regret in the preface.

A Providence newspaper remarked some time since that Mrs. Livermore had just delivered in Newport her celebrated lecture, "What shall we do with our Trials?" It was, I suppose, one of those felicitous misprints, by which compositors build better than they know. The real title of the lecture was, "What shall we do with our Girls?" Perhaps it was the unconscious witticism of some poetic young typesetter, to whom damsels were as yet only pleasing pains; or of some premature cynic of the printing-office, who was in the habit of regarding himself as a Blighted Being.

Yet to how many is this morose phrase "humanly adaptive," as Mrs. Browning abstrusely says! Anxious mothers, for instance, will accept it, the mothers of the thousands of surplus maidens--or whatever the statistics say--in Massachusetts. Frederica Bremer inserts in one of her novels an "Extra Leaf on Daughter-full Houses;" an extra that should have a large circulation in many towns of New England. The most heroic and unflinching remedy for this class of trials, so far as my knowledge goes, was that announced by a small relative of my own, aged three, who sitting on the floor thus soliloquized to her doll: "If I had too many daughters, I'd take 'em into the woods and lose 'em--I'd take 'em to the sea and push 'em in: I wouldn't have too many daughters!" She is now a happy wife and mother; but Fate, warned in time by such exceeding plainness of speech, has judiciously endowed her chiefly with sons.

Most of the serious assertion that women are trials comes from masculine wisdom. One hears a good deal of it in summer, at the seaside, from the marriageable youth of some of our chief cities. After a languid hour's chat upon tailors or boots or the proper appointments of a harness,--or of the groom, so perfectly costumed that he seems but a part of the harness,--how often they fall to lamenting the extravagance, the exactions, the general unmarriageableness, of the young women of the present day! Some wit once said that the Pilgrim Mothers had much more to bear than the Pilgrim Fathers, since the Mothers had not only to endure the cold and the hunger, but to endure the Fathers beside. In hearing these remarks I have sometimes thought that these young ladies must be extravagant indeed, if, in addition to their own expenses, they take to themselves so very costly a luxury as a fashionable husband.

And I think that wiser critics than these youths are sometimes tempted into treating these lovely and lovable "trials" in too severely hopeless a way. There is folly enough on the surface, no doubt, and something of it below the surface: yet who does not remember how, in time of need, all these follies proved themselves, during our civil war, but superficial things? The very maidens over whom we had shaken our anxious heads were suddenly those who with pale cheeks bade their lovers leave them, or who changed their gorgeous array for the plain garments of the hospital. So far as I can judge, there is not a young girl within the range of my knowledge who can confidently be insured against marrying a poor artist or a poorer army officer to-morrow, should she once fall thoroughly in love. And, once married, she will very probably develop a power of self-denial, of economy, and of dressing herself and baby gracefully out of the cast-off clothes of her genteel relations,--in a way to put her critics to shame. I think we ought all patiently to endure "trials" that turn to such blessings in the end.

For one, I can truly say, with charming Mrs. Trench in her letters written in 1816, "I do believe the girls of the present day have not lost the power of blushing; and, though I have no grown-up daughters, I enjoy the friendship of some who might be my daughters, in whom the greatest delicacy and modesty are united with perfect ease of manner, and habitual intercourse with the world." And if this is the case,--and I think we shall all own it to be so,--we may as well have the typographical error corrected, after all, and hereafter say--for "trials" read "girls."

A young friend of mine, who was educated at one of the very best schools for girls in New York City, told me that one day her teacher requested the older girls to write out a list of virtues suitable to manly character, which they did. A month or more later, when this occurrence was well forgotten, the same teacher bade them write out a list of womanly virtues, she making no reference to the other list. Then she made each girl compare her lists; and they all found with surprise that there was no substantial difference between them. The only variation, in most cases, was, that they had put in a rather vague special virtue of "manliness" in the one case, and "womanliness" in the other; a sort of miscellaneous department or "odd drawer," apparently, in which to group all traits not easily analyzed.

The moral is, that, as tested by the common-sense of these young people, duty is duty, and the difference between ethics for men and ethics for women lies simply in practical applications, not in principles.

Who can deny that the philosopher Antisthenes was right when he said, "The virtues of the man and the woman are the same"? Not the Christian, certainly; for he accepts as his highest standard the being who in all history best united the highest qualities of both sexes. Not the metaphysician; for his analysis deals with the human mind as such, not with the mind of either sex. Not the evolutionist; for he is accustomed to trace back qualities to their source, and cannot deny that there is in each sex at least a "survival" of every good and every bad trait. We may say that these qualities are, or may be, or ought to be, distributed unequally between the sexes; but we cannot reasonably deny that each sex possesses a share of every quality, and that what is good in one sex is also good in the other. Man may be the braver, and yet courage in a woman may be nobler than cowardice. Woman may be the purer, and yet purity may be noble in a man.

So clear is this, that some of the very coarsest writers in all literature, and those who have been severest upon women, have yet been obliged to acknowledge it. Take, for instance, Dean Swift, who writes:--

"I am ignorant of any one quality that is amiable in a woman, which is not equally so in a man. I do not except even modesty and gentleness of nature; nor do I know one vice or folly which is not equally detestable in both."

Mrs. Jameson, in her delightful "Commonplace Book," illustrates this admirably by one or two test cases. She takes, for instance, from one of Humboldt's letters a much-admired passage on manly character:--

"Masculine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first requisite for the formation of a character of real manly worth. The man who allows himself to be deceived and carried away by his own weakness, may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot be called a good man: such beings should not find favor in the eyes of a woman, for a truly beautiful and purely feminine nature should be attracted only by what is highest and noblest in the character of man."

"Take now this same bit of moral philosophy," she says, "and apply it to the feminine character, and it reads quite as well:--

"'Feminine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first requisite for the formation of a character of real feminine worth. The woman who allows herself to be deceived and carried away by her own weakness, may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot be called a good woman; such beings should not find favor in the eyes of a man, for a truly beautiful and purely manly nature should be attracted only by what is highest and noblest in the character of woman.'"

I have never been able to perceive that there was a quality or grace of character which really belonged exclusively to either sex, or which failed to win honor when wisely exercised by either. It is not thought necessary to have separate editions of books on ethical science, the one for man, the other for woman, like almanacs calculated for different latitudes. The books that vary are not the scientific works, but little manuals of practical application,--"Duties of Men," "Duties of Women." These vary with times and places: where women do not know how to read, no advice on reading will be found in the women's manuals; where it is held wrong for women to uncover the face, it will be laid down in these manuals as a sin. But ethics are ethics: the great principles of morals, as proclaimed either by science or by religion, do not fluctuate for sex; their basis is in the very foundations of right itself.

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