To be sure, there are certain advantages in the struggle for life which a woman seems to be conceded, and others which she by nature possesses. She is less exposed to dangers than men; she escapes avocations of the greatest hardship and risk; she is generally supported by the labor of others, and she is allowed privileges in many small matters of daily life which are denied the other sex. Of her own nature she is less the slave of passion, less reckless, less of an egotist, less inclined to deeds of violence and crime. In all civilized countries the convictions of women for criminal offenses are less than one-third those of men.
These points are in favor of her securing a larger share of happiness; but they are checked by many and serious countervails. She is born an invalid. Her periodic sickness, the burden of pregnancy, the pains of childbed, the years of distress at her climacteric age, place her for the best part of her life at a fearful disadvantage. Enter the
library of a physician and turn the leaves of his thick volumes on obstetrics and the diseases of women if you would have your sympathies harrowed by a long list of dreadful maladies of which men know nothing.
Another thought disables a woman, and must lessen and darken the enjoyment of her life in every rank and condition of society. Unless under immediate protection, she is always exposed to the possibility of insult and assault, and no general safeguards will ever entirely remove this danger.
Outside of these inevitable disabilities, the unfortunate elements in the modern condition of women are owing to the legal and religious tyranny of men. The dogmas of Christianity distinctly lowered her position compared to what it was in the Roman Republic or the cities of Etruria. At Delphi, the thoughts of the gods found expression through the mouth of the priestess; but the founder of Christian institutions forbade women to speak in the churches. The ancient Greek prayed to the goddesses, Minerva, Aphrodite, and Demeter, as the givers of the good things of life, of wisdom, of love, and the fruits of the field; but to the Christian, evil and death and pain were what the first mother of the race brought as a dower to her husband and left as a legacy to her children.
These pernicious teachings led to a steady oppression of woman in all ages of Christianity, our own included. So
thoroughly did they become ingrained in the minds of men that the most liberal scarcely recognized their presence. The priest laid on the bride the obligation of obedience to her husband; and the philosopher, Rousseau, servile in this to the ideas of his time, when he has completed the education of his Emile, contents himself with saying to Sophie, “This is the man whom it is your duty to endeavor to please!” Not until a man arose emancipated from all tradition, did the teaching of Plato that the sexes should be socially and politically equal find a modern philosopher to echo it; that was when John Stuart Mill wrote his essay on the freedom of woman; though it would be unfair to the growth of religious thought not to add that he had been anticipated in most practical points by the despised dissenter, George Fox. Only when the spirit of teachers such as these will have permeated the institutions, the religions, and the social traditions of the day, will women have a fair chance with men at the common stock of happiness possible for the race.
Most fatal of all measures to the happiness of woman has been the unceasing effort of ecclesiasticism to make marriage, for her, an indissoluble sacrament of servitude, instead of an equal civil contract, in which no obligation is assumed on the one side which is not as fully accepted on the other. Mill well remarks that the miseries produced in the lives of individual women by subjection to individual men are simply incalculable. Guarantee the wife every
right and every privilege that the husband has, and the increased happiness of both will be sure to crown the concession.
The remedy for this state of things is the proper education of girls and women. But it is a remedy not likely to be administered soon, in spite of the talk about it. Men prefer ignorance in women, as women admire blind devotion in men; because these enable each sex to cheat the other more easily. Nothing is more essential to her happiness than that she should be taught the hygiene of her sex early in life; but the popular voice says ignorance means innocence, and thousands of women are condemned to life-long misery in consequence. I had a medical friend who wrote a volume of excellent advice to mothers, and his profession almost ostracized him for it. Beyond all things, a girl’s education should be directed toward manual training and exercises of the understanding; instead of that, she is taught the fine arts and regaled with poetry and fiction. Her imagination is fostered by lectures on esthetics, and her memory crammed with moral platitudes which have no place in real life; while the principles of business and the maintenance of her own rights are left out of her training. I cannot but attribute to this the most common and fatal defect of the female mind,—its lack of the sense of abstract justice.