In this great spinster class, dominated by such a voice, we may physiologically expect to find an excess of the neurotic altruistic type, women sickened and extremists, because their nature was unexpressed, unbalanced, and astray. They found a positive joy in self-negation and self-sacrifice, and evidenced in the perturbations and struggles of family life a patience, a dumb endurance, which the humanity about them, and even that of our later day, could not comprehend, and commonly translated into apathy or unsensitiveness. The legendary fervor and devotion of the saints of other days pale before their self-denying discipline.
But instead of gaining, as in the mediæval faith, the applause of contemporaries, and, as in those earlier days, inciting veneration and enthusiasm as a “holy person,” the modern sister lived in her small world very generally an upper servant in a married brother’s or sister’s family. Ibsen’s Pillar of Society, Karsten Bernick, in speaking of the self-effacing Martha, voices in our time the then prevailing sentiment, “You don’t suppose I let her want for anything. Oh, no; I think I may say I am a good brother. Of course, she lives with us and eats at our table; her salary is quite enough for her dress, and—what can a single woman want more?... You know, in a large house like ours, it is always well to have some steady-going person like her whom one can put to anything that may turn up.”
Not such estimates alone, but this woman heard reference to herself in many phrases turning upon her chastity. Her very classification in the current vernacular was based upon her condition of sex. And at last she witnessed for her class an economic designation, the essence of vulgarity and the consummation of insolence—“superfluous women;” that is, “unnecessary from being in excess of what is needed,” women who had not taken husbands, or had lived apart from men. The phrase recalls the use of the word “female”—meaning, “for thy more sweet understanding,” a woman—which grew in use with the Squire Westerns of the eighteenth century, and persisted even in decent mouths until Charles Lamb wrapped it in the cloth of gold of his essay on Modern Gallantry, and buried it forever from polite usage.
In another respect, also, this New England spinster grew into a being such as the world had not seen. It is difficult of explanation. Perhaps most easily said, it is this: she never by any motion or phrase suggested to a man her variation from him. All over the world women do this; unconsciously nearly always; in New England never. The expression of the woman has there been condemned as immodest, unwomanly, and with fierce invective; the expression of the man been lauded. Das Ewig-Weibliche must persist without confession of its existence. In the common conception, when among masculine comrades she should bear herself as a sexless sort of half-being, an hermaphroditic comrade, a weaker, unsexed creature, not markedly masculine, like her brother or the present golfing woman, and far from positively feminine.
All her ideals were masculine; that is, all concrete and human expression of an ideal life set before her was masculine. Her religion was wholly masculine, and God was always “He.” Her art in its later phases was at its height in the “Spectator” and “Tatler,” where the smirking belles who matched the bewigged beaux of Anne’s London are jeered at, and conviction is carried the woman reader that all her sex expressions are if not foul, fool, and sometimes both fool and foul.
In this non-recognition of a woman’s sex, its needs and expression in home and family life, and in the domination of masculine ideals, has been a loss of grace, facile touch in manner, vivacity, légèreté; in short, a want of clarity, delicacy, and feminine strength. To put the woman’s sex aside and suppress it was to emphasize spinster life—and increase it. It is this nullification of her sex traits that has led the world to say the New England woman is masculine, when the truth is she is most femininely feminine in everything but sex—where she is most femininely and self-effacingly it.
It is in this narrowness, this purity, simplicity, and sanctity, in this circumspection and misdirection, that we have the origin of the New England woman’s subjectivity, her unconscious self-consciousness, and that seeming hermaphroditic attitude that has attracted the attention of the world, caused its wonder, and led to its false judgment of her merit.
Social changes—a result of the Zeitgeist—within the last two generations have brought a broadening of the conception of the “sphere” of women. Puritan instincts have been dying. Rationalism has to a degree been taking their place. While, on the other hand,—one may say this quite apart from construing the galvanic twitchings of a revived mediævalism in ecclesiastic and other social affairs as real life—there have also come conceptions of the liberty and dignity of womanhood, independent or self-dependent, beyond those which prevailed in the nunnery world.
A popular feeling has been growing that a woman’s sphere is whatever she can do excellently. What effect this will have on social relations at large we cannot foresee. From such conditions another chivalry may spring! What irony of history if on New England soil!! Possibly, the custom that now pertains of paying women less than men for the same work, the habit in all businesses of giving women the drudging details,—necessary work, indeed, but that to which no reputation is affixed,—and giving to men the broader tasks in which there is contact with the world and the result of contact, growth, may ultimately react, just as out of injustice and brutalities centuries ago arose a chivalrous ideal and a knightly redresser.
The sparseness of wealth, the meagreness of material ideals, and the frugality, simplicity, and rusticity of New England life have never allowed a development of popular manners. Grace among the people has been interpreted theologically; never socially. Their geniality, like their sunshine, has always had a trace of the northeast wind—chilled by the Labrador current of their theology. Native wit has been put out by narrow duties. The conscience of their theology has been instinctively for segregation, never for social amalgamation. They are more solitary than gregarious.