Part 3
The truth seems to be, that Nature is endeavoring to take a new departure in the American, and to produce a race more finely organized, more sensitive, more pliable, and of more nervous energy, than the races of Northern Europe; that this change of type involves some risk to health in the process, but promises greater results whenever the new type shall be established. I am confident that there has been within the last twenty years a great improvement in the physical habits of the more cultivated classes, at least, in this country,—better food, better air, better habits as to bathing and exercise. The great increase of athletic games; the greatly increased proportion of seaside and mountain life in summer; the thicker shoes and boots of women and little girls, permitting them to go out more freely in all weathers—these are among the permanent gains. The increased habit of dining late, and of taking only a lunch at noon, is of itself an enormous gain to the professional and mercantile classes, because it secures time for eating and for digestion. Even the furnaces in houses, which seemed at first so destructive to the very breath of life, turn out to have given a new lease to it; and open fires are being rapidly re-introduced as a provision for enjoyment and health, when the main body of the house has been tempered by the furnace. There has been, furthermore, a decided improvement in the bread of the community, and a very general introduction of other farinaceous food. All this has happened within my own memory, and gives _a priori_ probability to the alleged improvement in physical condition within twenty years.
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.
IX. “VERY MUCH FATIGUED.”
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.
X. THE LIMITATIONS OF SEX
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.
Ἀνδρὸς καὶ γυναικὸς ἡ αὐτὴ ἀρετή.—ANTISTHENES _in Diogenes Laertius_, vi. 1, 5.
“Virtue in man and woman is the same.”
XI. THE INVISIBLE LADY.
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.
It is not that any considerable portion of mankind actually wishes to abolish woman from the universe. But the opinion dies hard that she is best off when least visible. These appeals which still meet us for “the sacred privacy of woman” are only the Invisible Lady on a larger scale. In ancient Bœotia, brides were carried home in vehicles whose wheels were burned at the door in token that they would never again be needed. In ancient Rome, it was a queen’s epitaph, “She staid at home, and spun,”—_Domum servavit, lanum fecit_. In Turkey, not even the officers of justice can enter the apartments of a woman without her lord’s consent. In Spain and Spanish America, the veil replaces the four walls of the house, and is a portable seclusion. To be visible is at best a sign of peasant blood and occupations; to be high-bred is to be invisible.
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.”
XII. SACRED OBSCURITY.
In the preface to that ill-named but delightful book, the “Remains of the late Mrs. Richard Trench,” there is a singular remark by the editor, her son. He says that “the adage is certainly true in regard to the British matron, _Bene vixit quæ bene latuit_,” the meaning of this adage being, “She has lived well who has kept herself well out of sight.” Applying this to his beloved mother, he further expresses a regret at disturbing her “sacred obscurity.” Then he goes on to disturb it pretty effectually by printing a thick octavo volume of her most private letters.
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.
XIII. “OUR TRIALS.”
A Providence (R.I.) 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.