Common Sense About Women

by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Then there are the cases where indolence, or selfishness, or vanity, or the love of social excitement, in the woman, unfits her for home life. Here we come upon ground where perhaps woman is the greater sinner. It must be remembered, however, that against this must be balanced the neglect produced by club-life, or by the life of society-membership, in a man. A brilliant young married belle in London once told me that she was glad her husband was so fond of his club, for it amused him every night while she went to balls. “Married men do not go much into society here,” she said, “unless they are regular flirts,—which I do not think my husband would ever be, for he is very fond of me,—so he goes every night to his club, and gets home about the same time that I do. It is a very nice arrangement.” It was apparently spoken in all the fearlessness of innocence, but I believe that it has since ended in a “separation.”

It is common to denounce club-life in our large cities as destructive of the home. The modern club is simply a more refined substitute for the old-fashioned tavern, and is on the whole an advance in morals as well as manners. In our large cities a man in a certain social coterie belongs to a club, if he can afford it, as a means of contact with his fellows, and to have various conveniences which he cannot so economically obtain at home. A few haunt them constantly: the many use them occasionally. More absorbing than clubs, perhaps, are the secret societies which have so revived among us since the war, and which consume time so fearfully. There was a case mentioned in the newspapers lately of a man who belonged to some twenty of these associations; and when he died, and each wished to conduct his funeral, great was the strife! In the small city where I write, there are seventeen secret societies down in the directory, and I suppose as many more not so conspicuous. I meet men who assure me that they habitually attend a societymeeting every evening of the week except Sunday, and a church meeting then. These are rarely men of leisure: they are usually mechanics or business men of some kind, who are hard at work all day, and never see their families except at meal-times. Their case is far worse, so far as absence from home is concerned, than that of the “club-men” of large cities; for these are often men of leisure, who, if married, at least make home one of their lounging-places, which the secret-society men do not.

I honestly believe that this melancholy desertion of the home is largely due to the traditional separation between the alleged spheres of the sexes. The theory still prevails largely, that home is the peculiar province of the woman, that she has almost no duties out of it; and hence, naturally enough, that the husband has almost no duties in it. If he is amused there, let him stay there; but, as it is not his recognized sphere of duty, he is not actually violating any duty by absenting himself. This theory even pervades our manuals of morals, of metaphysics, and of popular science; and it is not every public teacher who has the manliness, having once stated it, to modify his statement, as did the venerable President Hopkins of Williams College, when lecturing the other day to the young ladies of Vassar.

“I would,” he said, “at this point correct my teaching in ‘The Law of Love’ to the effect that home is peculiarly the sphere of woman, and civil government that of man. I now regard the home as the joint sphere of man and woman, and the sphere of civil government more of an open question as between the two. It is, however, to be lamented that the present agitation concerning the rights of woman is so much a matter of ‘rights’ rather than of ‘duties,’ as the reform of the latter would involve the former.”

If our instructors in moral philosophy will only base their theory of ethics as broadly as this, we shall no longer need to advertise “Homes Wanted;” for the joint efforts of men and women will soon provide them.

XXIV.
THE ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.

Nothing throws more light on the whole history of woman than the first illustration in Sir John Lubbock’s “Origin of Civilization.” A young girl, almost naked, is being dragged furiously along the ground by a party of naked savages, armed literally to the teeth, while those of another band grasp her by the arm, and almost tear her asunder in the effort to hold her back. These last are her brothers and her friends; the others are—her enemies? As you please to call them. They are her future husband and his kinsmen, who have come to aid him in his wooing.

This was the primitive rite of marriage. Vestiges of it still remain among savage nations. And all the romance and grace of the most refined modern marriage—the orange-blossoms, the bridal veil, the church service, the wedding-feast—these are only the “bright consummate flower” reared by civilization from that rough seed. All the brutal encounter is softened into this. Nothing remains of the barbarism except the one word “obey,” and even that is going.

Now, to say that a thing is going, is to say that it will presently be gone. To say that any thing is changed, is to say that it is to change further. If it never has been altered, perhaps it will not be; but a proved alteration of an inch in a year opens the way to an indefinite modification. The study of the glaciers, for instance, began with the discovery that they had moved; and from that moment no one doubted that they were moving all the time. It is the same with the position of woman. Once open your eyes to the fact that it has changed, and who is to predict where the matter shall end? It is sheer folly to say, “Her relative position will always be what it has been,” when one glance at Sir John Lubbock’s picture shows that there is no fixed “has been,” but that her original position was long since altered and revised. Those who still use this argument are like those who laughed at the lines of stakes which Agassiz planted across the Aar glacier in 1840. But the stakes settled the question, and proved the motion. Pero si muove: “But it moves.”

The motion once proved, the whole range of possible progress is before us. The amazement of that formerly “heathen Chinee” in Boston, the other day, when he saw a woman addressing a missionary meeting; the astonishment of all English visitors when young ladies hear classes in geometry and Latin, in our high schools; the surprise of foreigners at seeing the rough throng in the Cooper Institute reading-room submit to the sway of one young woman with a crochet-needle—all these simply testify to the fact that the stakes have moved. That they have yet been carried half way to the end, who knows? What a step from the horrible nuptials of those savage days to the poetic marriage of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett—the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” on one side, the “One Word More” on the other! But who can say that the whole relation between man and woman reached its climax there, and that where the past has brought changes so vast the future is to add nothing? Who knows that, when “the world’s great bridals come,” people may not look back with pity, even on this era of the Brownings? Probably even Elizabeth Barrett promised to obey!