Another plain fault of our women, and one which in a measure is the cause of the fault above noticed, is the wild chase after and copying of European fashions. We are accused of being a nation of copyists. This is more than half true. And why we should be, I cannot understand. Are we never to have anything original, American? Are we always to be content to be servile imitators of Europe in our art, literature, social life, everything, except mere mechanical invention? I am thankful that we are beginning to have an art, a literature, of our very own. Let us also have a fashion, that shall be, distinctively, if not entirely, American. There is surely enough of us, of our splendid country, our institutions, our theories, our brave, free people, to build for ourselves, from our own foundation, and with our own material. But American Women have yet to inspire society with this patriotic ambition.
Not what is becoming or suitable to her, but what is the fashion, does the American woman buy; not what she can afford to purchase, but what her neighbors have, is too commonly the criterion. This constant pursuit of Fashion, with her incessant changes, this emulation of their neighbors in the manifold ways in which money and time can be alike wasted, and not the necessary and sacred duties of home, the personal attention and effort which the majority of American women have to give to their household affairs, produce that lack of time that is offered as an excuse for the neglect of the duty of self-culture. This it is which fritters away thought and the taste for higher things, leaving the mind blank and nerveless except when thus superficially excited.
This duty of self-culture I would notice as one of the demands of the times upon American women in the attainment of the proposed standard. A wide, liberal, generous self-culture, of intellect, of taste, of conscience, for the sake of the better fulfilment of the mission to which, as an American citizen, every woman in the land is called. We do not begin to realize this. It is a great defect in our social system, that, when a woman has left school and settled down in life, she considers it the signal for her to quit all mental acquisition except what she may gather from her desultory reading, and, henceforth, her family and her immediate neighborhood absorb her whole soul under ordinary circumstances. The great majority of our countrywomen thus grow careworn, narrow-minded, self-absorbed. Now this is not right—it is not necessary. A woman's first, most important duty is in her home; but this need not clip the wings of her spirit, so that thought and affection cannot go out into the great world, and feel themselves a part of its restless, throbbing, many-sided life; brain and heart need not stagnate, even if busy, work-a-day life does claim her first endeavors. Indeed, the great danger to our women is not so much that they will become trifling and frivolous, as that they will become narrow-minded and selfish.
But these vices of extravagance and excessive devotion to fashion, of which I have spoken, are due, largely, to a still more radical defect in our social education. I mean its anti-republican spirit. This is our crowning absurdity. We are good democrats—in theory. It is a pity that our practice does not bear out our theory, for the sake of the homely virtue of consistency. To a great many otherwise sensible people our simple republican ways are distasteful, and they are apt to look with, admiring, envious eyes on the conventional life of foreign lords, not considering how burdened with forms it is, and full of the selfishness, the pride and arrogance of the privileged and titled few, at the bitter expense of the suffering, untitled many. The aping of aristocratic pretensions has been a much-ridiculed foible of American women. It is certain that American society needs republicanizing in all its grades. We have widely departed from the simplicity of the early days and of the founders of the republic, in social life, just as in our political course we had suffered the vital essence of our organic law to become a dead thing, and the whole machinery of the Government to work reversely to its intention. And the cause has been the same in each case. The spirit of a government and the theories embodying it are the reflection of the social condition of a given age and people, so that the one will never be of a higher order than the other; while it is, also, equally true, that the best and most advanced political theories may be suffered to languish in operation, or become wholly dormant, from the influence of social causes. Thus it was that the demoralising effect of human slavery did, up to the time of the great shock which the nation received in the spring of 1861—a shock which galvanized it into life, and sent the before vitiated blood coursing hotly, and, at last, healthfully through all the veins and arteries of the national body—persistently encroach alike upon Government and society. The slime of that serpent was over everything in the North as well as the South, and if it did not kill out the popular virtue and patriotism as completely here as there, where it is intimately interwoven with the life of the people, the difference is due to that very cause, as well as to the inextinguishable vitality that God has conferred on the genius of human liberty, so that when betrayed, hunted, starved, outlawed, she yet seeks some impregnable fastness, and subsists on manna from the Divine Hand. This, then, is the fourth step in the attainment of the true ideal of character for American women—the effort to renew society in the actual simplicity of our republican institutions. Women, American women, should hold dear as anything in life the preservation and purity of those blessed institutions, guaranteeing to them as they do all their eminent privileges, and founded as they are on that emancipating genius of Christianity, which, through every age, has pointed a finger of hope, love, encouragement to woman as a chief instrument in the world's promised elevation and enfranchisement.
While dwelling upon the faults of American women, I would at the same time do full credit to their virtues. I believe that they occupy as high a place as any women in the world, even a higher. But I trust that they will rise to the height of the demands which the changed times and the exigencies of the situation are pressing upon them, and will continue to press. This war has clearly and forcibly eliminated truths and principles which the long rule of the slave power had wellnigh eclipsed; it has been a very spear of Ithuriel, at whose keen touch men and principles start up in their real, not their simulated character. During its three years of progress, the national education has been advanced beyond computation. When it is over, things, ideas, will not go back to the old standpoint. Then will arise the new conditions, demands, possibilities. If there is one truth that has been unmistakably developed by the war, it is the controlling moral power and sanction which a free government derives from woman. And this has been shown not only in the influence for good which the loyal women of the North have contributed for the aid of the Government, but with equal power in the influence for evil which the Southern women have exerted for its destruction. I suppose it is true that this war for slavery has received its strongest, fiercest continuing impulses from the women of the South. Nothing could exceed the enthusiasm, the persistency, the heroic endurance, the self-sacrifice they have manifested. Only had it been in a good cause!
Just here let me say a word in behalf of these Southern women. There is a disposition on the part of the Northern public, forming their opinion from the instances of fierce spite and vindictiveness, of furious scorn and hatred, which have been chronicled in the reports of army correspondents and in the sensation items of the newspapers, to regard them as little short of demons in female shape. All this is naturally working a corresponding dislike and ill-feeling among the masses North. To such I would say: These Southern sisters are not demons, but made of the same flesh and blood, and passions and affections as yourselves. The difference between you is purely one of circumstances and training, of locality—above all, of education and institutions. It is as true that institutions are second nature as that habit is.
The peculiar faults of Southern women they share with their Northern sisters, only in a vastly enhanced degree; and besides these, they have others, born of and nurtured by that terrible slavery system under whose black shadow they live and die. Their idleness, their lack of neatness and order, their dependence, their quick and sometimes cruel passions, their unreason, their contempt of inferiors, their vanity and arrogance, their ignorance, their lightness and superficiality, are all the outgrowth of its diabolical influences. They are, in fact, no more idle, thriftless, passionate, or supercilious, than Northern women would be in similar circumstances. It is too much the habit among the unreflecting, in judging of the Southern masses in their hostile attitude toward their lawful Government, to give less weight than it deserves to the necessary and inevitable tendency upon the mind and character of such an institution as African slavery; and to let the blame be of a personal and revengeful nature, which should fall most heavily on the sin itself, the dire crime against God and society, against himself and his fellow man, which the individual is all his life taught is no crime but a positive good. This slavery is woman's peculiar curse, bearing almost equally with its deadly, hideous weight on the white woman of the dominant class as upon the black slave woman. And yet how deluded they are! If that curse does come to an utter end in the South, as it surely will, I shall hail, as one of the grandest results of its extinction, next to the justice due the oppressed people of color, the emancipation of the white women of that fair land, all of them, slaveholders and non-slaveholders, from an influence too withering and deadly for language to depict. Oh, when shall that scapegoat, slavery, with its failures and losses and shortcomings, its frauds and sins and woes, be sent off into the wilderness of non-existence, to be heard from nevermore? God speed the hour!
But with all their faults, they have many and shining virtues. Though the ideal of a Southern woman commonly received at the North and abroad, is not true to the life, being neither so perfect nor so imperfect as their eulogists, on the one hand, and their detractors, on the other, would fain make it to be, there is yet much, very much, to elicit both love and admiration in her character.
The Southern female mind is precocious, brilliant, impressible, ardent, impulsive, fanciful. The quickness of parts of many girls of fifteen is astonishing. I used often to think, what splendid women they would make, with the training and facilities of our Northern home and school education. But, as it was, they went under a cloud at seventeen, marrying early, and either sinking into the inanition of plantation life, or having their minds dissipated in a vain and frivolous round of idle and selfish gayeties. I compare their intellects to a rich tropical plant, which blossoms gorgeously and early, but rarely fruitens. The Southern women are, for the most part, a capable but undeveloped race of beings. With their precocity, like the exuberance of their vegetation, and with their quick, impassioned feelings, like their storm-freighted air, always bearing latent lightning in its bosom, they might become a something rich, rare, and admirable; but, never bringing thought up to the point of reflection; never learning self-control, nor the necessity of holding passion in abeyance; never getting beyond the degrading influence of intercourse with a race whose stolidity and servility, the inevitable result of their condition, on the one hand, are both the cause and effect of the habit of irresponsible power and selfish disregard of right fostered in the ruling class, on the other—what could be expected of them but to become splendid abortions?
There is another consideration in connection with the excessive war spirit they have evinced, which may help to account for it. I have often had occasion to notice the habit the educated class of Southern women have of conversing familiarly with their male friends and relatives on political subjects, and to contrast it with the almost total reticence of Northern women on subjects of public interest. This, of course, induces a more immediate and personal interest in them, and the more intimate one's interest in a subject, the more easily enthusiasm is aroused toward it.