Another error which many of the advocates of woman's rights have fallen into, is that of assuming that those conditions are weaknesses, disabilities, which God and nature have attested to be her crowning glory and power. Or, rather, this second error results naturally and most logically from the still more vital one of assuming that her sphere is intended to be no way different from man's.
And still another, equally false and mischievous, would place her in antagonism to man upon the question of comparative excellence and of precedence in the scale of being.
A brief analysis of some of the points of difference between the mind masculine and the mind feminine will show the futility of confounding the two, or of drawing any useless or invidious comparisons. They are as distinct in their normal action as any two things can well be. I begin, then, by dividing our whole conscious human life into two comprehensive departments, expressed by the generic terms, thought—feeling; reflection—spontaneity; knowledge—emotion; perception—reception; reason or intellect—affection or heart. The intelligent being unites these conditions—he is supreme in but one. Man reasons—woman feels; man analyzes—woman generalizes; man reaches his conclusions by induction—woman seizes hers by intuition. There is just the difference, in kind, between a man's mind and a woman's that there is between that of a man of genius and a man of talent. Genius grasps the idea, and works from it outward; talent moulds the form in which the already created idea may be embodied. Genius is creative, comprehensive, intuitive, all-seeing; talent is acute, one-sided, cumulative, inductive. The men of genius will ever be found to be gifted with this womanly quality of mind—the power of seizing truth, ideas, with the heart and soul, through love, rather than with the understanding, through reason.
Woman understands faith, or the taking things on trust; she has no love for that logical process of thought whereby, step by step, man delights to prove a fact in nature or law with mathematical precision and certainty. With the hard details and closely connected steps which make up the body of any science, mathematical, physical, or metaphysical, she has no patience. Her mind is not receptive of formulas or syllogisms. She comprehends results, but is incurious as to causes. She knows what love or benevolence means, under its triple form of charity, mercy, magnanimity, which, like a sea, surrounds the universe; she has no idea of law and justice, which are the eternal pillars thereof. If man feels or loves, it is because his reason is convinced; woman's affections go beyond reason, and without its aid, into the clear realm of ultimate belief. This is why there are so few skeptics in religious things among our sex. Woman's mental and spiritual constitution render belief or faith easy and natural. She is receptive in all the parts of her being.
I conclude, therefore, that in the outer world of fact, of demonstration, of volitions and knowledges, of tangible proofs and causalities, of positive and logical effects of reason, of all outward and material processes, man is supreme; while in that finer, higher, more subtile sphere of intuitions, loves, faiths, spiritual convictions, which overtop our actual life, and lead it up from grossness to glory, woman is the oracle and priestess. In the basic qualities of our nature man is stronger—woman, in those which, in grace, beauty, and sweetness, taper nicely toward its apex.
But are the two spheres therefore at war? By no means. Are they at all independent of each other? Are they not rather conjoined indissolubly? It is a fatal mistake which places an antagonism between the two. There should be between them harmony as sweet as that which moves the concentric rings of Saturn. Untaught by the presence and inspiration of woman, man becomes a cold, dry petrifaction, constantly obeying the centripetal force of his being, and adoring self. Without his basal firmness and strength, woman, in whom the centrifugal force is stronger, remains a weak, vacillating, impulsive creature, feebly swayed by the tides of emotion, lacking self-poise, and aimless and vagrant.
But teach her to reason—man to feel; open up to her the sources of knowledge, and cause him to learn the times of the tides of affection; cultivate her intellect and his heart, and in the healthy action and reaction consequent upon such a balance of forces, you have the true relationship established between the sexes, the relationship which the Creator pronounced perfect in the beginning.
It will be seen that while I attribute to woman a certain superiority both of nature and function, as to the highest part of the nature common to both, I at the same time assert her inferiority in what may be called its fundamental attributes, those which lie nearest to the constant and successful prosecution of mundane affairs, and, consequently, I also establish the fact of her absolute and inevitable dependence in such sense on man. But do I thus degrade her, or in effect annul this asserted superiority? Because man, and the strength, amplitude, and stability of his more practical nature, form a sure basis upon which she may rest, do I any the less make her the very crown and perfection of God's human handiwork? Assuredly not. The truth is, if, instead of making comparison where, from the nature of the case, comparison is almost precluded, so great is the difference between them, I were to say that each is the complement or counterpart of the other, and that, alone, each is but a half sphere, and imperfectly rounded at that, I should more nearly approach to accuracy. To make the perfect whole which the Creator had in His idea, the two halves must be united. And so I dignify the oldest of human institutions—marriage. I accord to it the very perfection of wisdom, beauty, utility, adaptation. I am aware that in so speaking I hold to an old-fashioned belief, and tread incontinently, not only on a notion afloat among some of the strong-minded of my sex at the present day, that this institution is nothing more nor less than an engine of selfish and despotic power on the one hand, and of slavish subjection on the other; but on the more moderate idea that it is not desirable for all women, nor even for a majority. But I still think that this state of union is the most natural, beneficent, satisfying condition possible for all of both sexes—the condition most conducive to the highest, widest, happiest development of the individual man or woman, especially the latter, for it is through marriage only, through the beautiful and sacred wifehood and motherhood which that institution guarantees in purity and holiness, that woman's highest nature finds scope and opportunity. And I make no exceptions. On the contrary, I should say that the exceptions which might occur should invariably be counted as misfortunes. Not that many good, true, noble women do not live and die unmarried. Circumstances, that inflexible arbiter of human life, as it often seems, may strangely turn into wide and unaccustomed channels the love, the devotion, the energy, the self-sacrifice, that, in their pure, strong action, make woman's best development, and so the world, the needy people of the world, humanity at large, may receive the immediate benediction of it. Let no woman who, alone it may be, goes steadfastly on her way of duty and self-abnegation, think she has lived in vain because the special lot of woman has been denied her. If not happiness, which comes from content and satisfaction, yet there is something higher, diviner still, arising from duty done and trials endured—blessedness. But such exceptions do not, I conceive, invalidate the general fact that marriage was intended to be the channel for the vast aggregate of human happiness and improvement. I speak of marriage as it should be, as it might be, as it will one day be, when men and women have acquainted themselves with the laws, physical and spiritual, which were intended to adjust these unions between the sexes in a harmonious manner, according to natural sympathies and affinities; laws, infallible, inherent in the individual constitution, and which, if understood and enforced, would obviate much of the sin, misfortune, and misery in the earth. It is a great and curious question, how much of the pain, suffering, and evil so rife among men, is due to the one-sided, blindfold, inconsiderate, and unsuitable marriages every day taking place; filling the homes of the land with discontent, bickerings, disorder, and continual strife, from the jostling together of antipathetic elements; cursing society with the influences derived from character formed and nurtured in such pestilent domestic atmospheres; and sending out thousands of unhealthy, misorganized, wrongly educated beings, the fruit of these disunions, to work ill both to themselves and their race. The world has much yet to learn with regard to the conditions necessary to a true and legitimate marriage of the sexes. There are thousands of illegal unions that have been blessed by church and magistrate, which yet carry only ban in their train. Whether read literally or not, the old, old story of the temptation and the fall has a significance not often dreamed of in respect to this question of marriage. It was a disturbance of the pure and perfect allegiance of each to the other, no less than a fall from the intimate communion of both with the Father of spirits. And a thicker darkness rests over the means whereby the institution of marriage may be rescued from its degradation, and man and woman be reinstated in the loyalty they owe to each other, than over the means by which the creature may make himself acceptable to the offended Creator; inasmuch as the former is left, without any special revelation, to the slow process of thought among men, to the workings of experience and the results of observation. And these laws are age-long in their evolutions. But when men and women have learned to look within themselves, have turned an intelligent eye upon the necessities of their threefold being, and when they recognize the God-made laws regulating these necessities, and have begun to mate themselves accordingly, the world will have received a powerful impulse toward its promised millennial epoch.
Such, then, being, in brief, the relation of woman to man, it is necessary to inquire, as pertinent to my subject, not so much whether man gives her all the rights within his own sphere which she may beneficially claim, but whether she has yet understood the weight and significance of her own position in the scale of being, and has exercised all the rights consequent therefrom. To know is far easier than to live according to knowledge. It is to be feared that women themselves have but a poor appreciation of the ideal of true womanhood. Oh, is it not time this ideal should be worthily understood? Has not poor suffering humanity borne the burden of its woes long enough, and will not woman help to lift it from the tired, stooping shoulders? For she may. How? Simply by working out her own divinely appointed mission. And is this not broad and absorbing enough? See what are some of its objects of influence and endeavors. First, here are the very faintest beginnings of intelligent existence to impress and mould—the embryos of character to stamp. And who knows how important this moulding and stamping may be? To go farther back still: Who knows what indelible constitution may be, is, fixed upon the individual organism, for better, for worse, by the authors of its life, that, if evil, no training, no education, no work of grace, not even omnipotence, can expunge or alter? This motherhood of woman, in its awful sanctity and mystery, in its bearings upon the immortality of personal identity, is a fearful dignity. Therein consists the first and chief claim of Woman to honor and reverence. She who has been a mother has measured the profoundest as well as the most exalted experience of which humanity is susceptible. Let her see to it that she honor herself.
Here is the white and plastic tablet of the new-born soul. Let woman fear and tremble to write on that, for the writing shall confront her forever. Like the Roman Pilate, what she has written, she has written. Here are the purblind human instincts to direct and culture; the vagrant, unbridled hosts of the spontaneous emotions to be tutored and restrained; the affections and the tastes to be trained toward the true, the beautiful, and the good; the warring passions to be curbed and disciplined; in short, the whole glorious domain of the heart and soul, the moral and spiritual nature, is to be surveyed, studied, swayed by that potential agency which woman possesses in a very eminent degree—personal influence. By this agency, informed and vitalized by love, she becomes the great educator in the great school of life, in the family, in society, in the world. Women do not sufficiently appreciate the importance of their work as the architects of character. Character! That, after all, is the man, the enduring individual, the real I, to whom the Creator has said, Live forever! Character is simply what education and habit make of a person, starting from the foundation of his inherited organic idiosyncrasies. It is a result—the work of time and countless shapings and impressings. It is not what a man thinks of himself, nor what others think of him, but what he really is in the sight of God, his Maker. This is what shall come out, at last, from the obscurations and uncertainties of this lower atmosphere into the clear, truthful light of eternity; shall cast off the devices, the flimsy pretences, the temporary shows, the convenient disguises, of this mortal life of mixed substance and shadow, and stand a bare, naked, unclothed fact of being before itself, the universe, and God. Alas! what multitudes of real dwarfs go out every day, 'unhouseled,' into that searching light of eternity.