It is impossible to remember how or when the idea of the book first visited me. Its publication bears the date of 1869. My impressions are that it may have been towards the close of 1864 that the work began; for there was work in it, more than its imperfect and youthful character might lead one ignorant of the art of book-making to suppose.
It was not until 1863 that I left school, being then just about at my nineteenth birthday. It is probable that the magazine stories and Sunday-school books and hack work occupied from one to two years without interruption; but I have no more temperament for dates in my own affairs than I have for those of history. At the most, I could not have been far from twenty when the book was written; possibly approaching twenty-one.
At that time, it will be remembered, our country was dark with sorrowing women. The regiments came home, but the mourners went about the streets.
The Grand Review passed through Washington; four hundred thousand ghosts of murdered men kept invisible march to the drum-beats, and lifted to the stained and tattered flags the proud and unreturned gaze of the dead who have died in their glory.
Our gayest scenes were black with crape. The drawn faces of bereaved wife, mother, sister, and widowed girl showed piteously everywhere. Gray-haired parents knelt at the grave of the boy whose enviable fortune it was to be brought home in time to die in his mother's room. Towards the nameless mounds of Arlington, of Gettysburg, and the rest, the yearning of desolated homes went out in those waves of anguish which seem to choke the very air that the happier and more fortunate must breathe.
Is there not an actual occult force in the existence of a general grief? It swells to a tide whose invisible flow covers all the little resistance of common, human joyousness. It is like a material miasma. The gayest man breathes it, if he breathe at all; and the most superficial cannot escape it.
Into that great world of woe my little book stole forth, trembling. So far as I can remember having had any "object" at all in its creation, I wished to say something that would comfort some few—I did not think at all about comforting many, not daring to suppose that incredible privilege possible—of the women whose misery crowded the land. The smoke of their torment ascended, and the sky was blackened by it. I do not think I thought so much about the suffering of men—the fathers, the brothers, the sons—bereft; but the women—the helpless, outnumbering, unconsulted women; they whom war trampled down, without a choice or protest; the patient, limited, domestic women, who thought little, but loved much, and, loving, had lost all—to them I would have spoken.
For it came to seem to me, as I pondered these things in my own heart, that even the best and kindest forms of our prevailing beliefs had nothing to say to an afflicted woman that could help her much. Creeds and commentaries and sermons were made by men. What tenderest of men knows how to comfort his own daughter when her heart is broken? What can the doctrines do for the desolated by death? They were chains of rusty iron, eating into raw hearts. The prayer of the preacher were not much better; it sounded like the language of an unknown race to a despairing girl. Listen to the hymn. It falls like icicles on snow. Or, if it happen to be one of the old genuine outcries of the Church, sprung from real human anguish or hope, it maddens the listener, and she flees from it, too sore a thing to bear the touch of holy music.
At this time, be it said, I had no interest at all in any especial movement for the peculiar needs of women as a class. I was reared in circles which did not concern themselves with what we should probably have called agitators. I was taught the old ideas of womanhood, in the old way, and had not to any important extent begun to resent them.
Perhaps I am wrong here. Individually, I may have begun to recoil from them, but only in a purely selfish, personal way, beyond which I had evolved neither theory nor conscience; much less the smallest tendency towards sympathy with any public movement of the question.