Increasing Personal Efficiency

by Russell H. Conwell

In speaking of the time when perfect manhood and perfect womanhood has come, Tennyson says in "The Princess":

Yet in the long years liker must they grow:
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind.

Home is the true sphere for woman; her best work for humanity has always been done there, or has had its first impulse from within those four walls. It was home with all its duties that made the Roman matron Cornelia the type of the lofty woman of the world and the worthy mother. While it endowed her with the power to raise two sons as worthy as any known to history, who sacrificed their lives in defense of the Roman poor, it also endowed her with courage to say to the second of her sons when he was leaving her for the battle which brought his death, "My son, see that thou returnest with thy shield or on it." Napoleon claimed that it was the women of France who caused the loss at Waterloo, not its men.

"Man's intellect is for speculation and invention, and his energy is for just war and just conquest; woman's intellect is for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision; her energy is not for battle, but for rule." Apparently relying upon man's magnanimity not to resent her abdicating her home, woman's exigencies—and perhaps her ambitions—have forced her more and more during the past fifty years into man's domains of speculation and energy—perhaps into some war and some conquest. The ever-increasing demand for her in these man-realms which she has invaded or into which she has intruded herself is abundant evidence that she has creditably acquitted herself in the betterment of business, education, and literature, as well as in the numberless things which she has invented to add beauty and comfort to the home, and to remove much of the bitter drudgery from house and office, and to promote the health and happiness of millions. All these helps she has given, even if she has undoubtedly lost some of the graces which have always made so lovable the woman of whom Andromache, Portia, and Cordelia are but types.

Although matrimony and motherhood were the first conditions of women and only conditions that poets sing about and philosophers write about, and although these are still the conditions where she is doing her largest and noblest work in humanizing, yet her proper sphere is as man's, wherever she can live nobly and work nobly. How many myriads in this country alone are drudging or almost drudging in shops and offices to relieve the too stern pressure of pain or poverty from some one who is dear to them, yet are doing it unselfishly and uncomplainingly! A young woman lately told me that she had for several years been employed to interview women applicants for positions; that during these years she had interviewed scores of women daily, and had learned much of their private lives; that although the majority were working partly or entirely to maintain others, yet had she never heard one complaint of the sacrifices this service involved. Hundreds of other women, like George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and Helen Hunt will long continue to bring pleasure and profit to millions through their writings.

It is women, too, whose inventions have not only lightened domestic work and brightened the home, but also have so far removed the modern schoolroom from the little red schoolhouse of long ago; and it is women who have improved the books and the studies for children. They seem to have entered almost every activity outside of the home, and their finer powers of observation, aided by their innate love of the beautiful and the practicality they have learned while in service, seem mainly to have bettered conditions for wage-earners as well as for home and childhood. Think of the thousands upon thousands in this land whose work with the smaller children of the school could never be so well done by men! Think of the service daily rendered by women outside the home, and picture the confusion that would now arise if all these remained at home, even for one week!

As a class, women do not speak so well as men, but they excel him as a talker. In truth it is less difficult for them to talk little, than to talk well. Somebody has said that there is nothing a woman cannot endure if she can only talk. It is the woman who is ordained to teach talking to infancy. Those who see short distances see clearly, which probably accounts for woman's being able to see into and through character so much better than men. A man admires a woman who is worthy of admiration. As dignity is a man's quality, loveliness is a woman's; her heart is love's favorite seat; women who are loyal to their womanhood can ever influence the gnarliest hearts. They go farther in love than men, but men go farther in friendship than women. Women mourn for the lost love, says Dr. Brinton, men mourn for the lost loved-one. A woman's love consoles; a man's friendship supports. What a real man most desires in a woman is womanhood. As every woman despises a womanish man, so every man despises a mannish woman.

Men are more sincere with the women of most culture, although mere brain-women never please them so much as heart-women. Men feel that it is the exceptional woman who should have exceptional rights; but they scorn women whose soul has shrunk into mere intellect, and a godless woman is a supreme horror to them. When to her womanly attributes she adds the lady's attributes of veracity, delicate honor, deference, and refinement, she becomes a high school of politeness for all who know her. "True women," says Charles Reade, "are not too high to use their arms, nor too low to cultivate their minds," but Hamerton believes that her greatest negative quality is, that she does not of her own force push forward intellectually; that she needs watchful masculine influence for this. It is claimed that single women are mainly best comforters, best sympathizers, best nurses, best companions.

Dean Swift says: "So many marriages prove unhappy because so many young women spend their time in making nets, not in making cages." Perhaps this is why they say that, in choosing a wife, the ear is a safer guide than the eye. The gifts a gentlewoman seeks are packed and locked up in a manly heart. Without a woman's love, a man's soul is without its garden. He is happiest in marriage who selects as his wife the woman he would have chosen as his bosom-companion, a happy marriage demands a soul-mate as for as a house-mate or a yoke-mate. Spalding says that it is doubtful whether a woman should ever marry who cannot sing and does not love poetry. The conceptions of a wife differ. When the Celt married, he put necklace and bracelets upon his wife; when the Teuton married, he gave his wife a horse, an ox, a spear, and a shield. A true wife delights both sense and soul; with her, a man unfolds a mine of gold. Like a good wine, the happiest marriages take years to attain perfection, and Hamerton says that marriage is a long, slow intergrowth, like that of two trees closely planted in a forest. The marriage of a deaf man and a blind woman is always happy; but this does not imply that conjugal happiness is attained only under these conditions. The greatest merit of many a man is his wife, but no real woman ever wears her husband as her appendage.

Maternity is the loveliest word in the language, and every worthy mother is an aristocrat. Mothers are the chief requisites of all educational systems, and the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. The home has always been the best school in the world, and nothing else that is known to education can ever supersede it. The cradle is the first room in the school of life, and what is learned there lasts to the grave. Dearth of real mothers is responsible for dearth of real education. Each boy and each man is what his mother has made him, and every worthy mother rears her children to stand upon their own two feet, and to do without her.