A New Atmosphere Part 1

A New Atmosphere.

by Gail Hamilton.

I.

A vitiated atmosphere is fatal to healthy development. One may be ever so wise, learned, rich, and beautiful, but if the air he breathes is saturated with fever, pestilence, or any noxious vapor, nothing will avail him. The subtile malaria creeps into his inmost frame, looks out from his languid eye, settles in his sallow cheek, droops in his tottering step, and laughs to scorn all his learning and gold and grandeur. He must rid himself of the malaria, or the malaria will rid itself of him.

There are many evils in the world, deep-seated and deleterious. I rejoice to see n.o.ble men and women working at the overthrow of these old Dagons; but the processes are many and long. Grievances are suffered which can be redressed only by the repeal of old and the enactment of new laws. Health suffers from ignorance which scientific discoveries, patient observation, and correct reasoning must dispel.

Religion suffers from a narrowness and shallowness which broader and deeper culture must remove. Heaven send the laws, the science, and the culture, for these ills are indeed sore and of long continuance; but we need not wait upon the slow steps of law and science. Every man and woman can begin at this moment a renovation. Behind all law and all literature, the very air we breathe, the moral atmosphere not of books and benches only, but of kitchen and keeping-room, is impure and unwholesome. The interests of humanity demand a purification.

What I am going to say may have been said before; but if so, the present condition of things shows that it has been said to too little purpose. I have myself glanced at it askance, but I have never looked it square in the face. I have spoken s.h.i.+ps bound to my port, but not freighted with my cargo. Success to them all! There is sea-room for every keel, and use for all their treasures. I am so far from claiming to be original, that I rather marvel there is any necessity for my being at all. The truths which I design to ill.u.s.trate lie so on the surface that I should suppose they would commend themselves to the most casual notice. I can account for the obscurity which seems to enshroud them only by supposing that the days of Eli have reached down to us, and that there is no open vision. Therefore the truth needs to be repeated and repeated, in different forms and tones, if it is to be made effectual to the pulling down of strongholds. I will do my part of the reiteration. If I can state no new truths, I will at least help to ring the old truths into the ears of this generation till every unjust judge shall moan in bitterness of soul, "Though I fear not G.o.d nor regard man, yet, because these women trouble me, I will avenge them, lest by their continual coming they weary me."

In pursuance of my plan, it will be necessary for me sometimes to recur more than once to the same topic; but the repet.i.tion involved will be more apparent than real. It will be such repet.i.tion as the multiplication-table displays, whose first column gives you two times four, its third four times two, its fourth four times five, and so on to the end. You have the same figures, but in different combinations.

I shall bring forward the same facts, but they will be presented under different lights, and will bear upon different conclusions.

I shall also, without hesitation, discuss topics on which I have spoken at former times, but without perceiving all their relations. No architect would reject stones which were necessary to the symmetry of his building because he had previously used them for other purposes.

I shall touch upon many and diverse themes; but nothing will be irrelevant. An atmosphere embraces the whole globe, and nothing human is foreign to it.

One person may not succeed in dispelling all the miasms of the earth, but if he can only cleanse one little corner of it, if he can but send through the murky air one cool, bracing, healthy gale, he will do much better than to sit under his vine, scared by the greatness of the evil and the dignity of those who support it.

II.

The laws and customs regarding the education of girls and the employment of women may be wrong and difficult of righting; but a more elemental wrong, and one that lies within reach of every parent, is the coa.r.s.e, mercenary, and revolting tone of sentiment in which girls are brought up and in which women live, entirely apart from their technical education and employment. I refer now to the refined and educated, as well as, and indeed more than, to the rude and illiterate, for it is their alt.i.tude which determines the level of all below. This tone of sentiment is such as to diminish girls'

self-respect, mar their purity, and dwarf their being. They inhale, they imbibe, they are steeped in the idea, that the great business of their life is marriage, and if they fail to secure that they will become utterly bankrupt and pitiable. Naturally this idea becomes their ruling motive; all their course is bent to its guidance; and from this idea and this course of action spring crime, and sorrow, and disaster, "in thick array of depth immeasurable."

In this and in many other instances you will doubtless think that I overstate the truth. Looking into an empty bucket, you would say the air is colorless; looking into the depths of the atmosphere, you see that it is blue. I am not writing about a bucket, but about the atmosphere.

Viewing the circ.u.mstances which form women, together with the women who are formed by them, one is filled with astonishment at the indwelling dignity and divinity of the womanly nature; and the thought can but arise, if a flower so fair can spring from a soil so badly tilled, what graceful and glorious growths might we not see did art but combine with nature to produce the conditions of the highest development! We lament heathendom, but much of our spirit is essentially heathenish. Little girls see in their geographies pictures of Circa.s.sian fathers selling their daughters to Turkish husbands, and they think it very inhuman and pagan. But, little girls, your fathers will traffic in you without scruple. Matters will not be managed in quite so business-like a fas.h.i.+on, but such a pressure will be brought to bear upon you that you will have very little more spontaneity than the Circa.s.sian slave who looks so pitiful in the geography book. At home you will hear yourself talked about, talked at, and talked to, in such a manner that you will have no choice left but to marry. It is expected and a.s.sumed. I do not mean girls who are to s.n.a.t.c.h their unhappy fathers from exposure and disgrace by a rich and hated marriage. Such things belong to ballads. We are dealing now with life.

I have seen girls,--respectable, well-educated, daughters of Christian families, of families who think they believe that man's chief end is to glorify G.o.d and enjoy him forever, who profess to make the Bible their rule of faith and practice, to eschew the pomps and vanities of this world, and consecrate themselves to the Lord,--who are yet trained to think and talk of marriage in a manner utterly commercial and frivolous. Allusions to and conversations on the subject are of such a nature that they cannot remain unmarried without shame. They are taught, not in direct terms at so much a lesson, like music or German, but indirectly, and with a thoroughness which no music-master can equal, that, if a woman is not married, it is because she is not attractive, that to be unattractive to men is the most dismal and dreadful misfortune, and that for an unmarried woman earth has no honor and no happiness, but only toleration and a mitigated or unmitigated contempt.

What is the burden of the song that is sung to girls and women? Are they counselled to be active, self-helpful, self-reliant, alert, ingenious, energetic, aggressive? Are they strengthened to find out a path for themselves, and to walk in it unashamed? Are they braced and toned up to solve for themselves the problems of life, to bear its ills undaunted and meet its happinesses unbewildered? Go to! Such a thing was never heard of. It is woman's rights! It is strong-minded!

It is discontented with your sphere! It is masculine! Milton and St.

Paul to the rescue!

"For contemplation he, and valor formed, For softness she, and sweet attractive grace."

So "she" is urged to cultivate sweet attractive grace by acquainting herself with housework, by learning to sew, and starch, and make bread, to be economical and housewifely, and so a helpmeet to the husband who is a.s.sumed for her. This is the true way to be attractive, she is informed. "Men admire you in the ball-room," say the mentors and mentoresses, "but they choose a wife from the home-circle."

Marriage is simply a reward of merit. Do not be extravagant, or careless, or bold, or rude, for so you will scare away suitors. Be prudent, and tidy, and simple, and gentle, and timid, and you will be surrounded by them, and that is heaven, and secure a husband, which is the heaven of heavens. A flood of stories and anecdotes deluges us with proof. Arthur falls in love with beautiful, romantic, poetic, accomplished Leonie, till she faints one day, and he rushes into her room for a smelling-bottle, and finds no hartshorn, but much confusion and dust, while plain Molly's room is neat and tidy, and overflows with hartshorn; whereupon he falls out of love with Leonie, in with Molly, and virtue and vice have their reward. Or Charles pays a morning visit, and is entertained sumptuously in the parlor by Anabel, and Arabel, and Claribel, and Isabel, in silk, while Cinderella stays in the kitchen in calico and linen collar. But Charles catches a glimpse of Cinderella behind the door, and loves and marries the humble, grateful girl, to the disappointment and deep disgust of her flounced and jewelled sisters. Or Jane at the tea-table cuts the cheese-rind too thick, and handsome young Leonard infers that she will be extravagant; Harriet pares it too thin, and that stands for n.i.g.g.ardliness; but Mary hits the golden mean, and is rewarded with and by handsome young Leonard. Or a broomstick lies in the way, over which Clara, Anna, Laura, and the rest step unheeding or indifferent, and only Lucy picks it up and replaces it, which Harry, standing by, makes a note of, and Lucy is paid with the honor of being Harry's wife.

Moral: Go you and do likewise, and verily you shall have your reward, or at least you stand a much better chance of having it than if you do differently. "Be good, and you will be married," is the essence of the lesson.

Laying aside now all question of the dignity and delicacy of such proceedings, a.s.suming for the time that it is the proper course, let us notice whether it is followed out to its conclusions. Not in the least. Having done its best to transpose the feminine raw material into the orthodox texture and pattern of "good wives," society lays it on the shelf to run its own risk of finding a purchaser. It neither provides husbands for the "good wives" which it has made, nor suffers them to go and look up husbands for themselves. If a girl is ready to enter service, she can enroll her name at the intelligence office. If she is prepared to teach, she sends to the "Committee." If she desires to be a saleswoman, she applies at the different shops; but your "good wife" candidate must wait patiently,--not the grand old theological "waiting in the use of means," but the Micawber waiting for something to turn up. She has learned the bread-making and the clear-starching; she is mistress of domestic economy; she is familiar with all the little details of puddings and preserves; she is ripe for wifehood and green for all else, and now she wants an arena for the exercise of her skill. But she would better pull her tongue out at once than say so.

People may talk to girls at pleasure of the fair domestic realm where they will be queen, of the glory of such a kingdom, and the unsatisfying emptiness of any and every other; but no crime is more fatal to a girl's reputation and prospects than the suspicion of husband-hunting. That fate, that career, that glory, which has been constantly mapped out to her as the very Land of Promise, the goal of her ambition, the culmination of her happiness, is the one fate, the one career, the one glory, which she must not lift an eyelash to secure. Let a girl, the very same girl whom you have been pus.h.i.+ng through a course of the received proper training, be supposed to set but so much as a feather on her hat, a smile on her lips, a tone in her voice, to attract the admiration which she has been constantly taught is the guerdon of all the virtues,--and her reputation sinks at once to zero. "Trying to get a husband," whether couched in the decorous phrase of polite society, or in the uncompromising language of more primitive circles, is the death-warrant of a girl's good name.

She must sedulously prepare herself for a position to which she must be totally indifferent. She must learn all domestic accomplishments, but she must take no measures, she must exhibit no symptoms of a desire to secure a domestic situation. You bid her make ready the wedding-garments and the marriage feast, and then sit quietly waiting till the bridegroom cometh, her small hands folded, her meek eyelashes drooping, no throb of impatience or discontent or anxiety in her heart, no reaching out for any career at home or abroad, except a meek ministration in her father's house, or a mild village benevolence. But will Nature set aside her laws at your behest? Is it of any use for you to lay down your yardstick and say, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther"? Do you not see the inevitable result is a course of falsehood?

Is this a strong statement, a libel upon the female s.e.x? But you read novel after novel in which the larger number of women--all, perhaps, except the heroine--are represented as artful, sly, deceitful, managing; and generally the main object of their artifice is to secure a husband for themselves or for their daughters: yet you do not at once cry out in indignant protest against such misrepresentation. On the contrary, you follow the plot with lively interest, think the author has a very clear insight into human nature, and especially excels in the delineation of female character!

Hear what one of your own writers says: "If all the world were paper, all the sea ink, all the plants and trees pens, and every man a writer,--yet were they not able, with all labor and cunning, to set down all the craft and deceits of women."

If my statement is a libel, it is less a libel than statements and implications under which people have hitherto rested with a wonderful degree of equanimity. It would be marvellous if it were a libel. A girl receives such training that it is wellnigh impossible for her to be sincere. You cannot give her whole life for six or a dozen years one direction, and then set her face suddenly towards another quarter, banis.h.i.+ng from her mind every remembrance of past lessons, and every thought of her portrayed future. But unless such an erasure is made, or seems to be made, she knows that she forfeits good opinion, and stands in great danger of losing the one prize which has been placed before her, and which she may hope, but must not be detected in hoping, to win. Consequently she learns to dissemble. It is her only resource. Duplicity pa.s.ses into her blood, and she learns to conceal and deny what you have taught her it is improper to feel, but what you have also made it impossible for her not to feel. I only wonder that any uprightness is left among women. That there are women upon whose garments the smell of fire has not pa.s.sed,--that there are women whose robes of whiteness have but a faint tinge of flame,--is not because the f.a.gots have not been piled around them and the torch applied.

This is one result of the famous, the infamous "good wife" doctrines.

Another, less fatal but sufficiently evil and more vexatious, is the injury that is inflicted upon natural and healthful a.s.sociation. Men and women are not allowed to look upon each other as rational beings; every woman is a wife in the grub, every man is a possible husband in the chrysalis state. If young people enjoy each other's conversation, and make opportunities to secure it, there are dozens of gossips, male and female, who proceed to forecast "a match." Intelligent interchange of opinion and sentiments between a man and a woman for the mere delight in it, with no design upon each other's name or fortune, is a thing of which a large majority of civilized Americans have no conception. Such a commodity never had a place in their inventory. A man and a woman find each other agreeable, they cultivate each other's society, and anon, East, West, South, and North goes the report that they are "engaged." It is easy to see what a check this gives to an intercourse that would be in the highest degree beneficial to both s.e.xes; beneficial, by giving to each a more accurate knowledge of the other, and by improving what in each is good, and diminis.h.i.+ng what is bad.

One of three things should be done: cease to urge a girl on to marriage by every terror threatened and every allurement displayed; by making it the reward of all her exertion, the arena of all her accomplishment, the condition of all her development; or take measures to provide her with a suitable husband, so that she shall not be left for an indefinite time in uncertainty and doubt, settling, perhaps, at length into frivolity, waste, and despair; or cease to condemn her for taking matters into her own hand, and furnis.h.i.+ng herself an opportunity for the exercise of those powers whose cultivation you have strenuously urged, and for whose employment you have made no provision. "Get a husband!" Why should she not get a husband? What should you think of a boy who had been fitted by long training for the duties and responsibilities of a clergyman, or a lawyer, or a statesman, and should then make no attempt to become a clergyman, a lawyer, or a statesman? What would you think of a father who should train his son for any especial office, and should then forbid his son, upon pain of universal derision, to do anything to secure an induction into office?

I am loath to linger here, but I descend into the valley of shadows to show that, even on your own ground, you are a wicked and slothful servant.

Whom do I mean by "you"? I mean ninety-nine out of every hundred of the men who will read this, and, in a modified degree, all the women whom they have drilled to acquiescence in their decisions.

This baleful teaching goes still further. It not only drives girls into deception: it drives them into uncongenial marriages. It forces them to degradation. It does not permit them to view marriage in its natural and proper light. By perpetually a.s.suming it as their destiny, even before they have any knowledge either of marriage or destiny, you so force their inclinations that they come to prefer marrying an indifferent person to not marrying at all,--or even to running the risk of not marrying at all. Instead of letting their minds take a healthful turn, branching off in such directions as nature chooses, you dwarf them in every direction but one, and in that you stimulate.

If society were equally divided; if for every girl there were a man exactly adapted to her, and the two might by your words be induced to meet and marry, your talk might be harmless, and possibly beneficial; but as the world is, at least this part of it, there is no such arrangement, and no remote possibility of such an arrangement. The material does not exist, even suppose the sagacity to discern and dispose of it did. The number of women is much larger than the number of men. In New England, at least, it is a dangerous thing for a woman to set her heart on marrying for a living. When, therefore, you make marriage indispensable, you inst.i.tute an indiscriminate scramble.

Since in theory every girl must marry, and there are few to choose from, she must take such as she can get, and be thankful. She would like this, that, or the other quality, but it will not do to dally.

The chance of a better husband is very remote; numbers are worse off than she, inasmuch as they have none at all; the contingency of going unsupplied is not to be thought of, and accordingly she takes up with what comes to hand. The few who are endowed with unusual charms of mind or person may exercise a limited choice, but the common run of girls must make a common run of it. If one who is so attractive as to have many admirers remains long unmarried, she is abundantly admonished of her danger. She is duly informed that she will one day grow old, and will certainly not always have such opportunities as she now enjoys. Her attractiveness is her stock in trade, which she must invest while the market is brisk. Great will be her loss if she does not. If without special attractions, a girl's position is still more embarra.s.sing. Dependent in her father's house, with no career open to her, no arena for her action, what is to become of her? Anything is better than a dependence which, her own heart tells her, is not long grateful to her father. He may not be unkind or miserly toward her; he may not--and he may, for such things are done--taunt her with her want of success in making a match; he may even be generous and chivalric towards her; but she is conscious that he is disappointed. He may not acknowledge it even to himself, but she knows that she is not fulfilling his wishes, not meeting his ideal. Her support is somewhat a burden, her enforced presence somewhat a shame. He rejoiced in her infancy, childhood, and youth, but he did not expect to have her on his hands all her life. He would gladly spend twice as much on her dowry as he gives for her allowance. She has a _sense_ of all this, and, rather than remain in this state of pupilage, a woman in character, a child in position, she marries the first man that holds out the golden spectre,--I meant sceptre, but perhaps the first will do just as well. I am speaking of the ma.s.ses. I know that there are exceptions. In spite of circ.u.mstances, there are women so strong,--strong-minded if you like, but so symmetrical that you see no peculiar strength or sweetness, only "a perfect woman,"--so strong, that public opinion and private opinion, all the blare and blarney of lecture-room and female-school orators, all the thinly disguised paganism of church-worldlings, beat against them and leave them unmoved as Gibraltar by the summer ripples of its southern sea. You see them yourself, perhaps; but so beautiful, so gentle and lovely, that you do not discern the granite which underlies beauty and grace, and which alone redeems beauty and grace from the charge of gaud, and makes their value; and in your low Dutch dialect you "wonder she doesn't get married."

There are fathers and mothers, though these are rarer, who joy in their children with a rational and Christian joy; who believe in G.o.d and righteousness, immortality and human destiny; whose daughters are polished stones, not in the palaces of earthly pride, vanity, and ambition, but in the temple of the living G.o.d. Such parents and such children are few, but they are enough to reveal possibilities. The higher the few can reach, the higher the many shall rise. But these are the strong, and the strong can take care of themselves. I have nothing to say for them. I speak for those who are not strong,--for the good and true-hearted, who feel themselves overborne by external pressure, and swept along into a hateful and hated vortex,--for those who wish to lead an upright Christian life, but who need a helping hand. Still more, and saddest of all, I speak for those on whom the blight has so long rested that they have lost the sense of uprightness; they feel no wrong, and aspire to nothing higher. More than this, I speak for those whose opening lives are yet untouched, for whom warning and caution may not be too late. It is these--the weak, the plastic, the impressible--whom your earth-born morality is corrupting, whose possibilities of happiness and self-respect your enervating woman's-sphere-ism is destroying. Women may be weak, yet even in weakness is strength, but you have trodden down strength. You trample under foot all sensibility, all delicacy, all dignity. A woman can preserve her integrity only so far as she repels and represses your miserable didactics;--by word and look, if the power be given her; by a silent indignation of protest, if that is her only resource.

I know well, judging from past experience, that there will not be wanting those who will think I am depreciating and deprecating marriage. But it would be extremely foolish to set one's self against marriage, for it would be holding out a straw to dam a river. I not only do not hold out the straw, I do not even wish to dam the river.

But I would prevent it from being banked up here and banked up there, and narrowed, twisted, and tortured, till it bursts all bounds, natural and acquired, and rushes wildly over the country, destroying villages, inundating harvests, sweeping away lives, and becoming a terror and a fate instead of the beneficence it was meant to be.

_I_ depreciate marriage? I magnify it! It is you that depreciate, by debasing it. You lower it to the level of the market. You degrade it to a question of political and domestic economy. You look upon it as an arrangement. I believe it to be a sacrament. You subordinate it to ways and means. I see in it the type of mortal and immortal union. You make it but the cradle of mankind. I make it also the crown. All that is tender, grand, and enn.o.bling finds there its home, its source and sustenance, its inspiration, and its exceeding great reward.

But by as much as marriage is sacred, by so much is he a blasphemer who travesties it; and he thrice and four times blasphemous who leads others to do so. No sin is so dwelt on in the Bible with a stern, reiterated fixedness of divine abhorrence as the sin of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin. They who barter their children for a string of beads, or a talent of gold, are no more pagan than they who, by acc.u.mulated indirections, lead them to barter themselves.

I do not undertake the defence of all "woman's rights," but with whatever strength G.o.d has given me I will do battle for woman's right to be pure. "Caesar's wife should be above suspicion," said haughty Caesar, and the world applauds; but every woman is czarina by divine right. No wretched outcast, wandering through the darkness of the great city,

"With h.e.l.l in her heart And death in her hand, Daring the doom of the unknown land,"

but has lost a crown. For her who, through weakness or despair, has forfeited her birthright, the world has no pardon. I do not say that ye should pray for it to be otherwise. But a deeper sin, a tenfold more gross and revolting violation of G.o.d's law written on the human heart,--giving force to the law written erewhile on the tables of stone,--does she commit who, in the holy name of love, under the holy forms of marriage, burns incense to false G.o.ds. Where love may walk white-robed and stainless, brus.h.i.+ng the morning dews from the gra.s.s, only to descend again in fresher and fragrant showers, pride or prudence or ambition can but bring the deepest profanation: roses spring in his pathway; behind them is the desert.

Marriage contracted to subserve material ends, however innocent those ends may be in themselves, is legalized prost.i.tution; as much more vilifying, as mischief framed by a law is more destructive than mischief wrought in spite of law. To such vice the world is lenient, scarcely recognizing it as vice; but the soul bears its marks of wounds forever and forever.

Marriage is a result, not a cause. In G.o.d's great economy it may have its separate and important work; but from a human point of view, it is conclusion and not premise. It cannot be made the premise without bringing fatal and disastrous conclusions. Whatever ends nature may design her inst.i.tution to compa.s.s, be sure nature will work out.

III.

I do not design to sketch any Utopia for woman; but there are certain things which can be done in this world, in this country, in this generation, at this moment,--simple, practical, practicable measures, which can be accomplished without any change in laws, without any palpable revolution or disruption of society, but by which women shall be relieved of the indignity that is constantly put upon them, even by the society which considers itself, and which perhaps is, the most civilized and chivalric in the world.