The old Hungarian women, when their country was invaded by the Turks, performed prodigies of valor; and now, among the predatory tribes of Illyria and Dalmatia, he who attempted to insult a girl, would find that she wore a dagger and pistol at her belt. But Christianity, which has done so much for woman—which, at a time when its pure maxims could produce nothing better, by reason of man’s own evils, brought forth the generous spirit of chivalry from the iron despotism of the middle ages—Christianity is removing the garlands from the bloody front of war, and teaching her sons and her daughters that evil must be “overcome with good.”
Women are apt to be more aristocratic than men; for the habits of their life compel attention to details, and consequently make them more observing of manners than of principles.
Where the Mohammedan religion prevails, man’s reason is taught to bow blindly to faith, and his affections have little freedom to seek their corresponding truth; in all such countries women are slaves.
At those periods when reason has run wild, and men have maintained that there was no such thing as unchangeable truth, but that every one made it, according to the state of his own will—at such times, there has always been a tendency to have men and women change places, that the latter might command armies and harangue senates, while men attended to domestic concerns. These doctrines were maintained by infidels of the French revolution, and by their modern disciple, Fanny Wright.
Many silly things have been written, and are now written, concerning the equality of the sexes; but that true and perfect companionship, which gives both man and woman complete freedom in their places, without a restless desire to go out of them, is as yet imperfectly understood. The time will come, when it will be seen that the moral and intellectual condition of woman must be, and ought to be, in exact correspondence with that of man, not only in its general aspect, but in its individual manifestations; and then it will be perceived that all this discussion about relative superiority, is as idle as a controversy to determine which is most important to the world, the light of the sun, or the warmth of the sun.
WOMEN IN SLAVE-HOLDING COUNTRIES.
A separate article is appropriated to this subject, because slavery everywhere produces nearly the same effects on character; but the story is briefly told, because the details of that system are alike discreditable to man and woman. A recent writer who defends slavery has said that in slave-holding countries “women are not beasts of burden.” This is a gallant phrase to apply to all those ladies who live in countries where the traffic in human beings is not introduced, like a plague-spot, into the social system; but the chief fault to be found with it is, that it is founded on the common mistake of leaving out of the estimate all those whose complexions are not perfectly white. In all slave-holding communities, colored women are emphatically “beasts of burden;” yet, under kindly influences, they are capable of the same moral and intellectual cultivation as other human beings.
One of the worst features of this polluting system is that female slaves are neither protected by law, or restrained by public opinion. Their masters own them as property, and have despotic control over their actions; and such is their degraded condition, that to be the mistress of a white man is an object of ambition rather than of shame. The same result would be produced upon any class of people under similar circumstances. They are taught from infancy that they have no character to gain or to lose; and their whole moral code consists in one maxim—obedience to the white men. The personal kindness of their masters, though founded on the most impure feelings, is likely to shelter them in some degree from harsh treatment, and to procure for them those articles of finery upon which all ignorant people place an inordinate value. The idea of obtaining money to purchase freedom is likewise a frequent incentive to immorality. It is not proposed to disgust the reader with a recapitulation of facts in proof of these remarks. It is sufficient to say that female virtue is a thing not even supposed to exist among slaves; and that when individual instances of it occur, it sometimes meets with severe castigation, and generally with contemptuous ridicule.