The ideal woman will play Beatrice to man’s Dante in the Inferno of his passions. She will give him the clue out of materialism’s Labyrinth. She will be civilization’s Una, taming the Lion of disease and misery. The State shall no longer go limping on one foot through the years, but shall march off with steps firm and equipoised. The keen eye and deft hand of the housekeeper shall help to make its everyday walks wholesome; the skill in detail, trustworthiness in finance, motherliness in sympathy, so long extolled in private life, shall exalt public station. Indeed, if I were asked the mission of the ideal woman, I would reply: It is to make the whole world homelike. Some one has said that “Temperament is the climate of the individual,” but home is woman’s climate, her vital breath, her native air. A true woman carries home with her everywhere. Its atmosphere surrounds her; its mirror is her face; its music attunes her gentle voice; its longitude may be reckoned from wherever you happen to find her. But
“Home’s not merely four square walls.”
Some people once thought it was, and they thought, also, that you might as well throw down its Lares and Penates as to carry away its weaving loom and spinning wheel. But it survived this spoliation; and when women ceased to pick their own geese and do their own dyeing, it still serenely smiled. The sewing machine took away much of its occupation; the French and Chinese laundries have intruded upon its domain; indeed, men, by their “witty inventions,” are perpetually encroaching on “woman’s sphere,” so that the next generation will no doubt turn the cook stove out of doors, and the housekeeper, standing at the telephone, will order better cooked meals than almost any one has nowadays, sent from scientific caterers by pneumatic tubes, and the debris thereof returned to a general cleaning-up establishment; while houses will be heated, as they are now lighted and supplied with water, from general reservoirs.
Women are fortunate in belonging to the less tainted half of the race. Dr. Benjamin Ward Richardson says that but for this conserving fact it would deteriorate to the point of failure. A bright old lady said, after viewing a brewery, distillery and tobacco factory: “Ain’t I thankful that the women folks hain’t got all that stuff to chew and smoke and swallow down!” It behooves us to offset force of muscle by force of heart, that what our strong brothers have done to subdue the material world for us, who are not their equals in physical strength, may be offset by what we shall achieve for them in bringing in the reign of “Sweeter manners, purer laws.” For the world is slowly making the immense discovery that not what woman does, but what she is, makes home a possible creation. It is the Lord’s ark, and does not need steadying; it will survive the wreck of systems and the crash of theories, for the home is but the efflorescence of woman’s nature under the nurture of Christ’s gospel. She came into the college and elevated it, into literature and hallowed it, into the business world and ennobled it. She will come into government and purify it, into politics and cleanse that Stygian pool as the waters of Marah were cleansed; for woman will make homelike every place she enters, and she will enter every place on this round earth. Any custom, or traffic, or party, on which a woman can not look with favor is irrevocably doomed. Its welcome of her presence and her power is to be the final test of its fitness to survive. All Gospel civilization is radiant with the demonstration of this truth:
“It is not good for man to be alone.”
The most vivid object lesson on history’s page is the fact that his deterioration is in exact proportion to his isolation from the home of woman’s pure companionship. To my own grateful thought, the most sacred significance of woman’s work to-day lies in the fact that she occupies the outer circle in this tremendous evolution of the Christian idea of home. Ours is a high and sacred calling. Out of pure hearts, fervently let us love God and humanity; so shall we be Christ’s disciples, and so shall we safely follow on to know the work whereunto we have been called.
“’Tis home where’er the heart is,”
and no true mother, sister, daughter or wife, can fail to go in spirit after her beloved and tempted ones, as their adventurous steps enter the labyrinth of the world’s temptations. We can not call them back.
“All before them lies the way.”