XL.
1.—“... but a slave himself ...”
“The domination of either sex over the other paralyses the dominion of either.”—Ellen Sarah, Lady Bowyer (Letter to Daily News, 24th October, 1891).
Id....
“Can man be free if woman be a slave?
Chain one who lives, and breathes this boundless air
To the corruption of a closed grave!
Can they whose mates are beasts, condemned to bear
Scorn, heavier far than toil or anguish, dare
To trample their oppressors?”
—Shelley (“The Revolt of Islam,” Canto 2, s. xliii.).
2.—“... she to shape her own career be free ...”
“Not less wrong—perhaps even more foolishly wrong—is the idea that woman is only the shadow and attendant image of her lord, owing him a thoughtless and servile obedience, and supported altogether in her weakness by the pre-eminence of his fortitude. This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors, respecting her who was made to be the helpmate of man. As if he could be helped effectively by a shadow, or worthily by a slave.”—John Ruskin (“Of Queens’ Gardens,” p. 125).
4.—“Free mistress of her person’s sacred plan.”
Eliza W. Farnham (in “Woman and Her Era,” Vol. II., p. 92) clearly enunciates the depth of degradation and slavery from which woman’s person must be freed:—“When this mastery is established, and ownership of her becomes a fixed fact, she who was worshipped, vowed to as an idol, deferred to as a mistress, required to conform herself to nothing except the very pleasant requirement that she should take her own way in everything; to come and go, to accept or reject, to do or not, at her own supreme pleasure—this being may find herself awaking in a state of subjection which deprives her of the most sacred right to her own person—makes her the slave of an exacting demand that ignores the conditions, emotions, susceptibilities, pains, and pleasures of her life, as tyrannically and systematically as if she were indeed an insensate chattel.”
Happily, as far as England is concerned, our law no longer lends its power to enforce such a position.
5.—“Free human soul ...”
Woman’s deep and wholesome impulse and yearning for individual freedom and selfdom is well-spoken in the following lines, by an anonymous writer; touchingly shown also is the unsufficingness to her soul of even the most honeyed of unequal positions:—
“Oh, to be alone!
To escape from the work, the play,
The talking every day;
To escape from all I have done,
And all that remains to do.
To escape—yes, even from you,
My only love, and be
Alone and free.
Could I only stand
Between gray moor and gray sky,
Where the winds and the plovers cry,
And no man is at hand;
And feel the free wind blow
On my rain-wet face, and know
I am free—not yours, but my own—
Free, and alone!
For the soft firelight
And the home of your heart, my dear,
They hurt, being always here.
I want to stand upright,
And to cool my eyes in the air,
And to see how my back can bear
Burdens—to try, to know,
To learn, to grow!
I am only you!
I am yours, part of you, your wife!
And I have no other life.
I cannot think, cannot do;
I cannot breathe, cannot see;
There is ‘us,’ but there is not ‘me’:—
And worst, at your kiss I grow
Contented so.”
7.—“From woman slave can come but menial race,”
“If the result to the family is such as I have described what must be the effect on the race? A slow but sure degeneration. And has this not taken place? Is the race now such as you read of it in early times before the Mogul invasion brought the Zenana and child-marriage in its train? Where are the Rajputs and the Mahrattas with their manly exercises and their mental vigour? For centuries you have been children of children, and there is no surer way of becoming servants of servants.”—Mrs. Pechey Phipson, M.D. (“Address to the Hindoos,” p. 9).
Id.... “If children are to be educated to understand the true principle of patriotism, their mother must be a patriot.”—Mary Wollstonecraft (Letter to Talleyrand).
8.—“The mother free confers her freedom and her grace.”
“The child follows the blood of the mother; the son of a slave or serf father and a noble woman is noble. ‘It is the womb which dyes the child,’ they say in their primitive language.... ‘The woman bears the clan,’ say the Wyandot Indians, just as our ancestors said ‘The womb dyes the child!’”—Letourneau (“The Evolution of Marriage,” Ch. XI., XVII.).