It was also an old notion that rest and quiet and peace were natural characteristics of womanliness; and that life had been not unfairly apportioned between the sexes, each having its own distinctive duties as well as virtues, its own burdens as well as its own pleasures. Man was to go out and do battle with many enemies; he was to fight with many powers; to struggle for place, for existence, for natural rights; to give and take hard blows; to lose perhaps this good impulse or that noble quality in the fray—the battle-field of life not being that wherein the highest virtues take root and grow. But he had always a home where was one whose sweeter nature brought him back to his better self; a place whence the din of battle was shut out; where he had time for rest and spiritual reparation; where a woman's love and gentleness and tender thought and unselfish care helped and refreshed him, and made him feel that the prize was worth the struggle, that the home was worth the fight to keep it. And surely it was not asking too much of women that they should be beautiful and tender to the men whose whole life out of doors was one of work for them—of vigorous toil that they might be kept in safety and luxury. But to the advanced woman it seems so; consequently the home as a place of rest for the man is becoming daily more rare. Soon, it seems to us, there will be no such thing as the old-fashioned home left in England. Women are swarming out at all doors; running hither and thither among the men; clamouring for arms that they may enter into the fray with them; anxious to lay aside their tenderness, their modesty, their womanliness, that they may become hard and fierce and self-asserting like them; thinking it a far higher thing to leave the home and the family to take care of themselves, or under the care of some incompetent hireling, while they enter on the manly professions and make themselves the rivals of their husbands and brothers.
Once it was considered an essential of womanliness that a woman should be a good house-mistress, a judicious dispenser of the income, a careful guide to her servants, a clever manager generally. Now practical housekeeping is a degradation; and the free soul which disdains the details of housekeeping yearns for the intellectual employment of an actuary, of a law clerk, of a banker's clerk. Making pills is held to be a nobler employment than making puddings; while, to distinguish between the merits of Egyptians and Mexicans, the Turkish loan and the Spanish, is considered a greater exercise of mind than to know fresh salmon from stale and how to lay in household stores with judgment. But the last is just as important as the first, and even more so; for the occasional pill, however valuable, is not so valuable as the daily pudding, and not all the accumulations made by lucky speculation are of any use if the house-bag which holds them has a hole in it.
Once women thought it no ill compliment that they should be considered the depositaries of the highest moral sentiments. If they were not held the wiser nor the more logical of the two sections of the human race, they were held the more religious, the more angelic, the better taught of God, and the nearer to the way of grace. Now they repudiate the assumption as an insult, and call that the sign of their humiliation which was once their distinguishing glory. They do not want to be patient, self-sacrifice is only a euphemism for slavish submission to manly tyranny; the quiet peace of home is miserable monotony; and though they have not come to the length of renouncing the Christian virtues theoretically, their theory makes but weak practice, and the womanliness integral to Christianity is by no means the rule of life of modern womanhood. But the oddest part of the present odd state of things is the curious blindness of women to what is most beautiful in themselves. Granting even that the world has turned so far upside down that the one sex does not care to please the other, still, there is a good of itself in beauty, which some of our modern women seem to overlook. And of all kinds of beauty that which is included in what we mean by womanliness is the greatest and the most beautiful.
A womanly woman has neither vanity nor hardness. She may be pretty—most likely she is—and she may know it; for, not being a fool, she cannot help seeing it when she looks at herself in the glass; but knowing the fact is not being conscious of the possession, and a pretty woman, if of the right ring, is not vain, though she prizes her beauty as she ought. And she is as little hard as vain. Her soul is not given up to ribbons, but neither is she indifferent to externals, dress among them. She knows that part of her natural mission is to please and be charming, and she knows that dress sets her off, and that men feel more enthusiastically towards her when she is looking fresh and pretty than when she is a dowdy and a fright. And, being womanly, she likes the admiration of men, and thinks their love a better thing than their indifference. If she likes men she loves children, and never shunts them as nuisances, nor frets when forced to have them about her. She knows that she was designed by the needs of the race and the law of nature to be a mother; sent into the world for that purpose mainly; and she knows that rational maternity means more than simply giving life and then leaving it to others to preserve it. She has no newfangled notions about the animal character of motherhood, nor about the degrading character of housekeeping. On the contrary, she thinks a populous and happy nursery one of the greatest blessings of her state; and she puts her pride in the perfect ordering, the exquisite arrangements, the comfort, thoughtfulness and beauty of her house. She is not above her métier as a woman; and she does not want to ape the manliness she can never possess.
She has always been taught that, as there are certain manly virtues, so are there certain feminine ones; and that she is the most womanly among women who has those virtues in greatest abundance and in the highest perfection. She has taken it to heart that patience, self-sacrifice, tenderness, quietness, with some others, of which modesty is one, are the virtues more especially feminine; just as courage, justice, fortitude, and the like, belong to men.
Passionate ambition, virile energy, the love of strong excitement, self-assertion, fierceness, an undisciplined temper, are all qualities which detract from her ideal of womanliness, and which make her less beautiful than she was meant to be. Consequently she has cultivated all the meek and tender affections, all the unselfishness and thought for others which have hitherto been the distinctive property of her sex, by the exercise of which they have done their best work and earned their highest place. She thinks it no degradation that she should take pains to please, to soothe, to comfort the man who, all day long, has been doing irksome work that her home may be beautiful and her life at ease. She does not think it incumbent on her, as a woman of spirit, to fly out at an impatient word; to answer back a momentary irritation with defiance; to give back a Roland to his Oliver. Her womanliness inclines her to loving forbearance, to patience under difficulties, to unwearied cheerfulness under such portion of the inevitable burden as may have been laid on her. She does not hold herself predestined by nature to receive only the best of everything, and deem herself affronted where her own especial cross is bound on her shoulders. Rather, she understands that she too must take the rough with the smooth; but that, as her husband's way in life is rougher than hers, his trials are greater, his burden is heavier, it is her duty—and her privilege—to help him all she can with her tenderness and her love; and to give back to him at home, if in a different form, some of the care he has expended while abroad to make her path smooth.
In a word, the womanly woman whom we all once loved and in whom we have still a kind of traditional belief, is she who regards the wishes of men as of some weight in female action; who holds to love rather than opposition; to reverence, not defiance; who takes more pride in the husband's fame than in her own; who glories in the protection of his name, and in her state as wife; who feels the honour given to her as wife and matron far dearer than any she may earn herself by personal prowess; and who believes in her consecration as a helpmeet for man, not in a rivalry which a few generations will ripen into a coarse and bitter enmity.