In all that has been written until now, I have simply tried to outline the new horizon opened up to the gentler sex as the supreme outgrowth of that civilization which He introduced, of whom history records the significant fact that women were “last at his cross, first at his sepulchre.” To attempt some delineation of the landscape enclosed by that far-reaching horizon is my more difficult task in the chapters now to follow. Many letters have come to me as a result of the articles thus far; they bristle with questions and are eloquent with aspiration. Later on I may ask space for a “symposium” with these “inquiring friends” in the genial pages of our tolerant Chautauquan. One speaking with authority exhorts me to “Be practical—that’s what we want!” As if I hadn’t been! But every mind is the prisoner of its own material and method. I can but give of such things as I have; can only tell what life has told to me. According to my own habits of thought, the sequence seems logical, when I turn for a while from the presentation of the modern outlook for women, with its opportunity and hope, to the rationale of this new horizon stretching so far away. Let us note the pathway that has led up to this more hopeful point of view, asking the inevitable question, “Why does that seem natural and fitting for a young woman to do and to aspire to now, which would have been no less improper than impossible, a hundred years ago?” Sweet friends, it is because the ideal of woman’s place in the world is changing in the average mind. For as the artist’s ideal precedes his picture, so the ideal woman must be transformed before the actual one can be. In an age of brute force, the warrior galloping away to his adventures waved his mailed hand to the lady fair who was enclosed for safe keeping in a grim castle with moat and drawbridge. But to-day, when spirit force grows regnant, a woman can circumnavigate the globe alone, without danger of an uncivil word, much less of violence. We shall never span a wider chasm than this change implies. All our inventions have led up to it, and have in nothing else wrought out beneficence so great as they have accomplished here, purely by indirection. In brief, the barriers that have hedged women into one pathway and men into another, altogether different, are growing thin, as physical strength plays a less determining part in our life drama. All through the vegetable and animal kingdoms the fact of sex does not widely differentiate the broader fact of life, its environment and its pursuits. Hence, the immense separateness which sex is called in to explain when we reach the plane of humanity, is to be accounted for largely on other purely artificial grounds. In Eden it did not exist, nor in the original plan of creation, as stated in these just and fatherly words: “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, after our own likeness. Let them have dominion.’ … So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them, and God blessed them, and said unto them, ‘ … replenish the earth and subdue it … and have dominion over every living thing.’” After the fall came the curse, which was no part of the original design, and from which the gospel’s triumph is releasing us, for there is “neither male nor female in Christ Jesus.” I believe that the origin of evil came in with man’s supremacy over one who was meant to be his comrade, and that Paradise regained will come only when the laureate’s prophecy is realized:
“Two heads in council, two beside the hearth,
Two in the noisy business of the world,
Two in the liberal offices of life;
Two plummets dropped to sound the abyss of science
And the secrets of the mind.”
The times when a new ideal is moulded, in church, state, or society, mark the epochs of history. Amid what throes did Europe pass from that of supreme authority in the church to the incomparably higher one of supreme liberty in conscience; from the divine right of kings to the divine right of the people. But there was to come a wider evolution of the same ideal, namely, the coequal power of the copartners, man and woman, in working out the problem of human destiny. This newest and noblest of ideals marks the transition from physical force ruling, to spiritual force recognized. The gradual adjustment of everyday occupation, custom and law, to this new ideal, marks ours as a transition period. Those who have the most enlargement of opportunity to hope from the change, will, in the nature of the case, move on most rapidly into the new conditions, and this helps to explain, I think, why women seem to be climbing more rapidly than men, to-day, the heights of spiritual power, with souls more open to the “skyey influences” of the oncoming age.
More women study to-day than men; a greater proportion travel abroad for purposes of culture; a larger share are moral and religious. Half of the world’s wisdom, three fourths of its purity, and nearly all its gentleness, are to-day to be set down on woman’s credit side. Weighted with the alcohol and tobacco habits, Brother Jonathan will have to make better time than he is doing now, if he keeps step with Sister Deborah across the threshold of the twentieth century. For the law of survival of the fittest will inevitably choose that member of the firm who is cleanliest, most wholesome, most accordant with God’s laws of nature and of grace, to survive. To the blindness or fatuity which renders him oblivious of the fact that the coming woman is already here, our current writer of the W. D. Howells and Henry James school owes the dreary monotony of his “society novel.” Not more “conventional” was the style of art known as “Byzantine,” which repeated with barren iteration its placid and colorless “type,” than are the dudesque pages of this pair of literary martinets. The “American novel” will not be written until the American woman, a type now to be found in Michigan, Madison, Boston, Cornell, and other universities, shall have taken her place, twentieth century product that she is, beside the best survivals of young men in similar institutions, and wrought out the Home, the Church, the State that are to be. Measuring each other on all planes, these life partners will know each other’s value, and no appeal to the divorce court will be made to relieve them, a few years after marriage, from an incompatibility that has ripened into open war. Happy homes will dot the country from shore to shore, in which both the man and the woman will do their best to lift the world toward God.
“Self-knowledge, self-reverence, and self-control; these three alone lead life to a sovereign power,” and these are fast becoming essential to any ideal of womanly character which the modern age will recognize as the product of its institutions. Of self-knowledge, these talks have said much. Self-reverence I would fain help you to develop in your character as a woman. If my dear mother did me one crowning kindness it was in making me believe that next to being an angel, the greatest bestowment of God is to make one a woman. With what contempt she referred to the old Jewish formula in which the less refined sex rolled out the words, “I thank thee, O God, that thou hast not made me a woman,” and with what pathos she repeated the gentle prayer of the other, “I thank thee, O God, that thou hast made me as it pleased thee,” with the pithy comment, “What could have pleased Him better, I should like to know, than to make one so rare, so choice, so spiritual as woman is?” Perhaps some of you may have thought you wanted to be a boy, but I seriously doubt it. You may have wanted a boy’s freedom, his independence, his healthful, unimpeding style of dress, but I do not believe any true girl could ever have been coaxed to be a boy. Reverence yourself, then, if you would learn one of the first elements of “How to Win” in this great world race, with its “go-as-you-please” terms, but its “Lucifer-may-take-the-hindmost” penalty for failure.
What will the new ideal of woman not be? She will never be written down in the hotel register by her husband after this fashion: “John Smith and Wife.” He would as soon think of her writing “Mrs. John Smith and Husband.” Why does it not occur to any one to designate him thus? Simply because he is so much more than that. He is a leading force in the affairs of the church; he helps decide who shall be pastor. (So will she.) He is perhaps the village physician, or merchant (so she will be, perhaps—indeed, they are oftentimes in partnership, nowadays, and I have found their home a blessed one). He is the village editor. (Very likely she will be associate.) He is a voter. (She will be, beyond a peradventure.) For the same reason you will never read of her marriage that “the minister pronounced them man and wife” for that functionary would have been just as likely to pronounce them “husband and woman,” a form of expression into which the regulation reporter will be likely to fall one of these days, it being, really, not one whit more ridiculous than the time-worn phrase, “man and wife.” The ideal woman of the future will never be designated as “the Widow Jones,” because she will be so much more than that—“a provider” for her children, “a power” in the church, “a felt force” in the state. I think George Eliot is the first woman to attain the post-mortem honor of having her husband called “her widower,” John W. Cross having been thus indicated in English papers of the period. A turn about is fair play, and the phrase is really quite refreshing to one’s sense of justice. The ideal woman will not write upon her visiting card, nor insist on having her letters addressed, to Mrs. John Smith, or Mrs. Gen. Smith, as the case may be, but will, if her maiden name was Jones, fling her banner to the breeze as “Mrs. Mary Jones Smith,” and will be sure to make it honorable. She will not be the lay figure made and provided to illustrate the fashions of Monsieur Worth and lesser lights of the same guild, but will insist that the goddess Hygiea is the only true modiste, and will dutifully obey her orders. As the Louvre gallery proves that when men were but the parasites of the court they too decked themselves with ear-rings, high heels, powdered hair and gaudy garments, so the distorted figures in the detestable fashion plates of to-day are the irrefutable proofs of woman’s fractional estate; but this will not be so to-morrow, when she finds her kingdom—which is her own true self. The ideal woman will cease to heed the cruel “Thus far and no farther,” which has issued from the pinched lips of old Dame Custom, checking her ardent steps throughout all the ages past, and will be studious only to hear the kindly “Thus far and no farther” of God.