It has long been a social mystery, over which conservatives and radicals have puzzled alike, why the gifted men and women of our race should spring almost exclusively from the intermediate ranks of life. The solution is found in Piazzi Smyth’s metaphor of the Great Pyramid. A circumscribed routine of pleasure on one hand, of toil on the other, equally engrosses the time and thoughts of the dwellers at either end. It is only in the middle of the pyramid that one is free to live up to the standard of the hideless coffer, the sarcophagus measure, the measure of a man!
Of the feminine attainers to this measure, says a writer in the American Queen, the women who are taking up their lives and living them fully in all their length and breadth and dignity, as lives must be lived to reach the cosmic standard of the pyramidal man, there is found one pre-eminent type in that woman of letters against whom a hard battle is being waged to-day.
To woman emancipated, freed from veil and harem, elevated from her primal position when she was but the toy and tool of man’s passion, this age of civilization points with a pride whose justifiableness has yet to be proved. Exterior liberty she has gained indeed; but in the face of the fact that this universal crusade against women of letters is but the determination to hold the old shackles on heart and brain, what is her alleged emancipation but a lengthening of the chain which still binds her in moral and mental bondage.
“The shrieking sisterhood,” be it said in justice to the sex, represent a small minority. Few and far between are the women who would usurp man’s place on platform or at poll; still fewer and farther apart the advocate of woman’s right to drop her petticoat for the untrammeled freedom of the trousers. But the great-hearted woman, yearning for recognition as paramount forces of social regeneration—the great-minded women taking up the problems of life and grappling with them for the sake of their weaker sisters—these are many, confined and silenced within the gilded bars which society is daily drawing closer and stronger about them. This narrowing of woman’s sphere, this withholding her from anything but a mission purely physical, is but a different form of the old barbarism whose alleged destruction is the boast of the present day; and the time is not far distant when the wrong must be acknowledged and amended, or retrogression brand the age for which we so proudly claim progression! Let the hackneyed cry of woman’s intellectual inferiority prove its truth, conclusively, as it has not yet been proved, or let it be silenced forever! The cranial differences existent between the sexes, upon which the theoristic foundation of their respective superiority and inferiority of intellect has been laid, are, in truth, the exponents of sexual intellectual equality, science having proclaimed them the visible proofs of that mutual dependence and adaptability which, sexually, mind has for mind, as body for body. Let this truth be no longer denied; let present social theories hold their sway, and in a generation of pigmies, moral, mental, and physical, our race, in all its glorious potentialities, must sink ignominiously into oblivion. This is an important fact, of which society seems to have lost sight—that upon the women of to-day and of to-morrow the coming man is wholly dependent, type being the transmitter of type, according to its kind. The increase of female education has naturally awakened women to a recognition of all her latent intellectual possibilities, and hence the growth of feminine ranks in that wide field whose battles are fought with a weapon “mightier than the sword.” The recruits of to-day are not all Mrs. Brownings nor George Eliots, but the world will lose infinitely in good and strength and sweetness if the budding Adelaide Proctors and Mrs. Burnetts are blighted by the propagation of that harsh masculine doctrine which, stripped of its pretty sophisms, is resolved into the bare assertion that a woman of talent is a woman unsexed! This doctrine, false, shallow, and unjust, is the enemy with whom woman is battling to-day.
May the pyramidal prophecy soon be verified when “all things shall be compared in pure truth and righteousness.” Then the conflict shall be ended and the intellectual growth of woman be revealed, the heightener, enricher, purifier of that emotional development which is the essence of ideal womanhood—an essence thrilling as deeply and tenderly the hearts of the humble followers in her footsteps as it thrilled the hearts of that greatest of woman poets, who sang:
What art can a woman be good at? Oh, vain!
What art is she good at but hurting her breast
With the milk-teeth of babes and a smile at her pain?
pointing in the zenith of her fame to the divine right of maternity as the supreme, holiest and sweetest potentiality of womanhood.