Women of America / Woman: In all ages and in all countries Vol. 10 (of 10)

by John Ruse Larus

The surrender of Johnston's army, following hard upon that of Lee's forces, ended the struggle, and the South was left to face the consciousness and consequences of defeat. On none of its children did the blow fall with such stunning force as upon its daughters. That the South could not be conquered, that it must attain its independence, that God fought its battles, formed the creed of every Southern woman, and even when the end was in sight to the vision of Lee and Johnston, still fighting desperately as their duty rather than in any hope, the women refused to believe in such a possibility. But the possibility became a certainty, and Rachel could do nothing but mourn for her children and turn with what courage she might to face conditions full of threat of the worst; nor even here did her courage falter, though her beliefs had proved but broken reeds and her hopes had been swept away, leaving nothing in their place. The South was a land of mourning, not of death only, but of failure of a beloved and trusted cause. Meanwhile, the North was a land of rejoicing; and her women, like all their sex, were immoderate in their triumph, and did not consider, as had the soldiers of the victorious armies, the feelings of those who had fought so long and well. But there was scant opportunity for the display of triumph; for the terrible blow which fell upon the whole country, South as well as North, when Lincoln died under the hand of the assassin, changed joy into mourning, and made of a victorious people one that tasted all the bitterness of sorrow. Heavier calamity never visited this land; and its effects upon the feeling of our womanhood were almost as far-reaching and distressing as its political results. For the women of the South, sore in defeat and unjustly holding Lincoln responsible for the sorrows that had come upon them, openly rejoiced in his taking-off, and forgot their womanhood in their exultation over the foul crime. It was the spirit that awoke at John Brown's insurrection over again, though differently directed; and it awakened a natural response in the North, which saw in the exaltation of murder as the judgment of God a perversity and even criminality of thought which could spring only from innate baseness. Again there was misunderstanding; for the women of the South, blinded by their prejudices and sufferings to the true character and greatness of the dead man, held him in detestation and rejoiced over his death as that of a hated foe, while they of the North, listening to the cry of exultation that arose from their Southern sisters and unmindful of the sources,--however false in themselves, yet bearing some excuse, if only of madness,--which led to that demonstration of joy, naturally held that Southern women were hardly better than human fiends and utterly unworthy of the guise of womanhood.

The trial of those implicated in the assassination of Lincoln gave a name to be remembered in the annals of American women, though the record be of the saddest. That Mrs. Surratt was legally guilty of complicity in the murder of the martyred president is at least doubtful; it may even be questioned if she were guilty of foreseeing the crime, her part in the conspiracy most probably ending with the plan of abduction which was the forerunner of the murder. None the less, she suffered a shameful death, the passions of the time being too strong for the cooler voice of justice to be heard; and again was enacted, in minor form, the national drama that followed upon the insurrection of John Brown. The women of the South, if they did not go to the lengths of their Northern sisters on the former occasion, looked upon Mrs. Surratt in the light of a martyr to their lost cause, and so expressed themselves with a bitterness and forgetfulness of the true nature of the case which was a denial of their best attributes as women; and the Northern woman, holding Mrs. Surratt to be a very devil of malignity and criminality, could not patiently hear her name spoken with aught but horror and detestation. So the war ended, as it began, in misunderstanding, and, therefore, the bitterest of hatred between the two sections of a land which was at the end of the struggle no more united than at the beginning.

It is pleasant to turn from these manifestations of all that was worst in American womanhood to the consideration of woman's social conditions at the time of the expiration of the war. Even during the period of strife there had been uplifted a new voice from the women of our land, though as yet that voice was too feeble and too drowned in the clash of battle to attract much attention. One of the expressions of this new spirit which had arisen in at least a portion of our women is worthy of note as being in some sense a pioneer. In 1864 there was issued a book called Woman and Her Era, by Eliza W. Farnham. The object of the author was to demonstrate the superiority of women over men: not superiority in comparative sense or even for certain ends, but absolute and unimpeachable. The leading argument of the book, as it appeared in syllogistic form and in all its wonders of capital letters, was as follows: "Life is exalted in proportion to the Organic and Functional Complexity; Woman's Organism is more Complex and her Totality of Function larger than those of any other being inhabiting our earth; Therefore her position in the Scale of Life is the most exalted--the Sovereign one." The minor proposition was supported by arguments which belong to the lecture room of the anatomist. Passing in silence over that which the lady calls the "Organic Argument," a little of that which she terms the "Religious Argument,--wherefore, is not clear,--may be quoted with a view to entertainment if not to profit:

"Organic Superiority is in itself proof positive of Super Organic Superiority.... Life is the most advanced which employs, in the service of the greatest number of powers, the most complex mechanism for the End of Use. We are therefore prepared to find in it" [the feminine structure] "the embodiment of a larger number of powers and higher aims in its Use... a deeper feeling for the Ends of Use, a more abiding faith in and loyalty to Development, as the one aim that makes life worthy of acceptance and sweet in its passing taste, and on the other hand to see that its failure herein is more fatal and destructive than it is in the masculine life.... The feminine includes the masculine, transcending it in all directions."

This is the synopsis of the major part of the argument, given in the lady's own words; but her conclusion has a more familiar sound to our ears. Here it is:

"The question of Rights settles itself in the true statement of Capacities. Rights are narrowest where Capacities are fewest broadest where they are the most numerous.... It is plain, then, as between masculine and feminine, where the most expanded circle of Rights will be found; and equally plain the absurdity of man, the narrower in Capacities, assuming to define the sphere of Rights for Woman, the broader."

Such was the trumpet-blast sent out by Miss Eliza Farnham, one of the pioneers of the movement which took for its slogan her own cry of "Women's Rights." The work made no stir and has long since passed to the limbo of forgotten books, but it was undeniably suggestive and seems worthy of being rescued, at least in name and purpose, from the oblivion into which it passed. Absorbed in nearer if not weightier questions, the women of that day gave scant welcome to the theories of Miss Farnham; but the appearance of those theories, even if in rudimentary form, was ominous, though the omen was not recognized. It was one of the first guns of a struggle compared with which even the war which was then raging was tame and half-hearted, and of which the end is not yet; perhaps never will be.

For the time, however, the women of our land were concerned with national rather than sexual questions. Indeed, the physiological argument never took root among the theories of women when they discussed their place in the scheme of creation; but the mental argument, the position that women were in all mental attributes equal to men and therefore should be possessed of equal rights, proved to be seed sown in good ground. Time was needed for its development into the grain of general or even partial acceptance; but it grew and was even then growing, even if not directly under the fostering of the author of Woman and Her Era.

Already there had been more than whispers of such theories. As is usually the case, the first movements were clumsy and ill-directed and were too radical to hope for general popularity even among those whom they were intended to benefit. There had been among certain disgruntled women a movement toward "dress reform"--not, however, having as its end aesthetic or even sanitary considerations, but merely an assertion, of strange and even ridiculous nature, of equality with the men. Even before Miss Farnham had uttered her call to battle there had come into existence those strange bifurcated garments called "bloomers," though their adoption had been limited to very few indeed among the women of our land. Moreover, nearly fifteen years prior to the appearance of Miss Farnham's book, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had signed a summons to the first "Woman's Rights" convention, which was held at the home of Mrs. Stanton, at Seneca Falls, New York. On this occasion was made the first formal claim for suffrage on the part of women; but the movement accomplished little and was rather suggestive than effective.

The female suffragists had accomplished nothing at this time; they had not even influenced the general thought of their sex, and such works as that of Miss Farnham--the most radical and yet representative in its theories and therefore selected as typical--were as few as ineffective. The failure of the movement to spread beyond a few rabid enthusiasts was doubtless because of its radicalness of theory; it was not content, being in this respect like almost all new movements, to make gradual progress, but must upset established institutions, both domestic and political, at a blow. Therefore it won from all sensible people either ridicule or neglect; it made no more real headway than had the sporadic outbursts of misdirected religious enthusiasm in older times, which indeed it greatly resembled in its methods and propagandists. Its central theory was so overlaid by cumbering cloaks of absurdity that, whatever might be its real attractions and merits if seen stripped of its fantastic garb, it could but be repugnant in present guise to all true womanhood; it was sent forth in "bloomers," as it were, and was thus made a figure of fun and deprived of the dignity which it might have held had its dress been simple and dignified. Yet it was portentous, though the portent was not of the thing that was seen but of that which was to be born of it.