The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863

WOMAN

The ever-present phenomenon of revolution bears two forms. They may be discrete or concrete, but they are two—ideas, movement,—cause, result—force, effect. And progressive humanity marches upon its future with ideas for its centre, movement its right and left wings. Not a step is taken till the Great Field-Marshal has sent his orders along the lines.

Revolutions go by periods. Are they possibly controlled or influenced in these years by the stellar affinities of the north pole? Is that capricious functionary leading up to Casseopeia, in this cycle, or Andromeda, that we find ourselves turning from great Hercules, fiery Bootes, and even neglecting the shining majesty of belted, sworded Orion, to consider woman? I have not consulted the astronomers. The stars of the heavens are in their places. Male and female, the groups come to us in winter and retire in summer: their faint splendors fall down upon our harvest nights, and then give way to the more august retinue of the wintry solstice. The boreal pivot, whose journal is the awful, compact blue, may, for aught I know, be hobnobbing at this moment with the most masculine of starry masculinities. But if it be, it is in little sympathy with the magnetic pole of human thought, whose fine point turns unwaveringly in these days of many revolutions to woman as the centre and leader of the grandest of them all.

A great storm overtook an ancient navigator of the Ægean. He called on his gods, he importuned them, but the waves rolled and raged the more angrily the more he prayed. 'Neptune, wilt thou not save me?' 'Go below,' was the uncourteous answer, and, as with a great blow struck by the hand of the busy deity, the vessel was suddenly suspended midway between the surface and the depths of the waters. What a peaceful spot she had reached! The astonished mariner looked around him in wonder more than gratitude. 'Good deity,' said he, taking breath, 'I prayed not to be saved thus from the storm, but in it. Return me to the upper world, I beseech thee, and let me do my stroke in its battle.'

Storms have swept over the ages as winds over the blue Ægean, and woman, shrinking from their blasts and the agitations that have followed them, has prayed to her gods, and been suspended between the depths of man's depravity and the heights of his achievements, around whose wintry peaks winds of ambition have roared, storms of vaulting self-love have gathered, tempests of passion have contended in angry and fierce strife. To brighten the heights they assailed each one, to clear the lofty airs embracing them. They shine now where clouds were wont to hover; sunshine steeps the rugged declivities where mists of ages hung their impenetrable folds, paths invite where unknown, forbidding fastnesses repelled even daring feet, and thus the stormy career of conflict is vindicated in its results. The dove testifies a certain divinity in the Doing which has produced it.

But that still region where the more timid life has nestled undaring, unadventured, shrinking from the struggle and the strife above, recoiling from the seething foulness below—what have we in this dreamland inhabited by woman? And wherefore the earnest turning thitherward, in our day, of so many brave, so many earnest, so many sad, so many yearning, aspiring eyes? Wherefore the restlessness, wherefore the groans of imprisonment here, wherefore the passionate longings, the resolute, deep, inextinguishable purpose of escape? Make way, O propitious gods; I can no longer be saved from this struggle of life, but through it. This mariner must be brought to the surface, or the waters will be parted before her by the conquering power in her own soul, and she will present herself there unaided. But not in the fierce spirit of a combatant, not as a conqueror—only as one moved by divine purpose to reach and take her place, to touch and accomplish her work.

What are the qualities of this new soldier in the field of human struggle? Whence comes and whither goes she?

These inquiries point us to the ideas of the Woman Revolution—its Movements will be deductions from them.

Man knows neither woman nor her whence or whither. He acknowledges her a Mystery from his earliest acquaintance with her to the present day. Whatever his conquests over the hidden and the mysterious elsewhere in nature, here is a mystery that confronts him whenever he turns hither—nay, that grows by his attempts at mastering it. The permanently mysterious is only that which exceeds us, and we study this but to learn how widely its embracing horizon can spread as we advance. Thus the woman of the nineteenth century is an incomparably greater mystery to man than was her sister of the ninth. Scientific conquests do but touch the periphery of her being; they explore her nature so far as it is of common quality and powers with the nature of man and of the feminine animals, and would perhaps do more wisely if they stopped dumb before what lies beyond and above these levels. For beyond, man reads but to misread—studies but to vex and confuse himself, and—shall I say it?—learns to sneer at rather than to reverence what baffles his inquiries. Does this statement seem harsh? Is it doubted? See its truth. The only science (so called) which undertakes a study of woman does not inspire its student with an increased respect for her. As a class, medical men, above that of other men, are perhaps less chivalrous than blacksmiths. Lucky is she and lucky are they if it be not diminished instead. For, assuming man as the standard, the corporeal functions, which absolutely elevate her in the scale of development, being added to all that he possesses, and constituting her corporeal womanhood, are seen by this student only as disabilities from which he is happily exempt (as if a disability could come into any life but through the door of an ability); and her larger measure of the divine attributes, faith, hope, and love—love, as compassion and as maternity—are seen as simple weaknesses to which he is happily superior.

The greatness of man's individuality lies in his power over the external; that of woman's is interior, central, as the sun to our planets, which roll through common fields of space, breathe a common ether, share a common light and warmth, but know not that ether, that light, that warmth, whence theirs flows out to them. Central, potent, commanding, superior to laws which alternately move and still their currents—nay, being in themselves those very laws—this hidden power is never touched by them, is shared by them only in fixed measure, beyond which drafts upon it are protested as inexorably as turn the wheels of fate in producing a midge or a mastodon.

The greater includes the less, said the first Mathematician. It is no more true of the geometer's space and the philosopher's matter than of the physiologist's functional power. Apply the axiom to the functional quantity of the feminine and masculine, and it will be seen which includes which, and why man, in all the pride of his highest achievements, is obliged to confess himself defeated, when, as an investigator, he addresses himself to the solution of the problem of womanhood. Her individualizing attributes make in her life a kingdom of her own. Possessing every function and power which man possesses, either in identity or equivalent—the faculties, capacities, and functions common to both differing only comparatively in each from their degree in the other, the masculine being confessedly the lighter side of the balance, when the higher and finer attributes are in the scale—woman has above them all her own unique life, which man can learn only as a student and spectator, the depths of which all his penetration does not enable him to explore, the secrets of which his consciousness can never report. From and through the powers and attributes which centre herein, come those experiences, perceptions—those faiths, hopes, trusts, yearnings, aspirations, loves, which ray out to man that purer and divine light without which he soon stumbles and falls—that warmth without which his life becomes a wintry waste—that harmony without which he is an instrument played at will by the cunning fiend of discord and selfishness—that purity without whose sweet, cleansing current flowing over and around him he is soon mired in the sloughs of appetite, or swamped in the unclean sinks of sensualism—that steadfast holding to things above, without which he soon drops down to grovel along the earth—that unwavering faith and that utter trust in good which keeps alive and warm in the heart of humanity its noblest ideals.

Thus the Cross of the feminine life embodies the idea of the revolution in its favor: revolution, which, above all its wars, national or civil, its struggles for or against freedom, above all its discoveries in the world of matter and of force, above all its inventions, its new arts and its improved old arts, its philanthropies, its religious agitations, is destined to command for the nineteenth century the respect of the coming ages. Dion's star upon its forehead, already the dim and distant future diaphaned in its light, comes up to cheer our waiting, wandering eyes.

It is only woman who can state woman. The unknown quantity falls not within the terms of any equation to which man can reduce her. Master, teacher of all other lessons in nature, here he must be the taught. Leader of all other movements, here he must be follower. Greater must not only include, it must conduct less.

Whence?

Out of the peaceful, still waters below: no longer stay possible there. The vis vitæ overruling the vis inertia, we take up the line of march. Fold the napkin away from your eyes, O daughter of the ages, and behold, there lies your road—a throng already pressing their way where you thought you were alone. Upward, as well by the universal as by the special law of the case. Many a tearful eye turned backward to the land we are leaving—land beloved by woman, though stained with oppression, darkened by slavery, impoverished by lack of action, dwarfed in its proportions, devious in many of its loveliest lines—some of its sweetest paths leading those who set feet of innocent trust in them down to hell at last; beloved despite all, because the heart of the traveller is tender and loving; cherished, because her repressed soul is timid and doubting. We have lacked light, freedom, space for action and growth, yet are there pleasant places there. All these are now before us. Dry your tears, O tender souls, suppress your sighs, stifle your groans. Let us press forward in courage and hope. Forty years, it may be, in the wilderness, but deliverance at last. The gentle cloud will be over us by day, the path of duty will shine as a fire upon us by night.

Farewell, then, Africa, land of despot and victim; farewell, Asia, land of satrap and slave; farewell, Europe, land of monarch and subject: welcome, broad, varied, exhaustless New World, spreading inviting fields before longing eyes that falter while they gaze.

Whither?

Two thoughts naturally result from this new attitude: first, to go straight to the kingdom already laid out and well beaten into paths by man; second, to be so polite when arrived there as to accept him, his life, power, work, as standards to which it were wisest that we conform ourselves with all expedient haste, and thus blot out as speedily as may be the woman world—let its existence be remembered only as an evil escaped, a humiliation left behind forever. Has not its narrowness shamed us, its poverty of action cramped and starved the capacities we begin to feel unfolding in us—has not its peace made us seem cowards while we lingered in it, and will not its imperishable purity bear transplantation, and bloom in perennial beauty on the wider fields to which we are hastening?

We touch the borders of the promised land. Weary and spirit-sore, less from the travel than the bitter experiences which prompted it, we yearn for the hospitable welcome due to a stranger, a helper arrived in due season. We are come, O potentate. Open wide the glad gates that shall receive us. Is not this the Canaan which we but ask to divide with thee?—a goodly land, and a prosperous, which it were joyful to go in and possess. But the heathen inhabitant thereof turns his back upon us, shuts his gates, closes his doors, ascends his throne, takes up his sceptre, and waving it before our astonished eyes, says: 'This is my own kingdom. I have created it from a wilderness to suit my own life, not another. It cannot be shared; nobody, not you, my mother, my wife, sister, daughter—not even you, most beloved, cherished, worshipped woman, shall divide it with me. No admittance except on business.'

What to do in such an unexpected emergency!—such behavior, with all sorts of personal and external power to back it, to say nothing of those proverbial fractions of law, nine out of ten of which instantly convert themselves into an adamantine cement, binding his to him, so that indeed it were a critical piece of practice to essay their sundering, for Nature is in the union, and she is high to be overreached, deep to be undermined, strong to be defeated, compact and wary to be foiled.

Sit down, then, a beggar at the border of man's realm, craving permission to enter and share it with him? Essay to conquer an entrance? And when once within, whether by courtesy or conquest, what then? Competition with that stronger physique, that ruggeder life, that loves the wrestle with external hindrances which I love not, and am inferior for, did I love them? An equal part in that career with one who is exempt from the offices that absorb the half of my full lifetime, and require the best powers of every sort that I possess?

Surely, here, with this body and this constitution rivalling that body and that constitution, I am doomed to an inferiority more slavish and scarcely less painful than that I have left behind. For identity of career, identity of powers. Nature does nothing inductively; does not fit the parts of her scheme to each other experimentally; works at the centre, in the sublime repose of certainty, and lets facts, experiences, possibilities at the circumference take care of themselves. She has made man to dominate this kingdom which he calls his, else should I have had my share in it from the first. Wherein she has differed me from him, she has also differed my real kingdom from his. To stop him, I require as much and no more than man possesses. What is over in kind would place me in false relations with the objective; what is more in degree would imperil my subjective peace—what is less would try me by the measure another is made for, and leave me in the shadow projected by him. Nor would the standards which prevail here harmonize with my spiritual more happily than the activities with my corporeal nature. Could I work for outward success only, or chiefly, subordinating aspiration to what stifles aspiration? Would riches satisfy me? Would actual power over men, ecclesiastical, civil, or social? Could I live for ambition, and sit down unapproved of my better life to enjoy its achievements? Would the acquisition of knowledge and its employment as a means of worldly power, distinction, and advantage satisfy the inner hunger which longs for the truth, the light, the harmony of highest heavens? In short, would so much of the flesh as I could gratify, so much of the world as I could conquer, so much devil's service as I could cover up with any patched robe of decency, drawn tight, stretched to its utmost reach, satisfy me? Truly not. Not here then is Beulah, and I must journey on.

Again, whither? This time whither my own nature leads. I have learned this by experience, that leadership for me lies not without, but within myself. So much is gained, and now once more for movement. Gather up the effects—all that we have brought with us out of the past: it will find use. For woman has been woman so far as she has been anything, and the aromas of that high estate have hung and still hang about her. Bear them along. The finest effluence of her life in the first century of our era, as in this last, was love. Mary then bore the Christ; other Mary's loved him. Woman was first in his life, and last in it. When the bearded magi adored, she loved; she was the illustrator of his teachings, the repository of his hopes for their future realization. Bring all those memories, visions, yearnings, trusts, faiths—dreams of the good, never yet seen but by the inner sight of the woman-soul,—along, and let us set out for Beulah. Its blooming fields and fair mountains lie dim but sweet on the distant horizon. We will go over and possess them—a kingdom of our own. Why have we waited so long in bondage and darkness? Why submitted to the heaped-up wrongs of the ages? Patience very excellent: once admit the idea of a scheme, and some parts must necessarily arrive in the afternoon. Development presupposes the delay or withholding of things not yet developed. By the law of climax, these are not the unimportant parts. Woman's sovereignty has been long deferred, because of the preparation necessary for it. A John the Baptist must precede the Christ in the wilderness. Fiends robed and sceptred, once reigned over fiends clothed in skins and armed with broadsword and battle axe. To-day a gentleman, or gentlewoman can sit secure on any throne of Christendom. While we congratulate ourselves, let us not deny that the Tamerlanes, the Alarics, the Napoleons have had their share in the intermediate work of preparation.

Not always, as it seems to us, do the swiftest and clearest methods find favor with these hard-pressed worthies, but rather such methods as they can employ; and in time, as we see, the work gets done.

Take our planet in the condition in which its first proprietor found it on his arrival, and you will see that the improvements would be a heavy item in transactions with a real-estate broker for it. Liberal governments established—Canton, Paris, London, New York built—grain fields, mills, patent offices, world's fairs, electric telegraphs, ocean steamers, iron-clads, Central Park, show a long road travelled, and much rough, terrible, fearful work done by the way—work which has developed a condition for the exercise of the fine sovereignty of woman's pure, gentle, loving, harmonious nature—road which leads by divine intention to her empire. If the hand which has opened it has been red at times, let us remember that no purer color could have been preserved in the Thermopylæ—if the heart has been hard, that a softer one would have been surely defeated and we disadvantaged. Well could we afford to abide in the twilight-land when such struggle was going forward in our behalf, when the sunshine was descending upon such seedtime of the ages—to whose harvest we are drawing nigh.

The sceptre of Supreme Use on the earth is to the hand that is sovereign for that use. In its day every other power is subordinate to that, for it is the nature of sovereignty to be unitary, whether lodged in an idea or a person. It is because of this that personal sovereignty has been indispensable to human progress. Nothing could reign over the strong, undeveloped, turbulent brute life of the early and middle ages but the tremendous will and self-love of a man great according to his time—Charlemagne, Peter of Russia, Henry of Navarre.

And shall we complain that a development is slow which began with a Soudanese, a Papuan, and gives us now a Ruskin and an Emerson—that a career is tedious which opened, if you please, on Ararat, and has trailed its waxing splendors up to the Free American States—the libraries, the art galleries, the penetrating humanities which characterize the nineteenth century? For one, I cannot. Beulah has stood adjourned from Eden till now—wisely, needfully adjourned; and woman will enter its boundaries gratefully and gracefully, as a queen waited for and desired: grateful for the gift to the One who gave it in the Great Distribution—graceful in the reception of a right from him whose ages of struggle have made smooth her road to it.

What will she be therein? What will her life be? I close my eyes to the Actual around me, and I see her in that high land whose plains spread above the mountain peaks that surround us here. I see a creature whom the poets have sung, the artists have painted and chiselled, and the common heart of mankind has longed for, prayed for, and, in its hours of high communion, has trusted and believed in with the utter faith of a child in its mother's love. I see a being whom the pure, divine Imagination, the eye of God dimmed in man, has foreseen.

I see her not a dream—not an airy form haunting the unreal walks of night, to vanish when cockcrow recalls us to the cares of household life, the fields of labor, the paths of effort. No, but an enduring, very real, very practical embodiment of the poet's ideal, with new powers and relations illustrating its harmony in and fitness for the world that is purified and sanctified by its presence. There to my eye

'Her shape arises:

She less guarded than ever, yet more guarded than ever;

The gross and soiled she moves among do not make her gross and soiled;

She knows the thoughts as she passes—nothing is concealed from her;

She is none the less considerate or friendly therefore;

She is the best beloved—it is without exception—she has no reason to fear, and she does not fear;

Oaths, quarrels, hiccupped songs, proposals, smutty expressions, are idle to her as she passes;

She is silent—she is possessed of herself—they do not offend her;

She receive them as the laws of nature receives them—she is strong;

She, too, is a law of nature—there is no law stronger than she is.'

I look beneath, the ethereal drapery of qualities in which the prophetic imagination has clothed her, and central to them all I find a new phenomenon—the latest of the ages—True womanhood. From this proceeds the veiled glory hitherto seen but by poet's eye—not far hence to be felt and known of all. For it is no longer the vision of a distant and dim land, separated from this actual present by a fathomless abyss. Out of the yawning chasm that has divided that from this there rise to-day, clear, shining, visible to open eyes, the everlasting pillars of truth, which will shortly bridge it and make broad the road thither, so that neither he who walks straight with exact step between the pales of science, nor he outside wending, heedless, with wide-wandering eyes and feet who stumbles along, shall miss it.

A being planted above man, taking root where he blooms, in the pure affections, flowering in the high airs which he dreams of but sees not, or sees only in moments of inspiration from her—a being, who, more complex on her physical side, is therefore more affluent on her spiritual—who, from the established premises of science, demands not new, but the very largest deductions to reach the borders of her life—a being whose support with the earth-life is widened and strengthened by each added organ, function, susceptibility—whose divine support is opened, established, confirmed in increased degrees over man's by each womanly inlet to the spiritual nature—I see such a being irradiating the future years and paths of my race, and my soul grows strong and glad at the sight. In her the self-love of man is replaced by love; ambition pales its ineffectual fires in the light of that pure, undying flame of aspiration which her soul feeds; patriotism, ashamed of its narrowness, unfolds shining pinions over humanity, and becomes philanthropy; pleasure retreats in her wornout, patched-up harlequin robes; and happiness, pure, clean, bright from the sweet inner chambers of the soul, takes her place.

Life acknowledges a higher fealty. With the new sovereign, new aims, new standards, new methods for the improvement of humanity.

Under the masculine dynasty we have had force, organization, investigation, discovery, experiment—methods violent, harsh, selfish, slow, confused, chaotic: a magnanimous career at intervals spanning the wide weltering strife, as a bow the stormy heavens; noble deeds, not a few, shining out of the darkness here and there; real victory crowning the crests of the rolling sea now and then, and casting where they have shone long shadows over the waters darkened with selfish contention around them. Power under this reign has been applied to the multiplication of external resources, means, opportunities for the race. It has clothed the earth with them in forms so numerous, so varied—so good, so bad, so indifferent—so noble, so mean—so rich, so poor—so high, so low, that the most active memory of the longest life fails to furnish the catalogue of them. It professes human good; it cultivates personal good, family good, community good, or, at the largest, national good. But whatever the stature it attains, its methods are through external appeals to the soul—influences from without. Its common theology steadily refused for eighteen hundred years to credit the union of the divine with the human in the soul of mankind. Its deductive intellect is blind to truth till her presence is proved by facts—as if we would hale an archangel, with the shining light of the upper world yet flowing adown him, before the police magistrate, and swear the butchers and the newsboys on the question of identity. Its Art is timid, thin, and self-distrusting, because the Ideal is flouted as worthy only of women, dreamers, and liberal ministers—the silver wing of imagination is rarely loosed but to be soon folded in humiliation before the reproof of the exacting senses. Its statesmanship is smart, crafty, treacherous, because it cherishes a state, a nation, rather than humanity. Its jurisprudence is a gigantic, vigilant detective, dealing with a population of suspects. Its physical methods only are uniformly clear, honorable, straight-forward though. Even these in times and places might be nobler, more open; but it fights well, labors well, cultivates well, invents well, manufactures well, because in these it is dealing chiefly between its native elements, force and matter;—but being characteristically inductive, it cannot deal liberally with human nature, lacking the ideal of it, the faith in it, the reverence for it which are the only sustaining root of such behavior toward it.

Under the new sovereignty, the methods, like the power employing them, will have their nearest relations with the interior life. They will draw helps from the outward; and here the glory of man as a creator of conditions and opportunities, will be first measured and fully appreciated, for it is the woman only who can penetrate his works, draw thence their full significance and value, transmute their evils to goods, and incorporate their best spirit in humanity. It is a great thing to create that which helps any human soul to be diviner than without such help it would be. It is greater to develop conditions which establish and confirm true relations between the soul and its helps. It is greatest to create the soul to be divine—with helps, or in spite of hindrances. The first is eminently the office of the masculine. The second is shared between it and the feminine, with a preponderance to the latter; and the last belongs so exclusively to woman, that the day of its doing is necessarily the day of her sovereignty.

The divine, artistic, harmonious creation of the human spirit in the divine, artistic, harmonious human body, this is the grand function of the feminine era. For this it is that woman has those special finer endowments which in all ages have distinguished her from man, and foreshown a higher life for her in some future—some Beulah, visible to eyes that could o'ershoot the bounds of the passing age. Wanting this power, preparing the day of its advent, John Baptist has toiled, sweated, groaned, fumed, devastated in his wilderness, to touch its hither border at last in this pregnant nineteenth century. Age of revolution—age of wonders!—of which the very greatest are, I think, the beginnings we already see of settlement here. As a question, that of woman is not an old one. There can be no Woman Question among any people till it is advanced enough to ask for better methods than man's. When this stage is reached, life is ripe for the advent of woman—it appeals to her to come forward. It prepares better conditions, that it may invite her—opens fields, that it may engage her powers—seeks to clothe her in a real dignity, of which she has before worn rather the semblance than itself. Society, obeying the higher view of her, enacts new laws for her enlargement, modifies or sets aside social canons which restricted and warped and suppressed her, and begins with these movements to find itself enriched by the presence of finer influences; led upward to more exalted standards, penetrated with a subtler humane sentiment than it before knew.

Yet with all these movements in her favor, woman, bone of man's bone, remains a bone of contention to him, till nature, read truly and trusted reverently, is allowed to lead him as a little child by the hand and show him woman's real kingdom. He must not look on it with a timid or a grudging eye. A Chinese mandarin in California, becoming acquainted with the fact that American women could read and write and be trusted with accounts, replied, with a warning shake of the head, 'If he readee, writee, by and by he lickee all the men.' Does this apprehension possibly extend beyond the Celestial Empire? It will not be expressed, I know, but there is much unexpressed feeling which is none the less real for its silence.

'Every woman is an embodied revolution, now-a-days,' said a lank, grumbling dyspeptic, while the autumn leaves of '62 yet hung in bright profusion on the bordering forests of the Hudson. 'If you had said every woman is in these days an embodied revelation,' was the superb reply, 'you would have done both truth and my sex more even justice.' Man must not fear woman, for whatever nature designed for her is not only inevitable, but is his only means of salvation. He need not fear her, for she is the daughter of nature, so full of loyalty and filial devotion to her mother, that no wide or continued departure from her designs is possible. He will not fear her when he is religious enough to feel that each natural revolution is a step in the march upward, ordered in its season as calmly and inexorably as were the secondary rocks laid down when the primary had been prepared for receiving them, as the nebulous vapor is consolidated into a planet or sun, or the morning-glory brought forth of its sown seed. He will be comforted, too, by remembering that natural revolution does never dethrone. It only enthrones above the present ruler. Work out your kingdom. Define and fill its bounds and metes, and never will usurper's foot print its soil. No invasion of your sovereignty is possible. The magnetisms of the universe hold you there, and every other being outside—an infallible police, bent on the protection of your rights, charged to secure them to you without so much as a flaw in their finest edges. Nature knows your kingdom, and charges all yet unsettled parties to go aside. But in the coming cycles she will develop others above it.