The woman's club has become the school of the middle-aged woman. It has brought her up to the time. It has enabled her to keep pace with the better advantages given to her sons and daughters. It has put an interest into her life which it had never previously possessed, and made her more humanly companionable because better able to judge and more willing to suspend judgment. The clubs of women in America—the growth mainly of the past twenty years—can now be counted by the hundreds, and their membership by many thousands, and the history of them all is practically the same.
It is this woman, born of women's clubs, who is the woman of to-day. She is the centre of the intellectual activity of townships and neighborhoods all over the country. She forms stock companies, and builds athenaeums; she is at the head of working guilds; she organizes classes, teaches what she knows, while she is being taught what she did not know; and in mental activity, and labor which is not routine, has renewed her youth, and added to her attractions. She is at the same time far removed from a lobbyist. She is able to look at different sides; she is socially at home with the best people in every sense of the word. She is a lady as well as a woman, and does not adopt what is outre in order to obtain notoriety.
The New Life[1]
It is a very dull mind, whether belonging to man or woman, that does not feel stirred by recent movements—not here alone but all over the world—into some quickening sense of the deeper life, the broader human claims, the unifying and uniting influences which have sprung into activity, and which address, not the visionary, but the thoughtful and far-seeing, with prophetic gleams of a new heaven and a new earth.
[Footnote 1: The Cycle.]
It is also a very narrow and self-absorbed mind which, only sees in these openings opportunities for its own pleasure, or chances for its own advancement on its own narrow and exclusive lines. The lesson of the hour is help for those that need it, in the shape in which they need it, and kinship with all and everything that exists on the face of God's green earth. If we miss this, we miss the spirit, the illuminating light of the whole movement, and lose it in the mire of our own selfishness. To women this uplifting, these open doors, mean more than to men. They have been hedged about with so many restrictions, forced and held in such blind and narrow ways, that it is little wonder if sight and steps are feeble, and that they find it impossible to take it all in, or to recognize at once the full meaning of the day that is dawning for them.
For we are only at the threshold of a future that thrills us with its wonderful possibilities;—possibilities of friendship where separation was; of love where hatred was; of unity where division was; of peace where war was; of light—physical, mental and spiritual—where darkness was; of agreement and equality where differences and traditions had built up walls of distinction and lines of caste. This beautiful thing needs only to be realized in thought to become an actual fact in life, and those who do realize it are enriched by it beyond the power of words to express. "I should like to wake up rich one morning just to see how it would feel," said one woman to another not long since. "I do wake up rich every morning now," said the other, "though I have still my living to earn, because my life is full of prized opportunities, of cherished friendships, of chances for acquiring knowledge that I had not in youth, and keeping myself in touch with broad human facts and forces. Everything is interesting to me, more interesting the closer my acquaintance with it, so that I am fast getting rid of those ugly things we call prejudices, and laying in a stock of appreciation instead, which is in itself enriching."
The old feeling of patron and dependant—so irksome, so humiliating, so feudal, yet containing for many the whole moral law—is done away with, and in its place appears a spirit of true fellowship, a growing sense of mutual respect and helpfulness. Club life teaches us that there are many kinds of wealth in the world—the wealth of ideas, of knowledge, of sympathy, of readiness to be put in any place and used in any way for the general good. These are given, and no price is or can be put upon them; yet they ennoble and enrich whatever comes within their influence.
Money is the only kind of wealth that is not common, that is not given freely; and for that reason it has a deadening and demoralizing effect upon the minds of those who cultivate and increase it for its own sake, or fail to put it to its larger and more human uses. Wise distribution is the only way in which money can be made valuable in the world: it is only as a developing power, as an aid to the worker, and a creator of instrumentalities by which good objects can be accomplished, that it is desirable. In the light of this view, what place do those men and women occupy who shut themselves up with their money, and shut out the wide human interests which educate the mind and heart to noble issues? Going to church does not help them, for it must be an exclusive church and an exclusive pew, under an exclusive pastor who patronizes Jesus Christ but does not sympathize with Him, and who talks about the "dregs of society" as if it were something far removed from the knowledge and consciousness of his hearers.
The woman of the past has especially been cramped up, bound around, and blindfolded by her special form of belief, by her tradition, by her social customs, by her education, by her whole environment; and the effect will remain stamped more or less upon her individuality long after the predisposing causes have passed away and better influences and circumstances have taken their place.