Records of Later Life

by Fanny Kemble

I think, however, it will please you to hear that I am well and happy, and that my whole state of life and being has assumed a placid, tranquil, serene, and even course, which, after the violent excitements of my last few years, is both agreeable and wholesome. I should think, ever since my coming out on the stage, I must have lived pretty much at the rate of three years in every one—I mean in point of physical exertion and exhaustion. The season of my repose is, however, arrived, and it seems almost difficult to imagine that, after beginning life in such a tumult of action and excitement, the remainder of my years is lying stretched before me, like a level, peaceful landscape, through which I shall saunter leisurely towards my grave. This is the pleasant probable future: God only knows what changes and chances may sweep across the smiling prospect, but at present, according to the calculations of mere human foresight, none are likely to arise. As I write these words, I do bethink me of one quarter from which our present prosperous and peaceful existence might receive a shock—the South. The family into which I have married are large slaveholders; our present and future fortune depend greatly upon extensive plantations in Georgia. But the experience of every day, besides our faith in the great justice of God, forbids dependence on the duration of the mighty abuse by which one race of men is held in abject physical and mental slavery by another. As for me, though the toilsome earning of my daily bread were to be my lot again to-morrow, I should rejoice with unspeakable thankfulness that we had not to answer for what I consider so grievous a sin against humanity.

I believe many years will not pass before this cry ceases to go up from earth to heaven. The power of opinion is working silently and strongly in the hearts of men; the majority of people in the North of this country are opposed to the theory of slavery, though they tolerate its practice in the South: and though the natural selfishness with which men cling to their interests is only at present increasing the vigilance of the planters in guarding their property and securing their prey, it is a property which is crumbling under their feet, and a prey which is escaping from their grasp; and perhaps, before many years are gone by, the black population of the South will be free, and we comparatively poor people—Amen! with all my heart....

I had hoped to revisit England before the winter, ... but this cannot be, and I shall certainly not see England this year, if ever again.... I think women in England are gradually being done justice to, and many sources of goodness, usefulness, and happiness, that have hitherto been sealed, are opened to them now, by a truer and more generous public feeling, and more enlightened views of education.

I saw a good deal of Harriet Martineau, and liked her very much indeed, in spite of her radicalism. She is gone to the South, where I think she cannot fail to do some good, if only in giving another impulse to the stone that already topples on the brink—I mean in that miserable matter of slavery.

Yours very truly,

F. A. B.

CLAIMS OF WOMEN. [No more striking instance can be given of the rapidity of movement, if not of progress, of American public opinion, than the so-called "Woman's Rights" question. When these letters were written, scarcely a whisper had made itself heard upon this and its relative subjects: the "Female Suffrage" was neither demanded nor desired; Margaret Fuller had not made public her views upon the condition of "Woman in the Nineteenth Century"; the different legislatures of the different States had not found it expedient to enact statutes securing to married women the independent use of their own property, and women's legal disabilities were, in every respect, much the same in the United States as in the mother country. Now, however, so great and rapid has been the change of public opinion in this direction in America, that in some of the States married women may not only possess and inherit property over which their husbands have no control, but their personal earnings have been so secured to them that neither their husbands nor their husbands' creditors can touch them; while at the same time, strange to say, their husbands are still liable for their support, and answerable for any debts they may contract, and men must pay these independent ladies' milliners' bills, if all these additional rights have not brought with them some additional sense of justice, honesty, and old-fashioned right and wrong.

This amazing consideration for the property claims of women is not, however, without its possible advantages for the magnanimous sex bestowing it; and unprincipled speculators, gamblers, in pursuits calling themselves business, but in reality mere games of chance, may now secure themselves from the ruin they deserve, and have incurred, by settling upon their wives large sums of money, or estates, which, by virtue of the women's independent legal tenure of property, effectually enable their husbands to baffle the claims of their creditors. Every use has its abuse. The melancholy process of divorce, by which an insupportable yoke may be dissolved with the sanction of the law, is achieved in America with a facility and upon grounds inadmissible for that purpose in England. Pennsylvania has long followed the German practice in this particular, allowing divorce, in cases of non-cohabitation for a space of two years, to either party claiming it upon those grounds; in some of the Western States the ease with which divorces are obtained is untrammeled by any condition but that of a sufficient term of residence, often a very brief one, within the State jurisdiction.

Women lecture upon all imaginable subjects, and are listened to, whether treating of the right of their sex to the franchise, or the more unapproachable theme of its degraded misery in the public prostitution legally practiced in all the cities of this great New World, or the frantic vagaries of their theory of so-called Free Love. They are professors in colleges, practicing physicians; not yet, I believe, ordained clergywomen (the Quakers admit the female right to preach without the ceremony of laying on of hands), or admitted members of the bar; but it is difficult to imagine society existing at all under more absolute conditions of freedom for its female members than the women of the United States now enjoy. It is a pity that the use sometimes made of so many privileges forms a powerful argument to reasonable people in other countries against their possession.[3]]

[3] I have learned since writing the above that in some of the Western States and cities—among others, I believe, Chicago—women are now practicing lawyers. A "legal lady" made at one time, I know not how successfully, an attempt to become a received member of the profession in Washington. In this, as in all other matters, the several States exercise uncontrolled jurisdiction within their own borders, and the Western States are naturally inclined to favor by legislation all attempts of this description; they are essentially the "New World." In the Eastern States European traditions still influence opinion, and women are not yet admitted members of the New York bar.