It is possible to remain unmarried from low motives, shrinking from the duties and responsibilities of the relation, or from a worldly ambition for higher station than love can offer. Such sin brings its own terrible punishment with it. But far more often it is from a high ideal of marriage, from true nobility of character, or from devotion to some other relation which seemed paramount, that a woman remains single. How many a woman, hiding in her secret heart the romance that gave a charm to her youth, but did not find its reality in life, has devoted herself to the service of humanity with all the passionate devotion of a lover to his mistress! Of such an one, to whom hundreds of helpless babes looked up as to a guardian and protector, an artist said, “She has the mother in her face.” We owe too much to this noble class of women, in art, literature, and philanthropy, and in the service of the country in its most trying hour, ever to forget their claims, and he will be forever stigmatized as unworthy of the name of pure and noble manhood who sneers at the virtue which he cannot understand, or vilifies with opprobrious epithets the noble women whom Theodore Parker—God bless him for the word—called his “glorious phalanx of old maids.”[31]
Another wrong is often done to the young girl, under the name of prudence or worldly wisdom, by breaking down her ideal of life, and especially her ideal of the possible partner of her future life. Tennyson speaks of one form of this, in addressing the vain coquette as the possible future mother:—
“Oh, I see thee old and formal, fitted to thy petty part,
With a little hoard of maxims, preaching down a daughter's heart.”
Men often speak of the pain it is to them to see the debasement of woman, because she represents to them an ideal of good, the other nobler self, for which they must strive. Man should represent the same thing to woman. Love should see in its object the very crown and glory of creation.
“The person love to us doth fit,
Like manna, hath the taste of all in it.”
But the low social standard of morals and manners for man has so degraded him, that the very ideal of manhood is belittled, and the mother warns her daughter not to expect much from her future husband; she has no right to hope for the loyalty of Sir Philip Sydney or the pure ideality of Michael Angelo.
It is a great wrong to man to demand so little from him. All human beings from childhood upwards are stimulated by the opinion entertained of them, and the claims upon them for noble and high behavior. Whatever your own experience, do not thrust the poison of doubt and unbelief in goodness into a daughter's mind. Let her keep her faith and her romance, and look for a hero to win her young heart. True, it is hard to see a Thaddeus of Warsaw with a cigar in his mouth, or to imagine Hamlet with a blue veil about his hat, but nevertheless the race of heroes is not extinct, and the girl had better preserve her faith and her love till the true knight appears, than accept the dreary belief that all men are alike unworthy, and that she must not ask for a purity and truth which exist only in the dreams of romance. Man's low idea of woman has reacted upon him; her elevation will restore him to his true dignity, as equally entitled to spiritual and moral elevation of soul and refinement of manners with herself. It is as demoralizing to young women to hold men in contempt, as it is for young men to have a low idea of women. “In honor preferring one another” is the true condition of love, and no one has truly loved who has not exalted the beloved far above one's self.
But, after all that I have said, perhaps at too great length, I come back to my original thought of the grand art of education as of life. Do not dwell upon petty details or exaggerate accidental peculiarities. Lay your foundations broad and deep in the common ground of humanity. Base your calculations on the sure ground of universal law. Then, gradually, out of this common earth will grow up the special flower, true to its own individual law, which is just as sacred and unalterable as the general law. All the art of the gardener cannot transform the oak to a willow, or produce the blue dahlia, though by its aid the sour crab has become a mellow apple, and the astringent pear, the luscious Bartlett. We need to study the great subject of education more, and to talk less about the special peculiarities of woman's education, and we shall find that the greater includes the less, and that the more thoroughly we develop all the powers of mind, the more eminently will each woman be fitted to perform her own peculiar work in life.
I did once see a man crippled of both legs, who claimed to be specially able to manage a washing-machine because he stood lower than other men. I honored his acceptance of his limitation, but still think the ordinary complement of legs an advantage not to be despised.
The great duty of the educator is to place his wheel so that the stream will fill its buckets evenly. Far more than you can do directly for your daughter, will the great social forces, the influences of custom, society, hereditary tendencies do for her; but you can hold the helm and keep the rudder firmly fixed towards the pole-star of truth and right; and so, from all these forces thus combined, and from the overflowing fullness of a mother's love, always warming and kindling the spirit of life, however much you may err in details, on the grand basis of humanity, and in the consummate perfection of her own individuality you may rear