Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. III, No. XVII, October 1851

by Various

Here is a wide field of influence for woman. You are the vestal virgins to watch the fires on the altar of the fine arts. Yours it is to check the sensuousness of man, to recall him from his ceaseless toil after the mammon of this life, his restless ambition to turn every thing to account in available funds, in bank-stocks, copper-stocks, railroad-stocks. Tell your sons and your sires that there are higher sources of joy. Point them away from earth's sordid gold to the brighter gems of literature. Direct their energies to the intellectual and moral advancement of their age. Help them to slake their quenchless thirst at the pure fountains of knowledge and religion.

There is a poetry of life worth cultivating. There are spiritual entities around us to which we are linked by ethereal chains. Let us not struggle to throw off those chains, but rather to bind them faster about us. And when you see a link broken, and others likely to drop, mend it.

Woman's office is it also to soften political asperities in the other sex, and themselves to shun political publicity. Not that woman need be ignorant of the great questions of the age; better be familiar with them. But let her not become absorbed in them: rather keep so aloof from exciting occasions as to be better qualified to form and express a deliberate and unbiased judgment on men and measures. Let her opinions be well matured, and always uttered with calmness and caution. When her dearest friends of the other sex seem embittered toward others, and in danger of forgetting the sweet charities of life amid the chafings of party rivalry, let her pour out the milk of human kindness into the cup of courtesy, and ask them to drink of it. When the waters are troubled and the billows roar, let her diffuse over them the oil of love to still the waters into a great calm. Surely this is an office higher, better far, than to be pressing on, as some would have her, into the busy bustle of out-door politics. Here is influence, and it is better than power.

Who that loves woman, that really admires her worth as woman, that thinks of her as the delicate, refined, tasteful, sensitive development of humanity, the incarnation of all that is lovely, gentle, modest, peaceful, and pure, the highest earthly manifestation of God as love; who that remembers her as the "help-meet," can bear the thought of hurrying her out upon the theatre of politics, the platform of legislation?

"Woman's rights," they cry, and so loud the cry, that even woman's ambition has conquered her judgment and her delicacy, and she has gone forth, out of her appointed and fitting sphere, to be gazed on by a curious crowd, and perhaps to hear the plaudits of a noisy populace. O tempora! O mores! Save us from such a race of women!

Now woman has rights, many rights, and let them be well guarded; but she has no right to be a man. Yet, no wonder 'tis, if amid the stirring enterprises and new discoveries of the age, some half-amazon should defy the customs of social life, and assume the right of leveling all distinctions between the sexes, walking forth à la Turk, and becoming the gazing-stock of the street. Oh, let beauteous, winning woman wear the gracefully-flowing robes of modesty; let her not be met by us "up to the eyes" in politics, nor at the ballot-box, nor the caucus, nor in the legislative hall, nor on the judicial bench, surrounded, perchance, by tobacco-chewing barristers, nor as the public haranguer, addressing promiscuous multitudes.

Let us rather see her in the quiet retirement of home, not doomed to the busy drudgery of hard housekeeping merely, but there the refined woman, whose pure sensibilities are shocked at the thought of a public notoriety; who shuns the wistful gaze of the crowd, and finds in her own family circle her kingdom and her rights, and seeks to adorn that with all that is lovely and of good report. Thus will she win our admiration and secure our love. Were her intellect and her eloquence displayed at the bar or on the platform, we might indeed wonder with deep amazement, but we should not love; and wanting this, both she and we were unhappy.

While sensible, then, of her equality with man in the possession of a soul like his own, capable of the highest enterprises in science and literature, may she yet recognize, as the appointment of her all-wise Creator, subordination to man in power, superordination in influence. Be content to be woman. It is a province high enough. If not cherubic, it is seraphic. It is that phase of humanity we think most godlike; for if Jehovah's highest expression of himself is Love, then that form of humanity expressing most of it, is most like Him. That form, in our opinion, is woman.

Let her not, then, strip herself of her chief glory, and depart further from her God and Saviour, by shooting out from her own feminine orbit, and aiming to revolve in that of the other sex, under the false impression that it is a higher one. Even if it were, it is not hers, and by thus battling with the order of nature, and swinging loose from the proper relations of her being, she might become a wandering star in the blackness of darkness forever.

Another evident office of woman is, to regulate the forms and control the habits of social life. In this land, especially, do the "lords of creation" bow with due deference to their ladies. We give them our arms, 'tis true, and we ask them to lean upon us, yet do we take step with them, and in turn lean on them, amid the trying times of life, and look to them for many of our joys, for most of our happiness. He is vulgar, even barbarous, we think, who does not appreciate her worth and respect her character. Hence, every where, hers is the first place, the best place; and an American gentleman would rather suffer an agony than subject women to a discomfort.