Co-operative Housekeeping, Romance in Domestic Economy/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV.
Co-operation would set free the Intellectual and Artistic Energies of the Sex.
IN the last chapter I suggested that, in place of such invalid or incapable housekeepers as could not be depended upon in a responsible co-operative organization, the unmarried women of the community could profitably be employed. But there is another and very different class for whom they could also act as substitutes. I mean those women who are unfitted, both by talent and the modern education, for any of the duties and triumphs of practical housewifery, and who now, compelled by conventionality or poverty to a never-ending round of distasteful occupation, sigh bitterly indeed in the ear of Heaven over their ignoble captivity, but are unheard and unheeded by all the world beside. These unfortunates, if liberated from the prison of the household and freed from the fetters of the needle, the broom, and the receipt-book, would play the same noble part among women that the masculine leaders of knowledge, of art, of government, and of morality have enacted among men.
A Lost Genius.
I knew a woman once, gifted so extraordinarily by God that she might have been a florist, a musician, an artist, a physician, a teacher, an evangelist,—since to the mastery of any one of these callings she could have brought nearly equal power and passion. Whatever her fiery mind fastened upon it fused into itself, nor was there anything her cunning right-hand sought to do in which it did not excel. At fourteen her precocity was so great that her father cut short her studies, because she "knew enough for a woman," and made her a teacher in his school. At sixteen she married a young clergyman. Children came fast. Her health gave way, but her energy remained. She was never idle a moment; but, alas! neither father nor husband, nor one of all her twelve brothers and brothers-in-law, saw that it would be better economy to give the genius they were all so proud of, a musical or an artistic or a medical education, that she might pay with her earnings some commoner mortal to make clothes for her little ones, than to let her do it herself with the painful toil of the needle. And she had been brought up with too narrow a vision of woman's duties and destinies to understand herself that she was wasting her life and abusing her powers. All her ready gifts were, in her eyes, merely appropriate feminine "accomplishments," and to make fame or money out of them never occurred to her as a possibility, far less as a duty. And yet her mind was ever in a fever of desire, of invention, of agonized craving for the realization of the dreams of beauty, of beneficence, of friendship, that tormented her. The music rang in her ears; the pictures floated before her eyes; the fearful and wonderful human organism haunted her brain; the dread mysteries of sin and suffering, the awfulness of human responsibility, the glories of salvation, burned upon her lips as she taught her children their daily Bible lesson; and still, nailed to her chair, the swift needle went in and out,—went, as it often seemed to her, through her delicate lungs as well as through the cloth,—until at nine-and-thirty the struggle ended; the body, after long paroxysms of exquisite anguish, gave up its strong hold on life, and the rich soul exhaled away to Heaven, rejoicing to escape from the bars against which it had so long beaten its bright wings in vain. I saw her in her coffin, with an expression of freedom and exaltation upon her marble features that seemed a glory reflected down from her now triumphing far-off spirit, and I resolved to remember the woe and earthly wreck of her thwarted nature, and never to cease until I saw some better way for women than this which can so horribly waste and abuse their finest powers.
The bad Economy of our present Feminine Standard.
Apart from the individual suffering it occasions, the question arises, Can we as a sex afford to make mere seamstresses or housewives or parlour ornaments of these highly gifted women that occasionally appear among us? Is it the individual or the multitude that makes discoveries? It is the favourite American lie,—but I think as dangerous a one as ever was believed, and quite the most basely ungrateful,—that the great multitude, which, after a scanty education, is obliged to toil daily to the limits of its physical strength in procuring or preparing the necessaries of life, is yet able to go, by virtue of some inscrutable wisdom innate in itself, along the path of progress toward perfection. On the contrary, it is the daring intellectual energy and moral courage of the strong and mighty few that have pulled the sluggish world even as far as it has got out of its inborn vice and stupidity; and the most that the multitude can ever do, far more than it often has done, is to know a worthy leader when it sees him, and to follow his teaching. This explains why in barbarous countries, where men all follow the same occupations,—devoting themselves to supplying their bodily wants merely, and fighting their enemies,—society never advances. Simply it has no class of educated thinkers, of persons superior to the rest in knowledge, and therefore in judgment and mental power, to go before the community and point it to a new advance. Even among intellectually active nations, if despotism or superstition succeed in saying to the human spirit, "thus far shalt thou go, and no farther," a torpor and a stagnation as of winter's frost settles down upon it, and it remains immovable for centuries.
Woman unable to assert her Individuality.
As with barbarians, so with women. We have never had among us a class of educated thinkers, and this has always resulted through the presence of both the above-mentioned powers of mental darkness. For, first, everywhere and at all times the immense majority of women have been engaged in the same round of simple but incessant domestic occupations, which, however admirable and necessary in their place, are nevertheless strictly unintellectual, and cannot be esteemed as anything higher than mere mechanical or manual labour; and, second, the all-powerful masculine rulers of women, from the beginning of history until now, have said to us: "This, that, or the other is not suited to the feminine mind. You are now all that your sex is capable of. Stop therefore where you are." It is true that they have never been consistent enough to draw the line at the same point. In India it is placed before the alphabet;[1] in England and America it stretches across the portals of the universities. But wherever it appears, our docile womanhood respects the prohibition, and agrees to call everything beyond it "unfeminine." At this dread word the greater number of those whose girlish impulse is to press forward are alarmed. They look back, and seeing the multitude steadily sewing with bent head, refusing to follow or approve, they lose confidence in their own instincts. Their courage fails: they hesitate: they pause: at length, abashed, they shrink back and begin sorrowfully and painfully to conform to the universal vocation,—
"To finger the fine needle and nice thread;"
though many, perhaps, like glorious Britomart,
"Liever would with point of foeman's spear be dead."
Fatal Consequences of a conventional Standard of Feminine Development.
"I am often complimented on my accomplishments," once said the exceptional woman just described, "but I ought much rather to be praised for my domestic acquirements. For my music and drawing never gave me any trouble,—indeed, I could not help doing them,—but O, what toil and tears it cost me to learn to plan and cut out my children's clothes!"
She laughed pleasantly as she said it, and seemed quite unconscious of the pitiful waste it was. And yet Nature herself protested against making this woman a housekeeper. Even when a child, owing probably to hereditary heart-disease, she did not love to run and skip like other children, and as a matron, walking seemed unnatural and even painful to her. She had not, therefore, that active habit of body which characterizes the true housewife, and enables her to keep constant watch over servants, closets, attics, and cellars. But she was a fearless and beautiful horse-woman, and, could she have followed the bent of perhaps her strongest inclination, and been a physician, then instead of spending her days between her bedroom and sitting-room, sewing and teaching her young children, she might have ridden or driven about, keeping her body healthy in the fresh air, her mind cheerful and active in ministering to her fellow-women, and so have run a long career of usefulness and happiness both to herself and the community.
Doctresses versus Doctors.
Nothing will ever make me believe that God meant men to be the ordinary physicians of women and babies. A few masculine experts might be tolerated in special institutions, so that cases of peculiar danger and difficulty might not be left, as they are now, to the necessarily one-sided treatment of a single sex; but, in general, if ever a created being was conspicuously and intolerably out of his natural sphere, it is, in my opinion, the male doctor in the apartment of the lying-in woman; and I think our sex is really guilty, in the first place, that it ever allowed men to appear there; and, in the second, that it does not insist upon educating women of character and intelligence and social position for that post.
Indeed, common delicacy would seem to demand that all the special diseases of women should be treated principally by women; but this aside, and speaking from common sense only, men may be as scientific as they please,—it is plain that thoroughly to know the woman's organism, what is good for it and what evil, and how it can best be cured when it is disordered, one must be one's self a woman. It only proves how much unworthy passion and prejudice the great doctors allow to intrude into their adoration of "pure science" and boasted love of humanity, that, instead of being eager to enlist the feminine intuitions and investigations in this great cause, as their best chance of arriving at truth, they are actually enacting the ignoble part of churls and misers, if not of quacks. For are they not well enough aware that often their women patients are so utterly beyond them that they do not know what to do with them? The diseases of the age are nervous diseases, and women are growing more nervously high-strung and uncontrollable every day, yet the doctors stand helplessly by and cannot stop it. When, however, there shall be a school of doctresses of high culture and thorough medical education going in and out among the sex with the proper medical authority, they will see, and will be able to prevent, much of the moral and physical neglect and imprudence which, now unchecked in school and home, make such havoc of the vital forces of the present generation.
Such a guardian of household health might have been the poor, heart-broken genius who never found her true place in the feminine community. For she bravely preached the laws of health in every family, while her presence in a sick-room was almost that of a Saviour. People sent for her for miles round, and often healing seemed to wait upon her coming, such new hope and confidence could she infuse into the patient. The very touch of her warm and skilful hand; the quickness of her sympathy and comprehension; her courage, decision, and presence of mind in cases of great danger; her observation of every minutest symptom,—all marked her out as one of Nature's great practitioners, while her enthusiasm for anatomy and physiology seemed to show that, if she could have had the opportunity, she would have been also a true and pure and tireless devotee of science. Her popularity drew her at one time into so wide an amateur practice that she found she was neglecting her home duties for it, and gave it up for the sake of her sewing. But how much more appropriate and grateful would her ministration have been,—a mother herself, a baby nurse absolutely perfect, and with the most sensitive and at the same time the steadiest nervous organization in the world,—at the bedside of her friends and neighbours in their need, than the services of the ordinary country doctors who did officiate there!
Why insist that the Feminine Community must be all Hand and no Brain?
It seems to me not well for us any longer presumptously to decide for each other what is and what is not "feminine," instead of simply taking it for granted that, when God gives a woman talent and aspirations other than domestic, he means her to use them. Agriculture is the noblest and manliest of all industrial pursuits, as well as the most indispensable; but if, for fear they were not "masculine," all men should suddenly betake themselves to the plough, this great civilization of theirs, with all its splendours, would disappear like a dream. It is the same with our sewing; it is indispensable; it is most womanly; but for the whole of us to be doing it, as we are, is simply keeping our sex from its natural development. Surely it is not to be denied that we are all on a dead level of mental achievement and social consideration, and that we are growing less valuable and less valued, because less helpful, all the time. One can count on one's fingers the American women of to-day who are known outside of their own circle, while a certain lower stratum of the sex is sinking ever deeper and deeper in the mire of shame and degradation. Before they can be raised out of it, all must be lifted up, for the lowest of us are in the abyss chiefly because the highest of us are scarcely above the surface.
What force is to accomplish this upheaval? Certainly nothing from without,—for the mass is too enormous,—though some seem to think so, and by way of ropes and pulleys are begging men for the vote, for employment, for "justice." Men do not agree to their demands, but in their own fashion they are talking about it. Doctors, clergymen, essayists, editors,—all are trying their pens at the "woman question," scolding, arguing, sneering; but they make nothing of it; they leave it all confusion and darkness as they found it; while, if the great novelists draw a grand heroine, it is only to overwhelm her with failure and despair, killing her off or sending her into a sisterhood at the end of the book, because there is actually no place for her on the face of the earth. Hawthorne, Goethe, George Eliot, Richter, De Stael, George Sand, Thackeray, Dickens, Kingsley, with the whole host of lesser ones, who echo the pagan strain on their small trumpets,—they all will let no woman be happy or successful except the good and sweet little darlings who walk in the orthodox "feminine" path, and are not sure whether their souls are their own or their husbands'. Charles Reade, strange to say, seems to have more discrimination, and to fancy, with Spenser and Shakespeare, that, when God sends a noble woman into the world, doubtless there is some noble work that he desires her to do there.
The Sphinx must speak for herself.
I believe devoutly that there is such a work for gifted women, and that it is the leadership and guidance of the great multitude of their sex, along the paths of progress and achievement, as the superior minds among men have in every age, generation, and community swayed and influenced their fellows. The elevation of woman cannot be accomplished by men. The theory of her nature cannot be made out, the riddle of her destiny cannot be solved, by them. We must have leaders of like constitutions, passions, sympathies, with ourselves, to help us out of our difficulties, to express our aspirations, to embody our conceptions. For our peculiar feminine interests we need our own thinkers, our own teachers, our own doctors, legislators, editors, reformers, artists, and poets; while for those of humanity in general we require the study and conclusions of wise and cultured women as well as those of men, since the latter we have already, and they seem to be inadequate. I say we want all this from the unknown gifted ones of our sex; but we have not got it and cannot have it, because those who should be its prophets are chained like ourselves to the traditional feminine tread-mill, they and we alike grinding nothing but chaff, for the men have long since taken the grain away.
Where have they sown, that we may reap it again, and once more fill our empty granaries? What shall take the place to us of the round of productive industries we have lost, making the women of all classes as indispensably useful to the community as the men, removing our too well merited reproach of frivolity and extravagance, and giving us all something to live for beside the imitation of the last new fashion?
We shall find it when we forget the prejudices and conventionalities of many ages of suffering and oppression, and start once more from the primal instinct of humanity,—the Social Instinct,—that which first creates the family, and then draws men into the brotherhood of nations,—which out of isolated souls and bodies builds governments and churches and commerce, and elaborates science and the arts, and which alone contains the whole secret of masculine power and success. For what indeed is this great "world" we talk about, that roars outside our doors and mocks us or treads us under foot if we try to get into it, but a vast masculine realm of co-operative industries and activities, in which we have neither part nor lot, and whose masters do not wish us to have any? And why should they care for our thought and labour, except that they get them cheaper? They help and employ, they buy and sell with each other, each one taking what he can do best, and getting paid for it according to its value. However at times they may fight and quarrel, yet in the main they all hang together, stimulating and encouraging each other to the most gigantic enterprises, and compelling every man who would succeed to put forth the whole of his very best.
What an infinite contrast their unity and wealth and power and glory make to our isolation and poverty and weakness and obscurity! And yet, all feeble and poor as we are, we never seek to
"Climb nearer out of lonely Hell"
to each other, but, remaining apart, aloof, suspicious, and critical, we suffer ourselves, and see the whole sex suffer, from the most dreadful forms of human degradation, and never come together so much as to find out the reason, far less to decide on a remedy.
The primal Feminine Necessity.
I have said that men do not want us in their world, and our general indifference to the extension of manhood suffrage to women shows that we have very little desire to enter it. What we do need, however, is a world of our own, a place in the universe for ourselves,—one not so wide, so grand, so rich, or so varied, it may be, as that which they have created, but a free and cheerful sphere, where we can meet and help each other in work and play, can forget our present formal and stilted intercourse and narrow gossip in a busy round of important interests and a frank exchange of thought and sympathy,—can expand all our faculties without being called strong-minded, and indulge all our tastes without being deemed extravagant,—a sunny and tranquil orb of order and perfumed beauty,—no rival, but the fair satellite of man's darksome earth, whose perfection and indispensableness, could he suppose it possible, he would be the first to confess and to desire. This feminine world, which has never yet been, but which must some day be, if there is any hope for women, will begin to emerge out of chaos as soon as we co-operate in the daily work and the great business of our lives,—housewifery?
For this is to us what agriculture is to men,—our indispensable function to the race, to be done first and before all, whatever else be neglected, and what true women do not slight for their own families even at the cost of their rarest gifts or most cherished aspirations. But just as the rude soil-scratching of the barbarian cultivator cannot be named in the same day with the high modern farming now developing through science and the mechanic arts, so neither will the artistic and perfect combinations of co-operative housekeeping, with all the added scope and power that feminine genius in other departments could give it, condescend to compare even with the very best that the most thorough housewife can do alone under the present expensive dislocated and harassing system. To use the strongest American expression of condemnation, it is "behind the age;" and we women who carry it on and who suffer from it are behind the age, with it.
Strangely enough, men are so far from perceiving this to be the real cause of the mysterious dead-weight which ever pulls back society against their herculean efforts, that they want us, not only to be behind the age, but if possible to lose sight of it altogether; for they are constantly preaching to us to go back to the habits and traditions of our grandmothers, to have "calicoes for our best gowns," "do all our own work," "get up with the sun," and so on. But how can we go back? Read only the descriptions of the incredible marvels of embroidery, lace, silk, featherwork, flowers, and jewellery at the Paris Exhibition, and ask whether, in order to return to this lamented, primitive simplicity, all the multitude of hands that wrought them—most of them women's hands too—are to fail because there is no demand for their skill? Already they are paid down to the starvation point, and to throw them out of employment is to devote them to death, or worse,—in my opinion as just a pretext of war as any that have lately set armies in motion. For a woman who is forced to live by hard labour, as is the case in those over-crowded poxmlations, has a right to her life; nay, more absolutely still, to a virtuous life.[2] The feminine love of ornament has created these industries; and in view of the suffering and demoralization it would cause to repress them, even if we could return to calico and homespun, we should be wicked to do it. But we never can. Woman's mission is to be beautiful, but, excepting the rich woman, hardly any of us can afford the beautiful dress we require to make us so. Instead, therefore, of deeming it a virtue to have as little of it as possible, we should rather insist on finding some way to earn money so that we could conscientiously buy all we need of these lovely things, and pay besides our poor foreign sisters a good price for making them. We could accomplish both of these ends, and be handsome ourselves while we made them happier, if, if we were only—Co-operative Housekeepers!
O that from the great book of human experience we could learn even one of its priceless lessons!
For just as every woman now keeps her own house, so in the beginning of society it is supposed that all men tilled their own land. To-day, however, we see only half of them engaged in agriculture, while in the centre of the cultivated domain the rest are engaged upon the vast edifice of their civilization, which even now, story over story of wonderful achievement, towers almost to the skies. What wrought the change? Simply the impulse to better their condition and rise into something higher, and which was so strong upon men that, to accomplish it, they scrupled not at the greatest crimes. They enslaved the weaker wherever they found them, and forced them beyond their strength to produce, not only their own food, but that of their oppressors also. Liberated now from the Adamic bondage to the soil, they found time and strength to attempt an entrance into the world of thought, and from this division of labour, though in the first place so cruelly brought about, have come all the great conquests of the human mind,[3]—conquests which now react upon agriculture, and will continue to do so until the whole earth becomes like the garden of the Lord.
Perhaps the world would have learned in no other way than by brute force, but surely we can look back and see that if men could have voluntarily co-operated in their agriculture and their arts, all the dreadful suffering of the ages of slavery and serfdom might have been spared. The alternative is not presented to women. We cannot, even if we would, enslave each other, and let us thank God that we have always been kept from the temptations and the crimes which so generally go with power! Our temptation is a negative one, but I believe it scarcely less fatal to human happiness and virtue. It is to stand apart, and, rather than give the pre-eminence to those among us to whom it naturally belongs, to do nothing to help either ourselves or the race. Unlike men, we do not care to oppress, but we cannot bear to obey. We prefer a very narrow margin of wilful independence to a wide realm of freedom regulated by law, and are happier to reign each one supreme in the little corner some man allots to her, than to be secondary to any in the spacious palace we might build in combination. But this happiness, if happiness it be, is that of the savage, who is equally undisciplined and prone to petty jealousies; and if women continue to choose it in preference to the larger development afforded by united action, no matter what our culture or refinement may be, fundamentally we shall belong to the same category as savages, since it will be a similar contemptible Self-hood that stands in the way of our progress, and inevitably, therefore, in the way of the progress of the world.
The Effects of Combination.
As, then, the vast fabric of masculine civilization is based upon agriculture, so let us unite quickly to build the feminine civilization upon housewifery. "The coneys are a feeble folk, but they make their nests in the rock." So are we feeble,—O, the weakest, most defenceless of created things!—but we too will make our nests in a rock,—the rock of Union, and in it we will hew out our foundations deep and wide. Offering up our small jealousies on the altar of a nobler womanhood, we will forego, as all our brothers have done who have risen above barbarians, a little of our present starveling independence of each other for the sake of the inestimable freedom and safety and abundance that must ensue to us all in an organized feminine community. For the leaders of our association we will elect the women who, by their pre-eminent fidelity and success in the "small things" of their own households, have shown themselves worthy of the great things of many households combined. Obedient to their experience, and under their wise and gentle guidance, our plain "home-cooking," to our husbands' astonishment and delight, will rapidly develop in the co-operative kitchens into the magic modern art which, out of Nature's raw material, creates new substances and elaborates new flavours, but whose every combination will now waft an aroma of daintiness and freshness impossible to restaurant or hotel, because it is an emanation of delicate ladyhood solely! Our co-operative laundries will not only send us back snowy linen, transparent muslins, and faultless flutings, but will perform for us also every species of dyeing and cleansing; while the co-operative sewing-rooms will add to themselves division after division of the feminine and household belongings, until finally all that is necessary to the complete furnishing and adorning of ordinary humanity and its home will be found within one ample circumference. When the profits begin to come in, the prudent housekeepers will first invest in farms and gardens, that our palace may be fitly set amid a smiling nature of its own; but as new means accumulate, new energies are roused, so that easily and swiftly they go on to lay the solid beams of its chambers, and to build high its goodly walls. Its centre will be a hall, lighted from above by heaven, and this noblest of all its apartments will be devoted to legislation.
"Feminine legislation?" Do we hear a laugh from our masculine law-givers assembled in their huge castle over the way?
Yes, gentlemen, the same. For co-operative housekeeping will, I think, settle the vexed question of women's voting.
Womanhood Suffrage.
Suppose that manhood suffrage, precisely as men now exercise it, were to be extended to women. As long as we agreed with the majority of men, all would go well. Not being able to fight ourselves, however, and too poor to bring mercenary armies into the field, what should we do in case of any irreconcilable difference of opinion or interest between men and women voters? Simply what we do now in our own families when we disagree with a determined husband or father,—give up! I suppose an extreme case that would probably never happen; but it is not impossible, and it lays bare the fundamental distinction which must exist between manhood and womanhood suffrage, though the leaders of the woman's rights movement seem unable to see it. The one will express Power, the other Influence.
Now influence has a fluidity of nature that runs to waste and loses itself as a direct force, unless it is collected compactly together, and brought to bear in a particular manner; and women are so dependent, so sympathetic, so by their very nature swayed and prejudiced by their husbands and fathers, that if they mix themselves up in the affairs of men, recognize all their national and State divisions, and take sides in all their political disputes and discussions, I believe their influence, which, specifically applied, might be so powerful and so beneficent, will be like water poured out upon the sand. Carried away by the vaster masculine interests, they will forget and overlook their own. Consequently they themselves will reap but little honour or advantage; like the Irish or the negro, they will be the tools of party, and they will leave the political world no better, if not worse, than they found it.
It seems as if some such theory as this must, in fact, be latent in the feminine mind, else why its indifference, and even dislike, of the efforts of the champions of woman's rights? Furthermore, I doubt whether the sex in general admits the proposition that men are its wilful tyrants and oppressors, from whom, for its own defence, it must wrest a portion of their power. Were women deliberately to discuss it, I think they would rather conclude that, first, being excessively absorbed in themselves, men forget us; and, second, acting always together in large masses, while every one of us is solitary, they are not aware that any strictly feminine rights and privileges exist which they should respect. The true remedy, then, is for the feminine hosts to come quietly together, and form themselves, not into an antagonistic, but simply a separate camp, where, removed from all disturbing influence, they could calmly and dispassionately take counsel as to what they would have men do either for their own or the mutual benefit. I believe this spectacle alone would set our masculine lawgivers thinking more than they have ever thought before. Conscience-smitten, they would begin to ask themselves whether they had indeed comported themselves generously and justly to this defenceless army of intelligent beings, so like, yet so different from themselves. The imperious necessity which is upon each sex to stand well with the other when brought fairly facing it, would agitate them, and, almost before any deputation could leave our tents to crave a hearing, they would be ready to grant us all that we desired.
To enforce my meaning, manhood suffrage is an instrument forged and tempered by men for their own use, and to answer their own necessities. Why should we tease them for it, when they do not want to give it to us, and when if we had it perhaps we could not use it any better than we could lift the sledge-hammers which yet they wield so easily? Womanhood suffrage, however,—that is, the regulation of our own affairs, the expression of our united opinion, and the preferring of our united request,—we have now, and without asking any one for it. At any moment we choose we can select some town as our headquarters, elect our delegates, and send them there with our instructions as to the favour, or petition, or remonstrance we wished them to frame for presentation to the law-making power; and I believe, with Gail Hamilton, that if the request were at all wise or reasonable, and were understood to come from the numerical majority of women, the legislature would no more think of refusing it than a just man would think of refusing the wile whom he trusted. Thus every end of justice which some women now hope for from the extension to them of manhood suffrage would be gained, while all this conflict of custom and prejudice would be avoided.
And how, in truth, can we bear to give up what is so far the peculiar and essential glory of feminine enfranchisement, that no blood, (except our Saviour's) has been shed for it? How bear to part with the grand and perfect sisterhood now within our power, since women are in fact of no nationality? If I love and reverence some Englishwoman as the rarest and wisest of her sex, I am glad to think that she and I have sworn allegiance to no government, so that we can never be arrayed by the passions of rulers in enmity against each other. So far, therefore, from women's wishing for manhood suffrage as an enlargement from their present limitations, they ought rather to scorn it as something too narrow for their sympathies and aspirations, as, in fact, directly imprisoning them in all the prejudices, hates, mistakes, selfishness, greed, and lies of these grand but detestable masculine nationalities that have filled the world with woe and slaughter, ruin and barbarism, since the day that Cain first murdered his brother Abel. Which of them can we respect or trust sufficiently to wish to become identified with it, since not one has the fear of God before its eyes or the love of mankind in its heart? Nay, rather let all women meet on common ground as women, and at first in small assemblies, and afterward in august Feminine International Parliaments, take counsel and devise action for the happiness and virtue of the whole sex, and through this of humanity. This is the true womanhood suffrage; and the only assignable reason why it has not long ago been exercised by women is, that, isolated from each other as we have always been, our common interests have not been sufficiently important or apparent to us to make us combine for their guardianship.
When, however, co-operative housekeeping throws a large part, if not eventually the whole, of the retail trade into the hands of women, they will have many moneyed transactions among themselves, and extensive business relations among men, that will need the force of existing laws, and perhaps the enactment of new ones for their protection. Women will very soon then recognize the necessity for mutual consultation and unity of action on these matters at least. But these deliberations and decisions, since they are about laws, will partake of the nature of legislation, and the body of women to whom, as representing the rest, such deliberation and decision is intrusted, will constitute, so far as women are concerned, a feminine legislature. Then the organizing of a legislative department, as a step which will naturally follow upon the co-operative kitchens and clothing-houses, is not so laughable as at first appeared.
Public Morals will be the special Care of the "Senatus Matronum."
But laws relating to trade and finance will not be the only ones which the feminine will request from the masculine legislature. The laws now protecting the feminine personality are utterly inadequate, and it is a vital question no longer to be put off, as to how much further and how much longer men are to be permitted to corrupt women. Why, also, in the case of women offenders, are lawyers, judge, and jury all men? Is this for us to be "tried by our peers?" As for the abominations of our police courts, the mingled harshness and ribaldry with which the wretched victims of social crime are treated, the depraving house of correction, the deadening, brutalizing penitentiary,—all, in fact, which men have devised for the punishment of men, and have applied indiscriminately to women,—it may do very well for their sex, which I suppose they understand, but not for ours. What the proper theory is I do not pretend here to say; but remedies would be thought of and applied quickly enough, were the lost and degraded of their own sex brought before cultured and Christian women. This is, indeed, where they should be brought, and then, perhaps, these would wake up to a sense of their duties and responsibilities in regard to those, to a horror of that into which a woman can be transformed when all other women abandon her, and to a recantation of the universal yet guilty feminine excuse, "Am I my sister's keeper?"
- ↑ "What!" says the Hindoo gentleman to the missionaries, "teach women to read? Teach cows to read!"
[The Hindoos were not always so. Messrs. Trubner & Co. are publishing a work, in which is given the names of twenty-eight Hindoo poetesses, with specimens of their poetry.—Athenæum, October 15, 1870.]
- ↑ Let me not be understood to say, however, that even the defence of womanly honour, though the most vital of any possible national interest, is a just cause of war as it is at present carried on. I am no believer in the precept of " doing evil that good may come." War seems to me wholly evil, and I hate it, because of all the hostile forces that work together for the degradation of women, it is the most rapidly and overwhelmingly ruinous.
- ↑ In the ancient world, it was among the aristocracies and the priesthood alone that science or culture had any existence. The Greeks themselves, though we think of them as a nation, were but some handfuls of free citizens set over a crowd of slaves.