Chapter VIII (7)

Then, when the wife and mother is engrossed in the political canvass, or in discharging her duties as a representative or senator in Congress, a member of the cabinet, or a major-general in the field, what is to become of the children? The mother will have little leisure, perhaps less inclination, to attend to them. A stranger, or even the father, cannot supply her place. Children need a mother's care; her tender nursing, her sleepless vigilance, and her mild and loving but unfailing discipline. This she cannot devolve on the father, or turn over to strangers. Nobody can supply the place of a mother. Children, then, must be neglected; nay, they will be in the way, and be looked upon as an encumbrance. Mothers will repress their maternal instincts; and the horrible crime of infanticide before birth, now becoming so fearfully prevalent, and actually causing a decrease in the native population of several of the States of the Union as well as in more than one European country, will become more prevalent still, and the human race be threatened with extinction. Women in easy circumstances, and placing pleasure before duty, grow weary of the cares of maternity, and they would only become more weary still if the political arena were opened to their ambition.

Woman was created to be a wife and a mother; that is her destiny. To that destiny all her instincts point, and for it nature has specially qualified her. Her proper sphere is home, and her proper function is the care of the household, to manage a family, to take care of children, and attend to their early training. For this she is endowed with patience, endurance, passive courage, quick sensibilities, a sympathetic nature, and great executive and administrative ability. She was born to be a queen in her own household, and to make home cheerful, bright, and happy. Surely those women who are wives and mothers should stay at home and discharge its duties; and the woman's rights party, by seeking to draw her away from the domestic sphere, where she is really great, noble, almost divine, and to throw her into the turmoil of political life, would rob her of her true dignity and worth, and place her in a position where all her special qualifications and peculiar excellences would count for nothing. She cannot be spared from home for that.

It is pretended that woman's generous sympathies, her nice sense of justice, and her indomitable perseverance in what she conceives to be right are needed to elevate our politics above the low, grovelling and sordid tastes of men; but while we admit that women will make almost any sacrifice to obtain their own will, and make less than men do of obstacles or consequences, we are not aware that they have a nicer or a truer sense of justice, or are more disinterested in their aims than men. All history proves that the corruptest epochs in a nation's life are precisely those in which women have mingled most in political affairs, and have had the most influence in their management. If they go into the political world, they will, if the distinction of sex is lost sight of, have no special advantage over men, nor be more influential for good or for evil. If they go as women, using all the blandishments, seductions, arts, and intrigues of their sex, their influence will tend more to corrupt and debase than to purify and elevate. Women usually will stick at nothing to carry their points; and when unable to carry them by appeals to the strength of the other sex, they will appeal to its weakness. When once they have thrown off their native modesty, and entered a public arena with men, they will go to lengths that men will not. {152} Lady Macbeth looks with steady nerves and unblanched cheek on a crime from which her husband shrinks with horror, and upbraids him with his cowardice for letting "I dare not wait upon I would." It was not she who saw Banquo's ghost.

We have heard it argued that, if women were to take part in our elections, they would be quietly and decorously conducted; that her presence would do more than a whole army of police officials to maintain order, to banish all fighting, drinking, profane swearing, venality, and corruption. This would undoubtedly be, to some extent, the case, if, under the new _régime_, men should retain the same chivalric respect for women that they now have. Men now regard women as placed in some sort under their protection, or the safeguard of their honor. But when she insists that the distinction of sex shall be disregarded, and tells us that she asks no favors, regards all offers of protection to her as a woman as an insult, and that she holds herself competent to take care of herself, and to compete with men on their own ground, and in what has hitherto been held to be their own work, she may be sure that she will be taken at her word, that she will miss that deference now shown her, and which she has been accustomed to claim as her right, and be treated with all the indifference men show to one another. She cannot have the advantages of both sexes at once. When she forgets that she is a woman, and insists on being treated as a man, men will forget that she is a woman, and allow her no advantage on account of her sex. When she seeks to make herself a man, she will lose her influence as a woman, and be treated as a man.

Women are not needed as men; they are needed as women, to do, not what men can do as well as they, but what men cannot do. There is nothing which more grieves the wise and good, or makes them tremble for the future of the country, than the growing neglect or laxity of family discipline; than the insubordination, the lawlessness, and precocious depravity of Young America. There is, with the children of this generation, almost a total lack of filial reverence and obedience. And whose fault is it? It is chiefly the fault of the mothers, who fail to govern their households, and to bring up their children in a Christian manner. Exceptions there happily are; but the number of children that grow up without any proper training or discipline at home is fearfully large, and their evil example corrupts not a few of those who are well brought up. The country is no better than the town. Wives forget what they owe to their husbands, are capricious and vain, often light and frivolous, extravagant and foolish, bent on having their own way, though ruinous to the family, and generally contriving, by coaxings, blandishments, or poutings, to get it. They set an ill example to their children, who soon lose all respect for the authority of the mother, who, as a wife, forgets to honor and obey her husband, and who, seeing her have her own way with him, insist on having their own way with her, and usually succeed. As a rule, children are no longer subjected to a steady and firm, but mild and judicious discipline, or trained to habits of filial obedience. Hence, our daughters, when they become wives and mothers, have none of the habits or character necessary to govern their household and to train their children. Those habits and that character are acquired only in a school of obedience, made pleasant and cheerful by a mother's playful smile and a mother's love. {153} We know we have not in this the sympathy of the women whose organ is _The Revolution_. They hold obedience in horror, and seek only to govern, not their own husbands only, not children, but men, but the state, but the nation, and to be relieved of household cares, especially of child-bearing, and of the duty of bringing up children. We should be sorry to do or say anything which these, in their present mood, could sympathize with. It is that which is a woman's special duty in the order of providence, and which constitutes her peculiar glory, that they regard as their great wrong.

The duty we insist on is especially necessary in a country like ours, where there is so little respect for authority, and government is but the echo of public opinion. Wives and mothers, by neglecting their domestic duties and the proper family discipline, fail to offer the necessary resistance to growing lawlessness and crime, aggravated, if not generated, by the false notions of freedom and equality so widely entertained. It is only by home discipline, and the early habits of reverence and obedience to which our children are trained, that the license the government tolerates, and the courts hardly dare attempt to restrain, can be counteracted, and the community made a law-loving and a law-abiding community. The very bases of society have been sapped, and the conditions of good government despised, or denounced under the name of despotism. Social and political life is poisoned in its source, and the blood of the nation corrupted, and chiefly because wives and mothers have failed in their domestic duties, and the discipline of their families. How, then, can the community, the nation itself, subsist, if we call them away from home, and render its duties still more irksome to them, instead of laboring to fit them for a more faithful discharge of their duties?

We have said the evils complained of are chiefly due to the women, and we have said so because it grows chiefly out of their neglect of their families. The care and management of children during their early years belong specially to the mother. It is her special function to plant and develop in their young and impressible minds the seeds of virtue, love, reverence, and obedience, and to train her daughters, by precept and example, not to be looking out for an eligible _parti_, nor to catch husbands that will give them splendid establishments, but to be, in due time, modest and affectionate wives, tender and judicious mothers, and prudent and careful housekeepers. This the father cannot do; and his interference, except by wise counsel, and to honor and sustain the mother, will generally be worse than nothing. The task devolves specially on the mother; for it demands the sympathy with children which is peculiar to the female heart, the strong maternal instinct implanted by nature, and directed by a judicious education, that blending of love and authority, sentiment and reason, sweetness and power, so characteristic of the noble and true-hearted woman, and which so admirably fit her to be loved and honored, only less than adored, in her own household. When she neglects this duty, and devotes her time to pleasure or amusement, wasting her life in luxurious ease, in reading sentimental or sensational novels, or in following the caprices of fashion, the household goes to ruin, the children grow up wild, without discipline, and the honest earnings of the husband become speedily insufficient for the family expenses, and he is sorely tempted to provide for them by rash speculation or by fraud, which, though it may be carried on for a while without detection, is sure to end in disgrace and ruin at last. {154} Concede now to women suffrage and eligibility, throw them into the whirlpool of politics, set them to scrambling for office, and you aggravate the evil a hundred fold. Children, if suffered to be born, which is hardly to be expected, will be still more neglected; family discipline still more relaxed, or rendered still more capricious or inefficient; our daughters will grow up more generally still without any adequate training to be wives and mothers, and our sons still more destitute of those habits of filial reverence and obedience, love of order and discipline, without which they can hardly be sober, prudent, and worthy heads of families, or honest citizens.

We have thus far spoken of women only as wives and mothers; but we are told that there are thousands of women who are not and cannot be wives and mothers. In the older and more densely settled States of the Union there is an excess of females over males, and all cannot get husbands if they would. Yet, we repeat, woman was created to be a wife and a mother, and the woman that is not fails of her special destiny. We hold in high honor spinsters and widows, and do not believe their case anywhere need be or is utterly hopeless. There is a mystery in Christianity which the true and enlightened Christian recognizes and venerates--that of the Virgin-Mother. Those women who cannot be wives and mothers in the natural order, may be both in the spiritual order, if they will. They can be wedded to the Holy Spirit, and be the mothers of minds and hearts. The holy virgins and devout widows who consecrate themselves to God in or out of religious orders, are both, and fulfil in the spiritual order their proper destiny. They are married to a celestial Spouse, and become mothers to the motherless, to the poor, the destitute, the homeless. They instruct the ignorant, nurse the sick, help the helpless, tend the aged, catch the last breath of the dying, pray for the unbelieving and the cold hearted, and elevate the moral tone of society, and shed a cheering radiance along the pathway of life. They are dear to God, dear to the church, and dear to Christian society. They are to be envied, not pitied. It is only because you have lost faith in Christ, faith in the holy Catholic Church, and have become gross in your minds, of "the earth, earthy," that you deplore the lot of the women who cannot, in the natural order, find husbands. The church provides better for them than you can do, even should you secure female suffrage and eligibility.

We do not, therefore, make an exception from our general remarks in favor of those who have and can get no earthly husbands, and who have no children born of their flesh to care for. There are spiritual relations which they can contract, and purely feminine duties, more than they can perform, await them, to the poor and ignorant, the aged and infirm, the helpless and the motherless, or, worse than motherless, the neglected. Under proper direction, they can lavish on these the wealth of their affections, the tenderness of their hearts, and the ardor of their charity, and find true joy and happiness in so doing, and ample scope for woman's noblest ambition. They have no need to be idle or useless. In a world of so much sin and sorrow, sickness and suffering, there is always work enough for them to do, and there are always chances enough to acquire merit in the sight of Heaven, and true glory, that will shine brighter and brighter for ever.

{155}

We know men often wrong women and cause them great suffering by their selfishness, tyranny, and brutality; whether more than women, by their follies and caprices, cause men, we shall not undertake to determine. Man, except in fiction, is not always a devil, nor woman an angel. Since the woman's rights people claim that in intellect woman is man's equal, and in firmness of will far his superior, it ill becomes them to charge to him alone what is wrong or painful in her condition, and they must recognize her as equally responsible with him for whatever is wrong in the common lot of men and women. There is much wrong on both sides; much suffering, and much needless suffering, in life. Both men and women might be, and ought to be, better than they are. But it is sheer folly or madness to suppose that either can be made better or happier by political suffrage and eligibility; for the evil to be cured is one that cannot be reached by any possible political or legislative action.

That the remedy, to a great extent, must be supplied by woman's action and influence we concede, but not by her action and influence in politics. It can only be by her action and influence as woman, as wife, and mother; in sustaining with her affection the resolutions and just aspirations of her husband or her sons, and forming her children to early habits of filial love and reverence, of obedience to law, and respect for authority. That she may do this, she needs not her political enfranchisement or her entire independence of the other sex, but a better and more thorough system of education for daughters--an education that specially adapts them to the destiny of their sex, and prepares them to find their happiness in their homes, and the satisfaction of their highest ambition in discharging its manifold duties, so much higher, nobler, and more essential to the virtue and well-being of the community, the nation, society, and to the life and progress of the human race, than any which devolve on king or kaiser, magistrate or legislator. We would not have their generous instincts repressed, their quick sensibilities blunted? or their warm, sympathetic nature chilled, nor even the lighter graces and accomplishments neglected; but we would have them all directed and harmonized by solid intellectual instruction, and moral and religious culture. We would have them, whether rich or poor, trained to find the centre of their affections in their home; their chief ambition in making it cheerful, bright, radiant, and happy. Whether destined to grace a magnificent palace, or to adorn the humble cottage of poverty, this should be the ideal aimed at in their education. They should be trained to love home, and to find their pleasure in sharing its cares and performing its duties, however arduous or painful.

There are comparatively few mothers qualified to give their daughters such an education, especially in our own country; for comparatively few have received such an education themselves, or are able fully to appreciate its importance. They can find little help in the fashionable boarding-schools for finishing young ladies; and in general these schools only aggravate the evil to be cured. The best and the only respectable schools for daughters that we have in the country are the conventual schools taught by women consecrated to God, and specially devoted to the work of education. These schools, indeed, are not always all that might be wished. {156} The good religious sometimes follow educational traditions perhaps better suited to the social arrangements of other countries than of our own, and sometimes underrate the value of intellectual culture. They do not always give as solid an intellectual education as the American woman needs, and devote a disproportionate share of their attention to the cultivation of the affections and sentiments, and to exterior graces and accomplishments. The defects we hint at are not, however, wholly, nor chiefly, their fault; they are obliged to consult, in some measure, the tastes and wishes of parents and guardians, whose views for their daughters and wards are not always very profound, very wise, very just, or very Christian. The religious cannot, certainly, supply the place of the mother in giving their pupils that practical home training so necessary, and which can be given only by mothers who have themselves been properly educated; but they go as far as is possible in remedying the defects of the present generation of mothers, and in counteracting their follies and vain ambitions. With all the faults that can be alleged against any of them, the conventual schools, even as they are, it must be conceded, are infinitely the best schools for daughters in the land, and, upon the whole, worthy of the high praise and liberal patronage their devotedness and disinterestedness secure them. We have seldom found their graduates weak and sickly sentimentalists. They develop in their pupils a cheerful and healthy tone, and a high sense of duty; give them solid moral and religious instruction; cultivate successfully their moral and religious affections; refine their manners, purify their tastes, and send them out feeling that life is serious, life is earnest, and resolved always to act under a deep sense of their personal responsibilities, and meet whatever may be their lot with brave hearts and without murmuring or repining.

We do not disguise the fact that our hopes for the future, in great measure, rest on these conventual schools. As they are multiplied, and the number of their graduates increase, and enter upon the serious duties of life, the ideal of female education will be come higher and broader; a nobler class of wives and mothers will exert a healthy and purifying influence; religion will become a real power in the republic; the moral tone of the community and the standard of private and public morality will be elevated; and thus may gradually be acquired the virtues that will enable us as a people to escape the dangers that now threaten us, and to save the republic as well as our own souls. Sectarians, indeed, declaim against these schools, and denounce them as a subtle device of Satan to make their daughters "Romanists;" but Satan probably dislikes "Romanism" even more than sectarians do, and is much more in earnest to suppress or ruin our conventual schools, in which he is not held in much honor, than he is to sustain and encourage them. At any rate, our countrymen who have such a horror of the religion it is our glory to profess that they cannot call it by its true name, would do well, before denouncing these schools, to establish better schools for daughters of their own.

Now, we dare tell these women who are wasting so much time, energy, philanthropy, and brilliant eloquence in agitating for female suffrage and eligibility, which, if conceded, would only make matters worse, that, if they have the real interest of their sex or of the community at heart, they should turn their attention to the education of daughters for their special functions, not as men, but as women who are one day to be wives and mothers--woman's true destiny. {157} These modest, retiring sisters and nuns, who have no new theories or schemes of social reform, and upon whom you look down with haughty contempt, as weak, spiritless, and narrow-minded, have chosen the better part, and are doing infinitely more to raise woman to her true dignity, and for the political and social as well as for the moral and religious progress of the country, than you with all your grand conventions, brilliant speeches, stirring lectures, and spirited journals.

For poor working-women and poor working-men, obliged to subsist by their labor, and who can find no employment, we feel a deep sympathy, and would favor any feasible method of relieving them with our best efforts. But why cannot American girls find employment as well as Irish and German girls, who are employed almost as soon as they touch our shores, and at liberal wages? There is always work enough to be done if women are qualified to do it, and are not above doing it. But be that as it may, the remedy is not political, and must be found, if found at all, elsewhere than in suffrage and eligibility.

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Daybreak.