A being planted above man, taking root where he blooms, in the pure affections, flowering in the high airs which he dreams of but sees not, or sees only in moments of inspiration from her—a being, who, more complex on her physical side, is therefore more affluent on her spiritual—who, from the established premises of science, demands not new, but the very largest deductions to reach the borders of her life—a being whose support with the earth-life is widened and strengthened by each added organ, function, susceptibility—whose divine support is opened, established, confirmed in increased degrees over man's by each womanly inlet to the spiritual nature—I see such a being irradiating the future years and paths of my race, and my soul grows strong and glad at the sight. In her the self-love of man is replaced by love; ambition pales its ineffectual fires in the light of that pure, undying flame of aspiration which her soul feeds; patriotism, ashamed of its narrowness, unfolds shining pinions over humanity, and becomes philanthropy; pleasure retreats in her wornout, patched-up harlequin robes; and happiness, pure, clean, bright from the sweet inner chambers of the soul, takes her place.
Life acknowledges a higher fealty. With the new sovereign, new aims, new standards, new methods for the improvement of humanity.
Under the masculine dynasty we have had force, organization, investigation, discovery, experiment—methods violent, harsh, selfish, slow, confused, chaotic: a magnanimous career at intervals spanning the wide weltering strife, as a bow the stormy heavens; noble deeds, not a few, shining out of the darkness here and there; real victory crowning the crests of the rolling sea now and then, and casting where they have shone long shadows over the waters darkened with selfish contention around them. Power under this reign has been applied to the multiplication of external resources, means, opportunities for the race. It has clothed the earth with them in forms so numerous, so varied—so good, so bad, so indifferent—so noble, so mean—so rich, so poor—so high, so low, that the most active memory of the longest life fails to furnish the catalogue of them. It professes human good; it cultivates personal good, family good, community good, or, at the largest, national good. But whatever the stature it attains, its methods are through external appeals to the soul—influences from without. Its common theology steadily refused for eighteen hundred years to credit the union of the divine with the human in the soul of mankind. Its deductive intellect is blind to truth till her presence is proved by facts—as if we would hale an archangel, with the shining light of the upper world yet flowing adown him, before the police magistrate, and swear the butchers and the newsboys on the question of identity. Its Art is timid, thin, and self-distrusting, because the Ideal is flouted as worthy only of women, dreamers, and liberal ministers—the silver wing of imagination is rarely loosed but to be soon folded in humiliation before the reproof of the exacting senses. Its statesmanship is smart, crafty, treacherous, because it cherishes a state, a nation, rather than humanity. Its jurisprudence is a gigantic, vigilant detective, dealing with a population of suspects. Its physical methods only are uniformly clear, honorable, straight-forward though. Even these in times and places might be nobler, more open; but it fights well, labors well, cultivates well, invents well, manufactures well, because in these it is dealing chiefly between its native elements, force and matter;—but being characteristically inductive, it cannot deal liberally with human nature, lacking the ideal of it, the faith in it, the reverence for it which are the only sustaining root of such behavior toward it.
Under the new sovereignty, the methods, like the power employing them, will have their nearest relations with the interior life. They will draw helps from the outward; and here the glory of man as a creator of conditions and opportunities, will be first measured and fully appreciated, for it is the woman only who can penetrate his works, draw thence their full significance and value, transmute their evils to goods, and incorporate their best spirit in humanity. It is a great thing to create that which helps any human soul to be diviner than without such help it would be. It is greater to develop conditions which establish and confirm true relations between the soul and its helps. It is greatest to create the soul to be divine—with helps, or in spite of hindrances. The first is eminently the office of the masculine. The second is shared between it and the feminine, with a preponderance to the latter; and the last belongs so exclusively to woman, that the day of its doing is necessarily the day of her sovereignty.
The divine, artistic, harmonious creation of the human spirit in the divine, artistic, harmonious human body, this is the grand function of the feminine era. For this it is that woman has those special finer endowments which in all ages have distinguished her from man, and foreshown a higher life for her in some future—some Beulah, visible to eyes that could o'ershoot the bounds of the passing age. Wanting this power, preparing the day of its advent, John Baptist has toiled, sweated, groaned, fumed, devastated in his wilderness, to touch its hither border at last in this pregnant nineteenth century. Age of revolution—age of wonders!—of which the very greatest are, I think, the beginnings we already see of settlement here. As a question, that of woman is not an old one. There can be no Woman Question among any people till it is advanced enough to ask for better methods than man's. When this stage is reached, life is ripe for the advent of woman—it appeals to her to come forward. It prepares better conditions, that it may invite her—opens fields, that it may engage her powers—seeks to clothe her in a real dignity, of which she has before worn rather the semblance than itself. Society, obeying the higher view of her, enacts new laws for her enlargement, modifies or sets aside social canons which restricted and warped and suppressed her, and begins with these movements to find itself enriched by the presence of finer influences; led upward to more exalted standards, penetrated with a subtler humane sentiment than it before knew.
Yet with all these movements in her favor, woman, bone of man's bone, remains a bone of contention to him, till nature, read truly and trusted reverently, is allowed to lead him as a little child by the hand and show him woman's real kingdom. He must not look on it with a timid or a grudging eye. A Chinese mandarin in California, becoming acquainted with the fact that American women could read and write and be trusted with accounts, replied, with a warning shake of the head, 'If he readee, writee, by and by he lickee all the men.' Does this apprehension possibly extend beyond the Celestial Empire? It will not be expressed, I know, but there is much unexpressed feeling which is none the less real for its silence.
'Every woman is an embodied revolution, now-a-days,' said a lank, grumbling dyspeptic, while the autumn leaves of '62 yet hung in bright profusion on the bordering forests of the Hudson. 'If you had said every woman is in these days an embodied revelation,' was the superb reply, 'you would have done both truth and my sex more even justice.' Man must not fear woman, for whatever nature designed for her is not only inevitable, but is his only means of salvation. He need not fear her, for she is the daughter of nature, so full of loyalty and filial devotion to her mother, that no wide or continued departure from her designs is possible. He will not fear her when he is religious enough to feel that each natural revolution is a step in the march upward, ordered in its season as calmly and inexorably as were the secondary rocks laid down when the primary had been prepared for receiving them, as the nebulous vapor is consolidated into a planet or sun, or the morning-glory brought forth of its sown seed. He will be comforted, too, by remembering that natural revolution does never dethrone. It only enthrones above the present ruler. Work out your kingdom. Define and fill its bounds and metes, and never will usurper's foot print its soil. No invasion of your sovereignty is possible. The magnetisms of the universe hold you there, and every other being outside—an infallible police, bent on the protection of your rights, charged to secure them to you without so much as a flaw in their finest edges. Nature knows your kingdom, and charges all yet unsettled parties to go aside. But in the coming cycles she will develop others above it.
The wheel revolves. You can only remain at the summit by its standing still. It is not your degradation, but another's glory, that is sought. Open your eyes to the scheme: look adown its vistas of grandeur, and at every step taken above you, you will sing, Hosanna! We also rise by your ascent.