Women have always interested me. I have studied them deeply. They have virtues and foibles which are equally a surprise—“and still the wonder grows.” After a long lifetime of comparison, however, I am persuaded that men and women are by nature neither better nor worse the one than the other. How often do we find some boy to be the sweetest-souled child in the house and the timidest, while his sister is the strongest, most unmanageable, and the leading spirit. We are our father’s daughters and our mother’s sons; and superiority of either—in mind, person or morals—is as it happens and not by reason of sex. Many differences are but the results of education and would disappear should the two sexes be treated under identical influences. Many so-called virtues of women and vices of men are but the fruits of environment and of the tone of the public thought.
The shielded, subject position of woman has originated as many weaknesses in her as excellences. She is the victim of her own devotion, as well as of her necessity to please the one on whom she and her children are dependent. If she is illogical, as is claimed, it is only because her deductions have not generally been made the rule of action in private or public. It were futile to run down a proposition to its legitimate conclusion when somebody else’s conclusions are to be in force. A man’s deductions have to stand the test of actual practice, and not only he but all dependent on him must sink or swim by their correctness. The logic of the condition is simply that of the trained and the untrained—as may be proven by the fact that proportionally as many women as men who have been thrown into business or professional life succeed. If women are not frank, as is sometimes charged, let me ask how any one can cultivate the high grace of ingenuousness who in all the ages past had to gain her ends by indirection, and who may utter not her own thought and opinion and will but that which shall be pleasing to another? The irresponsibility of her position in great things has created a corresponding irresponsibility in other scarcely less serious matters; for instance, in a freedom of expression about persons that a man would not dare to indulge in, because he knows he must be prepared to defend, with his life, if need be, the accuracy of his statement. I have sometimes thought the two most irresponsible of creatures in speech are a college boy and a woman; and for the same reason—that both hold a position of minority which never involves a strict accountability.
A distinguished physician once lavished upon a lady, both of them my guests at the time, such a superfluity of flattery that I afterward expostulated with him. “Oh, madam,” he answered, “I give her compliments as I would give a beggar a dime. It is what she baits and angles for, so I hand her out what she wants!” It is a human merit to desire to please; it is equally human to like to hear when we have succeeded; but excess of merit ceases to be meritorious. I have often wondered if woman’s subjection has developed such a slavish spirit in her as sometimes deserves the contempt conveyed in the above incident?
On the other hand the chief vices of a man are the result of his ruling attitude as head of the race. Where there is absolute power there is always abuse of power. The tyrant must be the chief sufferer for his tyranny. His absolutism has caused him to fix in law and custom the expression of his own desires and ideals without due regard to the interests of the rest of humanity—womanhood and childhood. Thereby, great vices inhere in social life of which man is the direct victim. He has not given himself a proper chance to develop into his best, because in the exercise of his unfettered rights he has fastened upon the social organism institutions, temptations and habits which start him out handicapped, and even with congenital obstructions to his legitimate evolution. This will be the case so long as it is considered proper that the little boy at his mother’s knee may hear and see and do things which it is wrong that his little sister may not hear and see and do.
But slowly, slowly, this misinterpretation for the race is correcting. We are told that in 1827 (while I was yet in my infancy) “Von Baer discovered the ovule—the reproductive cell of the maternal organism—and demonstrated that its protoplasm contributed at least one half to the embryo child. Before this time man was said to be ‘the seed and woman the soil.’ The establishment of equal physical responsibility opened the question of the extent of the mother’s mental and moral responsibility.”—Like as the vegetable and animal kingdom are indistinguishable in their lower orders, so boys and girls differ little in their natural characteristics until they enter upon the period which marks their differentiation in function. There is nothing rudimentary in the formation of the female body; it possesses two entire organs—the uterus and the breast—which are wanting or rudimentary in the male. These organs, according to Webster, are “the seat of the passions, the affections and operations of the mind.” Their functions constitute woman’s special domain, her exclusive kingdom, where man cannot intrude, which he may not share.
Nature recognizes the importance of the mother by restricting the exercise of her peculiar office to the meridian of life—her ripest maturity—in order that the race may be protected in full vigor. Other parts of her being, which may have lain dormant or in partial disuse through over-estimated activity in other directions, now awake, and late in years women may perform wonders in an intellectual and business way. I recently heard a wise and brilliant speaker—a man—say, “I never try to make a man over forty years old grasp new ideas of action. He cannot. There’s something the matter with him—whether pride of opinion or rigidity of brain I know not; but I do know that it is different with a woman. She seems to be always receptive.”
The twentieth century begins with a reconstructed mental state toward the race. It does not believe in woman’s natural inferiority, nor in man’s exclusive ideals. It recognizes that the wellbeing of both man and woman consists in a whole humanity, and that there can be no whole humanity with anything less than perfect freedom for both halves of it. The right to freedom of thought and liberty of speech is established for a woman nearly as fully as for a man; but the past stretches out a ghastly finger, and looking back to precedent, delays full freedom of action; hereditary inertia, the chains of ancient prejudice and the strength of present customs are obstacles to be reckoned with in the rapidity of future development. But women and men are now both thinking, are both educating for the battle of life, are beginning to tramp side by side in the march of ideas and endeavor. Mothers realize intensely that if they had known how better to rear their sons there would already be a better race; but they have been so held down during all the ages that they have not understood how to make a free, noble son, and a daughter fit to mate with him.
Sometimes the way seems long and devious, and human apprehension is so dull that our hearts faint. There is so much to correct in creatures as well as in conditions that we wonder why even Divine patience does not despair. But there is to me logical encouragement in the reflection that actually up to the date of my own birth, girls were admitted into the public schools of Boston only during the summer months when there were not boys enough in attendance to fill the desks; science and all but rudimentary mathematics were considered beyond their faculties. Not only high schools but the chief colleges of the world are now open to women, and co-education is a growing determination. Women are now admitted—as reported by the Commissioner of Education—to one hundred and fifty colleges and universities in America. Of these one hundred and five are denominational—notwithstanding that the liberty wherewith Christ maketh free has been the root of woman’s emancipation. To-day all the professions except the ministry are open to women; yet there are many women evangelists, and others who have taken the course in theological schools. Woman has learned the power of organization, and her full political liberty is now in sight. Some persons are afraid that the activity in woman’s interests exhibited during the last quarter of a century will experience a reaction. Well, religious revivals, like showers on earth, are always followed by a dry spell. Still—let us have rain! We should not be disheartened because history always moves in spirals, and not by direct ascent.
The new century begins with a radiant idea which now seems a new-born impulse of the present day; yet nineteen hundred years ago it haunted the heart of the divine Judean philosopher and prophet. This hoary new idea is that love alone can
“Follow Time’s dying melodies through,
And never lose the old in the new,—
And ever solve the discords true.”