They could not be persuaded that it is the boasted “spirit of the age”
which is in fault; that its irrepressible tendencies are to raise one class by depressing another, and to create a countless multitude of tastes and wants which can be gratified by none but the favored class who are the possessors of great wealth.
They fret vainly—beating against the little that remains of ancient bulwarks erected to shield them, as if by destroying these their condition would be improved—and indulge an idle dream that women’s suffrage will remedy the evils, real or imaginary, of which they complain. “Let us vote,” they say; “let us have some voice in regulating our own affairs, and, if we do not succeed in shaping them entirely to our wishes, we shall at least reduce the number and weight of our grievances, be enabled to open new channels through which we can attain the independence we desire, and, by making our presence felt as an element of the body politic, be acknowledged as an existing fact that is of some importance to the nation.”
It is indeed an idle dream! The mind of every intelligent person must, upon a very little reflection, discover innumerable reasons why woman must cease to be woman, wife, and mother, before she can exercise the elective franchise to any purpose.
As a true American woman, we cannot regard the clamor which has been raised upon the subject of woman’s rights with the entire contempt it has met in many quarters. There is an invisible current of sad and mournful facts underlying this agitation.
If “material prosperity” is the key-note of Protestantism—as the testimony of its own writers would seem to prove—the development of material comfort and luxury is its highest expression. In all the appliances, arrangements, and habits
of our domestic and social life, there has been a constant and alarming increase of expense during the past fifty years. New fashions have been invented, new wants created and multiplied, so rapidly that the supply, never exceeding the demand, has altogether exceeded the means of a great majority of our people. The few who were able to indulge in each novelty as it appeared have gone to surprising lengths; while the many, whose revenues were wholly inadequate, have strained every possible resource to keep pace with their wealthy leaders in expensive follies. Crime, bankruptcy, widespread ruin, and desolation have followed, of course. Multitudes have been left in poverty, with all the habits, tastes, and aspirations which wealth alone can gratify, and of these multitudes a large proportion are women. Accustomed to affluence, they are determined not to accept poverty—the synonym for disgrace in their circle—and eagerly cast about them for some avenue of escape. Hence the frantic efforts to obtain entrance into new paths, hitherto untrodden by woman, for securing the object of their ambition.
Woman has a right to be all that her Maker designed when he created her as a “help” to man. He is not of more importance to society in his own place than she in hers. He would not render himself more ridiculous by forsaking his own duties and avocations for the care of the household, the kitchen, and the nursery, than she would by abandoning these for the public employments of men. The present state of affairs is sufficiently deplorable, but I do not see how such an exchange would mend the matter. Nor can we see any remedy, but by returning to old-fashioned ways. Very comfortable ways they were, too, however disdainfully
the Flora McFlimsys of modern times may toss their pretty befrizzled heads at the mere mention of them.
What sensible woman would not prefer the happy solitude of a Eugénie de Guérin—whereof her pen discourseth so eloquently that even the chickens fed by her hand seem to the reader like birds-of-paradise—in her beloved Cayla, to all the magnificent bleakness, splendid miseries, and heart-burning rivalries too often enclosed within the walls of a palace on the Fifth Avenue?