WHAT SOME WOMEN ARE DOING.
REV. A. H. BRADFORD, D.D.
This is woman’s era. Her influence and presence are in all spheres. Within a quarter of a century there were few in stores, and none in public offices. To-day they are clerks, operators in the factories, teachers in schools; they are in telegraph, and telephone, and post-offices; they are artists and traders; a few are captains of steamboats; a few are lawyers; now and then one ventures to preach; and even the mysteries of Wall Street are not terrifying to them, for they have commenced competition with the brokers. Women have already won recognition in the practice of medicine, and are among the most successful practitioners in all great cities. They are among the most popular lecturers. At least one of the most successful publishing houses in New York is owned and managed by a woman. In business and on the platform she has ceased to be a curiosity.
The power of woman in politics is not appreciated, but it is one of the most vital forces of this century. No Anarchist in Paris could influence the Faubourgs quicker than Louise Michel. In the history of Nihilism in Russia no names have been regarded with more devotion by those struggling for wider liberty, and none more dreaded by the existing order, than Sophie Perovskaia, Jessy Helfman and Vera Zassulic. Charles Dickens never exhibited a truer insight into human nature than when he made a woman the impersonation of remorseless vengeance.
But notwithstanding all that women are doing in trades, industries, politics, it still remains that in works of reform, charity and missions, she is especially distinguishing herself.
Two of the largest and most efficient charitable institutions in the world, viz: “The Deaconesses’ Institution of Rhenish Westphalia, at Kaiserwent,” and “The Mildmay Conference Hall and Deaconesses’ Home, in London,” are almost exclusively in the hands of women. The influence of these two noble charities reaches around the world, not only in works of beneficence, but also in active evangelistic ministry.
The first person to call attention to the horrible condition of English prisons was Elizabeth Fry. The horrors of war were immeasurably mitigated by Florence Nightingale. She gave an impetus to the work of training nurses, which has grown into enthusiasm in all civilized lands. Agnes Jones changed the work-house hospitals of Great Britain, from places of torture into places of blessing. Sister Dora glorified the “Black Country” by her heroism and self-sacrifice. The first person to make practical a good plan for improved tenement houses was Octavia Hill. Her efforts reach the people which such houses as those built by the Peabody estate only displace.
In this country the most conspicuous effort to improve the low-class of tenement houses has also been made by a woman. The success Miss Collins has won in Gotham Court is one of the most noticeable in the history of such efforts. The Bureau of Charities in New York is very largely managed by Mrs. Lowell and her devoted co-workers. The President of the American Branch of the Red Cross Society, that non-sectarian, but most Christian Association, which extends its arms of blessing wherever human suffering is found, is that American Florence Nightingale, whose heroism and sacrifice on Southern battle-fields can never be too highly appreciated—Clara Barton. And these are only hints, here and there, of woman’s work in charity.
If now we turn to her service in Reform we are met, at once, by the fact that not even the fiery eloquence of Phillips, nor the unconquerable agitations of Garrison did so much to hasten the abolition of slavery as the persuasion and persuasive eloquence of Mrs. Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. People were beguiled into reading that, who would not have listened to a word from the equally sincere, but more rampant agitators.
After the abolition of slavery there remained that other relic of barbarism, entrenched in a far more impregnable position, the rum-power. Intemperance has had to meet many who have attacked it in past days, but never yet an organization so tireless in effort, so fertile in expedients, and so exhaustless in resources as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. That association has made many mistakes, and is in danger of making many more, but one of the elements of its power is its willingness to learn. If it cannot fight with one weapon it adopts another. The brewers and distillers have millions of money at their command, but millions of money are not so formidable as millions of motherly hearts.
If now we turn to that other evil, more subtly and surely ruinous even than intemperance, impurity and the social evil, we find a new organization rising with great promise of power, viz.: The White Cross Society. The aim of that Association is to promote purity. It reaches out its hands to young men and women alike, and that work, in its organized form, owes its existence to the fertile brain and motherly heart of Josephine Butler, the wife of a canon of an English cathedral.
If woman works for the salvation of the physical life of her brothers and sisters, of course she must be equally anxious for the salvation of their souls. Woman has an instinct for religion. Living a life of greater seclusion than man, her heart in the silence, like a flower in the darkness, has grown toward the light. And this spiritual faculty has found the natural field for its operations in missionary work. The first American missionary martyr was Harriet Newell. Grand as was the life, and courageous as was the heart of Adoniram Judson, in all that called for heroism and consecration he was surpassed by his first wife, the beautiful, the almost preternaturally heroic Ann Hasseltine.
Women preponderate in all the departments of missionary activity. They are in distant lands as teachers, Bible-readers, nurses, physicians, missionaries’ wives. They go enthusiastically to homes in dug-out houses, and teach school and rear and train children, and keep the house, and do the drudgery, and then go to heaven, without complaining of earthly obscurity. They are among the Indians on their reservations, and in the Chinese quarters of the Pacific cities. But it has sometimes seemed to me that the most difficult and unattractive work for Christ that woman has ever undertaken, has been among the millions of blacks in the South. The work itself in many instances, if not all, has been disagreeable, if not repulsive. It has been at home, and has not inspired the enthusiastic admiration which has been given to those who have been in the foreign field. It has been attended with misconception, social ostracism, and sometimes with personal danger not found in any other branch of missionary service. But in all parts of the South are women at work with no motive but the love of Christ and humanity, winning souls by their Christ-like examples, and refining the uncultivated and vicious by the sweetness and purity of their unconsciously beautiful lives.
Woman’s work for woman among the blacks of the United States is the most important of all work for that people. Pure women have lessons to teach their own sex who have been degraded by a century of bondage, or who are the inheritors of the legacies of slavery, that none others can teach, and which must be well learned before there can be much progress in the moral amelioration of the race.
Her enthusiasm, her swift hostility to the more degrading sins, her sympathy which bears all the sorrows of those around her, her intuition of the Divine Fatherhood, and her patience, qualify woman for kinds of work which most men can never do so well. But there is one thing that men can do—they can remember the Apostle’s injunction, “Help those women.”