Читать книгу Common Sense About Women - Thomas Wentworth Higginson - Страница 11

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A very old man once came to King Agis of Sparta, to lament over the degeneracy of the times. The king replied, “What you say must be true; for I remember that when I was a boy, I heard my father say that when he was a boy, he heard my grandfather say the same thing.”

It is a sufficient answer to most of the croakers, that doubtless the same things have been said in every generation since the beginning of recorded time. Till within twenty years, for instance, it has been the accepted theory, that civilized society lost in vigor what it gained in refinement. This is now generally admitted to be a delusion growing out of the fact that civilization keeps alive many who would have died under barbarism. These feebler persons enter into the average, and keep down the apparent health of the community; but it is the triumph of civilization that they exist at all. I am inclined to think, that when we come to compare the nineteenth century with the seventeenth, as regards the health of women and the size of families, we shall find much the same result.

We look around us, and see many invalid or childless women. We say the Pilgrim mothers were not like these. We cheat ourselves by this perpetual worship of the pioneer grandmother. How the young bachelors, who write dashing articles in the newspapers, denounce their “nervous” sisters, for instance, and belabor them with cruel memories of their ancestors! “The great-grandmother of this helpless creature, very likely, was a pioneer in the woods; reared a family of twelve or thirteen children; spun, scrubbed, wove, and cooked; lived to eighty-five, with iron muscles, a broad chest and keen, clear eyes.” But no one can study the genealogies of our older New England families without noticing how many of the aunts and sisters and daughters of this imaginary Amazon died young. I think there may be the same difference between the households of to-day and the Puritan households that there is confessedly between the American families and the Irish: fewer children are born, but more survive.

And is it so sure that the families are diminishing, even as respects the number of children born? This is a simple question of arithmetic, for which the materials are being rapidly accumulated by the students of family history. Let each person take the lines of descent which are nearest to himself, to begin with, and compare the number of children born in successive generations. I have, for instance, two such tables at hand, representing two of the oldest New England families, which meet in the same family of children in this generation.

FIRST TABLE.
	CHILDREN
First generation (emigrated 1629)	9
Second generation	7
Third generation	7
Fourth generation	8
Fifth generation	7
Sixth generation	10
Average	8

SECOND TABLE.
	CHILDREN
First generation (emigrated 1636)	10
Second generation	7
Third generation	14
Fourth generation	7
Fifth generation	6
Sixth generation	4
Seventh generation	10
Average	8.29

It will be seen that the last generation exhibits the largest family in the first line, and almost the largest—much beyond the average—in the other.

Now, when we consider the great change in all the habits of living, since the Puritan days, and all the vicissitudes to which a single line is exposed,—a whole household being sometimes destroyed by a single hereditary disease,—this is certainly a fair exhibit. These two genealogies were taken at random, because they happened to be nearest at hand. But I suspect any extended examination of genealogies, either of the Puritan families of New England, or the Dutch families of New York, would show much the same result. Some of the descendants of the old Stuyvesant race, for instance, exhibit in this generation a physical vigor which it is impossible that the doughty governor himself could have surpassed.

There are undoubtedly many moral and physiological sins committed, tending to shorten and weaken life; but the progress of knowledge more than counterbalances them. No man of middle age can look at a class of students from our older colleges without seeing them to be physically superior to the same number of college boys taken twenty-five years ago. The organization of girls being far more delicate and complicated, the same reform reaches them more promptly, but it reaches them at last. The little girls of the present day eat better food, wear more healthful clothing, and breathe more fresh air, than their mothers did. The introduction of india-rubber boots and waterproof cloaks alone has given a fresh lease of life to multitudes of women, who otherwise would have been kept housed whenever there was so much as a sprinkling of rain.

It is desirable, certainly, to venerate our grandmothers; but I am inclined to think, on the whole, that their great-granddaughters will be the best.