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COMMON SENSE ABOUT WOMEN

BY

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

BOSTON

LEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK

CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM

1882

COPYRIGHT, 1881,

BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON.

_All rights reserved._

=To=

=My Little Daughter Margaret.=

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PAGE =Physiology= 5

I. TOO MUCH NATURAL HISTORY 7

II. DARWIN, HUXLEY, AND BUCKLE 11

III. WHICH IS THE STRONGER? 16

IV. THE SPIRIT OF SMALL TYRANNY 18

V. “THE NOBLE SEX” 21

VI. PHYSIOLOGICAL CROAKING 24

VII. THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR GRANDMOTHERS 28

VIII. THE PHYSIQUE OF AMERICAN WOMEN 33

IX. “VERY MUCH FATIGUED” 37

X. THE LIMITATIONS OF SEX 40

=Temperament= 43

XI. THE INVISIBLE LADY 45

XII. SACRED OBSCURITY 49

XIII. “OUR TRIALS” 52

XIV. VIRTUES IN COMMON 55

XV. INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 60

XVI. ANGELIC SUPERIORITY 63

XVII. VICARIOUS HONORS 66

XVIII. THE GOSPEL OF HUMILIATION 69

XIX. “CELERY AND CHERUBS” 73

XX. THE NEED OF CAVALRY 77

XXI. “THE REASON FIRM, THE TEMPERATE WILL” 80

XXII. “ALLURES TO BRIGHTER WORLDS, AND LEADS THE WAY” 83

=The Home= 87

XXIII. WANTED—HOMES 89

XXIV. THE ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION 93

XXV. THE LOW-WATER MARK 96

XXVI. “OBEY” 99

XXVII. WOMAN IN THE CHRYSALIS 103

XXVIII. TWO AND TWO 106

XXIX. A MODEL HOUSEHOLD 109

XXX. A SAFEGUARD FOR THE FAMILY 112

XXXI. WOMEN AS ECONOMISTS 116

XXXII. GREATER INCLUDES LESS 120

XXXIII. A CO-PARTNERSHIP 123

XXXIV. “ONE RESPONSIBLE HEAD” 127

XXXV. ASKING FOR MONEY 131

XXXVI. WOMANHOOD AND MOTHERHOOD 135

XXXVII. A GERMAN POINT OF VIEW 139

XXXVIII. CHILDLESS WOMEN 142

XXXIX. THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO MOTHERS 145

=Society= 149

XL. FOAM AND CURRENT 151

XLI. “IN SOCIETY” 155

XLII. THE BATTLE OF THE CARDS 159

XLIII. SOME WORKING-WOMEN 163

XLIV. THE EMPIRE OF MANNERS 167

XLV. “GIRLSTEROUSNESS” 171

XLVI. ARE WOMEN NATURAL ARISTOCRATS? 175

XLVII. MRS. BLANK’S DAUGHTERS 178

XLVIII. THE EUROPEAN PLAN 181

XLIX. “FEATHERSES” 185

L. SOME MAN-MILLINERY 189

LI. SUBLIME PRINCES IN DISTRESS 192

=Education= 197

LII. “EXPERIMENTS” 199

LIII. INTELLECTUAL CINDERELLAS 203

LIV. FOREIGN EDUCATION 207

LV. TEACHING THE TEACHERS 210

LVI. “CUPID-AND-PSYCHOLOGY” 213

LVII. MEDICAL SCIENCE FOR WOMEN 216

LVIII. SEWING IN SCHOOLS 219

LIX. CASH PREMIUMS FOR STUDY 223

LX. MENTAL HORTICULTURE 226

=Employment= 231

LXI. “SEXUAL DIFFERENCE OF EMPLOYMENT” 233

LXII. THE USE OF ONE’S FEET 237

LXIII. MISS INGELOW’S PROBLEM 240

LXIV. SELF-SUPPORT 245

LXV. SELF-SUPPORTING WIVES 248

LXVI. THE PROBLEM OF WAGES 251

LXVII. THOROUGH 255

LXVIII. LITERARY ASPIRANTS 259

LXIX. “THE CAREER OF LETTERS” 263

LXX. TALKING AND TAKING 266

LXXI. HOW TO SPEAK IN PUBLIC 269

=Principles of Government= 273

LXXII. WE THE PEOPLE 275

LXXIII. THE USE OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 278

LXXIV. THE TRADITIONS OF THE FATHERS 281

LXXV. SOME OLD-FASHIONED PRINCIPLES 285

LXXVI. FOUNDED ON A ROCK 288

LXXVII. “THE GOOD OF THE GOVERNED” 292

LXXVIII. RULING AT SECOND-HAND 296

LXXIX. “TOO MANY VOTERS ALREADY” 299

=Suffrage= 303

LXXX. DRAWING THE LINE 305

LXXXI. FOR SELF-PROTECTION 309

LXXXII. WOMANLY STATESMANSHIP 312

LXXXIII. TOO MUCH PREDICTION 316

LXXXIV. FIRST-CLASS CARRIAGES 320

LXXXV. EDUCATION VIA SUFFRAGE 324

LXXXVI. “OFF WITH HER HEAD!” 328

LXXXVII. FOLLOW YOUR LEADERS 331

LXXXVIII. HOW TO MAKE WOMEN UNDERSTAND POLITICS. 335

LXXXIX. “INFERIOR TO MAN, AND NEAR TO ANGELS” 339

=Objections to Suffrage= 343

XC. THE FACT OF SEX 345

XCI. HOW WILL IT RESULT? 349

XCII. “I HAVE ALL THE RIGHTS I WANT” 352

XCIII. “SENSE ENOUGH TO VOTE” 356

XCIV. AN INFELICITOUS EPITHET 359

XCV. THE ROB ROY THEORY 363

XCVI. THE VOTES OF NON-COMBATANTS 368

XCVII. “MANNERS REPEAL LAWS” 372

XCVIII. KILKENNY ARGUMENTS 375

XCIX. WOMEN AND PRIESTS 379

C. THE ROMAN CATHOLIC BUGBEAR 382

CI. DANGEROUS VOTERS 386

CII. HOW WOMEN WILL LEGISLATE 389

CIII. WARNED IN TIME 393

CIV. INDIVIDUALS VS. CLASSES 396

CV. DEFEATS BEFORE VICTORIES 400

PHYSIOLOGY.

“Allein, bevor und nachdem man Mutter ist, ist Man ein Mensch; die mütterliche Bestimmung aber, oder gar die eheliche, kann nicht die menschliche überwiegen oder ersetzen, sondern sie muss das Mittel, nicht der Zweck derselben sein.”— J.P.F. RICHTER: _Levana_, § 89.

“But, before and after being a mother, one is a human being; and neither the motherly nor the wifely destination can overbalance or replace the human, but must become its means, not its end.”

COMMON SENSE ABOUT WOMEN.

I. TOO MUCH NATURAL HISTORY.

Lord Melbourne, speaking of the fine ladies in London who were fond of talking about their ailments, used to complain that they gave him too much of their natural history. There are a good many writers—usually men—who, with the best intentions, discuss woman as if she had merely a physical organization, and as if she existed only for one object, the production and rearing of children. Against this some protest may well be made.

Doubtless there are few things more important to a community than the health of its women. The Sandwich-Island proverb says:—

“If strong is the frame of the mother, The son will give laws to the people.”

And, in nations where all men give laws, all men need mothers of strong frames.

Moreover, there is no harm in admitting that all the rules of organization are imperative; that soul and body, whether of man or woman, are made in harmony, so that each part of our nature must accept the limitations of the other. A man’s soul may yearn to the stars; but so long as the body cannot jump so high, he must accept the body’s veto. It is the same with any veto interposed in advance by the physical structure of woman. Nobody objects to this general principle. It is only when clerical gentlemen or physiological gentlemen undertake to go a step farther, and put in that veto on their own responsibility, that it is necessary to say, “Hands off, gentlemen! Precisely because women are women, they, not you, are to settle that question.”

One or two points are clear. Every specialist is liable to overrate his own specialty; and the man who thinks of woman only as a wife and mother is apt to forget, that, before she was either of these, she was a human being. “Women, as such,” says an able writer, “are constituted for purposes of maternity and the continuation of mankind.” Undoubtedly, and so were men, as such, constituted for paternity. But very much depends on what relative importance we assign to the phrase, “as such.” Even an essay so careful, so moderate, and so free from coarseness, as that here quoted, suggests, after all, a slight one-sidedness,—perhaps a natural re-action from the one-sidedness of those injudicious reformers who allow themselves to speak slightingly of “the merely animal function of child-bearing.” Higher than either—wiser than both put together—is that noble statement with which Jean Paul begins his fine essay on the education of girls in “Levana.” “Before being a wife or mother, one is a human being; and neither motherly nor wifely destination can overbalance or replace the human, but must become its means, not end. As above the poet, the painter, or the hero, so above the mother, does the human being rise pre-eminent.”

Here is sure anchorage. We can hold to this. And, fortunately, all the analogies of nature sustain this position. Throughout nature the laws of sex rule everywhere; but they rule a kingdom of their own, always subordinate to the greater kingdom of the vital functions. Every creature, male or female, finds in its sexual relations only a subordinate part of its existence. The need of food, the need of exercise, the joy of living, these come first, and absorb the bulk of its life, whether the individual be male or female. This _Antiope_ butterfly, that flits at this moment past my window,—the first of the season,—spends almost all its existence in a form where the distinction of sex lies dormant: a few days, I might almost say a few hours, comprise its whole sexual consciousness, and the majority of its race die before reaching that epoch. The law of sex is written absolutely through the whole insect world. Yet everywhere it is written as a secondary and subordinate law. The life which is common to the sexes is the principal life; the life which each sex leads, “as such,” is a minor and subordinate thing.

The same rule pervades nature. Two riders pass down the street before my window. One rides a horse, the other a mare. The animals were perhaps foaled in the same stable, of the same progenitors. They have been reared alike, fed alike, trained alike, ridden alike; they need the same exercise, the same grooming; nine tenths of their existence are the same, and only the other tenth is different. Their whole organization is marked by the distinction of sex: but, though the marking is ineffaceable, the distinction is not the first or most important fact.

If this be true of the lower animals, it is far more true of the higher. The mental and moral laws of the universe touch us first and chiefly as human beings. We eat our breakfasts as human beings, not as men and women; and it is the same with nine tenths of our interests and duties in life. In legislating or philosophizing for woman, we must neither forget that she has an organization distinct from that of man, nor must we exaggerate the fact. Not “first the womanly and then the human,” but first the human and then the womanly, is to be the order of her training.

II. DARWIN, HUXLEY, AND BUCKLE.

When any woman, old or young, asks the question, Which among all modern books ought I to read first? the answer is plain. She should read Buckle’s lecture before the Royal Institution upon “The Influence of Woman on the Progress of Knowledge.” It is one of two papers contained in a thin volume called “Essays by Henry Thomas Buckle.” As a means whereby a woman may become convinced that her sex has a place in the intellectual universe, this little essay is almost indispensable. Nothing else takes its place.

Darwin and Huxley seem to make woman simply a lesser man, weaker in body and mind,—an affectionate and docile animal, of inferior grade. That there is any aim in the distinction of the sexes, beyond the perpetuation of the race, is nowhere recognized by them, so far as I know. That there is any thing in the intellectual sphere to correspond to the physical difference; that here also the sexes are equal yet diverse, and the natural completion and complement of the other,—this neither Huxley nor Darwin explicitly recognizes. And with the utmost admiration for their great teachings in other ways, I must think that here they are open to the suspicion of narrowness.

Huxley wrote in “The Reader,” in 1864, a short paper called “Emancipation—Black and White,” in which, while taking generous ground in behalf of the legal and political position of woman, he yet does it pityingly, _de haut en bas_, as for a creature hopelessly inferior, and so heavily weighted already by her sex, that she should be spared all further trials. Speaking through an imaginary critic, who seems to represent himself, he denies “even the natural equality of the sexes,” and declares “that in every excellent character, whether mental or physical, the average woman is inferior to the average man, in the sense of having that character less in quantity and lower in quality.” Finally he goes so far as “to defend the startling paradox that even in physical beauty, man is the superior.” He admits that for a brief period of early youth the case may be doubtful, but claims that after thirty the superior beauty of man is unquestionable. Thus reasons Huxley; the whole essay being included in his volume of “Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews.”[1]

Footnote 1:

Pp. 22, 23, Am. ed.

Darwin’s best statements on the subject may be found in his “Descent of Man.”[2] He is, as usual, more moderate and guarded than Huxley. He says, for instance: “It is generally admitted that with women the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.” Then he passes to the usual assertion that man has thus far attained to a higher eminence than woman. “If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music,—comprising composition and performance,—history, science, and philosophy, with half a dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison.” But the obvious answer, that nearly every name on his list, upon the masculine side, would probably be taken from periods when woman was excluded from any fair competition,—this he does not seem to recognize at all. Darwin, of all men, must admit that superior merit generally arrives later, not earlier, on the scene; and the question for him to answer is, not whether woman equalled man in the first stages of the intellectual “struggle for life,” but whether she is not gaining on him now.@

Footnote 2:

II., 311, Am. Ed.

If, in spite of man’s enormous advantage in the start, woman has already overtaken his very best performances in several of the highest intellectual departments,—as, for instance, prose fiction and dramatic representation,—then it is mere dogmatism in Mr. Darwin to deny that she may yet do the same in other departments. We in this generation have actually seen this success achieved by Rachel and Ristori in the one art, by “George Sand” and “George Eliot” in the other. Woman is, then, visibly gaining on man, in the sphere of intellect; and, if so, Mr. Darwin, at least, must accept the inevitable inference.

But this is arguing the question on the superficial facts merely. Buckle goes deeper, and looks to principles. That superior quickness of women, which Darwin dismisses so lightly as something belonging to savage epochs, is to Buckle the sign of a quality which he holds essential, not only to literature and art, but to science itself. Go among ignorant women, he says, and you will find them more quick and intelligent than equally ignorant men. A woman will usually tell you the way in the street more readily than a man can; a woman can always understand a foreigner more easily; and Dr. Currie says in his letters, that when a laborer and his wife came to consult him, he always got all the information from the wife. Buckle illustrates this at some length, and points out that a woman’s mind is by its nature deductive and quick; a man’s mind, inductive and slow; that each has its value, and that science profoundly needs both.

“I will endeavor,” he says, “to establish two propositions. First, that women naturally prefer the deductive method to the inductive. Secondly, that women, by encouraging in men deductive habits of thought, have rendered an immense though unconscious service to the progress of science, by preventing scientific investigators from being as exclusively inductive as they would otherwise be.”

Then he shows that the most important scientific discoveries of modern times—as of the law of gravitation by Newton, the law of the forms of crystals by Haüy, and the metamorphosis of plants by Goethe—were all essentially the results of that _a priori_ or deductive method, “which, during the last two centuries, Englishmen have unwisely despised.” They were all the work, in a manner, of the imagination,—of the intuitive or womanly quality of mind. And nothing can be finer or truer than the words in which Buckle predicts the benefits that are to come from the intellectual union of the sexes for the work of the future. “In that field which we and our posterity have yet to traverse, I firmly believe that the imagination will effect quite as much as the understanding. Our poetry will have to re-enforce our logic, and we must feel quite as much as we must argue. Let us, then, hope that the imaginative and emotional minds of one sex will continue to accelerate the great progress by acting upon and improving the colder and harder minds of the other sex. By this coalition, by this union of different faculties, different tastes, and different methods, we shall go on our way with the greater ease.”

III. WHICH IS THE STRONGER?

What is strength,—the brute hardness of iron, or the more delicate strength of steel? Which is the stronger,—the physical frame that can strike the harder blow, or that which can endure the greater strain and yet last longer? “Man can lift a heavier weight,” says a writer on physiology, “but woman can watch more enduringly at the bedside of her sick child.” The strain upon the system of all women who have borne and reared children is as great in its way as that upon the system of the carpenter or the woodchopper; and the power to endure it is as properly to be called strength.

Again, which is the stronger in the domain of will,—the man who carries his points by energy and command, or the woman who carries hers by patience and persuasion? the man in the household who leads and decides, or the woman who foresees, guards, manages? the mother of the family, who puts the commas and semicolons in her children’s lives, as Jean Paul Richter says, or the father who puts in the colons and periods? It may be hard to say which type of strength is the more to be admired, but it is clear that they are both genuine types.

One grows tired of hearing young men who can do nothing but row, or swing dumb-bells, and are thrown wholly “off their training” by the loss of a night’s sleep, speak contemptuously of the physical weakness of a woman who can watch with a sick person half a dozen nights together. It is absurd to hear a man who is prostrated by a single reverse in business speak of being “encumbered” with a wife who can perhaps alter the habits of a lifetime more easily than he can abandon his half-dollar cigars. It is amusing to read the criticisms of languid and graceful masculine essayists on the want of vigorous intellect in the sex that wrote “Aurora Leigh” and “Middlemarch” and “Consuelo.”