The Friendships of Women

by William Rounseville Alger

Take the example of war. War is an evil, a transient incident in the fortunes of humanity; therefore the fewer who take part in it, the better. Women, being out of it, had best keep out of it. No one desires to have women become soldiers. Mental and physical labor will, as long as the world lasts, be a necessary part of the experience of humanity; therefore men and women properly have a joint heritage in its exactions and its privileges. But government is a passing phase in the evolution of the social system: when men are perfected, it will vanish in spontaneous obedience. War or crude violence universally governed in the primitive society. Little by little, this barbaric reign of force was encroached upon and superseded by politics, the forms of statesmanship and legislation. Then, little by little, the realm and rule of politics began to shrink before the increasing sway of conscience, reason, and sympathy, the personal law of justice and love, the intrinsic motives appropriated by the private heart from society and religion. As war has been narrowing and receding before politics, politics in turn must narrow and recede before morality. The less need a nation has of governmental interference for the securing of justice, the better off that nation is. The smaller the number of persons engaged in working that political mechanism, which is never productive, but merely regulative, the better it would seem to be for the people. We do not desire ever to see a woman occupy the office of a hangman, nor of a prosecuting attorney, nor yet of an electioneering politician; because, these being transient accompaniments of an imperfect society, the desideratum is to have concentrated on them the interest and energy of the smallest number competent to secure the needful results of order. He who believes that a universal devotion to politics would most speedily achieve the end of politics, namely, the supersedure of its whole machinery by the arrival at a self- rectifying observance of the conditions of private and public welfare—must advocate the bestowment of legislative and other public functions on women. Let all take part in voting and governing, for the sake of more quickly reaching the time when none shall vote or govern, but every one be a law unto himself. On the contrary, he who believes that a universal rush into public life, forensic controversy, party and personal rivalry, would exasperate the interest, and prolong the dominion, of politics, must earnestly recommend women to abstain from the struggle. Whatever logical right they may have, he will think it best that they abandon that right, and devote their zeal to the sphere of morality, whose elements are the eternal concern of all humankind. A wider outbreak of plots and cabals, an enlargement of the chase for notoriety and the scramble for office, a more virulent division of neighbors and of families, a new lease for the spirit of ambition and partisanship, would be an evil of the deadliest fatality. Being out of politics, which is the transient sphere of some, is it not best that woman keep out of it, and devote herself to morality, which is the permanent sphere of all? Here is furnished an honorable ground on which she may be, not shut out of, but excused from, the province of government.

What is the ideal of perfect society? Is it a state where there is a universal contention for notice, power, and honor? Then let women enter that contest now. Is it a state where each is content with the personal fruition of his own powers, in harmony with the same enjoyment by all others? Then let women, by setting such an example of abstinence from the public realm of politics, draw men also to their true happiness, in "the realm of home and morals."

Turning from the authority of history to the authority of moral science, there is no reason for the enslavement of woman to man. This is not yet fully seen, because the historic type of woman as pure subject, of man as pure sovereign, has sunk so deeply into the imagination of both sexes. The Gentoo Code declared, "A woman ought to burn herself alive on the funeral pyre of her husband." Body and soul, she was a mere appendage to him. The Mosaic Code declared a woman unclean eighty days after bearing a female child, but only forty days after bearing a male child. One of the laws of Solon forbade the Greek fathers and brothers from selling their daughters and sisters as slaves; showing that such an infamous custom had been prevalent. The passage of thousands of years had brought a degree of physical emancipation to woman; but she still remained mentally servile, when Catharine Parr said to her husband, Henry VII, "Your majesty doth know right well, neither I myself am ignorant, what great imperfection, by our first creation, is allotted to us women, to be appointed as inferior and subject unto man as our head; and that, as God made man in his own likeness, even so hath he made woman of man, by whom she is to be governed." This type of unquestioning subjection and obedience is depicted by Chaucer, after Boccaccio, in his "Griselda," and by Tennyson in his "Enid." The husbands of these most lovely and womanly of women try their temper, and their subjectedness, by the most capricious, and the most cruel, tests. They submit to every thing with unmurmuring sweetness and humility. The true lesson of these charming stories is, that an inexhaustible self-abnegation and obedience forms the most heavenly trait and power of human nature. But it is a perversion to limit the application to woman. Moral excellence is the same in man as in woman. It is an outrage to make that meek submission to wrong, which shows so divinely in her, a duty; and it is equally an outrage to make that autocratic authority of man over woman, which he so complacently assumes, a right. The progressive emancipation of woman, revealed in history, will go on until she ceases to be, in any sense, "a mere appendage of man," and they become mutually as independent as they are mutually dependent.

It is very curious to study the extremes of dishonor and of honor, in which women, as such, have been held, at different periods, under various social conditions. In the Oriental world, in consequence of the character fostered in them by despotism, they have always been regarded by men with complacent condescension as toys, or with distrust and scorn as vicious inferiors. In the Classic world, they were always treated as far inferior to the other sex, and held up in literature in the most odious light. Euripides was surnamed the woman-hater, from the scorn with which he depicts the sex. The comedies of Aristophanes are mercilessly sarcastic, in their portrayals of women: his "Ecclesia" might be taken for a freshly painted ironical picture of the "Woman's-rights Movement" of to-day. And what a frightful picture of the Roman women Juvenal paints in his "Sixth Satire "! In the Christian world, the pagan type of woman, thought of as lower and wickeder than man, bore, for a long period, an aggravated form, imparted by an intense theological dogma. The theologians taught that woman—by the seduction of Adam and the introduction of original sin, which led to the crucifixion of Christ— was the guiltiest and worst of human beings, the Temptress of Man and the Murderess of God. Hear how Tertullian raged against her: "She should always be veiled, clothed in mourning and in rags; that the eye may see in her a penitent, drowned in tears, and atoning for the sin of having ruined the human race. Woman! thou art the gateway of Satan."

The condition of women in the East has been unfavorably affected by polygamy, despotism, stagnant ignorance, their close confinement, and the profound sensual element in their religion. Yet there are exceptions to the rule there as well as elsewhere. It was a woman who recited the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments" to the Sultan. Oriental literature boasts many shining names of women. We have a pleasing introduction to some of them in Garcia de Tassy's essay on "The Female Poets of India." Ruckert's "Hamiisa," a collection of Arabic poetry, contains specimens from fifty-five female poets of Arabia. The genius of the Mohammedan saint, Rabia, has been given to fame by her wonderful sayings, translated into many modern tongues. In spite of these examples, however, the superiority of the condition of Western women over Eastern is not only incontestable, but, as a whole, incomparable.

The difference of the character of Jesus from that of Mohammed, and the difference of the spirit which they showed in their personal relations with women, would legitimate just the difference now existing in the condition of women, respectively in Christian and Mohammedan lands. Passing over other more notorious incidents, one anecdote will illustrate this statement. After the battle of Bedr, a Jewess of Medina, named Asma, wrote some satirical couplets against Mohammed. Omeir, at dead of night, instigated by the prophet, crept into the apartment where Asma, surrounded by her children, lay asleep. Feeling stealthily with his hand, he removed her infant from her breast, and plunged his sword into her bosom with such force that it went through her back. The next morning, at prayers in the Mosque, Mohammed said, "Hast thou slain the daughter of Marwan?" "Yes; but is there cause of fear for what I have done?" The implacable prophet replied, "None whatever: two goats will not knock their heads together for it."

Lamartine says of the Armenians, with whom he was intimate at Damascus, "I could not turn my eyes from these beautiful and graceful women. Our visits and conversations were everywhere prolonged; and I found them as amiable as they were lovely. The customs of Europe, the dress and ways of the women of the West, were our chief topics. They did not seem to envy the lives of our women; and, on observing the grace, the amiability, the simplicity, the serenity of mind and heart which they preserved in the seclusion of their domestic life, it would be difficult to say what they could envy in our women of the world, who, in the turmoil of society, waste in a few years their beauty, their minds, and their health." And yet, allowing the utmost for this greater calm and contentment, our women would lose a boon, standing quite alone in its immense value, if they were to give up that liberty which is so fast gaining them a full share in every real privilege enjoyed by men. Christian women mingle on equal terms in our social, literary, patriotic, and religious festivals. Hindu or Mohammedan ladies are condemned merely to look in, through windows grated with bamboo slats, on the preaching of the priests, and on the banquets of their husbands. Perhaps our ignorance as to the facts, and our prejudices as to the principle, exaggerate the actual evils of polygamy in Asia. The most trustworthy travellers there testify that not one man in ten can afford to maintain more than one wife; and that not one in ten, of those who can afford it, will venture on the trial, if they have a child by the first. Besides, the dreadful mortality of wives in many parts of America—owing to excessive worry, household drudgery, and rapid child-bearing—amounts to polygamy, only it is successive instead of simultaneous.

But one privilege European and American women have, which they cannot easily over-estimate; namely, their exemption from the irresponsible despotism still exercised over a majority of their sisters. The whole force of public opinion and of civil law is pledged for their protection. In his travels in Khasmir, published in 1844, Vigne relates this horrid incident, which happened within his own knowledge. Mihan Singh, governor of Kabul, had a favorite wife, the mother of his only son, who was accused of an intrigue. Her son, fearing the worst, dashed his turban on the ground before his father— the most imploring act an Oriental can use—and knelt, bareheaded, at his feet. But the enraged husband was inexorable, and caused his hapless wife to be baked alive. What a breadth of progress separates us from the state of society in which such a deed could be done openly, and without illegality, by a ruler! Can any woman be too grateful that she stands on this side of that breadth instead of on the other side? It is to be feared that her sex is not always mindful enough of the duty of those who are free to be bravely sincere and true. Deceit is proper to the slave. Liberty imposes frankness. The Asiatic woman carefully covers her face, but leaves her legs naked, and considers her European sister shameless in reversing this custom, There are, however, more impenetrable veils than those outwardly put on. When we compare the simplicity of the primitive ages of the East with the guileful art and hardened worldliness of the fashionable society of the West, we are tempted to think, that the more woman has bared her face, the more she has masked her mind.

Truth requires us to qualify the view of the social condition of women which we derive from the comic poets, from the later Greek writers in general, and from the biting epigrams on women preserved in the Greek Anthology. That qualification may be drawn from the history of Sappho. The consenting conclusions of the best critical scholars of recent times—as may be seen in such works as Smith's "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography" and Miller's "Literature of Ancient Greece,"—have cleared her name from the foul aspersions thrown on it by the authors of a subsequent age, who interpreted her life and works by the unclean standards of their own. "Not a line in her fragments, rightly understood, can cast a cloud on her fair fame." In her time, sensual and sentimental love were not distinctly separated; and she expressed her passionate but pure sentiments with a simple freedom and fervor afterwards grossly misconceived. It is to a friend of her own sex that Sappho writes, "Equal to the gods seems to me the man who sits opposite to thee, and watches thy sweet mouth and charming smile. While I look at thee, my heart loses its force, my tongue ceases to speak, a subtile fire glides through my veins, and a rushing sound fills my ears." This mixture of feelings, this carrying on of friendships between men, or between women, in the language of passionate love, without the implication of any thing corrupt, was a feature of the Greek character, unknown to nations of a poorer and colder temperament. It seems, as is set forth by Miller, in the fourth book of his "Dorians," that, in Lesbos, and some other parts of Greece, female societies were formed, each under the lead of some woman of distinguished genius, for the cultivation of poesy, music, refinement and grace of manners, and the other elegant arts. Girls were sent from distant cities, and even from foreign lands, to be educated in these societies. Sappho was the head of one of them. She calls her house, "The House of the Servant of the Muses." She formed ardent friendships with many of her pupils. It is these friendships which she celebrates in most of her poems. They reveal the varied, affectionate intercourse sometimes known by the women of classic Greece in their private apartments. The fragments which have reached our day preserve, as the names of the choicest friends of Sappho, Telesilla, Megara, Athis, Mnasidica; Anactoria, of Miletus; Gongyla, of Colophon; Eunica, of Salamis; and Damophila, of Pamphylia. The animosity of her allusions to her rivals, Gorgo and Andromeda, shows that she could hate as vigorously as she loved, and reminds us of the title of Middleton's tragedy, "Women, beware Women!"

In the world of modern civilization, the tendency is in the opposite direction from that of the Oriental, Classic, and early Christian worlds. It expresses reverence for woman as a moral superior. But the chivalrous impulse to exalt woman above man is as mistaken as the impulse to degrade her beneath him. Humanity is worshipful only as it exhibits worshipful attributes; and these attributes have the same rank, wherever they appear. A woman deserves to be honored above a man only as she has more than he of the highest qualities of humanity. The moment she demands precedence, the crown crumbles from her brows in fragments of dark decay. This lesson is finely taught in the ancient Hindu epic, the "Mahilbhiirata." As Radhika walked with Krishna, her soul was elated with pride, and she thought herself better than he; and she said, "O my beloved! I am weary, and I pray you to carry me upon your shoulders." Krishna sat down and smiled, and beckoned to her to mount. But, when she stretched forth her hand, he vanished from her sight; and she remained alone, with outstretched hand. Then Radhika wept bitterly.