Chapter 7

These questions have been answered by thousands of women, answered with tears, after the manner of women, but tears of joyful recognition of the new day which has dawned for them;--a day of larger opportunities, a day which comes after a night of ages; for the woman is for the first time finding her own place in the world. Heretofore she was only welcome if the man wanted her, and if he no longer wanted her she was again cast out. But she is now learning that the world exists for her also; that she is one half the human race; that life, liberty, and the pursuit of whatever is good are as desirable for her as for the man, and as necessary in order to put her in _rapport_ with the eternal springs of all life and its varied forms of activity.

The first impulse of the awakened woman is to unite herself with other women; her next to learn that which she does not know in regard to art, literature, peoples, races; the countries she has never visited, the kinsmen and kinswomen she has never seen, and the degree in which their progress has kept pace with or gone beyond her own. This knowledge comes to her through her club or literary society.

The woman's club has become the school of the middle-aged woman. It has brought her up to the time. It has enabled her to keep pace with the better advantages given to her sons and daughters. It has put an interest into her life which it had never previously possessed, and made her more humanly companionable because better able to judge and more willing to suspend judgment. The clubs of women in America--the growth mainly of the past twenty years--can now be counted by the hundreds, and their membership by many thousands, and the history of them all is practically the same.

It is this woman, born of women's clubs, who is the woman of to-day. She is the centre of the intellectual activity of townships and neighborhoods all over the country. She forms stock companies, and builds athenaeums; she is at the head of working guilds; she organizes classes, teaches what she knows, while she is being taught what she did not know; and in mental activity, and labor which is not routine, has renewed her youth, and added to her attractions. She is at the same time far removed from a lobbyist. She is able to look at different sides; she is socially at home with the best people in every sense of the word. She is a lady as well as a woman, and does not adopt what is _outre_ in order to obtain notoriety.

The New Life[1]

It is a very dull mind, whether belonging to man or woman, that does not feel stirred by recent movements--not here alone but all over the world--into some quickening sense of the deeper life, the broader human claims, the unifying and uniting influences which have sprung into activity, and which address, not the visionary, but the thoughtful and far-seeing, with prophetic gleams of a new heaven and a new earth.

[Footnote 1: _The Cycle_.]

It is also a very narrow and self-absorbed mind which, only sees in these openings opportunities for its own pleasure, or chances for its own advancement on its own narrow and exclusive lines. The lesson of the hour is help for those that need it, in the shape in which they need it, and kinship with all and everything that exists on the face of God's green earth. If we miss this, we miss the spirit, the illuminating light of the whole movement, and lose it in the mire of our own selfishness. To women this uplifting, these open doors, mean more than to men. They have been hedged about with so many restrictions, forced and held in such blind and narrow ways, that it is little wonder if sight and steps are feeble, and that they find it impossible to take it all in, or to recognize at once the full meaning of the day that is dawning for them.

For we are only at the threshold of a future that thrills us with its wonderful possibilities;--possibilities of friendship where separation was; of love where hatred was; of unity where division was; of peace where war was; of light--physical, mental and spiritual--where darkness was; of agreement and equality where differences and traditions had built up walls of distinction and lines of caste. This beautiful thing needs only to be realized in thought to become an actual fact in life, and those who do realize it are enriched by it beyond the power of words to express. "I should like to wake up rich one morning just to see how it would feel," said one woman to another not long since. "I do wake up rich every morning now," said the other, "though I have still my living to earn, because my life is full of prized opportunities, of cherished friendships, of chances for acquiring knowledge that I had not in youth, and keeping myself in touch with broad human facts and forces. Everything is interesting to me, more interesting the closer my acquaintance with it, so that I am fast getting rid of those ugly things we call prejudices, and laying in a stock of appreciation instead, which is in itself enriching."

The old feeling of patron and dependant--so irksome, so humiliating, so feudal, yet containing for many the whole moral law--is done away with, and in its place appears a spirit of true fellowship, a growing sense of mutual respect and helpfulness. Club life teaches us that there are many kinds of wealth in the world--the wealth of ideas, of knowledge, of sympathy, of readiness to be put in any place and used in any way for the general good. These are given, and no price is or can be put upon them; yet they ennoble and enrich whatever comes within their influence.

Money is the only kind of wealth that is not common, that is not given freely; and for that reason it has a deadening and demoralizing effect upon the minds of those who cultivate and increase it for its own sake, or fail to put it to its larger and more human uses. Wise distribution is the only way in which money can be made valuable in the world: it is only as a developing power, as an aid to the worker, and a creator of instrumentalities by which good objects can be accomplished, that it is desirable. In the light of this view, what place do those men and women occupy who shut themselves up with their money, and shut out the wide human interests which educate the mind and heart to noble issues? Going to church does not help them, for it must be an exclusive church and an exclusive pew, under an exclusive pastor who patronizes Jesus Christ but does not sympathize with Him, and who talks about the "dregs of society" as if it were something far removed from the knowledge and consciousness of his hearers.

The woman of the past has especially been cramped up, bound around, and blindfolded by her special form of belief, by her tradition, by her social customs, by her education, by her whole environment; and the effect will remain stamped more or less upon her individuality long after the predisposing causes have passed away and better influences and circumstances have taken their place.

But the present is full of encouragement. The new life has begun: the woman is here;--not the martyred woman of the past; not the self-absorbed woman of the present, but the awakened woman of the future. That woman whose faculties have been cultivated, whose gifts have been trained, whose mind has been enlarged, whose heartbeats respond to the touch of the unseen human, and whose quickened insight recognizes father, brother, sister, and friend beneath the strange as well as the dilapidated robe.

This woman whose face no artist has painted, who is not yet familiar, is among us, and will remain. Her work humanizes and reconciles, and the changes it will effect will come so noiselessly that the majority will not be aware of them till they are accomplished, and then each one will announce, and perhaps believe, that they themselves have brought these things about. But this will not matter, for when the work is done it is really of little consequence who did it, since all who do any good work at all are simply agents and ministers, charged with a task it is their business to perform, and happy only as they are able to execute it. It is those who are "let alone," who live for and in themselves, who are the unhappy ones; and for these, though they possess fine houses, much gold, stocks and bonds, the poorest worker may well fervently pray that the new life may come to these also.

The Days That Are[1]

We live in an age of discontent. Discontent has been deified. It has been called divine; and unrest, the seal as well as the sign of progress. Doubtless there is a time and a place even for discontent, for there is no faculty that has not its function. But discontent, which is a sacred fire when it burns within and is kept for home use, is a mischievous and destroying element when it is widely distributed and unthinkingly-employed by ignorance and short-sightedness.

[Footnote 1: _The Cycle_.]

Then it is certain that if discontent is good, content is far better, and thankfulness better yet. If time teaches us anything, it is to work and wait and trust; to be thankful for what is--for the digging and seeding time as well as for the harvest; for one must come before the other.

Time brings only one regret--that we had not more joy in the things that were; more belief, more patience, more love; more knowledge of the way things work out; more willingness to help toward the final result. The preparation, the planting, the laying foundations, must be done in the dark; usually done with blind eyes as well, which see not what may or will be, but anticipate a harvest of pain from a spring-time of rain. Yet these showers may have been indispensable to the ground, and the seed may have expanded and sent its shoots up to the surface in consequence of them.

But why use symbols? The days that are;--the days that are with us are the good days. Suppose it is hard work, and only the prospect of hard work? Work is the best thing we have got: it is salvation. It is the means by which we struggle up out of the darkness into the light. It is the law of life. It is the ministry of all that is good in the world; and the better it is the better for us, the better for every one. It is only those who do not know how to work that do not love it; to those who do, it is better than play--it is religion.

But this is the mere influence of work itself. Suppose, besides your work, you have the blessing of a family to be cared for, and your work provides for them? This consecrates every part of it. It makes every movement of the hand a benediction, every heart-throb an unuttered prayer. Are not these days so full of labor best days? For about you are those you love. They are under the roof you provide; their voices furnish the music, their presence the sunshine of your life. Sometimes that which your discontent craves will come to you. The freedom from toil, the absence of "troubles" that now loom up so large to you; but with your troubles your joys will have vanished, and you will sit in the twilight waiting for the end, and wishing that you had cultivated the sweetness instead of the bitterness of the beginning, that you had not allowed the thorns to cover up your roses.

Wisdom seems to have been the same always, but each one has to learn its lessons for himself. That is the reason why there is so little apparent progress in essential truths. There are always those who have grown into their realization; there are always those who are at the threshold, and who must travel over the same paths, for we can none of us acquire true wisdom for another; it must become a part of ourselves, of our own moral and spiritual consciousness.

"It is all very well for you," says one; "you have never known the pinch of poverty." How do you know that? We none of us know how and where the shoe has pinched another person's foot. It is not our business to know, but it is our business to prevent our soreness from becoming sourness and bitterness. It is our business to make the pathway of others as pleasant as we can, so that their unseen corns shall irritate them as little as possible. All the wisdom of the days that have been, and the days that are, will be found in the following lines from Goethe's "Tasso":

"Would'st thou fashion for thyself a seemly life? Then fret not over what is past and gone; And spite of all thou mayest have lost behind, Yet act as if thy life were just begun. What each day wills, enough for thee to know, What each day wills, the day itself will tell. Do thine own task, and therewith be content; What others do that shall thou fairly judge. Be sure that thou no mortal brother hate, Then all beside leave to the Master Power."

A People's Church[1]

"What would you do if you were rich?" This is a question often asked, and readily answered by those who have not wealth of their own to dispose of, for there is nothing easier than to give away other people's money. But it is more difficult to the conscientious, who feel that their unearned millions ought to inure in some way to the public benefit, yet do not always see the way to the reconciling of their own conditions and circumstances with that use of money which seems to them wisest and best.

[Footnote 1: _The Cycle_.]

As a rule it may safely be assumed that if all who are poor were suddenly made rich, they would do as the majority of our rich men do with their money--keep it. But it is at least pleasant to think how generous one might be, and as the rich occasionally are; and I propose to suggest one object that I hope will one day be realized in this great city, where everything good is possible, as well as everything evil, and which only needs to take vital root in some active mind to become a living reality.

Within a certain area New York may be called a city of churches, but they are churches for the rich; solemn, imposing, cathedral-aisled, glass-stained, costly, munificently beneficed, elegantly pastored--God locked in, the poor locked out. I know there are "mothers'" meetings and "mite" societies, and all the rest of it, but all the same the poor woman in her old shawl and bonnet would not think of entering one of those expensive pews, nor does the man in his working suit feel that that is the place for him. Outside, the majority of churches take no account of the necessity for the consolation, the comfort, the upbuilding, the refreshment of religion, save and only for certain hours on Sunday, and then it must be in full toggery, and in company with, the eminently respectable.

The most beautiful thing about the old churches abroad is not their splendor of carving and painting, but that they stand with, open doors week days and Sundays, for the people to enter; and they do enter. The market woman with her basket drops in for a moment on her way home from the labor of her weary day. The old woman totters in to say her "Ave Maria," the young woman to pray away her perplexities. Even the business man sometimes finds it a resource from his struggles and temptations. The poor, with their crowded houses and narrow quarters, have so little privacy as to make quiet, and even an opportunity for self-communion, a luxury. Then how often in the perplexities which fill their lives they desire for a little while a retreat, a refuge where they can think, perhaps receive a word of counsel, at least find an atmosphere of absolute peace and restfulness.

The Monday prayer-meeting, the afternoon exhortation; the evening conference of the Baptists, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, or the Congregationalists, are not what is wanted; nor is it a cold and barn-like edifice which makes one feel, if one goes to call upon God, as though He were out, and could only be seen at stated times, and by the will of the sexton and the trustees.

A people's church is wanted, where the people can come and go as they please; which asks no questions, which is always open, which has brief singing and organ services that all and any people of any kind and degree may attend and feel themselves welcome. A morning service of praise, a mid-day song of rejoicing, a vesper hymn of thankfulness. No word of condemnation, no word of controversy, no word of doubt, no word of assertion or denial; only unceasing love, continued and eternal recognition of human kinship and readiness to minister to any soul's need as far as it may be reached and helped.

No one minister could perform its offices; its servants would have to be in a manner consecrated to its work, and they should be men and women who have suffered, and therefore know, but who would find more reason for rejoicing than lamentation; who would possess gifts of music and oratory, and whose personal influence would be strong for righteousness.

There are great churches with scattered congregations, in Fifth avenue; there are a few poor churches, and small, for which no one cares, and which offer no attractions to the over-flowing population of Mott street. The spring and summer will soon come, and then these great churches will be closed, their pew-owners distributed over lake and mountain in all the different parts of the wide world. But the "people" will be here. People who work in foundries and shops, who live in tenement-houses; people who earn a hand-to-mouth living as clerks, book-keepers, seamstresses and petty store-keepers; people who have to stay in such homes as they can support because they cannot afford to break them up and go elsewhere.

For these people and their children there is only the street. The children occupy the street. For four or five months in the year they make life hideous, especially on Sunday, by noise and exhibition of vandalism that would disgrace the savages of any age or nation. The police acknowledge themselves powerless to prevent it. It is simply the exercise of undirected faculty which might be turned to account, but which has only noise, confusion, and street warfare for its opportunity for exercise.

There are possibilities in these congregations of the highways and byways, and when we have our people's church or churches, open all the year, and all the night as well as all the day, and the voices of the angels for sweetness, singing love and peace on earth, in an anthem that pierces the roof, and with the tones of a mighty organ to emphasize to all the world its message, and it is not a question of clothes, many people will be glad to listen, and will find an influence in the music, in the willingness, in the free-heartedness, in the sympathy, in the kindness, in the spirit of brotherhood, that they would not get out of preaching nor dogma.

Whom are we waiting for to build this church? Is it a woman? Surely it is an opportunity that carries the two-fold blessing.

Notes, Letters and Stray Leaves

A "free lance" is less free than the organs of a party. In one case it means at least the opinions of a group; in the other, the dogmatism of the one who wields the lance. Nothing is less free than the self-styled freedom of the individual.

Enthusiasm implies a certain narrowness of vision. When people can take a broad view they can see the elements of goodness or beauty everywhere, and they cease to be enthusiastic in regard to one. The great popular preachers are not university men, or those who are quiet and literary in style, but strong, dogmatic men.

Perhaps the most noticeable difference between the so-called new woman and the new man is this, that she is seizing every opportunity that opens up new avenues of individual employment, while he is discovering and storing energy to save himself from doing any work at all. The old man made other men, and women too, work for him, the new man is making the hitherto uncontrolled forces his servants, locking them up in such small compass that a twist of the wrist will start the crash of worlds.

The notes of the great god Pan, so "piercingly sweet by the river"--a far cry and a weary way from Pan to Handel and Beethoven; yet during all that time music has been the joy and the consolation of peoples,--all except the Quakers.

If Poetry is the prophet of the future, music expresses all emotions,--love, joy, fear, above all, aspiration. Music is essentially religious, and has inspired the most perfect forms of emotional composition we know.

I take off my hat to the new man--that is, I would if I wore one, but I wear a bonnet, and pin it on with long, sharp-pointed things which if they were not used voluntarily would be considered instruments of torture. Think of the man who is testing the force of dynamite--who is holding lightning bolts in his hand and forcing them to do the work which he has planned for them, who is taking the altitude of the mountains in Mars in his observatory in the air at midnight,--think of these men stopping to swear while they ran the murderous little weapon through six thicknesses of buckram, lining, velvet, lace, feathers, ribbon and hair--to fasten on their bonnets!

Letter to the New York Woman's Press Club

October, 1900.

My dear Friends and Fellow-Members:

It was really a grief to me not to be able to meet you individually and collectively before leaving to be absent the entire season. The accident which disabled me for the summer, threatens to cripple me for the winter also, and in this condition of dependence and general disability, it seemed best to go where I could have seclusion, and the care of some member of my own family.

I resign my place among you with less reluctance because the Woman's Press Club is now strong and well able to guard its own interests, and direct its own affairs. It will, I am sure, be all the better and stronger from being thrown upon its own resources, and made to depend wholly upon the potent efforts which have been evoked, and which may be still further developed on the part of its membership.

It will be a source of the deepest satisfaction to me in my retirement to think of you in connection with the happy times we have had, and the good work done during the past three years, and also of the spirit of loving fellowship which has grown so strong and so deep. Nothing can give greater pleasure than to hear of your continued growth and prosperity, of continued endeavor to make the work effective, and the life of the Woman's Press Club beautiful and useful.

Remember that a well-rounded club is an epitome of the world; that it never can and never ought to be perfect according to any one individual's idea of perfection, for every one's ideal is different; and it is the unity in this diversity which constitutes the spiritual life of the club, as the soul animates and inspires the body.

Exalt the club. Bring your best to the front. Extinguish personal aims. Mind not at all the little picking and carping of human gadflies, whose desire to extract blood is perhaps a survival of their species, and an evidence of their unfitness for human companionship.

I think of you at every gathering, and if you remember me, show it in your determination to make the Woman's Press Club of Greater New York an honor to the metropolis of the New World and to American womanhood.

J.C. CROLY. Hill Farm, Hersham, Walton-on-Thames, England.

Letter to Sorosis

May, 1899.

To my dear friends and fellow-members of Sorosis: