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ON SOLITUDE
It is the custom to cry out against the lack of originality in woman; and it is quite true that those who have achieved it have first known the blessedness of solitude. It is the only way. It is difficult for the average woman to realize it, but she either takes too much from or gives too much to her friends. But the best and truest friendships are perhaps those which cannot stand the crucial test of a perpetual companionship. Just because one happens to know the power of giving out much, of feeling intensely, of being for the time so very much to those for whom she cares—precisely for this reason will she need at times to draw into herself, to go away, to be alone, to rest.
Especially is this true if those friends have the sympathetic temperament which takes its color partly from its surroundings. Your happiness, then, becomes partly theirs; they share in your anxiety, your sorrow, your depression—in everything, in fact, that belongs to you. In like manner they compel you to feel with them; and the result, perhaps, hardly recognized at the time, is to make you aware that you have been interested most intensely, that you have given out without intending it, something almost too intimate and too much your own to be so given.
Some of the bitterest lessons in life are learned through such intimacies. Sometimes we refuse to recognize those friends who take all and give nothing, until they have absorbed everything and we are left like a dry sponge to realize their unfaithfulness. But it is through such lessons that we come to know the chaff from the wheat and to realize the need of an inner strength which shall enable us to stand upon our own feet. Hence it is that even friends who know each other through and through, and who are congenial down to the very lightest mood, ought still to shun a life that will bring them into too close relationship and prevent their individual development.
Women have been slow to realize this. For generations women have been sheltered, protected and cared for until they have been contented to dwell in a state of contented babyhood. Think for an instant of a boy, surrounded from infancy with the influences that have enveloped girlhood. Keep him done up in cotton wool throughout childhood and youth, taught never to raise his voice for fear of being “unladylike,” never to assert his rights, never to be himself and to accept without question the decision and opinions of others on all topics outside the nursery. Repeat this experience with successive generations of boys, and where would your “superiority of man” be?
On the other hand, let your girls out into the sunlight and air, teach them the free use of muscles and mind, and reprove them not if, in the beginning, they are crude, and women will cease to be the complacent and gregarious beings they have been; they will cease to worship the fetish of Who is Who and What is What; they will cease to fear the awful and unblinking eye of Society and be ready to seek and find themselves.
Women are needed in all good work more to-day than ever before. Let us remember, then, the more we are in ourselves the more we can do for others. There is nothing greater in life, nothing greater in Christianity than this great principle of service and love for others. Kindliness, helpfulness, service; these three were never more needed than now. The great-hearted, sympathetic, charitable, brave, intelligent woman is needed everywhere, in the home as much, yes, more than in public service. It is hers to enlarge her own horizons and to lose her pettiness by loyal, intelligent service. The narrow, self-centered mother cannot do for her family what the mother does who possesses a trained and logical mind. It is not only the value of the moral judgment which suffers from a lack of privacy and individual freedom; it is the quality of the feminine mind itself which degenerates by overcrowding.
The hearthstone is no less sacred because intelligence reigns there; the touch of woman’s hand is no less tender because she studies Shakespeare and proposes measures for the beautifying of her town and the alleviation of the sufferings of its people; the press of baby fingers upon the mother’s brow will ever be dearer than the plaudits of the multitude.
But we should not forget that we need to have our horizons broadened. We need to accustom ourselves to larger views of life and of work. So long as our lives are bounded by our towns, or even our own States—so long are we neglecting our opportunities. Naturally, we are most interested in the things around us, and our own particular kind of work seems to us the greatest thing of the kind. But if we shut ourselves up in that, we cannot grow. We must be interested to know what others are doing, and if they are getting more out of life, or, more important yet, putting more into life, than we.