[4]. Religious Instruction of the Negroes. Savannah, 1842, pp. 208–211.
I must say that the Rev. Mr. Jones’s preaching seems to me precisely as good as Dr. ——’s, and that a sensible woman ought to be as much influenced by the one as was Frederick Douglass by the other—that is, not at all. Let the preacher try “subordination” himself, and see how he likes it. The beauty of service, such as Jesus praised, lay in the willingness of the service: a service that is serfdom loses all beauty, whether rendered by man or by woman. My objection to separate schools and colleges for women is, that they are too apt to end in such instructions as this.
XIX.
“CELERY AND CHERUBS.”
There was once a real or imaginary old lady who had got the metaphor of Scylla and Charybdis a little confused. Wishing to describe a perplexing situation, this lady said,—
“You see, my dear, she was between Celery on one side and Cherubs on the other! You know about Celery and Cherubs, don’t you? They was two rocks somewhere; and if you didn’t hit one, you was pretty sure to run smack on the other.”
This describes, as a clever writer in the New York Tribune declares, the present condition of women who “agitate.” Their Celery and Cherubs are tears and temper.
It is a good hit, and we may well make a note of it. It is the danger of all reformers, that they will vibrate between discouragement and anger. When things go wrong, what is it one’s impulse to do? To be cast down, or to be stirred up; to wring one’s hands, or clench one’s fists,—in short, tears or temper.
“Mother,” said a resolute little girl of my acquaintance, “if the dinner was all spoiled, I wouldn’t sit down, and cry! I’d say, ‘Hang it!’” This cherub preferred the alternative of temper, on days when the celery turned out badly. Probably her mother was addicted to the other practice, and exhibited the tears.
But as this alternative is found to exist for both sexes, and on all occasions, why charge it especially on the woman-suffrage movement? Men are certainly as much given to ill temper as women; and, if they are less inclined to tears, they make it up in sulks, which are just as bad. Nicholas Nickleby, when the pump was frozen, was advised by Mr. Squeers to “content himself with a dry polish;” and so there is a kind of dry despair into which men fall, which is quite as forlorn as any tears of women. How many a man has doubtless wished at such times that the pump of his lachrymal glands could only thaw out, and he could give his emotions something more than a “dry polish”! The unspeakable comfort some women feel in sitting for ten minutes with a handkerchief over their eyes! The freshness, the heartiness, the new life visible in them, when the crying is done, and the handkerchief comes down again!
And, indeed, this simple statement brings us to the real truth, which should have been more clearly seen by the writer who tells this story. She is wrong in saying, “It is urged that men and women stand on an equality, are exactly alike.” Many of us urge the “equality:” very few of us urge the “exactly alike.” An apple and an orange, a potato and a tomato, a rose and a lily, the Episcopal and the Presbyterian churches, Oxford and Cambridge, Yale and Harvard,—we may surely grant equality in each case, without being so exceedingly foolish as to go on and say that they are exactly alike.