Yet once more: may the undertaking flourish, and may it be the precursor of many a similar one!
What a field of beautiful and advantageous activity lies waste through the neglect of rightly cultivating the talent which God has entrusted to woman! Thus, for example, her taste and her feeling for the beautiful are universally acknowledged, and she is permitted to cultivate it—merely for her own adornment and beautifying; and by so doing makes this heavenly talent minister to vanity and self-love. What if this sense of beauty were developed under the guidance of knowledge, for the use of society, for the beautifying of life? Does not woman’s natural taste for ornament and for ornamenting give her an hereditary title in the realm of decorative art? And if she were allowed there to employ her single gift, if she felt herself, through it, living and working, as a fellow-citizen——?
Ought not every country to have its school of art, in which the artistic skill of women might develop itself, in a peculiar and national manner? Might there not, by these means, be a northern art, which, as such, might obtain acknowledgment even in foreign countries?
Might not the daughters of Sweden, so rich in natural feeling and fresh life, study the natural productions of Sweden; draw the pine and the linea borealis, the Apollo-butterfly, and such like beautiful things which God has given to the soil of their fathers; and arrange them in tasteful groups, in vases and baskets, for the decoration of walls and floors; and thus from northern scenes bring forth a northern art, tended by the hands of women, which might beautify northern homes, from the highest to the lowest; which might chase away ugly and common pictures, and let the brightest eye of home, the eye of the child, open into a world of beauty?
Is not, for all men and in all countries, one of the gates which opens into the sanctuary, like that in Solomon’s temple—the beautiful?
We are speaking now merely of a branch of art. But is there not in many other arts and in many manufactures—nay, perhaps in every art and manufacture and science, the more they are developed and ennobled—a department which ought preëminently to be cultivated by women, expressly because of that one talent which has been given to them by nature?
We merely ask. We acknowledge to a profound faith in our own questions. But we would beseech of thinking men and women to consider the subject with us.
For the importance of it lies not merely in the peculiarity of woman’s work. There is something beyond this in woman, through her own work, being able to acquire a self-relying position in society, a noble independence for the life both of soul and body; that she may feel, may know from childhood upward that she may courageously look toward a future which she, through her own power of work, can prepare for herself; to know that creditable work is not disgrace. And that beautiful consciousness which already exists in the intellectual heights of society, may alike in the palace and the cottage of the peasant be acquired by all.
What is it that people are afraid of in this independence of woman? Are they afraid that thereby she will become less womanly? Are they afraid that any being, if it develops itself in freedom and in truth, can become any other than that which God designed in its creation?
Are they afraid that women may take the work away from men?