Читать книгу Triumphs and Wonders of the 19th Century: The True Mirror of a Phenomenal Era - James P. Boyd - Страница 47

Table of Contents

The whole woman question may be briefly summed up as a century-old struggle between conservatism and progress. Women are moving irregularly, and perhaps illogically, along certain lines of development toward a point that will probably be reached; while conservatism, halting and fearful, is struggling blindly to hold points and maintain lines that must be given up.

Unfortunately for the rapidity of women’s advancement, women themselves have no thoroughness, no clearness, as to the fundamental cause of their grievances or the ends to be attained, and are not yet alive to a consciousness of the fact that the question of woman’s rights is simply and purely a question of human rights, the basic solution of which, on the broad plane of justice, will solve all the social, political, and industrial problems of which the woman question forms a part.

The time when woman suffered silently and toiled patiently without once questioning the justice of her lot has happily passed forever. Confusion and antagonism are engendered because of misunderstanding of the real movement. Women are consciously or unconsciously struggling for that selfhood which has hitherto been denied them, and are seeking for opportunity to develop that personality which Browning, Ruskin, and other broad thinkers declare “is the good of the race.” The most discouraging feature of the situation is the fact that women as a whole do not realize that a politically inferior class is a degraded class; a disfranchised class, an oppressed class; and that her economic dependence upon man is the basic cause of her inferiority.

The grievances openly proclaimed by the advocates of woman suffrage as causes of hostility are too frequently childish, unreasonable, and unworthy of serious attention. In the majority of cases they centre around some fancied wrong that is a result rather than a cause. The keynote not only to the woman question, but to the labor question may be found in the words of that deep thinker and able writer, August Bebel: “The basis of all oppression is economic dependence upon the oppressor.” The widespread discontent with present social conditions is an augury of hope for the future. There is no element in the unrest which need excite grave apprehension. Thoughtful people perceive clearly that women are intensely human, nothing more, and that as human beings they are entitled not only to food, clothes, and shelter, but to an opportunity for development.

It is only as we are familiar with the oppression that has been the common lot of women since the beginning of time that we can realize that her lot has been sweetened, her condition ameliorated, and her progress within the century marvelous indeed. The woman question, historically considered, contains all the physical subjugation and consequent inferiority which constituted all the differentiation between the physical and mental powers of men and women. It contains all the humiliation, uncertainty, and ultimate hope of her future. The history of the woman question is analogous with the history of the labor question, with the difference that woman slavery had its origin in the peculiarities of her sexual being, while the laborer’s slavery began when he was robbed of the land which is the birthright of every human being. It will be seen, therefore, that woman’s slavery antedates the thralldom of the thrall, and “was more humiliating, more degrading, because she was treated and regarded by the laborer as his servant, his inferior.” This condition largely prevails among laborers to-day, and was indirectly given utterance to a few weeks ago, when some of the members of the American Federation of Labor formulated a traditional resolution demanding that “women be excluded from all public work and relegated to the home,”—a demand that would be to some extent reasonable, and no doubt acceptable, to the great army of working-women, had the chivalrous laborers who formulated the demand the ability and industry to provide a home for the women whom they would render paupers by deprivation of work, and for the children for whom their fathers were unable to provide. It is gratifying to know that this resolution was lost in the committee room, and that its formulation was greeted by the press of the whole country with a storm of deserved disapproval.

Inasmuch as the rapidly increasing number of bread-winners among women makes it evident that men are either unable or incompetent to provide for them, it remains for the working-women of the country to formulate a resolution demanding that men be excluded from all work that has hitherto been considered as belonging to or peculiarly adapted to women. What an army of mosquito-legged men from the eating-houses, laundries, and dry-goods establishments would rise up to proclaim the idiocy of women and protest against such injustice!

On the threshold of the world’s morning, says a distinguished writer and worker in the German Reichstag of to-day, we may correctly assume that woman was man’s equal in mental and physical power. But she became his inferior physically, and consequently dependent upon his bounty, during periods of pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing, when her helplessness forced her to look to him for food and shelter. In the childhood of the race might made right; brute strength was the standard of superiority; the struggle for existence was crude and savage; and thus this occasional helplessness became the manner of her bondage.

That nature is primarily responsible for the centuries of woman’s enslavement there can be no doubt. And as nature’s laws are unchanging, the advocates of woman’s political advancement would do well to remember that woman’s greatest importance as a public factor can only begin when the function of motherhood ceases. “In a real sense, as a factory is meant to turn out locomotives or clocks, the machinery of nature is designed in the last resort to turn out mothers. Life to the human species is not a random series of random efforts; its course is set as rigidly as the pathway of the stars; its laws are as immutable as the laws of the Medes and Persians.” (Drummond’s Ascent of Man.)

Nature’s great work for the individual is reproduction and care of the species. The first, Drummond terms the cosmic process; the second, the moral process. Statistics show that one child out of every three dies before maturity, and nature’s task is incomplete unless at least two children be reared to the adult age by every family. Every couple, then, at marriage, assumes the responsibility to society and posterity of bringing three children into the world. Woman’s part in the stupendous economy of nature is first and distinctively most important, that of motherhood. She can only pay her debt to nature, fulfill her mission to the world, and discharge her obligations to humanity by faithfully discharging the duties of motherhood. But as the function of motherhood ceases when the woman is in the prime of life, ripened by experience and fortified by maternal ties, she may yet have ample opportunity to exert her far-reaching influence in public work when she has exemplified in her own life the words, Home, Love, Mother. And there is, there can be, no rational objection to granting the fullest suffrage to woman at this period.

MARY ELIZABETH LEASE

Having located the basic cause of her dependence, it will be seen that the only solution possible for the complete emancipation and mental and physical development of woman is to render her, through industrial freedom, so economically independent in every way of man’s grudging bounty that she will scorn his pity, resent his abuse, and claim her right to fullest individuality and opportunity as a human being.

For countless ages women were separated from the world by a barrier as effective as the myriad-miled wall of China; vacillating between the condition of slave and superintendent of the kitchen; taught nothing but those flimsy accomplishments that would catch the eye of the prospective husband and master; sneered at, ridiculed, and abused whenever she attempted to cross the line which hoary prophets and patriarchal slaveholders had marked across her path; subject to man’s whim and caprice; her physical development, in time, became meagre and crippled. And as her mental faculties were repressed and imprisoned in the narrowest circle of feminine opinions, it became difficult for her to rise above the most commonplace trivialities of life. Thus it came about that the term “Weaker Sex,” originally used to convey only the acknowledged truth that women are inferior to men in physical strength, came to include the mind as well as body. Be this as it may, the position of women for long centuries was inevitably one of extreme cruelty and oppression. Countless bitter and unnecessary limitations hedged her pathway and obstructed her development from the cradle to the grave. It is not to be wondered at that she in time became so inured to her degrading servitude as to accept it as her natural position. Madame De Staël has truly said, “Of all the gifts and faculties which nature has lavishly bestowed upon woman, she has been allowed to exercise fully but one, the faculty to suffer.” The extent of this suffering and the deteriorating influence which it has exerted upon the race can never be estimated till Finis is written to the story of humanity.

In the noonday of Grecian power and learning, woman trod not beside man as helpmate and companion, but followed as his slave. Demosthenes defines the wife as the “bearer of children, the faithful watch-dog who guards the house for her master.” At the Council of Macon, held in the sixth century, the question of the soul and humanity of women was gravely weighed and debated, profound doctors of theology maintaining that “woman is not a subject but an object for man’s use and pleasure.” For centuries theological divines whetted their wit on helpless woman; and the church in holy zeal persecuted the woman who was guilty of a fault as a “daughter of the devil,” and held her up to public contumely as the concentration of all evil.

Christianity, indeed, offered emancipation to women. It proclaimed a startling doctrine,—the equality of the rich and the poor, the weak and the strong, in the sight of God the Father. And it became evident that such teachings would inevitably break down the barriers of class and caste, eliminate injustice, and usher in a time when all should stand equal before the law. But alas, the world, with the exception of isolated and individual instances, has never been offered an opportunity to test the efficacy of the all-corrective principles of the religion which Christ gave to the world. The repression of women biased the reformatory tendencies of Christianity, and rendered it as ineffective as a medium of relief to the oppressed as our one-sided political system of to-day. Christianity, under masculine domination, was lost in the rubbish of churchianity, which, professing but failing to practice the religion of Christ, has held woman in the same contempt in which she has been held by all the ancient and idolatrous religions of the world. Yet despite the fact that the great Master, were He to come to-day, would scarcely recognize in the churches a trace of the code which He lived and died to exemplify, it must not be forgotten that the vital principle of religion never dies. It eventually attains fullest development, and becomes identified with the progress of civilization and the highest purpose of a people. Therefore, we may reverently believe that in the ultimate triumph and rehabilitation of practical Christianity lies the hope of the oppressed, and true liberty not only for women, but for every human being.

Emma Willard

Even now the mists are lifting. The great change in the position of women—legal, social, and educational—within a hundred years is breaking even the hard shell of orthodox usage. Whole denominations have dropped the word “obey” from the marriage service. Many ministers frequently omit it, or, if administered, it is pronounced by the bride with mental reservation and looked upon as a word that has only the most remote and shadowy significance. The new wine is breaking the old bottles; the spirit of the nineteenth century is too progressive for the usages and traditions of the eleventh century. Modern churchianity, realizing that women constitute three fourths of its membership, no longer wages a merciless warfare upon them. It has relaxed its Pauline grip upon her throat, “I suffer not a woman to speak in the churches.” And the more advanced theological bodies have offered her the intellectual hospitality of the pulpit, where her eloquence is a pleasing change to those who have grown tired of preachers’ platitudes. Clerical decrees are no longer hurled at her defenseless head. The doors of churches, schools, and colleges are swinging wide at her approach, though they sometimes creak on their hinges. The ministers no longer openly advocate that the gates of opportunity be bolted and barred against her. There is everything to stimulate hope; the wings of feminine nature have expanded till a return to the chrysalis is impossible.

It is true that a very large number yet profess to believe that a woman fulfills her whole mission in the world when she makes herself as pretty and agreeable as possible, and devotes all her time and attention to the discharge of domestic duties. But there has been a wonderful modification of opinion since Schopenhauer declared that “woman is not called to great things. She pays her debt to life by the throes of birth, care of the children, and subjection to her husband.” Two things have tended to bring about this modification of opinion; the broader education and increased opportunities for development attendant upon the growth of individual liberty and republican forms of government; and the capability of self-maintenance due to improved mechanical appliances. It is not mere inclination on the part of the individual, nor is it the voice of the agitator, that is bringing about these changes; it is the irresistible logic of events.

One hundred years ago the education of women in the most progressive and wealthy families went little beyond reading and writing. In 1819, when Mrs. Emma Willard issued an address to the members of the New York legislature advocating the endowment of an institution for the higher education of women, there was not a college in the country for girls. In 1892, the colleges of the United States numbered more than 50,000 female students. In 1888, the ratio of female students to the whole number of students pursuing a higher course of education in universities and colleges in this country was 29.3 per centum, or a little more than one fourth. At the same time the ratio in England was 11 per centum; in France, 2 per centum; while in Germany, Austria, and Italy the ratio was so slight as to be but a mere fraction of 1 per centum.

Such a thing as a female president of a college was unknown and probably undreamed of in the eighteenth century; but we learn from the Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1887–88 that there are in the United States forty-two colleges and institutions for the superior instruction of women having a woman for president.

In the high and secondary schools, in 1888, over one half of the students were girls. And in the same year, tabulated statistics reveal that 63 per centum of the teachers were women. And this percentage will become greater and greater as we grasp the truth that woman is, by gift of greater intuition and sympathy, the natural instructor of the human race. The salaries paid to women teachers are grossly unfair when compared to the pay of male teachers for the same or less work. But as the difference in compensation is growing smaller every decade, there is at least room for hope that this injustice will soon be righted.

The law of evolution is the discoverer and formulator of woman’s advancement. The invention and use of gunpowder placed the peasant on an equal war-footing with the mailed knight. The enormous increase in mechanical appliances and productive machinery has taken woman out of the rank of unpaid menials, has given her leisure for mental development, opportunity to receive recompense for toil, and is largely breaking down the physical barriers which had hitherto been considered unsurmountable. Statistics show that there are forms of machinery in the operation of which the production of a woman is even greater than that of a man, thus furnishing an actual proof of the falsity of the idea that woman is incapacitated for competition with man in the physical world. And the trend of events is indicated by the statistics given in the Report of the Commissioner of Labor, from which we learn that in some trades and professions the percentage of women engaged has increased fivefold in the last decade.

While woman’s work has always been a recognized factor in the world’s progress, yet her admittance to the field of remunerative work is limited to the last one hundred years; is, in fact, the prominent feature of the nineteenth century. There is overwhelming evidence that her work in every department to which she has been admitted is as capable, acceptable, and in every way as faithfully performed as the work of her brother man. In the last century it is estimated that not more than 1 per centum of artists and teachers of art were women; while in 1890 women comprised 48.08 per centum, or nearly one half of that profession. Nearly the same proportion of increase is found in the ranks of teachers and musicians,—women now forming over 60 per centum of the teachers of the United States.

There are now about three million women and girls in this country who earn their own livelihood. And the eleventh census reveals the startling information that in the city of New York there are twenty-seven thousand men who are supported by their wives. Yet these men, useless to society, a burden to the women who support them, are permitted the immunities and privileges of law and custom, while women have equality only in the duties and punishments.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were but few occupations in which women were permitted to engage. Their abilities and ambitions were restricted to the school and the home. In the latter they received food and shelter as compensation; in the former, but one half or one third the salary allowed to male teachers. The first noticeable change in woman’s condition, when she became something more than a mere household drudge, whose busy hands carded and wove, spun and knit, the family supply of cloth, dates from the first bale of cotton grown in this country in the early years of the eighteenth century. In that bale of cotton lay the seeds of not only a new movement in labor, but the beginning of a new epoch for woman, in which her work and wages were destined to take coherent shape and form. In all industrial progress since that time women have taken an active part while receiving a meagre share of the product. Forced by the course of events to emerge from seclusion and repression, she has passed from one stage of development to another, always a step or two behind man in the progress of social evolution, till the close of the nineteenth century reveals myriad changes and the actual realization of Tennyson’s prophetic lines in the “Princess,” “We have prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans.”

GEORGE ELIOT.

One hundred years ago it was the duty of a woman to efface herself. She was expected to make of herself a mental blank-book upon which her husband might inscribe what he would. Thus it is only lately that women have begun actively to compete with men in expression of any kind. Indeed, previous to that time, with a few notable exceptions, they were denied recognition of individual life. The woman, if unmarried, was merged in the family, or, if married, merged in the husband. Her name, her religion, her gods, were changed on marriage. But, married or single, the absorption was complete. So it has happened that woman, throbbing with poetic sympathy, has, with the exception of Sappho, produced less high and unmistakable poetry than man. With more harmony, more music in her nature, her very soul attuned to symphony and rhythm, she has been little known as a composer. With far vision and clear literary insight, she has been suppressed in art and literature. George Eliot gave her sublime literary productions to the world under a masculine nom de plume, because of the prejudice of even that not remote day. Fanny Mendelssohn was compelled by her family to publish her musical compositions as her brother’s. Mary Somerville met only discouragement and ridicule in her mathematical studies. In every sphere, in every department of science and art, abuse, injustice, and the croaking of reactionary frogs have greeted each step of her upward way. The wonder is, then, not that she has accomplished so little, but that she is not in the same condition to-day that she was when Paul thrust a gag in her mouth in the shape of a Corinthian text, “And if a woman would learn anything, let her ask her husband at home.” It will be seen, therefore, that the oft-repeated assertion that women have not given to the world as much evidence of genius as men is a Lilliputian assertion tainted somewhat with envy. “There has been no Shakespeare among women,” says the advocates of man’s supremacy. With all the world as their own, and the gates of boundless opportunities swinging wide, there has been but one Shakespeare among men. It has been asserted that George Eliot is the Shakespeare among women and Mrs. Browning the counterpart of Bacon. But their immortality has not been tested. They lived but a little while ago. But there is one woman, at least, who has established her claim thoroughly, and whose genius twenty-five centuries have tested. Sappho is truly immortal. Her fame and genius have been sealed by the approval of all the great literati of the centuries. Coleridge, who occupies no uncertain place in the world of letters, says of her, “Of all the poets of the world, of all the illustrious artists of all literature, Sappho is the one whose every word has a peculiar and unmistakable poetic perfume, a seal of absolute perfection and illimitable grace.” Swinburne, the greatest living master in the world of verbal music, declares that, “Her verses are the supreme success, the final achievement, of poetic art.” Sappho’s claim to immortality exceeds that of Shakespeare’s by twenty-three hundred years.

Men, viewing the literary productions of women, are apt to give them the color and bias of masculine thought. As instance the poetic critic of a New York periodical, who wantonly affronts the gifted author of “Poems of Passion” by declaring that her “fervent verses are but the burning of unseemly stubble that fails to give forth light or heat.” Yet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, all fair-minded critics will admit, has won a place in the ranks of poetic genius. Her poems throb with human sympathy, and from the exalted plane of her splendid womanhood she reaches down, fulfilling the law of Christly service, to lift up the fallen and soothe and bind the bruised and bleeding. Such masculine criticism is dying out, but it has not been uncommon in the past. Mrs. Browning and Jane Austen were accused of “breaking down by their writings the safeguards of society,” and they were admonished to “cease their literary efforts and devote themselves to sewing and washing dishes if they would retain the chivalrous respect of men.” “Jane Eyre” was pronounced too immoral to be ranked as decent literature. “Adam Bede” was classed as the “vile outpourings of a lewd woman’s mind.” Yet Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mrs. Browning, and Jane Austen have won an exalted and enviable place in the ranks of literature. Their writings have thrilled, uplifted, and sweetened humanity.

The test of literary genius is to create a character of universal acceptance. The record of half a century has but one world-wide, world-known character of that kind. That character was created by a woman. In all literature, no book since the Bible has been so widely circulated, so extensively translated, or has so thoroughly commanded the profound attention of all classes as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Mrs. Stowe impressed her genius upon the race and time, and marked a new epoch for freedom. Previous to the publication of her book only a few men recognized slavery as wrong, but a woman’s sympathetic heart and throbbing genius laid bare the evil and disclosed to a horrified world the wrong underlying slavery.

In philanthropy and the domain of morals there is none who is doing more heroic and effective work than Mrs. Elizabeth B. Grannis. She deals not with theories, but with real conditions. Her sympathies, her broad work, her manifold charities, go out to flesh and blood, men and women. She has the intuitive faculty of probing deep into human nature, leading those she would reform to mourn real defects, rejoice in real victories, and hope and struggle for better things.

FRANCES WILLARD.

The constantly broadening sphere of woman’s usefulness is in a large measure due to the organized forms of intellectual activity among women known as clubs. Half a century ago club-life for women was unknown. Their social sympathies were limited to the political party that claimed the franchise of their male relatives, or the church at whose shrine the women worshiped. But so rapid has been woman’s development in this direction that to-day women’s clubs form a chain from ocean to ocean, binding them as one great whole. The effect upon the members is magical; nature is enlarged; charity broadened; capacity for judgment increased; and hitherto unsuspected faculties are called into life and power.

The first organized demand by women for political recognition in the United States was made in 1848, at what was known as the Seneca Falls Convention. Ridiculed, persecuted, kicked like a football from one generation to another, this brave demand for political recognition was destined to become an agency that would work a peaceful revolution. That the movement is progressing, and will eventually succeed, is evinced by the record of half a century. In that time school suffrage has been granted in twenty-three States and Territories, partial suffrage for public improvements in three States, municipal suffrage in one, and in four States full political equality. Wyoming was the first State to accord citizenship to her women, and she bears testimony to its efficacy in the progress, honor, and sobriety of her people. In 1893, the Wyoming state legislature passed resolutions highly commendatory of woman suffrage and its results, and among other things said, “We point with pride to the fact that after nearly twenty-five years of woman suffrage, not one county in Wyoming has a poor-house, that our jails are almost empty, and crime, except that by strangers in the State, is almost unknown.”

From the banks of the far-off Volga come the good tidings that even Russia is preparing to take a great step in advance by granting to women many legal and political privileges now enjoyed only by men. England granted municipal suffrage to women a quarter of a century ago, and has more recently granted partial parliamentary suffrage. And to the influence of English law, more particularly the Married Women’s Act, is largely due the betterment of the legal status of women throughout the world. In England we find women prominent in art, literature, politics, the school and the church. While in this country the middle classes have heretofore carried on the suffrage agitation, in England it finds active workers among the peerage.

Woman in politics meets with the opposition of job politicians, but she realizes that every step of her progress, from the unveiling of her face to a seat in the legislature of a State, has been taken in the face of fierce opposition and in violation of conventionalities and customs. Undismayed she advances for the ultimate betterment of humanity.

The historian of the future will record the nineteenth century as the Renaissance of womankind. And the ultimate effect upon the human race of having individuals, not servants, as mothers will surpass the progress made in science and in art.

The eighteenth century found woman an appendage; the nineteenth transformed her into an individual. The wonderful altruistic twentieth century, whose dawn even now is breaking, will so develop this individuality that women will contend for all the rights of the individual, coöperating with the nation in the fulfillment of its mission, and with the world in the development of the eternal law of progress.

“Through the harsh voices of our day

A low, sweet prelude finds its way;

Through clouds of doubt and storms of fear

A light is breaking calm and clear.”