We have, then, in the book, a thorough statement, both of the shortcomings of women themselves, and of the wrongs which they in turn suffer from society. The cause of the weak against the strong is advanced with sound and rational argument. We will not say that a thoughtful reader of to-day will indorse every word of this remarkable treatise. Its fervor here and there runs into vague enthusiasm, and much is asserted about souls and their future which thinkers of the present day do not so confidently assume to know.
The extent of Margaret's reading is shown in her command of historical and mythical illustration. Her beloved Greeks furnish her with some portraits of ideal men in relation with ideal women. As becomes a champion, she knows the friends and the enemies of the cause which she makes her own. Here, for example, is a fine discrimination:—
"The spiritual tendency is toward the elevation of woman, but the intellectual, by itself, is not so. Plato sometimes seems penetrated by that high idea of love which considers man and woman as the twofold expression of one thought. But then again Plato, the man of intellect, treats woman in the republic as property, and in the[154] "Timæus" says that man, if he misuse the privileges of one life, shall be degraded into the form of a woman."
Margaret mentions among the women whom she considered helpers and favorers of the new womanhood, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs. Jameson, and our own Miss Sedgwick. Among the writers of the other sex, whose theories point to the same end, she speaks of Swedenborg, Fourier, and Goethe. The first-named comes to this through his mystical appreciation of spiritual life; the second, by his systematic distribution of gifts and opportunities according to the principles of ideal justice. The world-wise Goethe everywhere recognizes the presence and significance of the feminine principle; and, after treating with tenderness and reverence its frailest as well as its finest impersonations, lays the seal of all attraction in the lap of the "eternal womanly."
Nearer at hand, and in the intimacy of personal intercourse, Margaret found a noble friend to her cause.
"The late Dr. Channing, whose enlarged and religious nature shared every onward impulse of his time, though his thoughts followed his wishes with a deliberative caution which belonged to his habits and temperament, was greatly interested in these expectations for women. He[155] regarded them as souls, each of which had a destiny of its own, incalculable to other minds, and whose leading it must follow, guided by the light of a private conscience."
She tells us that the Doctor's delicate and fastidious taste was not shocked by Angelina Grimké's appearance in public, and that he fully indorsed Mrs. Jameson's defence of her sex "in a way from which women usually shrink, because, if they express themselves on such subjects with sufficient force and clearness to do any good, they are exposed to assaults whose vulgarity makes them painful."
Margaret ends her treatise with a synopsis of her humanitarian creed, of which we can here give only enough to show its general scope and tenor. Here is the substance of it, mostly in her own words:—
Man is a being of twofold relations,—to nature beneath and intelligences above him. The earth is his school, God his object, life and thought his means of attaining it.
The growth of man is twofold,—masculine and feminine. These terms, for Margaret, represent other qualities, to wit, Energy and Harmony, Power and Beauty, Intellect and Love.