The American Missionary — Volume 37, No. 1, January, 1883

by Various

It was my privilege to count among my friends a young Southern girl, who not content with the average boarding-school of the South, has already partly finished a thorough course of study in a Northern school with the expressed intention of becoming a teacher at her own home.

In an Eastern city during the past summer I found several young ladies who were spending the three hot months at the North, and while there were hard at work on music and other branches of study. They were taking care of themselves, and with eyes aglow with enthusiasm were apparently enjoying their new experience.

Such cases, multiplied as they will be, show that a new leaven is working out an ambition on the part of the Southern lady to win her way by an intelligent and self-reliant womanhood, not simply to charm by her helplessness and amiability.

But all this has reference to white society; you are ready to ask what is its bearing on the colored girls? The humbler life in the old days reflected the ideas of the superior, as the second rainbow reflects the coloring of the first. It will tend to do so now. When, by a sudden revolution the cords of the colored woman’s bondage were broken, and a new society of her own people sprang up around her, especially in the cities, the impress of old ideas was plainly seen. How quickly she copied the more artificial part of her white mistress’ life, exaggerating her elegance into display and her intellectual languor into utter indifference.

In the colored society of to-day, so largely an image of the old order of things, the colored woman does not realize what she has a right to expect or what she ought to require from the other sex among her own people. She has no knowledge of her womanly power or worth; why should she object to the outside gallantry which addresses her with flattering nonsense while it covers an underlying lack of genuine respect, and a sense of superiority that practically leaves her to do all the hard work and regards her as of lower intellectual grade?

Thus, from the impulse to imitate, the colored girl has a source of hope in the advanced position held by her white sister. But her new power of independent self-direction, unshielded by the safeguards that the white girl has, unguided by the intellectual culture that the other can obtain, may work incalculable harm.

What the colored woman’s place was under the old dispensation you know too well. Body and soul the slave of her owners; while her delicate mistress was shielded by all possible safeguards from evil, she was left exposed to all the storms of passion and sin, daring not to have any sense of her own value, her will for resistance growing weaker with each generation. What an element of moral weakness to both races this state of things was, neither race had any conception.

With the changing character and views of the South the colored woman’s position must change also, and she is an important agent in the change. She is no longer a captive, bound to the wheel, obliged to advance or retrograde with the chariot of her master. The place which she will take in the new civilization; the light in which she will be regarded by the white man, and her position among her own people, will be the result of her own choice—a choice which she, in the person of her best and most intelligent representatives, shall make within the next fifty years.

What choice she will make is a question of breathless interest. How to help her make the choice wisely and in time is the problem upon which we are at work. That she labors under great disadvantages in this decision of her destiny is plain. The vain and foolish life of a shallow society has all the ignorance of her nature to work on, to lead her to a life of the most empty frivolity. The door to greater evil is wide open at her feet. The tempter can no longer command, but he may allure—allure with deadly certainty, because inherited tendencies and customs of the past aid him to gain an easy victory. Over many a poor girl who comes to my thought now I could raise the prophet’s lament: “Oh, that my head were waters and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughters of my people!”

Sometimes it seems that the colored woman is willingly—or under the irresistible pressure of circumstances—making her choice so rapidly and so fatally that the slow processes which are her only safety cannot reach the surface in time to save her. But the final decision in this matter does not rest with the present generation; the young girls who are now in our schools, and the children whose ideas they will mold, shall make the choice of her moral standing in the South in relation to both races, and of her intellectual and social standing among her own people.