“Go on, Aunty,” said Alice, “what next?”
“Well, then the dress has a new style of trimming, and really is very elegant. I must do it the justice to say that it’s something quite recherché. And then they took me upstairs to see the trousseau, and there was a perfect bazaar! all her things laid out by dozens and tied up with pink ribbons, — you would have thought it got for the Empress. Those Elmores are the most worldly family I ever did hear of; all for dash and show! They seemed to be perfectly transported with these things, — and that reminds me, Eva, I noticed last Sunday at church your new poplin suit was made with quillings; now they are not going to wear quillings any more. I noticed none of those Paris dresses had them. You should have Jacobs alter yours at once, and substitute fringes; fringes are the style now.”
“And, Aunty, what do you suppose would happen to me if I should wear quillings when THEY don’t?” said Eva.
“Well, of course, you don’t want to be odd, child. There is a certain propriety in all these things. I will speak to Jacobs about it, and send him up here. Shall I?”
“Well, Aunty, anything to suit you. You may take off quillings, or put on fringe, if you won’t insist on marrying me to anybody,” said Eva; “only I do wish any one fashion would last long enough to give one time to breathe and turn round before it has to be altered; but the Bible says the fashion of this world passeth quickly away, and so I suppose one must put up with it.”
“Eva, do you correspond with Mr. Sydney?” said Aunt Maria after a moment’s reflection.
“Correspond? No, to be sure I don’t. What should I do that for?”
“He writes to mamma, though,” said Alice, laughing. “It’s his own affair if he does,” said Eva. “I told him, before he went, I never corresponded with gentlemen. I believe that is the correct thing to say. I never mean to, either, unless it’s with one whose letters are particularly interesting to me.”
“How do you like that young Henderson?”
“What, Ida’s admirer?” said Eva, coloring. “Oh, we think him nice enough. Don’t we, Alice? — rather jolly, in fact.”
“And does Ida continue gracious?”
“Certainly. They are the best of friends,” said Eva. “The fact is, he is quite a fine fellow; and he reads things to Ida, and she advises him about his style, you know.”
“He and Jim Fellows always come together,” said Alice; “and I think they are both nice — in fact, rather better than the average. He isn’t quite such a rattle-cap as Jim, but one trusts him more.”
“Well,” said Eva, “I don’t like a professed joker. A man that never is in earnest ought to wear the cap and bells, as the court fools used to do in old times.”
“Oh, bless you, child,” said Alice, “that’s what Jim is for; he always makes me laugh, and I like to laugh.”
“Don’t you think that Mr. Henderson would do nicely for Ida?” said Aunt Maria.
“Oh, as to that,” said Alice, “neither he nor Jim Fellows are marrying men. You see, they haven’t anything, and of course they can’t be thinking of such things.”
“But,” said Aunt Maria, “Ida is just the wife for a poor man. She has a turn for economy, and doesn’t care for dress and show; and could rub and scrub along, and help to support the family. I really think she likes work for the sake of it. I wish to mercy she could be engaged, and get all these dreadful queer plans and notions out of her head. I am always so puzzled what in the world to tell people when they ask why she doesn’t visit and go into society.”
“Why not tell the truth,” said Eva, “that she prefers to help papa in his business?”
“Because, love, that’s so odd. People can’t understand it.”
“They can’t understand,” said Eva, “that a woman may be tired of leading a lazy life, and want to use her faculties. Well, I ‘m sure I can understand it. I’d give all the world to feel that I was of as much real use to anybody as Ida is to papa; and I think papa likes it too. Poor, dear old papa, with his lovely old white head, who just toils and slaves for us. I wish I could help him, too.”
“Well, dear, I can tell you how you can help him.”
“How?”
“Marry Wat Sydney.”
“Nonsense, Aunt, what has that to do with papa?”
“It would have more to do than you think,” said Aunt Maria, shaking her head mysteriously.
CHAPTER XXIV. A DISCUSSION OF THE WOMAN QUESTION FROM ALL POINTS
THE bold intrusion of Miss Audacia Dangyereyes into my apartment had left a most disagreeable impression on my mind. This was not lessened by the reception of her paper, which came to hand in due course of next mail, and which I found to be an exposition of all the wildest principles of modern French communism. It consisted of attacks directed about equally against Christianity, marriage, the family state, and all human laws and standing order, whatsoever. It was much the same kind of writing with which the populace of France was indoctrinated and leavened in the era preceding the first Revolution, and which in time bore fruit in blood. In those days, as now, such doctrines were toyed with in literary salons and aristocratic circles, where their novelty formed an agreeable stimulus in the vapid commonplace of fashionable life. They were then, as now, embraced with enthusiasm by fair illuminati, who fancied that they saw in them a dawn of some millennial glory; and were awakened from their dream, like Madame Roland, at the foot of the guillotine, bowing their heads to death and crying, “O Liberty, what things are done in thy name!”
The principal difference between the writers on the “Emancipated Woman” and those of the French illuminati was that the French prototypes were men and women of elegance, culture, and education; whereas their American imitators, though not wanting in a certain vigor and cleverness, were both coarse in expression, narrow in education, and wholly devoid of common decency in their manner of putting things. It was a paper that a man who reverenced his mother and sisters could scarcely read alone in his own apartments without blushing with indignation and vexation.
Every holy secret of human nature, all those subjects of which the grace and the power consist in their exquisite delicacy and tender refinement, were here handled with coarse fingers. Society assumed the aspect of a pack of breeding animals, and all its laws and institutions were to return to the mere animal basis.
It was particularly annoying to me that this paper, with all its coarseness and grossness, set itself up to be the head leader of Woman’s Rights; and to give its harsh clamors as the voice of woman. Neither was I at all satisfied with the manner in which I had been dragooned into taking it, and thus giving my name and money to its circulation. I had actually been bullied into it; because, never having contemplated the possibility of such an existence as a female bully, I had marked out in my mind no suitable course of conduct adequate to the treatment of one. “What should I have done?” I said to myself. “What is a man to do under such circumstances? Shall he engage in a personal scuffle? Shall he himself vacate his apartment, or shall he call in a policeman?”
The question assumed importance in my eyes, because it was quite possible that, having come once, she might come again; that the same course of conduct might be used to enforce any kind of exaction which she should choose to lay on me. But most of all was I sensitive lest by any means some report of it might get to the Van Arsdels. My trepidation may then be guessed on having the subject at once proposed to me by Mr. Van Arsdel that evening as I was fitting with him and Ida in her study.
“I want to know, Mr. Henderson,” he said, “if you are a subscriber for the ‘Emancipated Woman,’ the new organ of the Woman’s Rights party?”
“Now, papa,” said Ida, “that is a little unjust! It only professes to be an organ of the party, but it is not recognized by us.”
“Have you seen the paper?” said Mr. Van Arsdel to me. Like a true Yankee I avoided the question by asking another.
“Have you subscribed to it, Mr. Van Arsdel?”
“Well, yes,” said h
e, laughing, “I confess I have; and a pretty mess I have made of it. It is not a paper that any decent man ought to have in his house. But the woman came herself into my counting-room and, actually, she badgered me into it; I couldn’t get her out. I didn’t know what to do with her. I never had a woman go on so with me before. I was flustered, and gave her my five dollars to get rid of her. If she had been a man I ‘d have knocked her down.”
“Oh, papa,” said Ida, “I’ll tell you what you should have done; you should have called me. She’d have got no money and no subscriptions out of me, nor you either if I ‘d been there.”.
“Now, Mr. Henderson, misery loves company; has she been to your room?” said Mr. Van Arsdel.
“I confess she has,” said I, “and that I have done just what you did — yielded at once.”
“Mr. Henderson, all this sort of proceeding is thoroughly vexatious and disagreeable,” said Ida; “and all the more so that it tends directly to injure all women who are trying to be self-supporting and independent. It destroys that delicacy and refinement of feeling which men, and American men especially, cherish toward women, and will make the paths of self-support terribly hard to those who have to tread them. There really is not the slightest reason why a woman should cease to be a woman because she chooses to be independent and pursue a self-supporting career. And claiming a right to dispense with womanly decorums and act like a man is just as ridiculous as it would be for a man to claim the right to wear woman’s clothes. Even if we supposed that society were so altered as to give to woman every legal and every social right that man has; and if all the customs of society should allow her to do the utmost that she can for herself, in the way of self-support, still, women will be relatively weaker than men, and there will be the same propriety in their being treated with consideration and delicacy and gentleness that there now is. And the assumptions of these hoydens and bullies have a tendency to destroy that feeling of chivalry and delicacy on the part of men. It is especially annoying and galling to me, because I do propose to myself a path different from that in which young women in my position generally have walked; and such reasoners as Aunt Maria and all the ladies of her circle will not fail to confound Miss Audacia’s proceedings and opinions, and mine, as all belonging to the same class. As to the opinions of the paper, it is mainly by the half truths that are in it that it does mischief. If there were not real evils to be corrected, and real mistakes in society, this kind of thing would have no power. As it is, I have no doubt that it will acquire a certain popularity and do immense mischief. I think the elements of mischief and confusion in our republic are gathering as fast as they did in France before the Revolution.”
“And,” said I, “after all, republics are on trial before the world. Our experiment is not yet two hundred years old, and we have all sorts of clouds and storms gathering —— the labor question, the foreign immigration question, the woman question, the monopoly and corporation question, all have grave aspects.”
“You see, Mr. Henderson,” said Ida, “as to this woman question, the moderate party to which I belong is just at that disadvantage that people always are when there is a party on ahead of them who hold some of their principles and are carrying them to every ridiculous extreme. They have to uphold a truth that is constantly being brought into disrepute and made ridiculous by these ultra advocates. For my part, all I can do is to go quietly on with what I knew was right before. What is right is right, and remains right no matter how much ultraists may caricature it.”
“Yes, my daughter,” said Mr. Van Arsdel, “but what would become of our country if all the women could vote, and people like Miss Audacia Dangyereyes should stump the country as candidates for election?”
“Well, I am sure,” said Ida, “we should have very disagreeable times, and a great deal to shock us.”
“It is not merely that,” said Mr. Van Arsdel; “the influence of such women on young men would be demoralizing.”
“When I think of such dangers,” said Ida, “I am, on the whole, very well pleased that there is no immediate prospect of the suffrage being granted to women until a generation with superior education and better balanced minds and better habits of consecutive thought shall have grown up among us. I think the gift of the ballot will come at last as the result of a superior culture and education. And I am in no hurry for it before.”
“What is all this that you are talking about?” said Eva, who came into the room just at this moment. “Ma and Aunt Maria are in such a state about that paper that papa has just brought home! They say there are most horrid things in it, Mr. Henderson; and they say that it belongs to the party which you, and Ida, and all your progressive people are in.”
“It is an excrescence of the party,” said I; “a diseased growth; and neither Miss Ida nor I will accept of it as any expression of our opinion, though it does hold some things which we believe.”
“Well,” said Eva, “I am curious to see it, just because they don’t want I should. What can there be in it so very bad?”
“You may as well keep out of it, chick,” said her father, caressing her. “And now, I’ll tell you, Ida, just what I think; you good women are not fit to govern the world, because you do not know, and you oughtn’t to know, the wickedness that you have got to govern. We men have to know all about the rogues, and the sharpers, and the pickpockets, and the bullies; we have to grow hard and sharp, and ‘cut our eye-teeth,’ as the saying is, so that at last we come to not having much faith in anybody. The rule is, pretty much, not to believe anybody that you meet, and to take for granted that every man that you have dealings with will cheat you if he can. That’s bad enough, but when it comes to feeling that every woman will cheat you if she can, when women cut their eye-teeth, and get to be sharp, and hard, and tricky, as men are, then I say, Look out for yourself, and deliver me from having anything to do with them.”
“Why, really!” said Eva, “papa is getting to be quite an orator. I never heard him talk so much before. Papa, why don’t you go on to the platform at the next Woman’s Rights Convention, and give them a good blast?”
“Oh, I’ll let them alone,” said Mr. Van Arsdel; “I don’t want to be mixed up with them, and I don’t want my girls to be, either. Now, I do not object to what Ida is doing, and going to do. I think there is real sense in that, although mother and Aunt Maria feel so dreadfully about it. I like to see a woman have pluck, and set herself to be good for something in the world. And I don’t see why there shouldn’t be women doctors; it is just the thing there ought to be. But I don’t go for all this hurrah and hullaballoo, and pitching women head-first into politics, and sending them to legislatures, and making them candidates for Congress, and for the Presidency, and nobody knows what else.”
“Well,” said I, “why not a woman President as well as a woman Queen of England?”
“Because,” said he, “look at the difference. The woman Queen in England comes to it quietly; she is born to it, and there is no fuss about it. But whoever is set up to be President of the United States is just set up to have his character torn off from his back in shreds, and to be mauled, pummeled, and covered with dirt by every filthy paper all over the country. And no woman that was not willing to be draggled through every kennel, and slopped into every dirty pail of water, like an old mop, would ever consent to run as a candidate. Why, it’s an ordeal that kills a man. It killed General Harrison, and killed old Zack. And what sort of a brazen tramp of a woman would it be that could stand it, and come out of it without being killed? Would it be any kind of a woman that we should want to see at the head of our government? I tell you, it’s quite another thing to be President of a democratic republic from what it is to be hereditary Queen.”
“Good for you, papa!” said Eva, clapping her hands. “Why, how you go on! I never did hear such eloquence. No, Ida, set your mind at rest, you sha’n’t be run for President of the United States. You are a great deal too good for that.”
“Now,” said Mr. Van Arsdel,
“there’s your friend, Mrs. Cerulean, tackled me the other night, and made a convert of me, she said. Bless me! she’s a handsome woman, and I like to hear her talk. And if we didn’t live in the world we do, and things weren’t in any respect what they are, nothing would be nicer than to let her govern the world. But in the great rough round of business she’s nothing but a pretty baby after all, — nothing else in the world. We let such women convert us, because we like to have them around. It amuses us, and don’t hurt them. But you can’t let your baby play with matches and gunpowder, if it wants to ever so much. Women are famous for setting things a-going that they don’t know anything about. And then, when the explosion comes, they don’t know what did it, and run screaming to the men.”
“As to Mrs. Cerulean,” said Eva, “I never saw anybody that had such a perfectly happy opinion of herself as she has. She always thinks that she understands everything by intuition. I believe in my heart that she ‘d walk into the engine-room of the largest steamship that ever was navigated, and turn out the chief engineer and take his place, if he’d let her. She’d navigate by woman’s God-given instincts, as she calls them.”
“And so she’d keep on till she’d blown up the ship,” said Mr. Van Arsdel.
“Well,” said I, “one fact is to be admitted, that men, having always governed the world, must by this time have acquired a good deal of traditional knowledge of the science of government, and of human nature, which women can’t learn by intuition in a minute.”
“For my part,” said Ida, “I never was disposed to insist on the immediate granting of political rights to women. I think that they are rights, and that it is very important for the good of society that these rights should finally be respected. But I am perfectly willing, for my part, to wait and come to them in the way, and at the time, that will be best for the general good. I would a great deal rather come to them by gradual evolution than by destructive revolution. I do not want them to he forced upon society, when there is so little preparation among women that they will do themselves no credit by it. All history shows that the most natural and undeniable human rights may be granted and maintained in a way that will just defeat themselves, and bring discredit on all the supporters of them, just as was the case with the principles of democratic liberty in the first French Revolution. I do not want the political rights of woman advocated in a manner that will create similar disturbances, and bring a lasting scandal on what really is the truth. I do not want women to have the ballot till they will do themselves credit and improve society by it. I like to have the subject proposed, and argued, and agitated, and kept up’ in hopes that a generation of women will be educated for it. And I think it is a great deal better and safer, where it can be done, to have people educated for the ballot, than to have them educated by the ballot.”
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 328