WOMAN’S WORK FOR WOMAN.
MISS MARY E. SAWYER.
A Paper read at the Women’s Meeting, held in connection with the Annual Meeting of the American Missionary Association at Norwich, Ct.
Before every Southern teacher to whom comes the opportunity of presenting this cause, so dear to us, to the Christian women of the North, two pictures rise.
Looking upon the one, you would shrink back in dismay, wondering if it be not hopeless to try and illumine a darkness so gloomy, to raise a class so utterly buried in ignorance, superstition and sin. But, could we turn to you the other view, show the work done, acquaint you with the trials, the sacrifices, the glorious victories over fiery temptations, the patient continuance in well-doing in the face of obstacles almost insurmountable, then, indeed, you might be tempted to take the other extreme and feel that missionaries are hardly needed among a people whose Christian record shines brighter than our own. So, coming as pledged witnesses before you to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we shrink from the vastness of the undertaking, for while exactly fulfilling the last requirement and telling nothing but the truth, we keenly realize the many contradictions, and know that the whole truth cannot be told in a single hour—can never, indeed, be fully known till seen in the light of eternity.
We read of nations with no word for home. Come through the cabins of the South and you will find not the name but the reality wanting. You will not find there any incentive or help to personal modesty, any retirement or any sense of impropriety in the state of things. From these influences and homes many of our girls come to us with minds and characters such as might be expected from such surroundings. We sometimes speak of them as children, but the comparison is hardly just. Never do I realize more keenly their deprivations than after talking with Northern children—little children whose precocity, to one fresh from the South, seems almost alarming, suggestive of brain fevers and early death. From babyhood their wits have been quickened by contact with other and mature minds, their many questions wisely answered till they have absorbed knowledge enough to be intelligent companions before their so-called education begins. But put them in the place of the colored children, remove all books, all papers, all pictures, let them have no knowledge of the outside world, let all their questions be addressed to people as ignorant as themselves, and you will find the youth of sixteen far behind the child of six.
To many of the girls, entering school is like entering a new world. They sit for the first time in their lives at a well ordered table, utterly at a loss as to the proper manner of conducting themselves. The refined manners of the older students bewilder them.
The door of a teacher’s room is suddenly and unceremoniously thrown open, and two or three girls march silently before her to the fire, and standing with vacant faces by its warmth, are perfectly unconscious of any impropriety in such a mode of entrance, or of the need of a single word of explanation. It is no uncommon thing for a girl to throw herself, fully dressed, on the outside of her freshly-made bed and there pass the night, having no conception of properly undressing and going to bed.
Our school work, then, includes much more than one would at first imagine. Each girl has some part in the household work, and must be taught the neatest, quickest and best method of doing it. This does not mean once showing, but careful, patient oversight for days and weeks. Her room, clean and tidy, when given her, must be kept in the same condition, and this necessitates very frequent and very thorough inspection, till she at length comprehends fully that a hasty use of the broom, leaving the sweepings under the bed or behind the door, a scrambling up of all loose articles into one pile on the closet floor, or a set of drawers with finger marks outside and a motley collection of clean and dirty clothing within, will not satisfy the requirement.
The same care is exercised over her person; clean, whole clothing, well-kept hair and thorough bathing transform her outwardly, while the loud, boisterous tones, the coarse expressions, the uncouth manners are toned and softened by constant care.
Sewing, in which they are woefully deficient, receives due attention, and girls whose hands can manage a plough or a cotton bag much more easily than they can hold a needle, become at the end of the course very nice seamstresses, whose work would rejoice the hearts of the advocates of hand sewing. In these classes, besides plain sewing of every description, the girls are taught patching and darning, and the cutting and putting together of garments, and in at least one of the colleges, each girl who graduates must leave behind a garment cut and made entirely by herself, as a specimen of her skill.
A few minutes daily are spent in giving the assembled school a brief summary of the important items of news in the great outside world, and more or less time is devoted to plain talks on practical matters, manners, morals and care of the health,—the last a subject, by the way, with which they seem wholly unacquainted, and which the girls especially need to become familiar with. Dress reform in two directions needs to be impressed upon them, as the uncouth garb of the girls from the woods, and the thin slippers, cheap finery, powder, paint and corsets laced to the last verge of human endurance donned by the city girls, bear testimony.
But this is not all. These girls are sent to us to be trained for Christ, and knowing the utter folly of attempting to build up a pure, noble womanhood on any other foundation than Christian principle, we try by all our system and watchfulness and oversight to establish them in this, earnestly praying the Master to send from on high that blessing without which all our labors will be nothing worth.
Have you never in some late Spring watched the brown leaf-buds, as day after day they seemed to remain unchanged, till you were tired of waiting for the fulfilment of their promise? And do you remember your joyful surprise when, leaving them thus at night you woke to find the whole tree aglow with the fresh, tiny bits of color from the bursting buds? So we feel often as we wake to realize that the rough, awkward girl who came to us has developed into the quiet, refined Christian woman, leaving us for her life work. Nor are we the only ones to see the transformation.
“I am looking to see what kind of a woman you are,” said a child to one of the Talladega students as she opened her log cabin school in the pine wood. “You look to me like a white lady.” The teacher’s face was of the most pronounced African type, and black as ebony, but her quiet dignity and refined manner excited the child’s wonder and elicited the unconscious compliment.
As teachers, these girls carry the missionary spirit with them, and feeling their responsibility, open Sunday-schools and engage in temperance work as surely as they begin their day schools. Into the cabins they carry, as far as may be, a regard for neatness, order, and those little adornments which make home what it is. Happy the young colored minister who wins one of them for his wife, thus establishing a home which shall supplement his sermons and act as leaven in the homes of his people. More than one graduate of the colored theological seminaries is gravely hampered in his usefulness by an ignorant, careless wife. As one frankly expressed the matter to a brother minister, “My wife is more trouble to me than all my work put together.” And in thus training our girls to be careful, efficient housewives, we know we may be moulding not them alone, nor their immediate households, but the whole community of women over whom, as ministers’ wives and the most thoroughly educated women, they will exert a powerful influence.
But we have deeply felt the need of more direct and personal influence over the women. The work of the school needs to be supplemented by that of the missionary: mother and daughter must work together for the best result. But the teacher had little time after the school duties were performed, and the lady missionaries so sorely longed for, were very few in number. Why not, then, work through our tried colored helpers? The description of the way this has been done in other States I leave to those whose experience is wider than my own. In Alabama, we have a “Woman’s Missionary Association,” holding annual meetings in connection with the State conference of churches, and having auxiliary societies in these several churches. The colored women who compose these societies have heartily and faithfully assumed the duties devolving upon them, and helping others have themselves been helped.
The work done is varied, no rigid plan being laid down. Sewing classes for the women and girls, prayer-meetings for the mothers, Bible-readings, visiting from house to house, bearing food and medicine for the sick, clothing for the destitute, and comfort and sympathy for all, health talks—than which nothing can be more needed,—literary societies to develop their untrained minds, foreign missionary meetings to broaden their sympathies; all these and other ways of working for the Lord are reported at their last meeting. In April, for the first time, this annual meeting was visited by several white Southern ladies. Our surprise at their coming was only equalled by their amazement at the revelations.
“You put our ladies to the blush,” said one. “You are far ahead of us in Christian work.”
“Only to think,” exclaimed another as she listened to the carefully prepared papers and systematic reports,—“Only to think that we have kept such women as these in slavery!”
There are bright, promising girls all over the South, who, to make just such women as these, need only your help. You cannot leave your home duties to go yourself to them, but you can provide the means by which they may be fitted to act as your substitutes among their people. “Ten times one is ten,” you know, and the girl to whom you lend a hand may win many more souls into the kingdom. They stand to-day on the border: your arm lifting, they will come into power and usefulness: your heart closed to them, they will sink back into the old life. There must be many in this room to-day who have aided this work by gifts dearer to them than their own lives. Does not the scene come back to you, when through blinding tears you looked for the last time on brother or husband or son, as for love of God and country the dear ones marched away to find a grave beneath the Southern skies? They rest from their labors. It remains for us, for their dear sake, to see that this work they so nobly begun shall be as honorably carried on.
Doubtless the Lord could perfect this work without our aid, but He has chosen to entrust it to our keeping. And with every instinct of humanity, every impulse of patriotism, every principle of Christianity urging us to the work, shall we not receive it as from our Saviour’s hand, holding fast that which we have, that no man take our crown?