Vesper Talks to Girls

by Laura A. Knott

Within the last few years many conventional ideas regarding woman’s sphere have been swept away and still others are disappearing. While the discussion is going on, sometimes with heat and bitterness, but sometimes calmly and sanely, a generation of girls is growing up, each one of whom is vitally concerned. In what sort of a world are these girls soon to take their places? To what extent are the duties and responsibilities of woman to be different from what they have been? The girl of to-day, who is to be the woman of to-morrow, should come into this new world open-eyed and intelligent.

Only a few hundred years ago philosophers were seriously debating the question whether or not women have souls. With the passing of the centuries an attitude of mind so extraordinary was no longer possible, but other ideas, which are not much less amazing in the light of to-day, long persisted.

The literature of any age reflects current public opinion, and if we would know how women were regarded and what qualities were thought most desirable in them, all we need do is read the literature of that period. Euripides reflects Greek sentiment when he makes Iphigenia say to Achilles, “Better a thousand women should perish than one man cease to see the light.” The Latin motto, Bene vixit qui bene latuit (“She has lived well who has kept well concealed”), speaks eloquently of woman’s place in the days of the Roman Empire. In the metrical romances of the mediæval period, women seem to live only to grace a tournament or to furnish opportunity for a feat of chivalry on the part of some knight-errant. In Chaucer’s time such stories as that of Patient Griselda force us to the conclusion that she was the most highly esteemed woman who patiently endured the grossest injustice and the most cruel wrong. The weak and sentimental women of Fielding, Richardson, and other eighteenth-century novelists call forth our pity when we realize the purposeless lives they were expected to lead. We must not overlook the fact, however, that in every age there have been marked exceptions to the general rule. From the time of Deborah, or long before, each age has had its “new women,” its nonconformists, who insisted upon doing their own thinking. Most of Shakespeare’s heroines are of this type.

From time immemorial laws have rested heavily upon women. This is true of the Roman law, so just and fair in most respects. Woman was not a citizen with the rights and privileges of a citizen; she was in a state of perpetual tutelage. We do not, however, have to go back to Roman times to find unjust discrimination against women. In this country Connecticut was the first State to give women the power to make a will, which it did only one hundred years ago. It is not long since a law was enacted in Massachusetts giving women a legal right to their own clothing. It took a terrible tragedy only a few years ago, the killing of a number of innocent children by their half-crazed mother lest they fall into the hands of their unworthy father, to cause the Massachusetts Legislature to abolish the law which made the father the sole guardian of his children.

In those parts of the world where the Christian religion is little known, the progress of women has been even slower and beset with more obstacles than in Christendom. Indeed, the women of those countries must look to Christian lands for their salvation. Buddhism, the principal religion of Japan, teaches that woman’s only hope of heaven is that she may be reincarnated as a man. Confucius, the founder of the religion that prevails in China, taught that ten daughters do not equal the value of one son. The woman of Brahminic faith is forbidden to read the scriptures or to offer prayer in her own right. We all know something of the horror of the suttee in India, which, until prohibited by English law, permitted a widow to be sacrificed on her husband’s funeral pyre. The Moslem man prays, “O God, I thank thee that thou hast not made me a woman,” and the Koran teaches that strict obedience to her husband is the only condition upon which a woman can be saved.

The fact that so few women have attained a supreme place in any art or profession is often brought forward to prove the natural inferiority of women. When we recall how few men attain the first rank in spite of the honors and rewards showered by an approving world upon such a man, and when we remember that until recently it was considered hardly respectable for a woman to write a book, to paint a picture, or even to publish music, the surprising thing is that so many women have defied public opinion and have given expression to the genius that was in them. George Eliot wrote under the name of a man in order to get a hearing. The rich poetic gifts of Dorothy Wordsworth largely increased the fame of her illustrious brother. No one knows how many of Felix Mendelssohn’s beautiful “Songs without Words” were the work of his sister Fanny, as we are told by his recent biographers. Caroline Herschel was another gifted sister whose labors helped bring honor and fame to her brother, the great astronomer. If any of these women had lived in the twentieth century, the world would have paid them high honor for the work of their gifted minds.

The last half of the nineteenth century brought educational opportunity to women and the inevitable result followed: they began to reason and hence to ask their share of things, and it looks as if they would not stop until they get it. What are they asking? That all artificial barriers to their freedom be removed, nothing more. So far as nature has created barriers for them and placed limitations upon them, these barriers and limitations should be respected, must be respected. With these, reasonable women have no quarrel. It is the artificially made barriers they are determined to remove. The Chinese woman is realizing that she has burdens sufficiently heavy to bear without adding that of an artificial deformity. Life will not be any too easy for the feminine half of the race even when they have obtained every right and every opportunity to which they have a claim.

One of the things which women asked in vain for many years was the privilege of higher educational opportunity. One hundred years ago there was not a single college in our country which opened its doors to women. All the arguments which are put forward against the enfranchisement of women to-day were put forward yesterday against the extension of their educational opportunities. Serious-minded and earnest men—and women, too—argued that women had no use for the higher education; that they were not capable of receiving it, and that if some, by chance, were equal to it intellectually, they were not physically. The final and seemingly unanswerable argument was that education would unfit women for the sacred duties of the home. Now that our colleges are graduating more than ten thousand young women every year who have not lost their health and who make better wives and mothers because of their wider horizon and broader interests, no one remembers these foolish fears.

Another privilege which women have been seeking for many years is the opportunity to work; that is, they have been asking that there be no artificial barriers between them and the work they want to do. The world is yielding them this privilege, though slowly and somewhat grudgingly. We are still told occasionally that woman is out of her place whenever she seeks remunerative employment outside of the home. It makes little difference, however, who approves and who disapproves. To put things back to where they were one hundred years ago would be no less difficult than to turn back Niagara River. Statistics tell us that there are at present over eight million women in this country engaged in gainful occupations.

Perhaps you ask, But why do women rush out into the world to find work? Why can we not go back to the good old times when all women found shelter and safety within the walls of the home? The answer to this question is a very complex one. More than fifty years ago Harriet Martineau wrote of conditions in England, “A social organization framed for a community of which half stayed at home while the other half went out to work cannot answer the purposes of a society of which a quarter remains at home while three quarters go out to work. With this new condition of affairs, new duties and new views must be adopted.”