For a beautiful woman, Caroline had the least of what one may call legitimate coquetry of any person I ever saw. There are some women, and women of a high class too, who seem to take a natural and innocent pleasure in the power which their sex enables them to exercise over men, and who instinctively do a thousand things to captivate and charm one of the opposite sex, even when they would greatly regret winning his whole heart. If well principled and instructed, they try to keep themselves under control, but they still do a thousand ensnaring things, for no other reason, that I can see, than that it is their nature, and they cannot help it. If they have less principle this faculty becomes their available power, by which they can take possession of all that a man has, and use it to carry their own plans and purposes.
Of this power, whatever it may be, Caroline had nothing; nay, more, she despised it, and received the admiration and attentions which her beauty drew from the opposite sex with a coldness, in some instances amounting to incivility.
With me she had been from the first so frankly, cheerfully, and undisguisedly affectionate and kind, and with such a straightforward air of comradeship and a literal ignoring of everything sentimental, that the very ground of anything like love-making did not seem to exist between us. The last evening before I was to leave for my voyage to Europe I spent with her, and she gave me a curiously wrought traveling-case, in which there was a pocket for any imaginable thing that a bachelor might be supposed to want on his travels.
“I wish I could go with you,” she said to me, with an energy quite out of her usual line.
“I am sure I wish you could,” said I; and what with the natural softness of heart that a young man feels when he is plunging off from the safe ground of home into the world, and partly from the unwonted glow of feeling that came over Caroline’s face as she spoke, I felt quite a rush of emotion, and said, as I kissed her hand, “Why didn’t we think of this before, Caroline?”
“Oh, nonsense, Harry; don’t you be sentimental, of all things,” she replied briskly, withdrawing her hand. “Of course, I didn’t mean anything more than that I wished I was a young fellow like you, free to take my staff and bundle, and make my way in the great world. Why couldn’t I be?”
“You,” said I, “Caroline, you, with your beauty and your talents, — I think you might be satisfied with a woman’s lot in life.”
“A woman’s lot! and what is that, pray? to sit with folded hands and see life drifting by — to be a mere nullity, and endure to have my good friends pat me on the back, and think I am a bright and shining light of contentment in woman’s sphere?”
“But,” said I, “you know, Caroline, that there is always a possibility in woman’s destiny, especially a woman so beautiful as you are.”
“You mean marriage. Well, perhaps if I could do as you can, go all over the world, examine and search for the one I want, and find him, the case would be somewhat equal; but my chances are only among those who propose to me. Now, I have read in the ‘Arabian Nights’ of princesses so beautiful that men came in regiments, to seek the honor of their hand; but such things don’t occur in our times in New England villages. My list for selection must be confined to such of the eligible men in this neighborhood as are in want of wives; men who want wives as they do cooking-stoves, and make up their minds that I may suit them. By the bye, I have been informed already of one who has had me under consideration, and concluded not to take me. Silas Boardman, I understand, has made up his mind, and informed his sisters of the fact, that I am altogether too dressy in my taste for his limited means, and besides that I am too free and independent; so that door is closed to me, you’ll observe. Silas won’t have me!”
“The conceited puppy!” said I.
“Well, isn’t that the common understanding among men — that all the marriageable girls in their neighborhood are on exhibition for their convenience? If the very first idea of marriage with any one of them were not so intensely disagreeable to me, I would almost be willing to let some of them ask me, just to hear what I could tell them. Now you know, Harry, I put you out of the case, because you are my cousin, and I no more think of you in that way than if you were my brother, but, frankly, I never yet saw the man that I could by any stretch of imagination conceive of my wanting, or being willing to marry; I know no man that it wouldn’t be an untold horror to me to be doomed to marry. I would rather scrub floors on my knees for a living.”
“But you do see happy marriages.”
“Oh yes, dear souls, of course I do, and am glad of it, and wonder and admire; yes, I see some happy marriages. There’s Uncle Jacob and his wife, kind old souls, two dear old pigeons of the sanctuary! — how charmingly they get along! and your father and mother — they seemed one soul; it really was encouraging to see that people could live so.”
“But you mustn’t be too ideal, Caroline; you mustn’t demand too much of a man.”
“Demand? I don’t demand anything of any man, I only want to be let alone. I don’t want to wait for a husband to make me a position, I want to make one for myself; I don’t want to take a husband’s money, I want my own. You have individual ideas of life, you want to work them out; so have I; you are expected and encouraged to work them out independently, while I am forbidden. Now, what would you say if somebody told you to sit down quietly in the domestic circle and read to your mother, and keep the wood split and piled, and the hearth swept, and diffuse a sweet perfume of domestic goodness, like the violet amid its leaves, till by and by some woman should come and give you a fortune and position, and develop your affections, — how would you like that? Now, the case with me is just here. I am, if you choose to say it, so ideal and peculiar in my views that there is no reasonable prospect that I shall ever marry, but I want a position, a house and home of my own, and a sphere of independent action, and everybody thinks this absurd and nobody helps me. As long as mother was alive there was some consolation in feeling that I was everything to her. Poor soul! she had a hard life, and I was her greatest pride and comfort, but now she is gone there is nothing I do for my father that â good, smart housekeeper could not be hired to do; but you see that would cost money, and the money that I thus save is invested without consulting me; it goes to buy more rocky land, when we have already more than we know what to do with. I sacrifice all my tastes, I stunt my growth mentally and intellectually to this daily treadmill of house and dairy, and yet I have not a cent that I can call my own; I am a servant working for board and clothes, and because I am a daughter I am expected to do it cheerfully; my only escape from this position is to take a similar one in the family of some man to whom, in addition to the superintendence of his household, I shall owe the personal duties of a wife, and that way out you may know I shall never take. So you are sure to find me ten or twenty years hence a fixture in this neighborhood, spoken of familiarly as ‘old Miss Caroline Simmons,’ a cross-pious old maid, held up as a warning to contumacious young beauties how they neglect their first gracious offer. ‘Caroline was a handsome gal in her time,’ they’ll say, ‘but she was too perticklar, and now her day is over and she ‘s left an old maid. She held her head too high and said “No” a little too often; ye see, gals better take their fust chances.”
“After all, cousin,” I said, “though we men are all unworthy sinners, yet sometimes you women do yield to much persuasion, and take some one out of pity.”
“I can’t do that; in fact, I have tried to do it, and can’t. This desperate dullness, and restraint, and utter paralysis of progress that lies like a nightmare on one, is a dreadful temptation; when a man offers you a fortune, which will give you ease, leisure, and power to follow all your tastes and a certain independent stand, such as unmarried women cannot take, it is a great temptation.”
“But you resisted it!”
“Well, I was sorely tried; there were things I wanted desperately — a splendid house in Boston, pictures, carriages, servants, — oh, I did want them; I wanted the éclat, too, of a rich marriage, hut I couldn’t;
the man was too good a man to he trifled with; if he would only have been a good uncle or grandpa I would have loved him dearly, and been ever so devoted, kept his house beautifully, waited on him like a dutiful daughter, read to him, sung to him, nursed him, been the best friend in the world to him, but his wife I could not be; the very idea of it made the worthy creature perfectly repulsive and hateful to me.”
“Did you ever try to tell your father how you feel?”
“Of what earthly use? There are people in this world who don’t understand each other’s vernacular. Papa and I could no more discuss any question of the inner life together than if he spoke Chickasaw and I spoke French. Papa has a respect for my practical efficiency and business talent, and in a certain range of ideas we get on well together. He thinks I have made a great mistake, and that there is a crack in my head somewhere, but he says nothing; his idea is that I have let slip the only chance of my life, but still, as I am a great convenience at home, he is reconciled. I suppose all my friends mourn in secret places over me, and I should have been applauded and commended on all hands if I had done it; but, after all, wouldn’t it be a great deal more honest, more womanly, more like a reasonable creature, for me to do just what you are doing, fit myself to make my own way, and make an independence for myself? Really, it isn’t honest to take a position where you know you can’t give the main thing asked for, and keep out somebody perhaps who can. My friend has made himself happy with a woman who perfectly adores him, and ought to be much obliged to me that I didn’t take him at his word; good, silly soul that he was.”
“But, after all, the Prince may come — the fated knight —— Caroline.”
“And deliver the distressed damsel?” she said, laughing. “Well, when he comes I’ll show him my ‘swan’s nest among the reeds.’ Soberly, the fact is, cousin,” she said, “you men don’t know us women. In the first place they say that there are more of us born than there are of you: and that doesn’t happen merely to give you a good number to choose from, and enable every widower to find a supernumerary; it is because it was meant that some women should lead a life different from the domestic one. The womanly nature can be of use otherwhere besides in marriage, in our world. To be sure, for the largest class of women there is nothing like marriage, and I suppose the usages of society are made for the majority, and exceptional people mustn’t grumble if they don’t find things comfortable; but I am persuaded that there is a work and a way for those who cannot marry.”
“Well, there ‘s Uncle Jacob has just been preaching to me that no man can be developed fully without a wife,” said I.
“Uncle Jacob has matrimony on the brain! it’s lucky he isn’t a despotic Czar, or, I believe, he ‘d marry all the men and women, willy nilly. I grant that the rare, real marriage, that occurs one time in a hundred, is the true ideal state for man and woman, but it doesn’t follow that all and everything that brings man and woman together in marriage is blessed, and I take my stand on St. Paul’s doctrine that there are both men and women called to some higher state; now, it seems to me that the number of these increases with the advancement of society. Marriage requires so close an intimacy that there must be perfect agreement and sympathy; the lower down in the scale of being one is, the fewer distinctive points there are of difference or agreement. It is easier for John and Patrick, and Bridget and Katy, to find comfortable sympathy and agreement than it is for those far up in the scale of life where education has developed a thousand individual tastes and peculiarities. We read in history of the Rape of the Sabines, and how the women thus carried off at haphazard took so kindly to their husbands that they wouldn’t be taken back again. Such things are only possible in the barbarous stages of society, when characters are very rudimentary and simple. If a similar experiment were made on women of the cultivated classes in our times, I fancy some of the men would be killed; I know one would,” — she said, with an energetic grasp of her little fist and a flash out of her eyes.
“But the ideal marriage is the thing to be sought,” said I.
“For you, who are born with the right to seek, it is the thing to be sought,” she said; “for me, who am born to wait till I am sought by exactly the right one, the chances are so infinitesimal that they ought not to be considered; I may have a fortune left me, and die a millionaire; there is no actual impossibility in that thing’s happening, — it is a thing that has happened to people who expected it as little as I do, — but it would be the height of absurdity to base any calculation upon it: and yet all the arrangements that are made about me and for me are made on the presumption that I am to marry. I went to Uncle Jacob and tried to get him to take me through a course of medical study, to fit me for a professional life, and it was impossible to get him to take any serious view of it, or to believe what I said; he seemed really to think I was plotting to upset the Bible and the Constitution, in planning for an independent life.”
“After all, Caroline, you must pardon me if I say that it does not seem possible that a woman like you will be allowed — that is, you know — you will — well — find somebody — that is, you will be less exacting by and by.”
“Exacting! why do you use that word, when I don’t exact anything? I am not so very ideal in my tastes, I am only individual; I must have in myself a certain feeling towards this possible individual, and I don’t find it. In one case certainly I asked myself why I didn’t. The man was all he should be, I didn’t object to him in the slightest degree as a man; but looked on respecting the marriage relation, he was simply intolerable. It must be that I have no vocation to marry, and yet I want what any live woman wants; I want something of my own; I want a life-work worth doing; I want a home of my own; I want money that I can use as I please, that I can give and withhold, and dispose of as absolutely mine, and not another’s; and the world seems all arranged so as to hinder my getting it. If a man wants to get an education there are colleges with rich foundations, where endowments have been heaped up, and scholarships founded, to enable him to prepare for life at reasonable expense. There are no such for women, and their schools, such as they are, infinitely poorer than those given to men, involve double the expense. If you ask a professional man to teach you privately, he laughs at you, compliments you, and sends you away with the feeling that he considers you a silly, cracked-brain girl, or perhaps an unsuccessful angler in matrimonial waters; he seems to think that there is no use teaching you, because you will throw down all, and run for the first man that beckons to you. That sort of presumption is insufferable to me.”
“Oh, well, Carrie, you know those old doctors, they get a certain jog-trot way of arranging human life; and then men that are happily married are in such bliss, and such women-worshipers that they cannot make up their mind that anybody they care about should not enter their paradise.”
“I do not despise their paradise,” said Caroline; “I think everybody most happy that can enter it. I am thankful to see that they can. I am delighted and astonished every day at beholding the bliss and satisfaction with which really nice, pretty girls take up with the men they do, and I think it all very delightful; but it’s rather hard on me that, since I can’t have that, I mustn’t have anything else.”
“After all, Caroline, is not your dissatisfaction with the laws of nature?”
“Not exactly; I won’t quarrel with the will that made me a woman, not in my deepest heart. Neither being a woman do I want to be unwomanly. I would not, if I could, do as George Sand did, put on men’s clothes and live a man’s life. Anything of that sort in a woman is very repulsive and disgusting to me. At the same time, I do think that the customs and laws of society might be modified so as to give to women who do not choose to marry, independent position and means of securing home and fortune. Marriage never ought to be entered on as a means of support. It seems to me that our sex are enough weighted by nature, and that therefore all the laws and institutions of society ought to act in just the contrary direction, and tend to hold us up — to widen our way, to e
ncourage our efforts, because we are the weaker party, and need it most. The world is now arranged for the strong, and I think it ought to be rearranged for the weak.”
I paused, and pondered all that she had been saying.
“My mother” — I began.
“Now, please don’t quote your mother to me. I know what she would say. If two angels were sent down from heaven, the one to govern an empire, and the other to sweep the streets, they would not wish to change with each other; it is perhaps true.
“But then, you see, that is only possible because they are angels. Your mother has got up somewhere into that region, but I am down in the low lands, and must do the best I can on my plane. I can conceive of those moral heights where one thing is just as agreeable as another, but I have not yet reached them. Besides, you know Jacob wrestled with his angel, and was commended for it; and I think we ought to satisfy ourselves by good, strong effort that our lot is of God. If we really cannot help ourselves, we may be resigned to it as his will.”
“Caroline,” I said, “if you might have exactly what you want, what would it have been?”
“In the first place, then, exactly the same education with my brothers. I hear of colleges now, somewhere far out West, where a brother and sister may go through the same course together; that would have suited me. I am impatient of half-education. I am by nature very thorough and exact. I want to be sure of doing whatever I undertake as well as it can be done. I don’t want to be flattered and petted for pretty ignorance. I don’t want to be tolerated in any halfway, slovenly work of any kind because I am a woman. When I have a thorough general education, I then want to make professional studies. I have a great aptitude for medicine. I have a natural turn for the care of sick, and am now sent for far and near as one of the best advisers and watchers in case of sickness. In that profession I don’t doubt I might do great good, be very happy, have a cheerful home of my own, and a pleasant life-work; but I don’t want to enter it half taught. I want to be able to do as good work as any man’s; to be held to the same account, and receive only what I can fairly win.”
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 313