Part 7
Of course, there is danger of running to the opposite extreme. Those clubs whose most laborious efforts seem to lie in serving tea once a month and providing a literary programme that is indeed milk for babes are too often inclined to rush into print with elaborated accounts of table decorations and good gowns, but even that shows a hospitable spirit, does it not? At least, they are setting a good example to clubs whose discussions and papers, if accurately reported, would be of immense value to younger clubs and to the outside world of women who cannot attend the meetings. For even the occasional woman who boasts that she never belonged to a club reads the club column in her favorite newspaper.
Exclusiveness, after all, is only another name for selfishness. And selfishness is utterly and thoroughly incompatible with the idea of women’s clubs. The club motif is helpfulness, and that is a quality diametrically opposed to selfishness. We might go further and say that the sensitiveness which so many of us plead is only another phase of selfishness—and none of us have a right to plead that. Why is it that some words we roll as a sweet morsel under our tongues, while their definitions we abhor?
Let us, as club-women, make some good resolutions and then keep them.
Whereas, we are all human and therefore love gossip, let us resolve:
That we will cultivate a spirit of love and patience for every woman in the club.
That if we hear a single word of criticism on her words or actions or dress or face or figure, we will not repeat it.
That we will not answer such criticisms, except to say something good of the assailed.
That we will make the club a place where helpfulness and kindliness go hand in hand with inspiration.
That the Golden Rule is just as good a guide to club life as to home life.
And that we will adopt it and practice it.
And let us reflect that if the club movement were not a good thing we would not find a million of the best women in our country in it.
I have seen many club mottoes and club platforms in my day and generation, but the following seems to me the best. It originated with the Lincoln (Neb.) club-women:
“Ours is an inclusive, departmental club. Since its object is to help and be helped, the following women are invited to become members:—
1. The university graduate.
2. The woman of common school education.
3. The self-educated woman.
4. The woman who belongs to other clubs.
5. The non-club woman.
6. The woman who does not believe in clubs.
7. The woman who does not wish to join a department.
8. The woman who wants to attend the club meetings but twice a year.
9. The woman who wants to be a member for the name of it.
10. The tired woman, full of domestic responsibilities, who wants to be a sponge, fold her hands, take in what the bright free woman who needs an audience, has learned, and then go home refreshed to her treadmill.
11. The woman without companionship.
12. The young woman and the young-old woman.”
XII
ON THE ETHICS OF CLOTHES
This is not a chapter on “What to wear and how to wear it.” It is not a question altogether of becoming and fashionable attire. It is, rather, of our clothes and their relation to the rest of the world that I would speak. We talk a great deal about art; is it not just as desirable in dress as anywhere? God meant women to be attractive just as He meant flowers to be lovely and birds to sing. Why, then, should women of earnest purpose think it advances their work to make frumps of themselves?
Is there a shy, poorly dressed woman coming to your church, always taking a back seat and slipping off like a frightened lamb when the service is over? Hunt her out and say something pleasant to her. And remember, especially if you can afford gorgeous raiment yourself, that that very woman may have something for you. Try it and see. I have often been asked if I do not consider it wrong for a rich woman to wear better clothes to her club than the average member can afford. I say No. As long as women are women half the pleasure of going out anywhere, even to church, lies in the opportunity it gives for seeing what other women wear. And it does not follow, because we cannot wear rich clothing ourselves, that we are unable to bear the sight of it displayed on the person of another woman without that secret stirring of pride and all uncharitableness of which Saint Paul speaks so eloquently. On the contrary, most of us delight in beautiful things, and it is a pleasure to see fine clothes, even if we cannot behold them under our own roof-tree and in our own wardrobes. Another thing. No woman likes to feel that she is being dressed down to, or that some other woman is pitying her because her raiment is not costly. If the choice lies between feeling that some other woman can wear better things than I do, or the consciousness that this other woman feels that she can and is trying to dress down to the limits of my purse, give me the former; I will try to bear the sight of her fine clothes with patience and to believe that my soul is above the glitter of outside adornment. For a woman’s a woman for a’ that.
The time is coming—we see it already around the corner—when clothes do not make the woman. The plain little woman whose garb is just about as noticeable as the feathers of a little brown sparrow is quite as apt to be the leading spirit in her club or town or State, as the one with reception gowns from Felix and tailor suits from Redfern. And yet why should anybody speak or think disparagingly of a woman because she follows Shakespeare’s advice, “Costly thy raiment as thy purse can buy”? May there not be just as much uncharitableness among women in this direction as in the other? Possibly a woman is abundantly able to wear a tailor gown that costs a hundred dollars or more, and her husband is more than particular about her dress. Some husbands are. Is it her duty to wear a cheaper gown because some of her sisters must?
Here is a nice question in club ethics. One’s husband may count his money by the hundred thousands or even the millions; both he and the children may be strenuous about the mother’s clothes. What is her duty? Shall she go against the wishes of her own family, not to mention her personal taste in the matter, and studiously avoid wearing good gowns when she goes to the club—simply because there are women there whose husbands can scarcely afford the “ready-made tailor” or the home-seamstress-made silk which they are wearing?
And as some woman has already said, should it be inconsistent with the Federation idea for the woman who can afford it, and who has always dressed well, to appear elegantly gowned at the conventions? Inconsistency would lie in the discarding of her usual apparel for the time being, and the substitution of plainer garments, and by so doing she would prove conclusively that she was not really democratic.
Should Robert of Lincoln’s Quaker wife—pretty and sensible and plain and brown—wish to change the brilliant plumage of the oriole when she flits into her range of vision? I think not; it would not be natural or fair or kind. And is it necessary in order to be effective in social service, in order to be consistent, in order to reach fulness of power, that we be so serious about it all? I like the expression which one of our ablest women used when she spoke of working “in gay self-forgetfulness.” My mother used to tell me that the best-dressed women were those who, having donned their pretty clothes and satisfied themselves that they were all right, thought no more about them, but went out into company with other women with no more consciousness of clothes than the flowers and birds seem to have of their colors and music. It is true that we should work hard for what is most dear to us, but not so seriously that we cannot see God’s beautiful sunshine and brilliant coloring of sky and field.
And so I contend, from a purely æsthetic standpoint, for the continuation of the wearing of pretty gowns and rare jewels by the possessors of them. Sidney Lanier, in “My Springs,” one of the poems addressed to his wife, after speaking of the “loves” she held for everything in the great world, says:
“And loves for all that God and man In art and nature make or plan, And lady-loves for spidery lace And broideries and supple grace.
“And diamonds and the whole sweet round Of littles that large life compound, And love for God and God’s bare truth, And loves for Magdalen and Ruth.”
“We are all living in a kindergarten for the blind,” said a prominent divine at Mr. Anagnos’ beautiful institution in Boston. “Having eyes, perhaps we do not see that best and highest life of the divine which awaits us just beyond our ken.”
The French gown and gorgeous hat which we envy, or at best admire, may cover a nature full of courage and healing for our secret woes, if we were not so blind we could not see; and in our turn we might supply some stimulus which she lacks. And the woman in the ill-fitting, home-made gown in the corner might, possibly, bring positive blessing to both of us and others. We each have something for the other. Have we given our share?
“Why don’t you bring some of your fine gowns up here with you?” asked the country relatives of a rich woman. “We like to see them even if our meeting-house and rag-carpeted sitting-rooms don’t seem just the place for them.” A great many women feel the same way. They like to see pretty clothes, even if they cannot wear them. So let us not worry over this matter of dress. It will right itself. If the woman who is apt to overdress—to whom dress is the main object in life—comes into contact with higher-minded women, she will soon absorb a higher ideal and come to feel that there are greater purposes than are covered by the Paris fashion plates, and worthier subjects of contemplation and discussion than whether to ruffle or not to ruffle the skirt. And do these not need such help just as much as those that dwell in low places and perhaps long ago learned to combine high thinking with plain living?
Oh, sisters, we none of us realize one another’s needs. How do we know that she whom we have been envying as possessing everything heart could wish, is not the most miserable of women? How do we know that the quiet, insignificant woman in sparrow-like raiment has not exactly the help which we are silently craving? Let us come out of our shells and see. Let us make of life something more than a series of good times, when we have gone forth arrayed in gorgeous attire and in search of amusement only. Have we been of those who shirk duty by leaving it to those who like to work, while we have acted as sponges to soak up the waters of gladness set running by the untiring efforts of others?
Or have we, through unselfish and self-forgetting labor for the advancement of all, grown up to a broader outlook on life, a more tolerant eye for the shortcomings of others and a wider charity for humanity everywhere? Only by losing ourselves do we find our best selves. There are so many things we can do to brighten the life-path for others, and almost without effort on our part. A kind word, a helpful suggestion, a pleasant smile in answer to a cross look; these cost nothing, and if we cultivate the habit we shall carry them unconsciously wherever we go; and they often mean so much.
There is the sister who comes from a home where the most rigid economy must be practiced, or where the children, dear as they are, wear on overworked nerves and brain; where death has brought havoc and desolation; where the husband is surly and penurious; where scandal or disgrace has been, or where sorrows worse than death have brought darkness and continual heartache. Do you think it does not matter to such whether you give them cordial greeting, whether your presence is like the blessed sunlight, whether your life of un-self-conscious faith and hope beams across their way, even for a half hour? How seldom it occurs to any of us to ask ourselves what is our real, unconscious influence among our sisters.
Somebody has said that to be warped unconsciously by the magnetic influence of all around is the destiny of even the greatest souls. If this is true, how much more is it likely that we common souls shall be swayed by outside spiritual forces. Let us see to it that we are not like Hosea Bigelow’s character who
“Might be a marvel of easy delightfulness If he would not sometimes leave the r out of sprightfulness.”
Let us, also, recall Dorothea’s motto in “Middlemarch”:
“I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me, that by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we do not know what it is, and cannot do what we would, we are a part of the divine power against evil, widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”
A good motto for us all, isn’t it?
XIII
ON THE AVERAGE WOMAN
The position of woman seems to be worrying a lot of people a great deal nowadays. Whether she is or is not psychologically inferior to man, whether “emancipation” is a good thing for her, whether it is better for her to vote intelligently or stay at home and knit stockings mechanically, whether she should be mentally and physically capable of supporting herself or be content to be the more or less beautiful appendage of some man; these are questions that are considered weighty enough to fill newspapers, magazines and even books with arguments pro and con. And woman continues to spell herself with a capital W.
Dyspeptic men and dyspeptic women with a literary tendency are rushing into print, and both long and short-haired logicians are taking to the platform in the vain endeavor to put woman where she belongs—although the exact location of that place has not been clearly determined nor concisely defined. And there is considerable doubt extant as to her remaining there, when the learned disputants have succeeded in putting her in the right spot. The modern woman seems to be more uncertain, coy and hard to please than those, even, that puzzled the poet.
But the most encouraging thing about it is the position of the average woman on these questions. The world is made up—let us devoutly thank Heaven—of average women, and it is the sanity of these that will save the situation. Nothing ever interested me more than the discussion at a State Federation Convention a few years ago on this very topic. One afternoon was given up entirely to the discussion of the position of woman—not by experts and psychological students, but by the reading and thinking average club women themselves. And it was indeed “happifying,” as the good old Methodist used to say, to behold the good sense and sweet reasonableness of these women. The erratic notions of Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman, the erotic ideas of Mme. Marholm, the vagaries of Olive Schreiner, and the dyspeptic pessimism of some of our recent novelists all came up for consideration, and it was with pious joy that I noted that the distorted views of woman in the economic and the domestic world have little weight with the average woman who reads and who has fallen into the pernicious but enjoyable habit of thinking for herself and forming her own conclusions.
It may be that what we are told is true and not one woman in five thousand is fit to bring up her own children, but it looks to me as if the aforesaid average woman with a mind-which-doesn’t-hurt-her-because-she-knows-how-to-use-it, belongs to a class which makes a serious matter of child-study when God sends her children. It may be that woman’s place is still at the loom and the spindle and the mending-basket, but judging from the average woman’s remarks she has other duties of more importance in the economic world in these days of machinery.
Once upon a time a woman, writing for a foreign review, bewailed the absence of serious concentrated thought among women, and advanced as the reason therefor their gregarious habits and crowded life, and their utter disability to apply to themselves the benefits of solitude. Women as a class do depend on each other or upon the men of their acquaintance for their opinions, whether on social or political themes.
And yet women are not, all of them, so absolutely without properly correlated opinions as certain writers would have us believe. That she is often defective in consecutive mental training derives from influences beginning with the embryo woman in her cradle. She is tended by a nurse who is not allowed to “turn her off” in the slightest degree. As soon as she can talk she is provided with a nursery governess and later with chaperones and companions, tutors and governesses, and is finally sent to boarding-school, where she lives, moves and has her being in “her set.” A boy may be taught to amuse himself before he walks. A boy may play alone and his elders are only too thankful if he will. When older, a boy may go off alone for delightful half days in the woods or follow the bent of his nature or his own sweet will.
But the girl imbibes with her mother’s milk an indefinite idea that she must not be alone. Whether it be the effect of injudicious nursery tales or the early development of her social nature, she is trained with a certain deference to that idea, and instead of a healthy, natural being, capable of standing on her own feet, intellectually and morally, she grows up, unavoidably, with an unconscious habit of leaning on others. Is this solely due to the unbiased woman-nature? May it not be attributed, as we say in New England, to her bringing up?
Sometimes she never experiences, in her sheltered and measured existence, any lack, mental or spiritual. Sometimes, indeed, this great universe with all its mighty forces of life and death and love and passion and hatred, is nothing to her but a pretty background for the display of fashions. But sooner or later comes to more women than are dreamed of in the philosophy of the world a great crisis, a time when human nature stands stripped of all false, meretricious pretences and the disillusionment of life comes upon her.
“There is scarcely,” says our review writer, “one man in a thousand who at some time in his life has not felt and indulged the impulse to step out from the rank and file of his familiars and contemporaries, and envisage his own nature. Not a man, worthy of the name, but has searched for and found himself—has borne out his own convictions, and wrestled through the long nights of his own youth with the stern-browed angel of some revelation.”
The same thing, we venture to assert, happens to thousands of women. The dreary time of disillusionment comes and the cutting contrast between the real and the ideal makes itself painfully felt. Friends die, hopes are shattered, the inexorable facts of life force themselves upon us and we awake from the golden dreams of early life. The more delicately organized a woman is the deeper the springs of truth in her lie, and the more is it a necessity of her nature that, when the spell is broken, she shall stand face to face with the inner meaning of life, that she shall search and find herself. Long nights are spent in passionate protest, in earnest struggling for light, in eager searching for truth. Call it morbid, unhealthy, if you will; you do not say so of man. Many a thoughtful, earnest woman of to-day, under whose calm demeanor no one suspects an extinct crater, dates the development of her intellectual self from just such battles, which resulted in the conquest of self and petty aims. The soul-writhings of such women in books are overdrawn and unnatural. Not one woman in a thousand would be guilty of writing such self-accusing, self-revealing scenes; but hundreds of women readers recognize the state of mind, and although they may not have writhed bodily all night on the floor like some heroines of recent novels, they have bidden, after reading of such, long forgotten ghosts to be quiet.
The secret of our late President McKinley’s strength was his mastery over self. He had himself under thorough control. He did not fear self-communion, for he was sanely balanced. The quality in him which appealed the most strongly to women, of course, was his unselfish devotion to his womenkind. His mother and his wife always stood first in his heart, and he was the good son and ideal husband before he was the soldier and the statesman. Some men seem to be ashamed of being true to their women-folk; President McKinley was great enough to respect all women and to love with a singularly unselfish devotion those belonging to him.
How much better this world would be if there were more such characters; if people were content to be simply true and faithful to their highest ideals, or rather were equal to the effort of living up to them. It is easy to lie awake at night or sit by the fire and dream of grand and noble deeds; it is another thing to carry those ideals right out into the workaday world and face the battles of life with them. So much depends on the way we carry them, however; if we carry the high ideals as a burden on our backs, they are not a success. Let us try using them as a shield.
There is one little book that I wish could be put into the hands of every woman. And then I should demand a promise that each one should read a chapter in it on retiring every night. It is called “The Magic Seven” and was written by Lida A. Churchill, who has struck a helpful chord in this little book that might go far toward transforming the world, if the world would stop long enough to read it.
The great need among women is to acquire self-poise and to learn self-control. This book comes nearer to teaching these than anything I have yet seen, although, of course, it all depends on the woman herself whether she will be calm and strong and self-reliant. As Miss Churchill says: “God Himself cannot give you anything which you are unwilling or unready to receive.”
Here is one of her formulas. Try it, and after saying it over every day in the quiet of your own room, or on the car, or in the midst of crowds, see if you are not more calm, more sure of yourself, more trustful of God:
“I am still of heart and of tongue. I invite, and I hold myself in the attitude to receive, the Intelligence which teaches, the Love which satisfies and protects, the Power which invincibilizes, the Peace which blesses. I admit nothing into my life which would prevent or hinder the greatest soul-receptivity. I wait in the silence with and for God.”
But we must not forget that it is the average woman who makes or unmakes life for us. She may not write books, nor paint pictures, nor become famous; but she is the home-maker—the mother of the world. And the Average Woman will continue right along at the old stand as wife and mother, but with an enlarged sense of outside responsibilities. She will vote wherever the law will let her and yet mind her baby. She will study polemics in clubs and higher mathematics all by her lonesome and yet continue to order the dinner and, if necessary, cook it herself; and owing to the spread of cooking schools and domestic science departments, it will be better cooked and more daintily served than of yore.
No; let us cease to worry about ourselves or fret our souls with the arguments of men who know next to nothing about us. Every man has his opinion about women as a class, but in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand his premises are all drawn from the women of his own household. So that if he sets us down as weak-brained, fickle, and vastly inferior to MAN, we can easily judge of the women of his immediate circle, and pity him accordingly.