Woman and Her Needs^[1]

1851

No. 1

The recent movements of Women in our Country in the shape of Conventions, the one in Ohio, and the other in Massachusetts, have called forth from the Press one grand jubilee of ridicule “from Dan even unto Bathsheba,” as if it were the funniest thing in the world for human beings to feel the evils oppressing themselves or others, and to look round for redress.

There is a large class of our sex so well cared for, “whom the winds of heaven are not allowed to visit too roughly,” that they can form no estimate of the suffering of their less fortunate sisters. Perhaps I do wrong to say less fortunate, for suffering to a Woman occupies the place of labor to a man, giving a breadth, depth and fullness not otherwise attained. Therefore let her who is called to suffer beware how she despises the cross, which it implies; rather let her glory that she is accounted worthy to receive the testimony to the capabilities of her soul.

But there is, as I have said, a class unconscious of this bearing; delicate, amiable, lovely even, but limited and superficial. These follow the bent of their masculine friends and admirers, and lisp pretty ridicule about the folly of “Woman Rights” and “Woman Movements.” These see no need of reform or change of any kind; indeed they are denied that comprehensiveness of thought by which they could hold the several parts of a subject in mind and see its bearings. Society is a sort of grown up mystery which they pretend not to comprehend, supposing it to have gradually grown to its present rise [size] and shape from Adam and Eve, by natural gradation like Church Bishops.

Then there is another class doomed to debasement, vice, labor of body and soul in all their terrible manifestations. Daughters of suffering without its ennobling influence; too weak in thought it may be, to discern the best good; or it may be too strong in passion to resist the allurements of the immediate; or it may be ignorant only, they wake to the sad realities of life too late to find redress for its evils. These are the kind over whom infinite Pity would weep as it were drops of blood. These may scoff at reform, but it is the scoffing of a lost spirit, or that of despair. Then come the class of our sex capable of thought, of impulse, of responsibility–the [those?] worthy to be called Woman. Not free from faults any more than the strong of the other sex, but of that full humanity which may sometimes err, but yet which loves and seeks for the true and the good. These include all who are identified with suffering in whatever shape, and from whatever cause, for these, when suffering proceeds from their own acts even, have that fund of greatness or goodness left that they perceive and acknowledge the opposite of what they are. These are the ones who are victims to the falseness of society, wand who see and feel that something may and will be done to redeem it. They are not content to be the creatures of luxury, the toys of the drawing room, however well they grace it–they are to true, too earnest in life to trifle with its realities. They are capable of thinking, it may be far more capable of it, than those of their own household who help to sway the destinies of the country through the ballot box. They are capable of feeling, and analyzing too, the evils that surround themselves and others–they have individuality, resources, and that antagonism which weak men ridicule, because it shames their own imbecility; which makes them obnoxious to those of less earnestness of character, and helps them to an eclectic power, at once their crown of glory.

To say that such beings have no right to a hearing in a world whose destinies they effect, is to reproach the First Cause for having imparted to his creatures a superfluous intelligence–to say they have no interest in the nature of legislation, when its terrible penalties hang like the hair suspended sword of Damocles over their heads, is a contradiction as weak as it is selfish and cruel.

Till now women have acted singly–they have been content with individual influence, however exercised, and it has often been of the very worst kind; but now they seem disposed to associate as do our compeers of the other sex, for the purpose of evolving better views, and of confirming some degree of power. There is no reason why they should not do this. They are the mothers and wives and sisters of the Republic, and their interests cannot be separated from the fathers and husbands and brothers of the Republic. It is folly to meet them with contempt and ridicule, for the period for such weapons is passing away.

Their movements as yet may not be altogether the best or the wisest–all is as yet new; but their movements truly and solemnly point to a step higher in the scale of influence. There is a holy significance in them–a prophetic power that speaks well for themselves, well for the world. It cannot be from the nature of things, that so much of human intelligence can be brought into vivid action without some great and good result. It has always been so in all subjects that have enlisted thought–men have come from the turmoil of mental action, with new and broader perceptions, a higher and freer humanity, a better identification of the individual with his species, and why should not Woman the same?

True, it is women who sneer most at these movements of each other–true women oftenest turn their backs upon the sufferings of each other. I do not mean the griefs or physical pains of those in their own rank and circle; far from it, their hearts are rarely at fault there; but to the cry of those ready to perish, to the needs of the erring, the despised and neglected of their sex they are deaf and blind. To the long, torturing discords of ill assorted marriages, to the oppressions of family circle, the evasions of property, and the lengthening catalogue of domestic discomforts growing out of the evils of society, they are –cruel, selfishly indifferent or remorselessly severe upon each other.

It is true they have not condemned such to the stake literally; have not roasted them alive; hung, quartered, tortured them with thumb-screws, impaled on hooks, confined in dungeons, and beheaded on blocks, as men have done, the good the great, the heroic, “of whom the world is not worthy,” of their own sex; for they have been denied the power–men choosing to hold the prerogative of externally inflicted cruelty in their own hands; but they have condemned their suffering sisters to the intangible and manifold tortures which can fall only upon the spirit, and which are ten fold more cruel than any external wrong.

Now it would seem a broader and better spirit is awakening within us, a nearer and more wholesome humanity–ill-directed it may be as yet, groping after hidden, unrevealed good, yet the search has opened, and the good will be grasped.

The world needs the action of Woman throughout its destinies. The indefinite influence springing from the private circle is not enough; this is shaded away into the graceful lights of feminine subserviency, and household endearment, blessing the individual husband, or ennobling the one group at the family altar, but the world goes on with its manifold wrongs, and women have nothing but tears to bestow–the outrages that may wring either her own heart or that of others, wring helpless hands, or plead with idle remonstrance, while her lord and master tells her these things are quite beyond her comprehension; she cannot see how unavoidable it is, but it is not the less unavoidable, and she must shut her eyes and ears, and “mind her spinning.” Or, if blessed with a large share of manly arrogance, he will tell her as did the Captain of a militia company of a country town, who, in practicing in the court of his house those martial evolutions that were to electrify the village upon parade, accidentally stepped down the trap door of the cellar. His wife rushed out to succor her liege lord, when she was met with, “Go in, woman; what do you know about war?”

Sure enough, what does she? But if this directed sympathy–this promptitude to relieve– makes her fruitful in resource in small matters, and why should it not in large? If an evil comes under her own inspection she at once casts about for redress, and good comes of it. There is no reason why she should not enlarge her sphere in this way, and no fear of her being the less feminine or endearing by the process.

The majority of women in society are suffering in the absence of wholesome, earnest, invigorating subjects of thought; expending themselves upon trifles, and fretting themselves and others for lack of employment. The routine of housekeeping, the study of the arts, or the management of children, is no more enough to fill their whole lives, than these things to the merchant, the artist, the professional man, who, over and above his business, whatever it may be, finds time to give the most earnest part of his nature “an airing.” As occasion comes, he is a man for the ballot-box, the navy, or the public parade; I have not, and do not say yet, that women should go to these;’ I have not reached that part of the subject; I only pray that she may be recognized as an intelligence, and not be compelled to dwarf herself lest she should be thought unfeminine.

I wish to show that while she has been created as one part of human intelligence, she has not only a right to be heard and felt in human affairs, not by tolerance merely, but as a welcome and needed element of human thought; and that when she is thus recognized, the world will be the better for it, and go onward with new power in the progress of disenthrallment.

There is a woman view, which women must learn to take–as yet they have made no demonstration that looks like a defined, appropriate perception. The key-note has been struck by the other sex, and women have responded; this response has been strong and significant, but it will evolve nothing because it indicates no urgent need. It has done good in one respect–it has raised the cry of contempt, the scoffings of ridicule, and this antagonism is needed to make us look deeper into the soul of things. We shall learn to search and see whether we are capable of bringing anything to the stock of human thought worthy of acceptance. If we can, bring it–if not, hold our peace.

No. 2

In my former article I said the world needed an admixture of Woman Thought in its affairs; a deep, free Woman souled utterance is needed. It is the disseverance of the sexes, the condemning of the one to indoor thought only, to the degradation of indoor toil, far more limiting in its nature than that of the outdoor kind, beneath the invigorations of air and sky: the expanse of these working enlargement upon the mind has done so much for the other sex; and in our own has developed from the poor serving girl of the Inn of Domremy, inured to the toils of the stable, the chivalric and enthusiastic Joan of Arc^[2]. It is the making woman a creature of luxury–an object of sensuality–a vehicle for reproduction–or a thing of toil, each one, or all of these–that has caused half the miseries of the world. She, as a soul, has never been recognized. As a human being to sin and to suffer she has had more than an acknowledgment. As a human being to obey her God, to think, to enjoy, men have been blind to her utmost needs.

She has been treated always as subservient; and yet all, and the most entire responsibility has been exacted of her. She has had no voice in the law and yet has been subjected to the heaviest penalties of the law. She has been denied the ability to make or enforce public opinion, and yet has been outraged, abandoned, given over to degradation, misery, and the thousand ills worse than a thousand deaths by its terrible action. Even her affections, those arbitrary endowments imparted by the Most High for her own safeguard, and for the best being of society, have been warped and crushed by the action of masculine thought upon their manifestations, till their unadulterated play is well-nigh lost.

Men have written for us, thought for us, legislated for us; and they have constructed from their own consciousness an effigy of a woman to which we are expected to conform. It is not a Woman that they see, God forbid that it should be; it is one of those monsters of neither sex, that sometimes outrage the pangs of maternity, but which expire at the birth, whereas the distorted image to which men wish us to conform, lives to bewilder, to mislead and be misled, and to cause discord and belittlement where the Creator designed the highest dignity, the most complete harmony. Men have said we should be thus and thus, and we have tried to be in accordance because we are told it is womanly. They have said we must think in a certain way; and we have tried so to think; they have said that under given circumstances we must act after a particular mode, and we have thus acted–ay! even when the voice of God in our own hearts has called out “where art thou?” and we have hid ourselves, not daring to reply, for with that cowardice which men tell us is feminine, we dared not face that public opinion which men have established; dared not encounter that ridicule which men first start, and weak women follow up–dare not face that isolation which great and true thought brings upon itself in the present pettiness and prejudice of the world.

Till Woman learns to cast out the “bond woman,” her and her offspring–send them forth into the wilderness of thought, no angel can succor her. She must cast herself down amid the aridness of thought–hungry and thirsty for the truth–she may veil her eyes that she “see not the death of the child,” even the Ishmaels of error, whence shall be born a nation, armed against its kind, even the hoariness of established falsehood, for often will she find Truth revealed in a way she little supposed, and which she trembles to perceive; but let her not fear–let her trust to those intuitions, better than all the demonstrations of reason–let her think and feel, and see, and grasp with a courage which is of God, and all will be well.

Let Woman learn to take a woman’s view of things. Let her feel the need of a woman’s thought. Let her search into her own needs–say, not what has the world hitherto thought in regard to this or that, but what is the true view of it from the nature of things. Let her not say, what does my husband, my brother, my father think, wise and good and trustworthy though they be–but let her evolve her own thought, recognize her own needs, and judge of her own acts by the best lights of her own mind.

Let her feel and understand that there is a difference in the soul as in the bodies of the sexes–a difference designed to produce the most beautiful harmony. But let her not, in admitting this, admit of inferiority. While the form of a Man is as it were more arbitrary, more of a fact in creation, more distinct and uniform, a sort of completeness of the material, and his mind also more of a fixture, better adapted to the exactitudes of science, and those protracted labors needful to the hardier developments of the understanding, let her bear in mind that this fixedness, this patience of labor, this steadiness of the understanding, are in conformity with his position as Lord of the material Universe to which God has appointed him, whereas she was an after creation, with something nearer allied to the heavenly. In her shape, there is a flexibility, a variety, more graceful, ethereal and beautiful, appealing more intimately to that something within the soul of Man, that goes onward to the future and eternal–a softening down of the material to the illusions of the unseen–her mind also, when unstinted and unadulterated, has in it more of aspiration, more of the subtle and intuitive character that links it to spiritual; she is impatient of labor because her wings are nearly freed from the shell of the chrysalis, and prompt to a better element; she cares less for the deductions of reason because she has an element in herself nearer to the truth than reason can ever reach, by which she feels the approaches of the true and the beautiful, without the manly wrestlings all night of the patriarch to which the other sex are subjected. She does not need the ladder of Bethel, the step by step of the slow logician, because her feet are already upon the first rung of that mystic pass-way; this is why she is bid by the arrogance of apostolic injunction to veil her head in public, “because of the Angels.” She is a step nearer them than her material lord and master. The Angels recognize her as of nearer affinity.

Let it not be thought I say this lightly. Would that Women would receive it as a solemn truth–that they would, out of their own souls reject the hardness of materialism which the masculine mind engenders from its own elements, and receive cordially and meekly the truth as it is witnessed in their own souls. It was this pure, ready recipiency, this “let it be to thy handmaid as seemeth to thee good,” that distinguished the maid of Judah above the others of her sex, and enabled her to receive without questioning the Divine Birth. Overshadowed by the Holy Ghost, the mystery of Truth was born of her, and new light though her came to the world. Had we spirits like hers, perpetual youth of soul might be ours, and new and miraculous revelations of better thought, and more beauty of life redeem the world again and again.

Would that Women would learn to recognize their own individuality–their own singleness of thought. Let them not feel disparaged at the difference which I have recognized; it is a difference that crowns them with a new glory. We give the material Universe to Men, and to those of our sex who, from whatever cause, approximate to their standard; to such let us yield ungrudgingly the way, but it is no less certain that there is a Woman thought, a Woman perception, a Woman intuition altogether different from the same things in the other sex, and to learn what these are, and to act from these is what Women must learn, and when they have so learned, and impressed themselves thus through these upon the world, it will be regenerated and disenthralled.

Look at the long catalogue of monstrous evils and errors that have disgraced the annals of our race, and then judge if Women had been allowed their proper share in the formation of opinion, in the making up of human judgements, would these things have been? Take for instance the least reprehensible of these errors, where the masculine mind has belittled, besotted, and bewildered itself under the aspect of sanctity. Where, under the priestly garb, the monkish cowl, it has busied itself with the absurd subtleties of the schoolmen, and wasted itself with vicious tendencies of the casuist, seeking not for the best good, but searching for intricate apologies for the worst evils. Let us consider a race of men shut up in cloisters, passing their lives in vigils and prayers, idling themselves in the contemplation of beatific dreams, or scourging their bodies for real or imaginary crimes, and that, too, while the world was groaning under the vices and cruelties of their kind. Could Women have done this? It is true Women followed in their career –immured themselves in convents, outraging their humanity by monkish denials, hypocritical pretenses, or secret and monstrous indulgences; but the system did not originate with them; the whole vile theory of that species of life was the growth of the masculine intellect.

No, there is a directness, a utilitarianism in the affections and thoughts of the Woman mind, that of itself would never have thus misled her; there is a tangibility in her religious impulses that leads her at once to prayer–a reality in her affections that involves the best devotedness of human love, and a solidness in her benevolence, inciting at once to good works. She has a natural going out of herself, a readiness of sympathy that prompts to relieve; while a certain buoyancy of her physique makes action more pleasurable to her than to the other sex. If she has lent herself to the evils that have outraged the world, it is because she has been cast into the back ground by Men and then has followed him like a slave; if she has been his aid in the cruelties that have shamed the world, it is because she has closed her own eyes and looked through his; if she has been his companion in luxuries and vices, at which the pure Woman blushes, it is because he has driven her to the resources of the weak in the lower orders of creation, and she has become crafty that she might obtain power–longing for companionship, she stepped from the rung of the ladder where she stood nearest heaven, and plunged into sensuality with him, the Lord of the material; then she, who had been his superior in the elements that most harmonize life; looking up from her debasement to the face of her companion, begged for tolerances where she before had a right to homage–pleaded her weakness as a motive for protection, because she had laid aside her own distinctive powers.

Women must recognize their unlikeness, and then understanding what needs grow out of this unlikeness, some great truth must be evolved.–Now they busy themselves with methods of thought, springing, it is true, from their own sense of something needed, but suggested altogether by the masculine intellect. Let us first shake ourselves from this pupilage of mind by which our faculties are dwarfed, and courageously judge for ourselves. In doing this I see no need of Amazonian strides or disfigurements, or stentorian lungs. The more deeply and earnestly a Woman feels the laws of her own existence, the more solemn, reverent and harmonious is her bearing,. She sees what nature designed in her creation, and her whole being falls gracefully into its allotted sphere. If she is a simple, genial, household divinity, she will bind garland around the altar of Penates and worship in content. If endowed with a more enlarged manner, I see no reason why she should diminish her proportions to please an imbecile taste in society. I see no reason why she should not be received cordially into the school of Arts, or Science, or Politics, or Theology, in the same manner as the individual capacities of the other sex are recognized. They do not all square themselves to one standard, and why should we? They have a very large number engaged in sewing, cooking, spinning, and writing very small articles for very small works, designed for very small minds. The majority are very far from being Platos^[3], or Bayards^[4], or Napoleons^[5]. When so very large a portion of the other sex are engaged in what is regarded as unmanly, I see no reason why those of ours who have a fancy to tinker a constitution, canvass a county, or preach the gospel, should not be permitted to do so, provided they feel this to be the best use of their faculties. I do not say this is the best thing for them to do, but I see no reason, if their best intelligence finds its best expression in that channel, why they should not be indulged.

Our right to individuality is what I would most assert. Men seem resolved to have but one type in our sex. They recognize the right of the matter-of-fact Biddy to raise a great clamor, quite to the annoyance of a neighborhood, but where’s the use of the Nightingale? The laws of stubborn utilitarianism must govern us, while they may be as fantastic as they please. They tell much about a “Woman’s sphere”–can they define this? As the phrase is used, I confess it has a most shallow and indefinite sense. The most I can gather from it is the consciousness of the speaker, which means something like the philosophy of Mr. Murdstone^[6]‘s firmness; it is a sphere by which every woman creature, of whatever age, appending to himself, shall circle very much within his own–see and hear through his senses, and believe according to his dogmas, with a sort of general proviso, that if need be for his growth, glorification, or well-being in any way, they will instantly and uncompromisingly become extinct.

There is a Woman’s sphere, harmonious, holy, and soul-imparting; it has its grades, its laws from the nature of things and we must seek for it. The pursuits of Men vary with their capacities, are higher or lower according to age; why should not those of Women? The highest offices of legislation are filled by men of mature age, whose judgements are supposed to be consolidated by years. Among the Mohawks^[7], a woman who had so trained a boy that he became elected to the office of Chief, for this honor was not hereditary, was received into the Councils of the Nation. The Spartan women emulated the men in the terseness of their language and the hardihood of their patriotism. Often and often do we see the attributes of the sexes reversed, the women becoming the protectors, and in fact the bond of the house, without a shadow of infringement upon the appropriateness or beauty of their womanhood. It is late in the day to be thrown upon the defensive. I see no way in which harmony can result in the world without entire recognition of differences, for surely nothing is gained upon either side by antagonism merely. Women cannot be so very ridiculous and absurd in their honest, hearty truth searchings, for we are the Mothers of the Republic, and he who casts contempt upon them indorses his own shame. If the members of his own household are exempt from solemn truth-askings, he should beware how he exults over such evidence of common-place dullness, or frivolity.

No. 3

In my former articles I spoke of a Woman’s right to be heard and of her individual differences, creating distinctive needs. I now speak of the safety there is in allowing her to think and speak.

It was a beautiful saying of old that, “The best form of government was that where an injury done to the meanest subject was a wrong to the whole community.” Now the injury here presupposed was one inflicted upon a man, not a woman, who could not, at that time nor hardly since be supposed to have any rights that could be wronged. Her claims have been admitted by sufferance only. If one of the sex, more fortunate than her sisters, fell into the hands of a Lord and Master capable of understanding the sacredness of a human soul, able to see the divine hand in the creation of a being little lower than the Angels, with the instinctive purity, the manifold graces and the true majesty of womanhood diffusing themselves into the very air she breathed, if such an one lived an almost ideal life, the ninety-nine less favored might turn their bewildered and blinded eyes in vain for the light–and at length sink down into utter darkness with no other relief than the false assurance that God made them to be thus blind, thus dwarfed, thus held in bondage, for the light was unsafe–fullness of life to them being coarse and masculine and dependence feminine.

Woman must receive happiness not as the gift of her Maker, careful of the well-being of the creature he had made, but as a boon from Man–who had the right to make her miserable but forebore the exercise of his prerogative. To me it is one of the saddest things that I hear said, and not by any means an infrequent one, the remark of women in regard to husbands–he is very good to her or me as the case may be, he treats her well, &c. as though this were a merit–as though a man deserved praise for treating well a creature utterly in his power, whom the law consigns to his jurisdiction, body and soul, and whom society will look askance at, if she shows the least discomfort under what may be in secret the most odious and galling bondage.

I do not mean to say that men are habitually cruel or selfish, though Heaven knows it would be near the truth if I did, but they are ignorantly so, and having the power all in their own hands, having always had it there, it would be miraculous indeed if they did not abuse it. Human Governments have been subverted because men could not be intrusted with unrestricted power over each other, and can the case be any better when the power is unlimited over our own sex? It is not enough to say that thousands are content under this state of things; there are tens of thousands who are not–who are degraded, oppressed, and miserable under it, and these should be heard.

I admit that under the highest state of society the two sexes would so harmonize that an injury done to one would be an injury to both; that so complete will be the unity that the name of sex will be unheard, and a long catalogue of words implying disseverance will disappear from the human vocabulary; they will be one in heart and soul–“they will no more hurt nor destroy in all the holy mountain;” veiled in the holiness of true dignity, they will walk hand in hand in a new Eden, hearing the voice of God and not afraid, for injustice and cruelty and wrong are forgotten things; but we are far, very far, from this beautiful state, and till this time arrives women need the protection of law and men need its checks.

Let us pray for the good time coming, most fervently, but in the meanwhile provide for the bad times existent. The world was held under the thunders of Sinai, the threatenings of interdict, the penalties of violation of “do not,” tell the advent of the divine principle of Love–the “do thou” of the new testimony. now, till this new law be thoroughly recognized, let our sex have the benefit of prohibitory law and the aid of public opinion, and in this way the new covenant will soonest be brought into exercise. Emancipate from external bondage, and the internal law written upon every human heart makes itself audible. Thus the most free are the most bound.

Take one of the other sex, surround him with restrictions, fetter him with petty chains, hold his intellect in abeyance because knowledge is power, compress his movements, condemn him to ungenial companionship, force him to paternity, and make the labor of his body and the action of his mind all subservient to a routine, and he is false, crafty, petty, sullen, degraded and irresponsible. The case is analogous. Make a woman nobly free, and she is the companion of Sages and Philosophers, a help-mete for men; confine and dwarf her, and she is subtle and dangerous, both to herself and others. The worst crime is the betrayal of truth, and now as the world is, this instinctive loyalty must either die out of a woman’s soul as a useless manifestation of the divine element, or it is violate, overwhelming her with remorse, and throwing her whole being into discord. She must use mean weapons because the nobler are denied her; she cannot assert her distinctive individuality, and she resorts to cunning, and this cunning takes the form of cajolery, deception, or antagonism in its many shapes, each and all as humiliating to herself as it is unjust to men.

Men ridicule every indication of disaffection on a woman’s part, as if it must spring from an ill-organized mind or a diseased temper. We are a sort of puppet, to be placed, like Tom Thumb, upon a giant’s palm and act our fantastic part, either of smiles or tears, and they are to regard us with the same kind of tolerating, half-amused indulgence. Reformers are afraid to recognize our needs; they are afraid to allow human beings the free exercise of the faculties imparted by the Deity; they are afraid they might be abused; therefore they dole out bits of freedom to us as they would atoms of food to half-starved wretches. Can they not, will they never learn that the Good Father is wise in the bestowal of his gifts; that he does not impart a superfluous intelligence; that he does not create a need without its appropriate, safe and harmonizing medium of gratification? They recognize this as their own first and inalienable right; in their Constitutions they plant the foot upon the self-evident truth, that every human being has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness–a God-guaranteed charter, which no created being may infringe; yet, when a woman dare lift her eyes reverently to this sacred and ennobling truth, she is spurned with ridicule and contempt.

They have struggled slowly through torture and bloodshed to this sublime position; they feel it is a safe, a secure position, for they have that within the elements of their own minds by which they feel its need and its power; why not, then, go a step further and ask if we have not like elements in our minds? has not God also written there great truths, which, when we shall read with a clear vision, we shall not tremble, with the impious Belshazzar, the pillars of empire crumbling about our heads, but shall fill the world with new harmonies and put a new song into human lips.

No human being was ever made better by restriction merely. We may coerce, withhold, and suppress; we may cover error with the hoariness of time and the verdure of the fast clinging ivy, but it is error still and has its limits. We may plant the mountain side with vine, the olive and the almond, but if the volcanic element be compressed beneath, it will upheave and bury the false covering in ruin. Give the Woman’s soul its legitimate healthy action, and all is safe and well, for God has provided its own checks; oppress, stultify and render servile and the evil is either moral death, stagnation of body and spirit or the upspringing of an outraged humanity. If Liberty is the great God-need to Man, it is so to Woman–if Liberty is safe to Man, it is so to her. Grant that it might be abused–is it never so by men? Is not the great contest of the world the struggle for the Truth which is to make it free? Why should not we cast in our element–pour the calm of our voice over the troubled waters; share in the labor and the glory of disenthrallment; The few lead the world less than formerly–the “wise minority” has become subjected to the aggregate many; the large instinctive throbbing of the great human heart is now felt and heard, and the world stands in awe. Is our element in this mighty movement nothing? God forbid–we are and must be heard, we say it reverently, hopefully, and with a strong sense of what is due to the best truth and best dignity of our own souls.

I propose to go more into a detail of our needs, defining somewhat of that which may be so regarded, in my future numbers.

No. 4

Heretofore in the discussion of our subject we have assumed the antagonistic ground, because we wished to assert the individuality of Woman; we wished to regard her as a being, entire, with her own laws, her own rights, stamped and guaranteed by the hand of the Eternal Father. We wished to show that she could not be harmonious in her sphere till these were acknowledged, and till men learned to regard them with the same reverence which they profess in the abstract for the rights of each other. We do not derive them from sufferance of men, but from the hand of God–they are not to be secured by the blandishments and cajoleries of the weak, and being weak, vicious of our sex, but by the free-will of beings capable of reverencing the sanctity of human rights and human needs. We wished our average standard to be judged not by the puppets of fashion; the sickly sentimentalists of our magazines, or the large class of the weak, degraded and blind who swell the dregs of society. Men do not average themselves by the coxcombs, of either fashion or literature–nor by the profligate, the vicious or the refuse of pauperism. They point proudly to the God-like of whatever creed or condition–the Heroes, Martyrs, Patriots, and Poets of the earth. And why should not we do the same? we who are not a whit behind them in our soul-stirring chronicles? It would be trite to enumerate these:–Women who have suffered and died for great truth or a great love, and in suffering and dying have asserted the individual woman soul, for their experience was true to their womanhood, and glorious in its womanhood.

We wished the standard to start from the earnest, true-hearted and noble of our sex–the “sewing women,” if you please–yes, the laborers if you will, for there is nothing in itself ‘vulgar’ but the spirit that makes it so; the woman who exercises the talents which God has given her to secure an honest livelihood, incited it may be by a God-like aspiration[,] is as noble in herself as any one of the other sex who toils with a singleness for position or creed–and I know of nothing more holy–more God-serving, ay, and more beautiful, than the steady, self-denying labor of the large class of women in the middle ranks of life, who with woman-like dignity, and solid sense pursue a calling humble and pains-taking to earn an honest subsistence for their families. The lives of these women are often truly heroic, are silent, beautiful epics, breathing the best aspirations of poetry and romance, and in the scale of being they are infinitely superior to the very women who employ them, who waste their lives in petty rivalries, unworthy competitions, and meager, puerile avocations.

We have taken the antagonistic ground, not that it is the true one, but because society has made it the necessary one. We were obliged to look at the subject from the nature of things, and now we must meet the sexes in relation, the only true and harmonious ground. It is folly to talk of men and women as isolated beings, designed to always stand in isolation; like the twin-stars of the heavens, held in perfect and harmonious balance, they were designed to move side by side, helping and ennobling each the other. They are each endowed with perceptions, affections, sentiments and intellects, finding their highest action in companionship. The man has a severe, sturdy passiveness, a courageous boldness of mind and limb, adapting him for the hardier and more external duties of life; while to the woman belongs that intuitive buoyance of spirit and half-retiring-ness of nerve that makes her, in her truest life, seek seclusion and dependence. While we say this, we admit the infinitude of shades in either sex by which they blend into each other; and those great occasions in life which may transform a woman into a Medea^[8], and the American savage even into a nursing mother to his bereaved child. We only claim that the right to these individual differences be recognized in our sex as well as the other; that the woman who has an intellect to study a profession be entitled to the same respect as the man who directs a spinning jenny. The woman who, like Portia, is disposed to plead a law case, may meet with the same tolerance as the man who breeds silk-worms and Canaries; the woman who teaches Navigation, or holds forth in an Anatomical or Theological lecture, be no more anomalous than the man who sells bonnets and ribbons. And this brings us to the right of property.

A[t] the very starting point of life, the difference of education indicates the difference of aim in regard to the sexes. While the boy is steadily and severely taxed to qualify him to earn an honorable position, a suitable maintenance for himself in life, the girl is at once trained in reference to marriage. The boy is placed in all and the best positions to develop his whole being, morally, intellectually, and physically–a thousand aberrations are pardoned him as being a part of the masculine nature; he is joyous, free, with vague expectations of manhood, renown, and Arcadias of happiness as his legitimate prerogative. The girl on the contrary is met at the threshold of life with infinite checks and restrictions–she is to conform to a pattern, by which (the lions having written the books,) a true woman is a being, helpless, dependent, luxurious, petty, inefficient in body and soul, and yet to be the presiding genius of a household, and the guide and teacher of her children. She is to be early and untiringly molded into the feminine shape by interminable teachings, ceaseless checks, and the denial of all trains of thinking which might aid her to regard herself as a being of innate dignity, of earnest aspiration, choiceful affection or elective passion. She is made to consider herself as a necessary appendage, not as a distinctive and rightful creation. She is not allowed to grow and blossom under the sweet dews of divine guardianship; to develop into holy and truthful womanhood, under the careful promptings of laws inherent in her own marvelous, complicated and most beautiful organism, but the one great object, supposed to be the end and aim of womanhood, marriage, is forced upon her at every step of her life. She is not joyous, nor aspiring, nor truly noble, because all and everything in her history is made subservient to this end. She is taught to use the sweet, holy graces of her angel-verging nature, designed to exalt and beautify the best affections, to the purposes of craft and fascination, in order to marriage. She is defrauded of her girlhood by premature marriage, and taught to feel a triumph in what in a true state of society would be a degradation; for surely there is something painfully sad, to say nothing of humiliating, in the sight of these baby wives to men old enough to be guides and fathers to them, and girl mothers, hardly escaped from pantalets.

Thus, while boys are properly taught the dignity of labor in its manifold shapes of thought, invention or manual effort, girls are expected always to be dependent, and gain a position by marriage or have none. If the inheritors of property, the world is full of the beauty of trust, and a man who does not scruple to marry her because she has property, all the wealth of her woman-soul thrown in as so much chaff in the balance, would feel himself at once aggrieved if she had the forethought to talk of security–“the romance would be gone–the beautiful trust of a woman is what most charms him, her utter abandon!” and thus all the instinctive conservation of her nature is to be sacrificed to the pettiness and selfishness of a man, who yields her a doubtful protection, and gives her his name, which may or may not confer an honor upon her. I know legislation has done much to protect a woman in her rights of property, but public opinion is still against her, and while education continues as it is, there will be little but these accumulating evils.

Give a girl her fair chance of development as a being and she would be very other than she now is. Thousands and thousands, both of men and women, are constitutionally indifferent to the relations of sex–the man is consigned to bachelorism with whimsical approving and a long life of entertainments and tolerations, and half-pettings, while the woman who remains an “unplucked bud on the ancestral tree,” is consigned to snubbings, shrugs, dependence and solitude. I admit both seem to depart from the instructions of nature, but I really see not why the one should be treated with honor and the other with contempt, except this universal expectation, written up, talked up, and educated up, that every woman must marry if she can; must give up the name so dear and sweet to her girlhood; must merge her being, be absorbed, and annihilated in marriage, be an extinct world, a gone-out soul, in the chaos of a household; or, if she does not do this, it is proof positive that she could not, that there never was a coxcomb or a flat who could succumb to her charms; that in default of leading one ape here, she must be doomed to lead ten “down below.” Heu lacrymans! Unhappy womanhood.

Property confers dignity and a certain position on the other sex, and there is nothing in the nature of things why it should not upon ours. Men become absorbed in science or literature, and make wretched husbands and fathers. Women have the same ambition–a kindred power of abstraction, and they make anything but comfortable wives. I know it is the fashion for magazine writers to talk sweetly about the tenderness and notability of women of genius. It may be so where their companionship is true and genial, but it is not the less true that the woman or the man who marries a genius does so at a peril, and must be content to be merged in the other, or if both are alike great, the intensity and sensitiveness of two such natures would be far from healthful.

Now, were girls from childhood up educated not in reference to marriage, but in reference to the entire unfolding of a creation which, I admit, in its healthiest and most harmonious manifestation would result in the relations of sex, these relations would take place under circumstances of true dignity, and not as now under a necessity, a mistaken opinion that they must take place, that a woman is nothing without them. Marriage would have then a holy and beautiful significancy, a solemn and sweet import, a sanctity of relation that could no more be violated than the great and immutable laws that hold the eternal spheres in their joyous and never-failing harmony. But I am anticipating.

I would not say, as has been said, women have a right to our Halls of Legislation, our Courts of Justice, our Military posts, and each and all spheres where men “most do congregate,” for in that pure state of society of which human aspiration is so prophetic, which poets and philosophers have seen in Divine vision, and for which blood has been shed even to the agonies of Gethsemane and Calvary, I believe many of these needs will pass away; men will waste their godlike energies less upon these grounds, and women will learn her holy and true nature, that of a link to the spiritual world. But, till “the good time coming,” arrives, let her be free to her own intuitions–let her cast her mite into the treasury of reform that shall redeem the world. Let the avenues of wealth and distinction be open to her as freely as to the other sex. Let her not be trained to a life which in fact may be made demoralizing and humiliating in the absence of a soul-stirring need, a life giving sentiment; and taught the exercise of the faculties, God-imparted faculties, which should raise her to the dignity of the Miriams and Deborahs of old, to say nothing of the great army of women who since their day, have nobly achieved a distinctive existence, whether married or otherwise, and are numbered among the great spirits of the world.

Every true woman should assert her right to pecuniary independence–to a position secured independent of the affections; and these holiest aspirations of her nature should be a free will offering, no more to be fostered [bartered] in marriage than in any other way. She should shudder at the bare thought of such desecration. Before the great era of her life, when these shall become the well spring of happiness to her, she should have been trained to look upon herself as filling a distinctive position in society, secured by her talents or industry; or if a competence has been awarded by inheritance, it should be used with that forethought and discretion which belongs to her construction of mind in a higher degree than in the other sex.

If she has been accustomed to this before marriage, she will find no difficulty in the proper ordering of her household afterward. Another reason why a woman should be trained in this way, is, that she will escape the pettiness too common in the other sex in the marriage relation. One fruitful source of discord between husband and wife arises from the penuriousness of the former. Wives, without doubt, are extravagant. Held in blindness and pupilage as they are, this is natural. But I have heard hundreds of women say they would rather go without money than ask for it; they feel mean and childish to have it doled out to them in little sums, and then be obliged to render an account of expenditure. Others, again, have not breadth of feeling enough for this, and they resort to all the artillery of coaxings and endearments, true or false–in the one case an outrage, in the other a humiliation–and thus obtain the coveted sum. Others, again, having neither dignity nor tenderness, are petulant and crafty, vixenish and turbulent, according to the strength of the lower passions, but each and all inconsistent and unworthy of the high and holy relation which God designed man and woman should occupy in relation to each other.

It may be thought that, in claiming the right and the dignity of labor for my sex, I am departing from the order of Nature–that the curse and the blessing of womanhood were to come through her affections, and the curse and the blessing of man were to come through the sweat of his brow. But the curse was at the exile from Eden, and the new blessing is to spring from the new law, the divine testimony of the new Christ Jesus–even the law of love, whose emblem is not the thunderings of Sinai, but the descent of the dove; and this new order cannot be received into the world till the whole abominations of degraded womanhood and fostered [bartered] affections of are obliterated in the race. Women must be accepted as a creation, and if society is so organized that the recognition of her as such must come through the medium of labor, the holding of property, then let her be no less a woman–disdaining to be received by the being most dear to her as an exchange, an appendage, but as a divine revelation of a great and beautiful need, accepted reverently, and fostered with manly protectiveness and heart inspiring tenderness.

There is an inherent dignity in the woman who steadily pursues an avocation of emolument or reputation; weak men may call it masculine and unfeminine, but the great voice of God within the soul extorts from them an instinctive homage, and when the sex shall have asserted their full rights to any and all positions for which their faculties are best adapted, refusing to barter their women for wealth or position; choosing labor as a good, by which they earn the right to independence, individuality and respect, one great step will have been taken in the great movement of reform. Men will then retire from behind counters, and leave a vast field of light occupation for the gentler sex–they will betake themselves to the plough and the machine shop, and leave the world of taste to women.

No. 7

By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law; that is the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage; or at least incorporated and consolidated into that of her husband.–Blackstone

The above extract, remarkable alike for the force and beauty of its expression, would seem to imply that the philosophy of law is not greatly at variance with the truth, recognizing that unity of life and feeling which our Saviour himself defines to be the true marriage, but which has had less to do in the actualities of life, than in the romance of literature, where it figures so conspicuously, one would be led to imagine that the great sum of life was made up of the anxieties and uncertainties of lovers prior to their entering this temple of beatitudes.

“I have many things to say unto you, but hitherto ye were not able to bear them, neither now are ye able,” were the words of the Divine Teacher, and assuredly there are many and deep revelations awaiting the reverent searcher into the great law of Love, which time and human progress will develop when the world is able to bear them. Jesus implied that Love was the foundation of the true Church, when he three times asked the impulsive Peter, “Lovest thou me,” and then commissioned him to feed the lambs with his life imparting bread. His teachings are full of quaint aphorisms illustrating the impossibility of any kind of harmony existing where this great law is wanting. “Can two walk together, except they be agreed?”–“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” &c. I am verging now upon delicate ground. When Pilate asked what is Truth, no answer was returned, obviously because Truth is not a fixture in this world–is not one fact–to all minds, but a revelation of the best to all who will search for it.

We talk much, we write more, we cavil, we speculate, and ask on every side what is Truth, and then every man casts a blank look into his neighbor’s face, and encounters one as blank in return–for no one dares receive her as she is–he is afraid of her–he will be perpetually lowering buckets into the well, not for the purpose of a fresh, beautiful god-like revelation–for of this he is afraid; it might shame his prejudice or imbecilities, therefore he is content to muddy the waters, and fish up a bedabbled image best pleasing to his distorted vision.

I have heretofore urged the importance of denying the marriage rite to those incompetent by the laws to enter into other contracts. I might say, but the sarcasm is even too severe, that a being held as an infant, a chattel, an idiot in law, never reaches her majority, and is therefore morally irresponsible even in this. Men who are delicate of their honor, careful of their name, and desirous to preserve the sanctity of the marriage relation, would do well to raise the legal liabilities of our sex, and by placing us in the same relative position with themselves, increase not only our sense of loyalty, but of dignity also.

But to my subject. In an earlier and ruder state of society among us, there might be found an apology for early marriages, and in this point of view many of the sayings of Poor Richard even had a pertinency applicable to the times, but we have survived their use; and yet like other exploded doctrines, they cling to the minds of people like a forlorn leaf upon an autumnal tree, shivering and wasted, yet tenacious of its hold. Common sense and common justice cry out against them, and yet they find their advocates, and then, when the natural consequences result, modern society shakes her robe piously, and thanks God she is not like others.

The marriage relation is certainly, at some time in the life of individuals, the natural and harmonious state, but as it now stands it is a bondage more than a life giving sacrament. The parties are unequal; the affinities essential to a joyful and peaceful relation are often wanting; the wife is not the help-meet for the man, but the appendage, the housekeeper, the female, of the establishment; I admit these terms are coarse, but the facts are coarse likewise; her very existence is merged in that of her husband; the children of her blood are not hers; her property is not hers; she is legally dead; and in this point of view, I believe, on my soul, she is morally irresponsible to society–not to God, be it remembered, not to the greatness and purity of her own nature, for, thanks to the framer of our spirits, under all these human disabilities come in the majestic laws of the great God, engraved upon the sacred tablet of the heart in lines of fire, and there we read and grow calm and thoughtful, and aspiring.

I would guard the relation of marriage as the most holy sacrament of earth. I would have the family altar for the entertainment of Angels not unawares. I would have the festivals of Hestia genial with the sweetest offerings of earth–the Penates crowned with undying garlands–the Penetralia holy, and fresh and beautiful, and unprofaned, and for this purpose no one should be admitted to the Temple without solemn preparation of heart and life. It should, as now, confer dignity on the parties, but dignity of a higher and purer kind. They should be those joined of God only. Even now, every generous mind respects the genuine, earnest, devoted human attachment, however at variance with conventionalism–but these sad, hopeless manifestations would have no existence in a truly ordered society. Marriage would take place where the deepest emotions of the heart, the highest affinities of intellect, and the utmost sense of beauty, one or all of these combine to make it desirable. In this case there could be no disloyalty, no bickerings, no division of interest. There would be no divorce, for none would be deserved.

That radical wrong exists in the present system of marriage, is evident from the frequency of divorce. The giddy manner in which the marriage vows are now assumed would be pitiful, were not the subsequent evils humiliating. When we see two discordantly joined, wearing out a joyless existence without companionship, without sympathy, looking to the past as all wretchedness, and the future as all hopeless, we are apt to say “A Divorce should take place”–we are apt to feel and perhaps justly, that no part of existence should be defrauded of its right, to its best means of happiness. We say this world is a state important in the link, and how do we know that the future will not be shorn of its glory by discordant elements like these? how do we know that we shall not look back upon this little ball half in sorrow and half in spite, as the place little entitled to our good will?–and, therefore, these should be freed.

I think not. By divorce we let in a flood gate of evil incalculable in its amount. The majority of the world admit of easy compromises, are so much the creatures of habit, of circumstance, and opinion, that they can settle into the yoke with little comparative discomfort, and legislation is for the many, not for a few, who are a law to themselves. It would seem that the few, who really suffer, who have that ingrained sense of truth, that integrity of life, that unity of being by which they are made sensibly alive to the touch of falsehood, should be the ones above all others for the law to relieve–but these are the ones who advance the world, who become eyes to the blind, who awaken human truth, and who should be content like their Great Master to suffer for the many, who should be willing to suspend the great needs of their own soul rather than become a rock of offense. They can endure, because their own discontent arises from depths of life unknown to the many, and should they demand the whole law, all that is lawful, but which a human recognition renders inexpedient, thousands, who are without this internal singleness would mistake a thousand petty ills, and shallow pretenses for the deep promptings of truth, and the whole structure of society by broken up.

Let our Legislators, or let public opinion forbid premature marriages, but admit of no divorce. In a right relation crime could not take place; in a false one entered into, in the maturity of judgement, let it be one of the contingencies from which there is no appeal. Let it not be entered into from pecuniary motives by our sex–allow women the rights of property, open to her the avenues to wealth, permit her not only to hold property, but to enter into commerce, or into professions, if she is fit for them. In that case she should assuredly take the stand that her fathers took, that taxation without representation is oppressive, and then from the nature of things society would grow more harmonious, marriage would be sacred, and divorce pass from the Statute book. With Milton I believe it should be sooner award to ungenial relations than to the commission of crime. In the former, there is a sturdy truthfulness of Nature, admitting of nothing short of the highest laws of being, while in the latter case, the readiness of compromise in one party or both, argues an instability and shallowness of character, that the best modifications of society would little effect.

The whole subject of Divorce is one to be approached with caution–regarding marriage as holy, divorce is like the hand laid upon the Ark of God beneath which it shakes mightily. The law may separate two who have stood in relation, but there is the action of the laws inherent in our being, by which the parties each feel the other can never be a creature wholly indifferent. There is the pleading of a great law of kindness, of considerateness, by which each feels that the well being of the other may be in his hands–there is a sense of self-respect, which is violated, by feeling that one who has once stood in that relation, is ejected from the altar, bearing with him or her, memories which no Lethe wave can efface. Dim, undefined human pleadings bid him be reverent in his dealings, and careful for the sacredness of being. Oh! God’s great laws within us are very beautiful, in calming and cheering the life–listed to with feet unshod and head bowed in reverence; the still small voice calls us from the dark cave of prejudice, where the tempest, the fire and the earthquake filled us with dread, into the clear tranquilizing light of better truth, which, like the droppings of dew and the stirring of leaves bring our disjointed being into harmony. We may trust these laws; did we do so more, there would be less of misery. Did the word Justice apply, not as now, to commercial relations only, but to the recognition of the whole nature of men, there would be little for our Legislative bodies to do; and till entire justice be established in regard to our sex, little can be hoped for.

A true man or woman, must naturally have a sense of shame when subject to divorce–more than all this, where children exist, a course of evasions, discomforts, and mortifications must ensue, painful to be borne and assuredly shaping the future characters of such unfortunate beings. They must at length find that the taint of crime stirs in their veins, or if not this, that their being was compounded amid warring elements, which may result in crime, or disease, or insanity to themselves. They become the reflex of innumerable ills, and all the discomforts that might perhaps have fallen upon one, through the action of a Divorce, are heaped upon the many. Their sense of their own responsibility will be lowered, or else a haughty antagonism excited equally repugnant to the best phase of life. I have in my memory now one illustration of the kind, where the mother from an uncongenial and early marriage, was able to obtain a divorce, upon what legal points I am unable to define, certainly not crime. There was one child, a boy, who was retained by the Father, who at length died, leaving the doubly orphaned boy to the uncertain tenderness of friends. He inherited all his mother’s sensitiveness without her electric impulses. He grew up nearly alone, without companions, without guidance, ; a taciturn, shy youth, remembering painfully the short period when his mother was all in all to him, she now a wife with other and fairer children, claiming her tenderness. He inherited a small competence, but a weight hung upon his energies, and he died leaving no vestige but these sad memories. Will any one believe that mother failed to feel her omissions to his child; who thus was more exiled than Ishmael, for Abraham left mother and child to share the exile together?

I have not known a case of discomfort in the marriage relation, in which the contract did not take place during the girlhood of the woman, when she was so young and immature that she could form no estimate of the importance of the step she took. Where suffering has arisen from marriages contracted later in life, the origin has been from causes so petty, external or coarse, that no legislation should be awarded–no legislation could help them. The nature of the parties were such that they might as well be uncomfortable in that relation as any other.

We need a higher estimate of the sanctities of marriage, not increased facilities for dissolving it. We cannot multiply the latter without increasing existing evils; without lowering not only public taste but the sense of justice. Were women allowed the exercise of their best faculties, and remunerated equally with the other sex, they might often escape the desire for divorce by a knowledge that avenues to wealth or distinction were open to them, and thus they might fill up the desert of their life. We might cite many who are doing this, honorably sustained by the better part of the community, though subject, of course, to the unmeaning sneers of the sticklers for womanly subserviency. We do need a better public opinion in regard to woman-labor. We do need to have this sphere enlarged almost infinitely. We need to impress upon the other sex the unmanliness of usurping avocations better adapted to our more delicate organization. We need the resources of labor broad and remunerative for those who are too young of years to be admitted into the marriage contract or disinclined to its responsibilities; and for those who, having made in this relation a great and irretrievable mistake, may find in it a relief for outraged affections, and from the apathy, or discontent, or pettiness, or oppression which it involves. Their penalty should not be a life-long penalty; their bondage unmitigated bondage. While a true marriage, and the happiness or sorrows of maternity, should unmistakably absolve a woman from labor–a false or external one, becoming painful and oppressive, should open to her its privileges.

No. 10

Were I the chosen, a dram of well doing should be performed before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil doing.–Milton

In my former numbers I have insisted, perhaps at too much length, upon the recognition of the entire individuality of Woman, her claims as a creation distinct, and one; not as a half –a supremacy–an appendage–a mere luxury for the delectation of man. According to the Mosaic myth, Man was created and placed in a garden provided for his existence, with all the beatitudes of sense amply cared for. Woman was the birth of Paradise; created amid its harmonies, a last glowing and bountiful demonstration of God’s good will to his creature. Adapted the one to the other, they were yet distinct in being, and each types of a great revelation. Woman being the last is undoubtedly the one through which the ultimate good to this world is to be achieved; in this way the worship of the Virgin in the Catholic Church is an instinctive acknowledgement of the symbol. Man was for a period alone in Paradise–till he slept–weighed by the latent energies of a great nature struggling for realization. So in the world. hitherto his career has been that of brute force–he has mastered the world and named all things according to his will–now he tires of the turmoil, the dust and heat of the contest; he is sated with blood and war and oppression, and longs for the divine companionship of purer and gentler elements, and the ministration of woman comes in to gladden the world, needing her gentleness, her singleness of perception, her holiness of love, and her protective tenderness. As she has been the formative element in the material world, so is she to produce the new heavens and the new earth of the moral world; hers is to be the great birth of a purer humanity, that of peace and love and good will; the embodied new testimony of love, when the law shall not lie in the prohibition, but in the enactment; when it shall no more be said, “Do not,” but do thou, even the whole law of love. There are natures even now who belong to the new testimony only , who feel that the external prohibition is an insult to the greater laws inscribed in their own souls, whose lives are peaceful, harmonious, and very joyful, for the Lord is his Holy Temple, even that of heart, and nothing can make them afraid.

Shall we say that in the long past ages, Man has wilfully oppressed and degraded his companion? Far from it. Age after age he has done little but cast aside usages that have survived their needs, grasping at one time a good, he enforces it by a law till that in time becomes a bondage, and he at length finds himself a Samson bound by his own locks, or a Gulliver struggling on the earth by the combined pegs of the Lilliputs–in gaining at one point he has lost at another–till the whole structure of society with its multitudinous laws, presents Man as a struggling Laocoon, writing under the fold upon fold of restrictive law, which towers above the true man and leaves him helpless or goaded to desperation; the very prohibition maddens him to the desire of infringement; the Law has become Master, Man the Slave; reversing the assurance of the Great Teacher, that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

In all this Woman, always in the back ground, has been swayed back and forth, often protected by the strong arm of her companion from blows which he met upon his unarmed breast, sometimes his slave, his wanton, his idol, never his free, joyous, godlike companion. There is too much talk of Woman and her Master. I remember a distinguished literary Woman, who in speaking of her own movements would say in bitter jest: “I don’t know what I shall do; that depends upon the man that owns me.” Our question is not now as to individual injustice and oppression, mighty as these isolated cases become in aggregate, but of the progress of the race itself, where I see that Man after so many centuries of enlightenment, has achieved comparatively little, and of course Woman, recognized as she has hitherto been only in sex, must necessarily more than share in the disabilities of her companion. He has been treading the wine press alone, sweating as it were great drops of blood–he has not yet escaped the agony of disenthrallment; he has had no time to study her rare and delicate organization as a whole–his broad, massive stirring hardihood could not, like Hercules at the distaff, feel the attenuated threads that compassed her being; he has been too busy in war; and toil and legislation, in bloodshed, and persecution and sensuality, to look into the soul of things; and but for the Poets of our kind, who have kept him human tenderness and aspiration alive, we should have been lost in darkness and brutality.

It is weak and foolish to suppose that man thus wilfully desired to enslave us. If done at all, it was done in blindness and in ignorance. The instinctive arrogance of sex may have led him to tyranny, as it undoubtedly has, and where in emergencies either party must yield in life, the physically strongest will of course prevail. If either must be in the back ground, the one least able to withstand brute force must be the one, but this has grown out of the imperfection of the race, not from deliberate intent. Beauty and Genius are easily emancipated, and hence we find in all ages beautiful and gifted women casting a halo over the dark features of an age, and misleading us into a belief that others were equally free–and these, affluent in homage, intoxicated with adulation, have unconsciously helped to deaden the cry of the many–the bitter cry of the ignorant and the oppressed, whose glory was turned to shame, and whose light had become darkness. It is cruel selfishness to fold our hands in idle contempt for the needs of others, because the Good Father has cast our lines in pleasant places.

I confess there is something humiliating in this cry of Woman’s Rights. I am ashamed that Man should have ever made it needful, and feel a sad pity over his blindness and meanness. It seems charging home unmanliness, pettiness and ignorance, and acknowledging, on our part to imbecility and all the odious vices that grow out of a feeble and oppressed creation. To confess to the injury mares the beauty and the dignity of life, and I would rather our sex would enact some magnanimous tragedy even, than utter this mawkish cry of oppression. The “proud stomach” of the mannish Bess, had something to command respect at least, and unless we can do, as well as talk, it were better to be silent. God forbid I should encourage a race of vixens; it is because I desire to see Woman nobly beyond these poor, mean tendencies that I urge her to the full demand of her being. It is because she is compressed that she is mawkish, and treacherous, and petulant, and meager. I do solemnly believe the race is physically dwarfed by the disabilities of Woman–that beauty and magnanimity, and God’s worship are all hindered by this lack of a true recognition. Sickness and wrinkles, and distortion, are not her inheritance, but grow upon the race from the evils inflicted upon her. Look at the pale faces, the feeble step, the uncertain and disaffected faces of half the married women that you see, and contrast them with the firm, upward, joyous look of the few–whether married or single–whose whole being has been recognized, and then say which realizes best the intents of the Creator.

It seems to me the very spirit of many of our laws is humiliating, and helps to lower public opinion–they are a living witness to the ignorance and one-sided views of men, and while we see him who styles himself the head of creation thus benighted, we cannot expect entire justice from him–but we can, by a noble exertion of our own true dignities, make him ashamed to enforce laws which carry with them a reproach to himself. It seems to me that a man who goes into a court of law to claim a divorce, for instance, upon the ordinary grounds, confesses to his own disgrace and his own lack of true manliness of character, so in regard to property, and many crimes even, where it may be said we suffer the penalties of a state of things which we had no voice in creating, and ought of right to be exempt from, and there is an intrinsic meanness in exposing us to the conditions. There is a certain conventional code, often unjust and oppressive, which women recognize in their intercourse with each other, and the tenacity with which they insist upon its observance argues a strong ability in them to keep all laws which they may be instrumental in making.

There is something in the spirit of the age inviting to action, not thinking merely–and often do we hear women say–“I feel a desire to do something beyond my present sphere–to act–I am tired of endurance merely.” To such we would say solemnly, tenderly–Up and do–it is the voice of God, it may be calling you to a divine work. She that feels a latent power within her calling her to action, is culpable for her neglect to obey the voice. Mistakes, failures must and will ensue–what then? it is something to have attempted great things–if the motive be pure, it is godlike, and good will come of it. Vanity, pretension, soon find their level, but the great and holy aim is in God’s keeping, and must go onward conquering and to conquer. I care not that a woman sometimes fails in her attempts, as thousands of the other sex do,–it will not lessen her, provided there is any magnitude in her nature; but I reverence the sentiment in her soul that dictate the movement. I feel there must have been deep need within her which she was bound to recognize, and that the mantle that perhaps slipped from her too delicate shoulders may be broadcast upon others more nobly proportioned.

We have passed the era of civilization when a woman was condemned solely to the productive, a laborious part of the domestic arrangement. True, in England she may yet be harnessed to a cart for the conveyance of coal, and she may be in many parts of the world burdened and tasked beyond measure–but these are evils growing out of the general enormities of society, through which the race must work its emancipation; they are evils aside from the general object of these articles.

The woman of the Chivalrous Ages would not content the woman of the Nineteenth Century. Modern mechanism has superseded the necessity of her cares of embroidery, and the breaking up of old forms has made her duty of distributing alms, and ordering her band of retainers unnecessary–nor would she be content to lean from her balcony watching the first gleam of her lover’s plume returning from his seven years’ warfare, or to sit in solemn state the Queen of Beauty and homage, or to listen to the songs of bearded Troubadour. The day for the worship of beauty, solely, is long since passed, and the woman of Thought usurps her place. These foregone types were but the preludes to this–beautiful in their day–or toleration as the best the world afforded. Something more noble, more full is required now. Now the true full woman must be more enlarged–more reflective, contemplative and more loving even. Her tenderness has a broader field even as her thoughts have; she is capable of more, she feels the stirring of more within herself, and feels a stirring to action too–for all power is vital, and wherever it may be lodged it will out at some time.

Such being the case, it is useless to talk of restricting women in the action of their faculties. In our age, unless the women of Intellect–for the type is maturing itself to that development which is highest and most beautiful–unless she is allowed the free exercise of her talents, is far more lonely and wretched than her poor sister of a byegone age, who toiled because her soul as well as boy was in bondage, or the handsome Dame, who moved the Queen of Beauty, listening with proud grace to the songs of her admirers. These were content, for the day-star of better things had not risen upon them; but the woman of our day is not content, because she sees a newer and better light, and she reads the handwriting upon the wall which says, “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting,” and therefore she is ready to cast her whole being, her thought, her aspiration, all into the scale of public good, and in being true to herself, become true to the world’s destinies.

Transcribed from The Elizabeth Oakes Smith Page: Woman and Her Needsstatic1.squarespace.com › static › eospage

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