THE IDEAL WOMAN
[Speech of Dr. Harvey W. Wiley at the banquet of the American Chemical Society, Washington, D. C, December, 1898. Dr. Wiley responded to the toast, "Woman.">[
Mr. President and Fellow-Members of the Chemical Society:—I propose to introduce an innovation to after-dinner speaking and stick to my text. In my opinion, it is too late in the day to question the Creator's purpose in making Woman. She is an accomplished fact! She is here! She has come to stay, and we might as well accept her. She has broken into our Society, which, until within a year or two, has remained entirely masculine. She has not yet appeared at our annual dinners, but I am a false prophet if she be not here to speak for herself ere long. And why not? Chemistry is well suited to engage the attention of the feminine mind. The jewels woman wears, the paints she uses, the hydrogen peroxide with which she blondines her hair are all children of chemistry. The prejudice against female chemists is purely selfish and unworthy of a great mind. There is only enough work in the world to keep half of humanity busy. Every time a woman gets employment a man must go idle. But if the woman will only marry the man, all will be forgiven.
I think I know why you have called on an old bachelor to respond to this toast. A married man could not. He would be afraid to give his fancies full rein. Someone might tell his wife. A young man could see only one side of the subject—the side his sweetheart is on. But the old bachelor fears no Caudle lecture, and is free from any romantic bias. He sees things just as they are. If he be also a true chemist, lovely woman appeals to him in a truly scientific way. Her charms appear to him in the crucible and the beaker:
I know a maiden, charming and true,
With beautiful eyes like the cobalt blue
Of the borax bead, and I guess she'll do
If she hasn't another reaction.
Her form is no bundle of toilet shams,
Her beauty no boon of arsenical balms,
And she weighs just sixty-two kilograms
To a deci-decimal fraction.
Her hair is a crown, I can truthfully state
'Tis a metre long, nor curly nor straight,
And it is as yellow as plumbic chromate
In a slightly acid solution.
And when she speaks from parlor or stump,
The words which gracefully gambol and jump
Sound sweet like the water in Sprengel's pump
In magnesic phosphate ablution.
I have bought me a lot, about a hectare,
And have built me a house ten metres square,
And soon, I think, I shall take her there,
My tart little acid radicle.
Perhaps little sailors on life's deep sea
Will be the salts of this chemistry,
And the lisp of the infantile A, B, C
Be the refrain of this madrigal.
No one but a scientific man can have any idea of the real nature of love. The poet may dream, the novelist describe the familiar feeling, but only the chemist knows just how it is:
A biochemist loved a maid
In pure actinic ways;
The enzymes of affection made
A ferment of his days.
The waves emergent from her eyes
Set symphonies afloat,
These undulations simply struck
His fundamental note.
No longer could he hide his love,
Nor cultures could he make,
And so he screwed his courage up,
And thus to her he spake:
"Oh, maid of undulations sweet,
Inoculate my veins,
And fill my thirsty arteries up
With amorous ptomaines.
"In vain I try to break this thrall,
In vain my reason fights,
My inner self tempestuous teems
With microcosmic mites.
"I cannot offer you a crown
Of gold—I cannot tell
Of terrapin or wine for us,
But rations balanced well.
"A little fat just now and then,
Some carbohydrates sweet,
And gluten in the bakers' bread,
Are what we'll have to eat.
"The days will pass in rapture by,
With antitoxine frills,
And on our Guinea-pigs we'll try
The cures for all our ills.
"O! maiden fair, wilt thou be mine?
Come, give me but one kiss,
And dwell forever blessed with me.
In symbiotic bliss."
This maiden, modest, up-to-date,
Eschewed domestic strife;
In mocking accents she replied,
"Wat t'ell—not on your life."
The philosopher and the theologian pretend to understand the origin of things and the foundation of ethics, but what one of them ever had the least idea of how love first started? What one of them can tell you a thing concerning the original osculation—that primary amatory congress which was the beginning of the beginning?—
Bathed in Bathybian bliss
And sunk in the slush of the sea,
Thrilled the first molecular kiss,
The beginning of you and of me.
The Atom of Oxygen blushed
When it felt fair Hydrogen's breath,
The Atom of Nitrogen rushed
Eager to Life out of Death.
Through Ocean's murmuring dell
Ran a whisper of rapture Elysian;
Across that Bathybian jell
Ran a crack that whispered of fission.
Alas! that such things should be,
That cruel unkind separation,
Adown in the depths of the sea
Should follow the first osculation.
O tender lover and miss,
You cannot remember too well
That the first molecular kiss
Was the first Bathybian sell.
Not only are women rapidly invading the domain of chemistry, but they are also the yellow peril of her sister science, pharmacy. A drug-store without a dimpled damsel is now a fit subject for the sheriff's hammer.—
There in the corner pharmacy,
This lithesome lady lingers,
And potent pills and philters true
Are fashioned by her fingers.
Her phiz behind the soda fount
May oft be seen in summer;
How sweetly foams the soda fizz,
When you receive it from her.
While mixing belladonna drops
With tincture of lobelia,
And putting up prescriptions, she
Is fairer than Ophelia.
Each poison has its proper place,
Each potion in its chalice;
Her dædal fingers are so deft,
They call her digit-Alice.
Love has been the theme of every age and of every tongue. It is the test of youth and of the capability of progress. So long as a man can and does love, he is young and there is hope for him. Whoever saw a satisfactory definition of love? No one, simply because the science of physical chemistry is yet young, and it is only when moulded by the principles of that science that the definition is complete and intelligible. Love is the synchronous vibration of two cardiac cells, both of which, were it not for the ethics of etymology, should begin with an S. Love is the source of eternal youth, of senile recrudescence. It is the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, the fountain of flowers. So love changes not—the particular object is not of much importance. One should never be a bigot in anything and a wise man changes often.
The grade of civilization which a nation has reached may be safely measured by three things. If you want me to tell you where to place a nation in the scale, don't tell me the name of it, nor the country it inhabits, nor the religion it professes, nor its form of government. Let me know how much sugar it uses per head, what the consumption of soap is, and whether its women have the same rights as its men. That nation which eats the most sugar, uses the most soap, and regards its women as having the same rights as its men, will always be at the top. And nowhere else in the world is more sugar eaten, more soap used, and women more fully admitted to all the rights of men than in our own United States and in the American Chemical Society.
To the chemist, as well as to other scientific men, woman is not only real but also ideal. From the fragments of the real the ideal is reconstructed. This ideal is a trinity, a trinity innominate and incorporeal. She is Pallas, Aphrodite, Artemis, three in one. She is an incognita and an amorph. I know full well I shall not meet her; neither in the crowded street of the metropolis nor in the quiet lane of the country. I know well I shall not find her in the salon of fashion, nor as a shepherdess with her crook upon the mountain-side. I know full well that I need not seek her in the bustling tide of travel, nor wandering by the shady banks of a brook. She is indeed near to my imagination, but far, infinitely far, beyond my reach. Nevertheless, I may attempt to describe her as she appears to me. Let me begin with that part of my ideal which has been inherited from Diana. My ideal woman has a sound body. She has bone, not brittle sticks of phosphate of lime. She has muscles, not flabby, slender ribbons of empty sarcolemma. She has blood, not a thin leucocytic ichor. I have no sympathy with that pseudo-civilization which apparently has for its object the destruction of the human race by the production of a race of bodiless women. If I am to be a pessimist, I will be one out and out, and seek to destroy the race in a high-handed and manly way. Indoor life, inactivity, lack of oxygen in the lungs, these are things which in time produce a white skin, but do it by sacrificing every other attribute of beauty.
In the second place, my ideal woman is beautiful. I will confess that I do not know what I mean by this; for what is beauty? It is both subjective and objective. It depends on taste and education. It has something to do with habit and experience. I know I shall not be able to describe this trait, yet when I look up into her eyes—eyes, remember, which are mere fictions of my imagination—when I look into her face, when I see her move so statelily into my presence, I recognize there that portion of her which she has inherited from the Aphrodite of other days; and this I know is beauty. It is not the beauty of an hallucination, the halo which a heart diseased casts about the head of its idol. It is the beauty which is seen by a sober second thought, a beauty which does not so much dazzle as it delights; a beauty which does not fade with the passing hour, but stays through the heat and burden of the day and until the day is done.
The beauty which my ideal woman inherited from Aphrodite is not a fading one. It is not simply a youthful freshness which the first decade of womanhood will wither. It is a beauty which abides; it is a beauty in which the charm of seventeen becomes a real essence of seventy; it is a beauty which is not produced by any artificial pose of the head or by any possible banging of the hair; it is a beauty which the art of dressing may adorn but can never create; it is a beauty which does not overwhelm the heart like an avalanche, but which eats it slowly but surely away as a trickling stream cuts and grooves the solid granite.
I regard true beauty as the divinest gift which woman has received; and was not Pandora, the first of mythical women, endowed with every gift? And was not Eve, the first of orthodox women, the type of every feminine perfection? Only Protogyna, the first of scientific women, was poorly and meanly endowed. If I were a woman I would value health and wealth; I would think kindly of honor and reputation; I would greatly prize knowledge and truth; but above all I would be beautiful—possessed of that strange and mighty charm which would lead a crowd of slaves behind my triumphal car and compel a haughty world to bow in humble submission at my feet.
In the third place my ideal woman has inherited the intellect of Pallas. And this inheritance is necessary in order to secure for her a true possession of the gifts of Aphrodite. For a woman can never be truly beautiful who does not possess intelligence. It is a matter of the utmost indifference to me what studies my ideal has pursued. She may be a panglot or she may scarcely know her vernacular. If she speak French and German and read Latin and Greek, it is well. If she know conics and curves it is well; if she be able to integrate the vanishing function of a quivering infinitesimal, it is well; if from a disintegrating track which hardening cosmic mud has fixed and fastened on the present, she be able to build a majestic, long extinct mammal, it is well. All these things are marks of learning, but not necessarily of intelligence. A person may know them all and hundreds of things besides, and yet be the veriest fool. My ideal, I should prefer to have a good education in science and letters, but she must have a sound mind. She must have a mind above petty prejudice and giant bigotry. She must see something in life beyond a ball or a ribbon. She must have wit and judgment. She must have the higher wisdom which can see the fitness of things and grasp the logic of events. It will be seen readily, therefore, that my ideal is wise rather than learned. But she is not devoid of culture. Without culture a broad liberality is impossible. But what is culture? True culture is that knowledge of men and affairs which places every problem in sociology and politics in its true light. It is that drill and exercise which place all the faculties at their best and make one capable of dealing with the real labors of life. Such a culture is not incompatible with a broad knowledge of books, with a deep insight into art, with a clear outlook over the field of letters. Indeed it includes all these and is still something more than they are.
My ideal then, so regally endowed, is the equal of any man—even if he be the "ideal man" of the American Chemical Society.
My ideal stands before me endowed with all the majesty of this long ancestral line. Proud is she in the consciousness of her own equality. Her haughty eye looks out upon this teeming sphere and acknowledges only as her peer the "ideal man," and no one as her superior. Stand forth, O perfect maiden, sentient with the brain of Pallas, radiant with the beauty of Venus, quivering with the eager vivacity of Diana! Make, if possible, thy home on earth. At thy coming the world will rise in an enthusiasm of delight and crown thee queen. [Long and enthusiastic applause.]