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Title: The woman of to-morrow
Author: Helen M. Winslow
Release date: November 20, 2024 [eBook #74769]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: James Pott & Company
Credits: Jamie Brydone-Jack and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMAN OF TO-MORROW ***
THE WOMAN OF TO-MORROW
_The Woman of
To-morrow_
_By
Helen M. Winslow
Author of “Literary Boston of To-day,”
“Concerning Cats,” etc._
New York
_James Pott & Company_
1905
Copyright, 1905, by JAMES POTT & CO.
First Impression, September, 1905
_To My Sisters_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE WOMAN OF TO-MORROW 7
II. ON INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY 15
III. ON OUR RELATION TO LIFE 29
IV. ON FRIENDS 38
V. ON ENEMIES 49
VI. ON MRS. GUMMIDGE 58
VII. ON MENTAL ATTITUDES 69
VIII. ON THE ESSENTIALS OF HAPPINESS 79
IX. ON WORRY 93
X. ON SOLITUDE 102
XI. ON WOMEN’S CLUBS 115
XII. ON THE ETHICS OF CLOTHES 139
XIII. ON THE AVERAGE WOMAN 149
XIV. ON PUBLIC DUTIES 160
XV. ON HOME-LOVING AND HOUSEKEEPING 169
XVI. ON GROWING OLD 179
XVII. ON THE OUTLOOK 193
THE WOMAN OF TO-MORROW
I
THE WOMAN OF TO-MORROW
What will she be like, the woman of to-morrow? We know all about the
woman of to-day—her virtues, tendencies, shortcomings, her hopes,
aims and splendid promise; reams have been written about the woman
of the past, in all ages, under all conditions, her limitations, her
achievements. But what about the woman of to-morrow? Will she go on
steadily, firmly, unswervingly towards the full accomplishment of what we
women to-day long for, hope for, pray for, wait for? Will she?
When we look back fifty years and note what has been overcome, what women
have achieved in educational, business, philanthropic and sociological
lines, we are wont to preen ourselves and to glory in all “we” have
accomplished. Fifty years ago the first woman was just beginning to
wrest her diploma from the unwilling university. Fifty years ago the
first woman doctor was taking her degree. The first newspaper women were
making their first attempts at journalism. And scores, yes, hundreds, of
avenues, now so long open to women that we do not stop to count them,
were not only shut, but nobody was dreaming of pushing them ajar—nobody,
that is, but Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone
and their friends—and well ridiculed for it they were, too.
But to-day all American womanhood stands on a broad, high plateau, with
eager faces turned hopefully to the future. We look forward confidently
and with the surety of success, because everything has been made easy
for us. Are we too confident? Is there not danger of our forgetting
that we are still a long footpath from the millennium and that there
is a deal of work to be done before women, collectively speaking, get
there? Do we realize sufficiently the duty and responsibility devolving
upon us in regard to the betterment of home and humanity? Do we really
understand the opportunities which influence begets? And since woman’s
responsibility goes hand in hand with her influence, which has always
been proportionate to her own merit, while environment and education have
been important factors in determining this work, then how great must be
her responsibility to-day as compared with that of her sister in former
ages!
Mary Lyon used for the motto at Mount Holyoke in the days when our
mothers and grandmothers used to come under her care, “Freely have ye
received, freely give”—although, for that, the words originated with
a Greater than Mary Lyon. There is no doubt about our having “freely
received”; are we “freely giving”? There was never a period in the
world’s history when women’s work counted for so much, when it was so
much needed. Ancient history says very little about what women did in the
early ages; but we know they did their part. The model women of Hebrew
history were toilers. We see, as one bright woman has said, “a mother’s
ready ingenuity saving the life of her baby boy, when the father’s
strength was a broken reed. We see her commit the tiny ark to the
mercy of the waters of the Nile; we see another woman—a sister—running
fleet-footed along the reedy banks of the river, her loving eyes upon
the rocking cradle adrift on the eddying stream. We see yet another
woman—a king’s daughter—stoop to the river’s edge to lift in her arms the
child of destiny. Three women working in unconscious federation—and lo! a
race of men is freed and a kingdom builded in the wilderness!”
What the world wants of woman to-day is the utmost development of the
positive feminine moral force in her spirit and her life. Woman has been
said to be the conscience of the world, and there is profound truth
in that. It was the conscience of Blanche of Castile which melted the
noblest king France ever had—Louis the Ninth. It was the conscience
of the American woman which was the one invulnerable, irresistible,
unsilenced enemy of American slavery. That conscience of woman is the
tower which society will always need to have developed and regnant within
it, and there is no other office so great.
Sympathy in woman comes nearest to the heart of Christ—sympathy for
the erring, the sick and suffering. That is one power which she needs
to contribute to society. Her sympathy is the heat ray combined with
the light ray in the perfect sunbeam, and wherever it goes there flower
charities, asylums, and all institutions of human benevolence spring
naturally as the bloom of the flowers from the sod which the sun has
warmed.
Then, too, there is woman’s courage. We are so accustomed to associate
courage with physical strength that we do not always think of it
as pre-eminently a womanly grace when the feminine nature has been
fully unfolded and trained, but it is. The reckless rapture of
self-forgetfulness, that which inspires persons and nations, that which
is sovereign over obstacle and defeat, and perils and resistance, has
belonged to woman’s heart from the beginning. In the early pagan time,
in the Christian development, in mission and in martyrdoms, it has
shown; in the mediæval age as well as in our own time; in the Prussian
woman after the battle of Jena, when Prussia seemed trampled into
the bloody mire under the cannon of Napoleon. Oh, the passion, the
forgetfulness, the supreme self-devotion with which woman flings herself
into the championship of a cause that is dear and sacred and trampled
under foot! It is her crown of renown; it is her staff of power! This
conscientiousness in woman, this sympathy, this courage and self-devotion
in woman, give her her place in the future civilization of the world and
glorify the society into which she is born and of which she becomes the
mistress.
We are in need of city mothers as well as city fathers; not until the
mother-care has reached out into all departments of municipal life and
the incentive to good has become as powerful as the incentive to evil;
not until the beautiful and the true are clothed in forms as attractive
as the vile and false; not until nobleness and purity of character are
requisites demanded of those who fill high public positions—not until
then will women cease to have opportunity for efficient, practical
effort; not until then will women cease to have a share of public
responsibility.
According to Dean Swift, the men of his age asked each other if it were
prudent to choose a wife who had a little knowledge of history and the
capacity to discuss the more important affairs of the time and the
obvious beauties of poetry. The general verdict, he says, was against
such attainments in women because their tendency was to make wives
pretentious and conceited, and not duly subject to their husbands. I
know of but one man to-day who would dare express such sentiments, if he
believed them—and but few who can be suspected of cherishing such ideas
in secret. For we have not many men who belong in the past ages.
Even in the early years of the last century it was supposed that woman’s
mentality could be broadened and exercised sufficiently by the receipt
book and the sampler, and it was not till the inventions of each
succeeding decade lightened woman’s labor that she had greater time for
study. It was this development which brought about the beginnings of the
club movement, in the late sixties and early seventies, which gathered
in women who desired mental improvement and longed for that life which
was more than meat and drink—women who needed an outlook upon the world
at large and an inlook upon their own intellectual condition. But mere
literary work did not satisfy women who conscientiously believed that
influence meant responsibility and were clear-sighted enough to see that
in organization was the power to combat the ills of the world and to
elevate humanity. Thus they broadened their scope, making their object
humanity-lifting. Above all is it to be seen in the mental development of
woman herself and in her awakening to the fact that she has powers and
capabilities which can be used for the good of humanity.
This rule, given in “What All the World’s a-Seeking,” ought to be daily
read over by all women: The self should never be lost sight of. It is the
one thing of supreme importance, the greatest factor even in the life
of the greatest service. Being always and necessarily precedes doing;
having always and necessarily precedes giving. But this law also holds:
That when there is being, it is all the more increased by the giving.
Keeping to one’s self dwarfs and stultifies. Hoarding brings loss; using
brings ever greater gain. In brief, the more we are, the more we can do;
the more we have, the more we can give. And thus it is that one becomes
a queen among women. Not honor for themselves, but service for others.
But notice the strange, wonderful, beautiful transformation as it returns
upon itself—honor for themselves, because of service for others.
II
ON INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY
But we must not let our sense of individual responsibility for the
general welfare become too keen. When we consider the multiplication of
societies almost daily for the amelioration of every possible wrong and
the furtherance of nearly every possible good, we seem in some danger
of such a result. Not only the average woman, but the exceptional one,
is infected by the universal desire to improve the world in general and
mankind in particular; and, figuratively, she seems to be going forth
morning, noon and night seeking for new evils to conquer. Mrs. Jellaby
and her Society for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Orphans
of Borrioboolah Gah was but a caricatured prototype of the passion
for organized work among women at the close of the century in which
Dickens lived and wrote. We are all in danger of overlooking the best
and sweetest in life, as well as its real meaning and essence, in our
mad rush after what? Is it the passion for humanity? or is it a sort
of contagious fever, the germs of which, having obtained an insidious
foothold in our mental and moral systems, work an unconscious change in
us from earnest, sincere and reasonably contented women to restless,
ambitious and discontented ones?
True, Saint Paul did say that woman was created for the man, and there
will always be men—and women, too—who, though they deny the inspiration
of every other part of the Scriptures, stake their faith on the
infallibility of this alleged prophecy of woman’s perpetual subjection.
But the copyright on his oracular utterances expired centuries ago. Some
of the new beliefs are not so good as some of the old ones, and these
will pass away. Some are better, and these will remain. But the whole
truth is that it is fair neither to Saint Paul nor to woman to quote
him in fragments. He adds, a very little way further on, “for as the
woman is of the man, so is the man also by the woman.” And this almost
inextricably mixes up the relations of man and woman; but there does not
seem to be any escaping the conclusion that woman’s responsibilities
began about at the beginning.
Saint Paul’s opinion as to the attitude and behavior of women in public
assemblies is hardly apropos now, and if he were alive to-day he would
be the first to admit it. Thucydides antedated the apostle by four
centuries, and his remarks to the effect that “Happiest is that woman
whose name is least in the mouths of men” are, of course, equally beneath
the serious consideration of the woman of to-day, even though they are
echoed by so recent and popular a writer as the author of “The Bread
Winners.” “A woman’s name should never be in the newspapers more than
twice: when she marries and when she dies.” Yet it was but a little while
ago that I heard a prominent woman say:
“I wish you and I were living in a little country town somewhere where we
could be content to knit and crochet and wash dishes and feed the cat.
I know we would all be much happier if we were freed from this ‘divine
discontent’ which leads us to fret our souls for that which is naught
when we get it.” There might, however, be some trouble in finding the
country town where the modern longing to be a factor in the life of
to-day has not penetrated. It is not altogether confined to cities, this
passion for the general welfare. It is shared by the woman of limited
opportunities and crops out in the least suspected places.
Without it where would be the progress made by our sex in the last half
of the nineteenth century? What would be the position of woman, for
instance, had not Lucy Stone been born with the sense of individual
responsibility which made of her a saint and an apostle for the uplifting
of the modern woman, to whom all femininity, whether suffragist or
remonstrant, owes its recognition and its place to-day? She and her
immediate followers were, perhaps, the first to develop this divine
discontent which is the inspiration and source of much of the modern
sense of individuality for the general welfare. And in view of all the
good work that is being inspired and carried out by women, who shall be
so blind as to deny that it is a part of the great plan of evolution
concerned in the problems that beset the opening of a new century?
The banding together of hundreds of thousands of women for various
purposes directly dealing with the world’s advancement along the lines
of education, temperance, philanthropy, political affairs and good
government emphasizes a new phase of this old world’s history. And the
fact that the very existence of this state of affairs is owing to the
impossibility of the modern woman’s sitting quietly at home and ignoring
her part in the general scheme of humanity compels us to own that this
sense of responsibility is not to be regretted, but rather to be taken
as an awakening of the real woman to a knowledge of what the “eternal
feminine” may be made to mean to the world at large.
It is not, therefore, to be deplored, but to be controlled. There is
little danger of its becoming abnormally strong in the aggregate; but
alas! for her who lets her own sense of what she as an individual owes to
society at large, cease to be a purpose in life and become her master.
She it is who joins every club within reach and rushes madly from
section to class in search of diversion and from club to club in what
she flatters herself is the pursuance of culture. She it is who forgets
that an hour spent in the silence of her own room or by her own fireside
with some book that is really worth while is more profitable than two
afternoons listening to mosaics carefully inlaid from bits of the
encyclopædia. She it is who leaves her sick and lonely child to the care
of hired nurses while she goes gaily from club pillar to D. A. R. post
or neglects the great home truth that a smiling, restful wife across the
dinner table is the easiest way to convert the ordinary man to belief in
women’s organizations.
It cannot be denied, however, that the modern tendency to organize has
greatly stimulated this sense of responsibility for the whole human race
that is at once a bane and an inspiration to the up-to-date woman. Women
are gregarious and imitative. Let us once realize that our friends are
active factors in the arena of life and we are immediately fired with
a determination to become factors, too. We want to go with the rest of
our kind, whether it be in the manner of reforms or bonnets. We will no
more be considered behind the times in organization than in sleeves.
Therefore, if other women belong to dozens of such societies, why not we?
It is a great compliment to women that they are being so cordially
recognized by organizations of men. Their educational associations are
inviting our co-operation in the consideration of questions of how
best to work out the problems with which they are confronted. From time
immemorial men have not asked the help of women in vain. Since Eve’s day
we have been making up for her thoughtlessness in allowing temptation
to come before Adam (she not having lived long enough to realize that
men are to be guarded from, not exposed to, temptation), and in all ages
whenever women could be of use to mankind in general they have done
their work nobly and well. Our Pilgrim foremothers are not exploited in
histories as they would have been had they fought Indians and defied
kings. But nobody pretends to deny that they acted fully as important
a part as did their worthy husbands and sires. Our grandmothers of the
Revolutionary War were no small factors in the establishment of a new
republic. The religious history of the world, since the day of Mary, the
carpenter’s mother, shows that the sense of individual responsibility is
no new development of the modern woman. It has been behind the greatest
achievements of the ages.
What has stimulated it and spread it like bits of leaven among the masses
is a question for us to consider. Is it because of the facility with
which newspapers and magazines and books now reach even the remotest of
our borders? It is hardly possible in these days to live apart from a
knowledge of what is going on in the great round world. There is scarcely
a hamlet in the country unreached by a daily newspaper, and the ordinary
workingman to-day knows more of the general trend of affairs than the
most learned and far-seeing of our grandfathers possibly could do.
What is the effect of all this modern development of progress? of this
individual sense of responsibility? The common consciousness of humanity,
the sense of our individual need and our individual duty is making
itself felt. We are open to deeper and wider impulses; let us see that
they are not allowed to die away as mere impulses. One of the inevitable
effects of the modern stimulus of organization is a high degree of
personal consciousness. We feel the responsibility of the whole “woman’s
movement”; we not only have a larger and broader personality and a sense
of revolt against any form of injustice, but we feel a wider, deeper
love for each other. We are standing together in a concerted movement
seeking a common good; and that brings us into a broader charity and
a commensurate growth of social consciousness. It is impossible for
us henceforth to settle back into selfish living—that is, if we are
developing the highest privileges that come to the modern woman. We
shall possess our souls in patience and find our balance in a serenity
of spirit that will give us a clearer vision and freedom from worry. We
may still feel that we are personally responsible for a great deal in the
world around us, but we shall not worry and fret over it, and we shall
learn the secret of combining earnest, constant endeavor with a sublime
unconsciousness to the pin-pricks of existence. We shall see and feel new
forces and give way to them in loyal service.
Doubtless this modern sense of personal responsibility is one of the laws
of social evolution which has been going on with greater activity than
most people have realized during the past quarter century. The increasing
individualism of women is one of the striking developments of the present
age. For that very reason the radiating diffusion, as one writer has
called it, of the clubs seems all the more welcome. Until the individual
woman finds her special differentiation, or, in other words, finds her
balance, she is in danger of wasting her nervous force in vague gropings
after the right thing. Never before have women cared so much for other
women, and the result is greater kindliness and helpfulness toward human
nature everywhere. The heart of womanhood is alive and stirring as never
before; shall we dare say this is not kindling a streak of electric fire
that may burn out old prejudices and kindle a new era? We may still be
in the groping, vague stage where mistakes are as frequent as the right
steps, but it is an evident uplift in the scale of human advancement.
Even in our family life we are letting the old notions go and recognizing
the individuality of each member. Children are now allowed to think
their own thoughts, and if they have a special bent in any one direction
it is encouraged rather than warped to fit an old, set pattern. Young
women as well as young men are expected to cultivate outside interests.
We realize that it is the duty of every woman of intelligence to take
active interest in some social organization and recognize some duty
beyond the borders of family life. Just as in the church women have
labored together for years to raise funds for some common end—to send
forth missionaries to the heathen or pay the one at home—so we have come
to know the value of organized effort for the benefit of the school, the
home and the individual. The work of women in sanitary commissions and in
the temperance unions has shown what may come of the modern passion for
outside work. The sense of humanity is growing daily, and though this may
crumble and flatten some old ideals, it also puts a new meaning and a new
heroism into life.
It depends upon us what we will make the effect on our own lives of this
keen anxiety to do something for the world around us. There will always
be work enough. There will always be some Macedonia with worthy objects
crying earnestly, “Come over and help us.” It depends upon us whether we
will take up our work calmly and strongly, careful not to undertake more
than we can do and yet not to leave untouched that for which we are best
fitted, or whether we will let ourselves become so “cumbered with much
serving” that we shall lose the best of life’s harmonies, the inner life
of the soul. We are in danger, in our eagerness to be of service and our
dread of losing some of the frills of life, of forgetting that we can
do no better service to humanity than to develop our own selves into the
highest types of womanhood. The world will always stand in need of noble
women.
The great trouble with the average woman is that she does not readily
find her balance. Who does not recall some rare, sweet nature that
while bearing the burdens of life—heavy burdens, perhaps—is marked by a
serenity of soul that is as restful to her friends as it is helpful to
herself? But alas! who cannot count on the fingers of one hand the number
of such women? On the other hand, the women who flutter and hover and
tremble and bustle and chatter are far from isolated cases. One is almost
tempted to liken them to the sands of the seashore.
It is not that they are not eager to be of the highest service to
mankind, but simply that they do not get at the true secret of how. How
to be lifted above the personal frets, the personal sense of importance.
Perhaps it is the personal element that spoils it; eliminate that and the
true cause for fretting and worrying has in a large measure disappeared.
Sometimes the question of what needs to be done gets entirely shunted
off the track by that other one: What will be the easiest way for me to
do it?
The sense of individual responsibility for the general welfare is one of
the hopeful signs of the times. We may as well recognize it and that each
generation needs more and more some sort of association with each other.
We are individuals, but the force which draws us together and keeps us
eager to work for a common cause is a need that belongs to the later
development of the human race. We need each other and to come together
and work together just as much as we need a home where we can sometimes
be alone. And this social dependence on one another is, as one writer
says, the highest faculty of the highest race on earth.
That is one of the chief reasons why we come together to discuss methods
of thought and of work. The women who join clubs because it is the
fashion or because of restlessness and emptiness of mind are few; the
women who join because of their need of belonging to a throng that can
stir and throb and work in unison are legion. We are seeking more or less
consciously the higher forms of relation which are the strength of modern
life. And this is the result of a prolonged thirst among women for a
fuller and truer social life than that provided by the ordinary functions
of society.
It scarcely seems necessary to sum up by saying that this sense of
personal responsibility for the general welfare is back of all organized
work, nor to repeat that it is to us, like life, what we make of it. It
is for us each and severally to settle that question. If we take the
attitude of master and make of this feeling a servant to do our bidding,
well and good; if, on the other hand, we let it master us and become a
slave to a vague and general desire to do something for somebody without
the slightest idea of how or what, then woe be to us!
III
ON OUR RELATION TO LIFE
How are we seeking to get the most out of life? By selfishly striving
to grasp all the good things therein for ourselves? By trying to stamp
our own individuality upon everything, by making ourselves a personal
power? Or are we realizing that only in serving others can we best help
ourselves? “He that is greatest among you shall be your servant.” And
what is a servant? One who works for others. Look over the women of your
acquaintance. Is it the self-seeking woman, who sacrifices her dignity
in a scramble for prominence and who pushes herself, regardless of the
rights of others, into prominent positions, whose name stands for real
service and real value in the world? Or is it she who forgets herself and
the paltry honors that come with self-sought place in honest, unselfish
work and far-seeing, wise and charitable thought for the best good of
the whole whose name is written high on “Rolls of Honor”?
She who is great enough to lose sight of small, unworthy aims and makes
it her chief purpose to help and serve others will always be the one who
is instinctively trusted. True greatness and true happiness do not come
when we set ourselves deliberately to call them to serve our purpose.
It is only by putting our lives in harmony with the great principle
of service to our fellow-men that we shall find them. It is of little
use to strive to attain popularity, greatness, power over others; it
is of infinite use to find out how we can be of service to those with
whom we are associated, and then to forget ourselves in such service.
Kindliness, helpfulness, service: these three were never more needed
than now. The great-hearted, sympathetic, charitable-minded, brave woman
is needed everywhere. She it is who is beloved, who makes for peace and
righteousness; yes, and for power. And it is easy to see why she is the
woman of power.
Let us learn the secret of “putting ourselves on the side of the
universal.” Let us work from the heart, giving ourselves with no thought
of personal gain. The more we do this the broader will become our
vision, the grander our lives; and thus while we are giving ourselves
to others the fuller and richer and truer will life be for us; and we
shall cease to think whether we are getting our money’s worth, satisfied
with the joy of living and the unconscious growth within. Can there
be anything more beautiful in life than to become one of those rare
souls whose personality is a help to their fellow-creatures; whose very
presence is like a benediction, and from whom goes out a silent influence
that cannot be defined, yet which every one within its radius feels,
even though not a word be spoken? And is there not a way by which this
serenity of soul, this illumination, may become a characteristic of every
good woman?
The more we are in ourselves the more we can do, the more we shall desire
to do for others. There is nothing greater in life, nothing greater in
Christianity than this great principle of helpfulness and service and
love for others. It is the kingdom of heaven to which we all aspire some
time or other, only we do not always realize that it is here and now if
we will have it so. And in proportion as we stand for higher conditions
and better influences we are an uplifting power to those around us. We
cannot do this, however, if we allow ourselves to take narrow and petty
views of the lives and motives of others. Only by merging the personal
side of things into the larger, universal one; by rising above prejudices
and becoming indifferent to the criticisms and opinions of others—so
long as we are sure of being actuated by right motives ourselves—do we
reach the higher life. Service to others is the great solution to the
actual problem of life. Realizing and building our lives upon this great,
eternal principle, minor things will not matter.
Think how much more charitable we then shall be toward the faults and
failings of others. We may even so accustom ourselves to the larger
view of life and service that we shall not readily see shortcomings in
those around us; or, if called to our notice, they will not rasp or fret
us, because our souls are lifted above the plane where such trials are
possible. And, above all, we shall be possessed of that larger charity
that sees beneath the surface and knows that we have no right to judge
our sister. Have we innate knowledge and infallible wisdom ourselves
that we shall decide for another? Can we know of the struggles another
woman makes for a better life, or condemn her when she fails? “You may
think I am cynical in my speech and impatient in my words at times,”
exclaimed one woman to another who had rebuked her, “but you do not know
how many times I have overcome that tendency, nor that I am striving
daily to outgrow it.”
The limitations of other women are no personal concern of ours. It is
ours to do for others, to lose our own pettiness and enlarge our own
horizon by giving loyal, loving service, and this includes a broad,
universal love to all women, to the world around us—a world, whoever and
whatever we are, that always needs us. It may be the world of home, it
may be the public schoolroom, it may be the ranks of fashionable society,
or it may be the small circle of the small country town, but our love and
our service are needed. We are individually responsible for so much.
“From each as she has power to give, to each as she has need.” What a
motto! It is so easy to forget that each one has something to give to
some one. And what is this giving to “each as she has need”? It is being
gracious, broad-minded, tolerant of others, “not easily puffed-up”—nor
put out, either; it is by keeping ourselves in a serene, well-balanced
frame of mind that will act on others as a bit of bright sunshine falling
across a dark corner. We cannot give to others anything better than is
in our own natures, and only by keeping them bright and sunny can we
shed sweet temper and serenity of soul wherever we go. “How shall we
keep ourselves so if we are not born that way?” asks somebody. Cultivate
the habit. We have habits of mind as well as of body. Cultivate sunshine
and sweetness in ourselves at home, every day and every hour in the day,
and we shall have no difficulty in keeping sweet and pleasant everywhere
else. Let us each be the woman for whose presence her friends wait as for
a benediction of peace.
Do you not know women whose very presence is uplifting, whose very
atmosphere is peace? We might all be so if we would set ourselves
steadily and calmly to work to find our balance and lift ourselves
to a mental plane where outside worries and flurries and tempers and
jealousies could not reach us. It would be a work of time, perhaps, but
it would pay. And having once arrived at that condition we should help
others just as naturally as the sun sheds its life-giving beams on the
dependent earth. Let us learn the highest secret of life, self-giving.
Not for what it will bring us in peace or honor or happiness, but because
we realize how much the world needs disinterested help, and how much more
we need to give it. “If you would have all the world love you, you must
first love all the world.”
“We buy ashes for bread;
We buy diluted wine;
Give me the tree—
Whose ample leaves and tendrils curled
Among the silver hills of heaven,
Draw everlasting dew.”
A few years ago Mr. Trine took occasion to send out to his friends a
little card with the following printed thereon. It helped us all, and
therefore I pass it on like so much “sunshine”:
“A SORT OF CREED.
“To live up to our highest in all things that pertain to us.
“To lend a hand as best we can to all others for this same end.
“To remain in nature always sweet and simple and humble, and
therefore strong.
“To open ourselves fully and to keep ourselves pure and clean
as fit channels for the Divine Power to work through us.
“To turn toward and keep our faces always to the light.
“To do our own thinking, listening quietly to the opinions of
others, and to be sufficiently men and women to act always upon
our own convictions.
“To do our duty as we see it, regardless of the opinions of
others, seeming gain or loss, temporary blame or praise.
“To play the part of neither knave nor fool by attempting
to judge another, but to give that same time to living more
worthily ourselves.
“To get up immediately when we stumble, face again to the
light, and travel on without wasting even a moment in regret.
“To love all things and to stand in awe or fear of nothing save
our own wrongdoing.
“To recognize the good lying at the heart of all people, of
all things, waiting for expression, all in its own good way and
time.
“To love the fields and the wild flowers, the stars, the
far-open sea, the soft, warm earth, and to live much with them
alone, but to love struggling and weary men and women and every
pulsing living creature better.
“To strive always to do unto others as we would have them do
unto us.
“In brief—to be honest, to be fearless, to be just, to be kind.
This will make our part in life’s great and as yet not fully
understood play truly glorious, and we need then stand in fear
of nothing—life nor death; for death is life.
“Or, rather, it is the quick transition to life in another
form; the putting off of the old coat and the putting on of a
new; a passing not from light to darkness, but from light to
light, according as we have lived here; a taking up of life in
another form just where we leave it off here; a part in life
not to be shunned or dreaded or feared, but to be welcomed with
a glad and ready smile when it comes in its own good way and
time.”
IV
ON FRIENDS
Who shall estimate the value of a cheery, breezy, hopeful friend? Nobody
can get along without her. She keeps us in good humor, she switches off
the bores, she lights us up and keeps things in motion; in her company
our spirits rise, our wits grow bright and our tongues loosen, so that
we really believe after half an hour’s contact with her that we are in
ourselves as brilliant and as happy as she makes us. A friend that can
raise everybody around her from a state of practical imbecility to that
of a brilliant and beautiful song bird is a being we may all envy. If
we would be such a friend ourselves, there is but one way: we must be
agreeable at all times, kindly serviceable to every outward call, never
see a slight or notice a snub, and never allow ourselves to get into the
dumps. “To be warped unconsciously under the magnetic influence of all
around is the destiny to a certain extent of even the greatest souls.” We
cannot be too careful of our friendships, nor value too highly the love
of the good women whom we meet in life.
The late “Jennie June,” Mrs. Croly, said at one of the celebrations in
honor of her seventieth birthday: “I am glad to have lived so many years
because I have come to know that most beautiful thing on earth, the
love of one woman for another—the love of good women for one another.”
And truly, if any woman on earth has reason to know it, this “mother of
clubs,” who did more than any other one woman to introduce women to one
another, ought to from long and intimate experience. Through her pen,
that of the first regular, trained woman-journalist in the world, and
through her long, active experience as president of the foremost woman’s
club in the country, Mrs. Croly did more, perhaps, for the emancipation
of women in a social way than almost any other woman of her age, and we
may well pause to consider her words for a moment.
It has long been the custom, even among women, to sneer at the love of
woman for woman; to say that women cannot be true, cannot overlook
peculiarities in other women, have not charity for one another’s
shortcomings. But the women who say this to-day are not trained thinkers
and observers. The more we associate with other women along any definite
line, the broader grows the individual outlook, the more charitable the
mental attitude. It is the beginner who believes women are not true
to each other, mainly because she hasn’t it in her own heart to be
true to others. It is a case where the verdict of the immortal bard is
illustrated:
“To thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
The modern “passion for organization” has done more for the friendships
of women than anything else has ever done. It has lifted the ordinary
woman from the plane of petty gossip and trivial interest in each other’s
every-day affairs, and it has, in part at least, killed out that love
of gossip which in times past men have delighted to ascribe to women as
their especial prerogative; although for that matter some of the worst
gossips I have ever known are men. Long ago, when clubs and societies
were first started, the club may have been a promoter of gossip just the
same as the sewing bee and the church social were in earlier days. Women
were not trained then to think great thoughts, to live on a plane where
the comings and goings of their neighbors are beneath them, to take so
broad and lofty an outlook upon affairs in general as to be incapable of
scrutiny of the insignificant motives of their friends.
After working together for others, women begin to recognize in one
another the loftier ideals and higher ambitions. When we are lifted upon
the peak of high living ourselves, we are not so isolated as perhaps
we once thought we should be; on the contrary, we are able to see many
others who are striving to reach the summit of high thinking and worthy
endeavor. Women have needed this outlook in ages past, while they are
but just coming to their own, and although we may have reached the state
where we are able to endure our own company, and to find comfort in the
inner life, we need the friendship of others; we need the sunshine of
good company to bring out the best that is in ourselves.
We may think we can do without other people, or that we do not care what
other women think of us, but we all know that we do and that we depend
on one another for help and for comfort. If we are inclined to too much
introspection or to looking upon the dark side of things it is well to
take pattern after Dr. Johnson and “live in a crowd of jollity,” at least
so far as to get out of our own solitary chambers and fling ourselves
into something which is their polar opposite. The ordinary woman needs
contact with her intellectual mates in order that she may get out of the
small round of her daily sympathies and interests. Dr. Johnson was the
greatest hypochondriac in the world, but when once aroused by stimulating
contact with the wise and the erudite, the change was like that in the
forlorn, drooping eagle in a cage to the same bird when free to soar into
the limitless space above.
It is this need that is bringing the rich woman into closer association
with her poorer sister. This mutual contact is helpful. The one learns
that riches do not buy brains and refinement; the other finds out that
poverty does not preclude the possibility of richness of intellect
and gentle manners. If one wears Paris gowns and another is severely
plain in her costumes, there need not be any difference in the attire
of their ideas. The one sees that an unfashionable garment may clothe a
body containing a mind that is above rubies, that “the rank is but the
guinea’s stamp—the man’s a man for a’ that.” The other discovers that her
next neighbor, whom she considered a toy of fashion, has a soul and some
lofty aspirations. Companionship with other women renders a woman more
lenient, more sincere and more sympathetic. The pettiness of personal
aims is dying out in the presence of humanity’s needs.
We should not forget that a barbed wire fence shuts out more than
it shuts in. Social barriers cannot set aside mental and spiritual
harmonies, for the force of personality is becoming the supreme force,
before which custom and conservatism must yield. The standard by which
all must judge each other is high, unselfish womanhood. The result of
woman’s individual growth is nowhere more apparent than in the home, the
corner-stone of civilization, and in her friendships.
Mrs. Croly declared that the passion for associated effort was far
greater than any one woman, and that no woman who sought only her own
personal aggrandizement could possibly have more than a transitory,
fleeting fame. How true her words have proved can easily be computed by
any of us. We all know women who, through personal machination or what is
even more contemptible, the unscrupulous use of their friends, have risen
to high positions; but who let ambition get the better of their judgment,
and consequently, though clinging tenaciously to place and grasping
violently at position, were finally engulfed in the sea of oblivion.
But, happily, these women are fewer and fewer as the years roll by, and
consequently the limitations of self are giving way to the largeness of a
universal idea.
To enter upon any labor worthy the honest effort of any earnest
woman with the selfish spirit dominant within, is not only to fail
ultimately by the personal measure, but to degrade the work itself to
the level of the spirit in which it was undertaken; to enter upon the
most unpretending labor simply because of duty, nobly because of the
possibility for others, is not only to beautify the worker, but to
glorify the work.
A soul so narrow as to know no broader horizon than is measured by its
own puny pleasure or purpose, ideal or method, can never be long in the
ascendant, and ultimately receives as it deserves the condemnation of
the larger, better world; the life that has no definitely fixed ideal
toward which it is stirring, no divinely conceived mission which it is
struggling to fulfil, can expect no less than the hearty contempt of
an honest humanity. Shall we not endeavor, each of us, to become the
radiating centre of kindliness and good will and helpfulness? It is
hard to do one’s best and then to be troubled with a haunting fear or a
real consciousness that some one else would have done that particular
thing better. It is harder yet to do one’s best, to work from the
purest motives even, and then to feel that one’s friends are looking
on with critical eye, or, at best, with cold approval. Why not say the
appreciative word and give the sympathetic hand clasp wherever we can?
Harder even than death is it to find some dearly loved friend grown cold
and indifferent; to find instead of the loving sympathy that has seemed
a strong fortress in the past, only a distant formality, a chilling
frost; or to find, worse than all, disloyalty in place of truth. Nothing
is more heart-breaking than to find a love grown cold, especially if
that love is one in which we have trusted and believed for years. Such
things happen. We find in place of the sympathy and affection on which we
have relied without question some sudden failure in time of stress. The
sympathy we have accustomed ourselves to lean upon disappoints us. The
hollowness of insincerity rings through the formal attempt to simulate
affection that is no longer a vital thing. And when this experience
befalls us—God help us.
No; death is not the worst thing that can happen to us or to our friends.
I sometimes wonder if it is not the best; if we do not do wrong in
wishing back those who have gone a little before us to the silent shore.
Death is a mystery, but it may be the best part of life, after all. We
cannot tell.
We say we believe in immortality; that we believe the future life will
take us far in advance of this; that we are to be infinitely happier,
infinitely better and infinitely more useful there. Why, then, are
we afraid to go forward into it? Why do we grudge our friends that
experience? And why—since we believe in infinite love and the life of the
soul hereafter do we mourn the death of any human love when we are sure
of God’s love and that of the friends who have gone before?
There is a poem of Edward Rowland Sill’s that has long been a favorite
with me. Perhaps it may bring a comforting thought to some other who
reads it here:
What if, some morning when the stars were paling
And the dawn whitened and the east was clear,
Strange peace and rest fell on me from the presence
Of a benignant spirit standing near,
And I should tell him, as he stood beside me,
“This is our earth, most friendly earth and fair;
Daily its sea and shore, this sun and shadow,
Faithful it turns, robed in its azure air?
“There is best living here, loving and serving,
And quest of truth and serene friendship dear;
But stay not, spirit. Earth has one destroyer,
His name is Death. Flee, lest he find thee here.”
And what if then, while the still morning brightened
And freshened in the elm the summer’s breath,
Should gravely smile on me the gentle angel,
And take my hand and say, “My name is Death”?
V
ON ENEMIES
Marcus Aurelius says: “No man can do me an injury unless he can make me
misbehave myself.” An older authority than he said: “Love your enemies.”
And a good way to love them is not to recognize them as enemies. The
old Roman was right—as usual. The greatest harm any one can do us is to
disturb the harmony of our souls. There is a serenity which is like an
armor. It protects us from the stings of petty jealousy and the stabs
of secret foes. Reports, false or true, of these things may come to our
ears, but we shall possess our souls in large patience and refuse to be
ruffled in spirit or worried by small fears. We shall not “misbehave
ourselves.”
My mother—the best and wisest woman I ever knew, God bless her!—used to
tell me that the person of whom it could be said, “He or she has not
an enemy in the world,” never amounted to anything. Few who accomplish
any real good in life escape the attacks of the envious. No matter how
disinterested our purpose or how high our ideal, somebody is going to
misunderstand; somebody is going to impute a selfish motive. Experience
with the world will teach us to expect and make allowances for these
things; but we need not be soured by them, nor lose sight of our own
standard, provided it be a right one. Only by lowering our own ideals,
by giving way to jealousy, envy, fear or discouragement can we really be
touched by these outside things. Let us keep single to the purpose of
pressing straight forward to the goal of right living and right thinking,
not expecting every one to understand or even appreciate our motives, and
our enemies can do us no real harm.
To be worried and fretted by little things; to live in a constant
atmosphere of anxiety about what may or may not be said of us; to be
continually dwelling upon the personal impression we are making on
others; to be forever thinking of ourselves and never enlarging our
vision to the greatness of humanity; to dwell upon the littleness of
some people and forget the nobleness of others; these are the things that
belittle us and keep our souls from growing. It matters not who or what
are our enemies from without, so long as we keep free from those within.
And when it comes to that, if we attend diligently to shutting the door
on those within ourselves, we shall have no time for recognizing our foes
from without. We need the spirit of serenity and sweetness and patience
with our fellow-creatures; and to practice all these virtues. We need
more toleration for the opinions and the expressions of opinion from
others. We need to cultivate broader views; to remember the difference in
environment among women; to remind ourselves that heredity and training
in one part of the country may differ widely from the same things in
another section; and to educate ourselves up to a standard where we can
see that another woman is not necessarily wrong because she cannot see
things in just the same light, nor believe just the same way that we do.
One of the greatest things any movement can do for women is to develop
their sense of proportion. As the individual develops and broadens her
sympathies by doing for others, the small personal side of life fades
into the background; the weightier interests of humanity are grasped by
degrees, and the better qualities of womanhood come out in bolder relief.
In this evolution we are growing up to a point where petty jealousies
will never be recognized and small enmities will have no place.
Self-development and a new sort of self-possession is what we need.
“Human nature is so constituted,” some one says, “that it cannot see
one person rising above his fellows without experiencing the pangs of
jealousy. No sooner does one of us rise, either by force of our own
abilities or by a combination of outside circumstances, than do some whom
we had once called friends set to work to pull us down, to belittle our
influence and to malign our motives. Human nature cannot stand success
in other people.” Some human nature cannot, perhaps. But there are as
many kinds of human nature as there are people in the world. We talk
as if human nature was one solid lump of which everybody is fashioned,
and consequently we must all be alike at heart—as a bushel of peas.
Thank God there are more kindly natures in the world than unkindly, and
a hundred good friends who rejoice at our success to one who gives it
grudging favor. The world is a much better place than we give it credit
for being. The trouble is we make more fuss over the one enemy than we do
over five hundred friends, staunch and true. There is lots of lovable,
kindly, faithful, generous human nature lying around loose. It is easy to
forgive our enemies by forgetting that we have them. It is easy to make
good cheer for others by keeping it first in our own hearts. The selfish
inlooking soul is never happy; the broad-visioned worker for humanity may
always be so. Which shall we choose?
Let us look out and not in; let us forget the annoyances of life and
recognize only the kindness and nobleness of humanity; let us give
generously of ourselves, seeking nothing in return.
We worry too much about what somebody has said or may say against us.
Some petty criticism which should be beneath our notice keeps many a
woman tossing on a restless pillow half the night.
Said a white sister for whom old Aunt Hannah was washing:
“Aunt Hannah, did you know that you have been accused of stealing?”
“Yes, I hearn about it,” said Aunt Hannah, and went on with her washing.
“Well, you won’t rest under it, will you?” said the sister.
Aunt Hannah raised herself up from her work, with a broad smile on her
face, and looking up full at the white sister, said:
“De Lord knows I ain’t stole nuthin’, and I knows I ain’t, an’ life’s too
short for me to be provin’ and ’splainin’ all de time; so I jest goes on
my way rejoicin’. Dey know dey ain’t tellin’ the truf, and dey’ll feel
ashamed and quit after awhile. If I can please de Lord dat is enough for
me.”
Let us remember this, and be satisfied with pleasing the Lord. And let us
not be too critical of others. Says Marcus Aurelius:
“How much trouble he avoids who does not look to see what his neighbor
says, or does, or thinks, but only to what he does himself, that it may
be just and pure.”
There is always danger of forming ourselves into a mutual
admiration society, and nothing is more of a hindrance to progress.
Self-satisfaction is fatal to self-development. And here our enemies may
have been all actual benefit to us, in order that we might not think
more of ourselves than we ought to have done.
Somebody once sent me a printed motto which I keep over my working-desk,
and read often. I do not know who, seeing it, recognized in it a message
for me, but I pass it along to you. It is called “The Foot Path to
Peace,” and is signed by Henry Van Dyke, whose writings show such a
wonderful appreciation of nature as God’s best minister. It reads as
follows:
“To be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work
and to play and to look up at the stars; to be satisfied with your
possessions but not contented with yourself until you have made the best
of them; to despise nothing in the world except falsehood and meanness,
and to fear nothing except cowardice; to be governed by your admirations
rather than by your disgusts; to covet nothing that is your neighbor’s
except his kindness of heart and gentleness of manners; to think
seldom of your enemies, often of your friends and every day of Christ,
and to spend as much time as you can with body and spirit in God’s
out-of-doors—these are little guide posts on the foot path to peace.”
There is a whole sermon in it. “To be governed by your admirations
rather than by your disgusts”—how many of us do this? Think what a
different atmosphere we should breathe, how much pleasanter our outlook
on life if we made this our rule. Again, “think seldom of your enemies,
often of your friends and daily of Christ,”—there is another “guide post
on the foot path to peace” which it is worth our while to linger over and
study. It is too easy to think often of our enemies, to poison our lives
and vitiate our whole moral atmosphere by dwelling upon their faults.
The truth is they are not worth our thinking about—unless we can do so
kindly and helpfully. We take our hosts of friends as a matter of course
and seldom congratulate ourselves that we have so many and such excellent
ones; but our one enemy! Alas! we let him or her sully our spirit
with all uncharitableness. She is not worth it. A high, clean soul is
infinitely better.
Let us walk together in the foot path to peace. We can find it if we
will; we can make for ourselves all these little guide posts along the
way. And we shall be much the better women and much better fitted for
life.
We have always before us the individual problem. We can solve it, not
in crowds nor in co-operation, but by wrestling with all cowardice and
meanness and narrowness and pettiness, and by looking up “to the stars”
and beyond them. Let us try.
Above all, let us love one another, and not hesitate to say the loving
word. Flattery is poison, but sincere approbation is a wholesome
stimulant. Let us speak the simple truth. A foolish reserve often makes
us withhold it. It seals the lips to the expression of the heart. It is
like locking the gate of a garden where roses bloom. Let their beauty and
perfume be freely given. True love never harms; it helps and ennobles.
For love is the fulfilling of the law. “Love your enemies.”
VI
ON MRS. GUMMIDGE
“Yes,” sighed that immortal woman, “I’m a lone, lorn creetur’ and not
only everything goes contrary with me, but I go contrary with everything.
I’d better die and be a riddance.” We all know Mrs. Gummidges. They exist
to-day in the family, in public life, in literature. Worse yet, there are
Mrs. Gummidges of both sexes.
If you venture some remarks during a discussion which call forth praise
from all the rest, Mrs. Gummidge looks superior; she regrets that you
should have been guilty of misstatement; or she notes a discrepancy
between what you say to-day and some other thing you said last year; and
how came you to fall into error when the magazines or the newspapers have
given such frequent opportunities for you to keep right? And after making
you feel too small and insignificant even to have an opinion of your
own, much less to express it, she remarks that she does not suppose other
people notice your errors, and that she only mentioned it because her own
critical acumen forced her to.
“Mrs. Gummidge’s was rather a fretful disposition,” says little David,
“and she whimpered sometimes more than was comfortable for other parties
in so small an establishment. I was very sorry for her, but there were
moments when I thought how much more agreeable it would be if Mrs.
Gummidge had a convenient apartment of her own to retire to, and had
stayed there until her spirits revived.” Alas! but our Mrs. Gummidge,
if she had such an apartment, would refuse to seek its solitude and
there bury or nurse her griefs; for she belongs to that class who
are gregarious. She insists that her whole world shall share in her
discomforts, bear her woes, carry her burdens.
Mrs. Gummidge, in short, was the queen of pessimists. True, after
being a lone, lorn creetur’ for many years she developed after the
most surprising fashion into a cheerful, busy worker. But so does any
confirmed pessimist when he or she realizes that there is honest, earnest
work cut out for his or her hand and no other. Those who discourse the
most fluently of the anguish and bitter woe of life are seldom those who
have felt the iron of sorrow in their own souls. They have more often
been soured by little disappointments, tormented by the pin-pricks of
a superficial existence; they know little of the heavy griefs which
discipline the soul.
We have been taught to believe that in the wise economy of nature nothing
superfluous has been created. But it certainly seems as if pessimism, as
a confirmed and habitual state of mind, is a quality of which the world
has no need. You and I have no right to drag our “lone-and-lorn-ness”
before our little public and make other people miserable when we might
make them happy. The confirmed pessimist is as much in need of missionary
work as ever was the wild Hottentot or the Fiji Islander. I learned a
hymn in childhood which was calculated to impress upon the juvenile mind
the power of a spoken word by showing how a word once spoken is gone from
us forever, but will go on for ages exerting a positive influence. The
logic of this hymn may have been far-fetched, but I think if people were
more generally brought up on it there would be a noticeable diminution
in the amount of useless talking done in the world.
What right have we to say words that shall depress or discourage the
hopes of other women? Hundreds of women lead lonely lives at home because
they are so busy with material things that they have no time for “high
thinking.” What right have we to utter careless words which shall fail
to raise their standards and quicken their desire for higher living? The
prophets of old felt that they had a message to bear to humanity and
their hearts burned within them until they uttered it. So ought all good
and earnest women to feel; and we may at least be sure we send forth no
depressing or unhealthy influences. “Of one thing I am sure,” says a
writer who has brought comfort to many women, “that I have never written
anything without a prayer in my heart that somewhere or somehow a human
soul might be the better for it. After all, we only hold the pen. The
dear God guides.” And this may apply to all of us, if we will.
I like Margaret Deland’s definition of happiness as “thinking straight
and seeing clear, and having a true perception of the value of things,”
but before reaching this high mental standpoint we must have many a
bonfire of what is narrow and feeble in us. A well-ordered home and a
mind filled with noble thoughts—what better equipment can we have for
the discouragement of Gummidge-ism? Perhaps the multiplication of these
is responsible for the fact that we are gradually outgrowing the old
habit of criticising each other, and learning to see and love the good
qualities in other women; we are even mastering that more difficult task
of learning to shut our eyes to their shortcomings in the remembrance
that none of us is perfect and that even we ourselves have our
limitations. And so we learn the great lesson of forbearance and charity,
and we become able to take our friends at their best.
The woman who is truly refined or who is attaining unto real culture will
not air her grievances in public places. There is a type of the feminine
gender that delights in holding forth on the subject of her family or
her neighborhood troubles in the street cars, and who enjoys the more or
less sympathetic attention of her fellow-passengers. But nobody would
be guilty of describing her as “truly cultured and refined.” There is
a kind of culture that is better than the ability to appreciate Charles
Lamb, or even to follow one’s favorite authors in delicious dreams where
eternity is entered and the fortunate aspirant is admitted to the society
of the Olympians. Very true, it cannot be acquired by cramming with
the lyrical or dramatic endings of Shakespeare’s lines, or the styles
of great artists whose names are difficult to spell and terrifying to
pronounce. It is something deeper, less selfish and more productive of
good to the world around us.
It is in our power to make our lives a beneficence to those who come
within our circle. Whether we will or no, the club movement is proving
such a beneficence. Let us resolve that we will enlarge our vision, that
we will broaden our sphere, that we will deepen our love to humanity,
that we will be true to our best selves.
Let us see to it that our hearts beat true; that they beat with sympathy
and love and sisterly charity; that they beat with high hope for the
future and a growing desire to help, and not hinder the work of making
the world a better place. God gives his prophets now as of old a message
to his people. Life with too many women is a treadmill. They need all
the stimulus they can get. If we realize how the things we say and the
things we do as individuals affect others, we should try at least to
guard our lips. We little think of the wounded souls near us ready to
drop the burden of life because of the dreary lack of a friendly word; we
are not conscious of the bereaved heart within our own radius, perhaps
dumb with despair; we do not realize that eager hearts are waiting
silently for some message of love and comfort; and so we are careless
and blind and cynical; and so we neglect our opportunities to be “God’s
messengers.”
In our anxiety to avoid being a “mush of concession,” as Emerson puts
it, let us not be that most uncomfortable person, the Chronic Objector.
I suppose it is true that sometimes we are pessimistic from physical
causes. Young people are usually inclined to morbid speculations. I
remember the sensation when I was young. I thought it came from a deep
appreciation of life’s mysteries; in reality it was the need of spring
medicine and liver pills. At a very early age I sought to give vent
to pent-up gloom and despair in blank verse patterned after Milton
at his best; but I committed the folly of repeating the first stanzas
to my older brother, who ridiculed me so unmercifully that my poetic
pessimism was nipped in the bud. Blushing with mortification I sought to
distract his mind from my poetry by playing at “see-saw” with him; but
he persisted, when his end of the board was uppermost, in screaming out
my beloved though gloomy stanzas in a derisive tone. It was very hard to
bear. But the world owes him a debt of gratitude—and so do I.
None of us is so humble that cheerful optimism is not in some sort a
duty. Not that we should go to extremes; and the out-and-out optimist is
seldom a good observer. But we should not indulge ourselves in sarcasm,
nor gloomy forebodings, nor in saying things that may be stumbling blocks
in the way of weaker sisters.
How much better to live a self-contained life—to maintain a steady
poise of character so that we shall be able to enjoy to the fullest the
winter’s work and the summer’s play. To be mistresses of ourselves, to
be calm and serene under all provocation, to be restful in ourselves and
therefore to others, to keep the love of God in our hearts simply and
humbly is to make of life a well-spring of joy, and to make of ourselves
a blessing and an inspiration to those around us. There are so many tired
souls, so many discouraged hearts, so many narrow-visioned ones, so many
weak ones that need the sunshine and courage and light and strength—how
dare we indulge ourselves in weakness or in discouragement?
When we are all through with life and the affairs of this world are only
a scroll of the past, if we shall find that a pathway has been smoothed
for somebody or a burden lightened for some one else; if we shall find
that even one sorrowing, heavy-hearted woman found comfort and the
source of all comfort from any word or any effort of ours, shall we then
ask—“Was it worth while?”
Let us make a little set of rules that can be easily learned and less
easily lived by. First, then, that we will seek the peace and the
strength that come from Mother Nature—for that is the sort that will make
better women of us.
That we will make our lives henceforth more profitable than ever.
That we will begin by doing everything required of us whether it happens
to be agreeable or not.
That we will make all days brighter for everybody because of our presence.
That we will seek out the poor, the unacquainted, the shabby and retiring
people and make them glad they belong to the same world as we do.
That we will, in everything, be true to ourselves; for then it shall
follow, as night follows day, that we cannot be untrue to any other woman.
That we will learn the gentle art of saying nothing uncharitable of any
person, no matter how great the provocation.
That the spirit of the right life means a broader charity, a greater
tolerance and a more universal, practical love for humanity; and that if
we are not learning all these we are missing our opportunity.
We might as well finish up with Saint Paul: “And now abideth faith, hope,
charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” Good for
Saint Paul; old bachelor though he was, he had the requisites necessary
to make a good all-round woman himself. And were he alive to-day, he
wouldn’t say a thing about silence in the churches, either.
VII
ON MENTAL ATTITUDES
The charge is made against American women, and it is too true, that we
lack repose of manner. How can we show that in our manner which we lack
in our natures? And how can we possess repose of the soul when we never
allow ourselves a minute to catch up with ourselves, to commune with
the silent forces of nature, to inhale the strength and calmness and
courage that we might exhale again in the fragrance which we call, in
the rare instances when we behold it in others, repose of manner? Life
for the most of us is an insane scramble to catch up with things—and not
half the time do we know or care whether they are things worth catching
up with; nor are we satisfied if we succeed for a moment in reaching
them. Once in a while the futility of the chase comes over us in a brief
gleam of reason, but others around us are hurrying through life after
the unattainable, and we forget and scramble on, too, in unconscious
emulation of the old Scotch saying, “The de’il take the hindmost.”
If our whole existence is made up of excitement—no matter whether we
term it that or disguise it under the name of endless activity, how
shall we establish that serenity of soul without which the real nature
cannot expand, nor the reality of noble womanhood become the guiding
principle of life? Those feverish mentalities who demand front seats
at the great pageant of life with a constant change of scenes, do not
know true serenity. They are infected with the malaria of inefficiency
and crave excitement as an ague patient craves a quieting draft. They
miss the delight of relaxation and have no conception of the joys of
quiet leisure. Self-communion is unknown to them and they are utter
strangers to themselves. They are in a whirl that sucks them ever onward
and downward. Serenity is an unknown word to them and they know it not,
either at home or abroad; while to be alone with their own thoughts is a
discomfort they cannot endure.
Emerson says our real life is in the silent moments, and many of us have
realized this during the vacation season, when we have stumbled upon
serenity in country byways, by the seashore or in the solitude of city
homes, when “everybody” has gone away. Stevenson declares that gentleness
and cheerfulness are the greatest virtues, and above all other morality.
There are thousands of women who do not know how to rest, who cannot
enjoy the silent moments. Blessed be she who knows that the inner life
does not receive its highest pleasure from the doing of things; who finds
definite joy in accessions of serenity, whether these come in the silent
hours when the grate fire is dying, or during the mid-day rest or in the
pauses in conversation.
What should we do if we were suddenly isolated? Be oppressed with
intolerable loneliness at first, no doubt; and then we should begin to
think. I sometimes think it would be a blessed thing if every woman were
obliged to go into retreat occasionally, as the good Catholics do. The
silence of a quiet room where she could be undisturbed and could spend
a few days in thinking out the problems of life, even if she were not
spiritually inclined enough to seek a higher communion, would be of
inestimable benefit to the average woman. There is such a thing as too
much of attrition with other human beings. A stone that rolls ever about
restlessly in the rushing waters of a strong current becomes polished off
to look and feel like every other stone in its neighborhood. So we lose
our individuality and come to have no atmosphere of our own.
There are women who can never endure their own company for the space
of half an hour. Their one desire is to avoid themselves—to hide from
themselves in the company of others. Of such we are not talking, although
they are not utterly hopeless; since it would not be impossible that
loneliness or isolation from their kind should develop the habit of
thinking, even in them. But to the woman who wants to be individual,
who wants to be an inspiration and a help to others—if she only had
time—I would urge the appropriation of just a little bit of time every
day or every night for getting acquainted with her real self, for the
cultivation of her power of thought.
In this way we may minister to the inner needs of the soul, develop love
and patience and the helpful instinct which makes of women what God
meant them to be: His messengers to humankind. Just as the observance
of the Sabbath is a wise thing from a physiological point of view, so is
self-communion and its breathing-spaces a blessing to the intellectual
world.
Not that we should cease our activities utterly, or take time for morbid
contemplation of our own peculiarities or tendencies. There is a great
deal of work to be done, and work that seems to be meant for our own
hands and no other. Only we must learn to discriminate between actual
service and aimless work that accomplishes nothing, even for ourselves.
And service should enrich the giver before all others, should it not?
Again, serenity is not idleness. The most effective workers are those
who are never flurried and hurried, who do not lose their balance in the
turmoil of every-day living, nor rush about in fussy excitement. We must
be sure to do something—much, for others, and we shall find our days
crowded full as they grow shorter by the almanac; but it is our own fault
if we get flustered and worried, if we allow our activities to destroy
our serenity of soul or hamper the inner life.
This atmosphere of poise in which the nicely adjusted balance of our
powers may be maintained is a habit—a mode of life. It is often a matter
of temperament, but it may be acquired and nobody needs it more than she
who is born without it. Some are blessed by the fairy godmother with
happier dispositions than others. Still there is no despair for any of
us; if we have not the temperament which makes for happiness, it is our
first business to acquire it. Why go through this world perpetually
disgruntled when the world will concede so much to a smile?
Let us then develop this sort of spiritual capital as the main necessity
of life. Let us not toil unprofitably nor become engulfed in activity
for its own sake. Let us measure out for ourselves only just so much of
play as we can do well without losing our balance or frittering ourselves
away uselessly. It will take more self-denial for some of us than to go
the other way. It is always easier drifting with the tide than resisting
it—even though it be towards the whirlpool.
A woman with no atmosphere is one of the most uninteresting objects in
the world. A woman should be an individual; more than that, she should
possess a distinct individuality. She should suggest to those with whom
she comes most in contact something bright and beautiful or soft and
restful. How can she, if she be uneasy, restless and strenuous? Certain
women come into a room or a house like an inspiration; they suggest an
exhilarating breath of June air, or the great calmness of a starry night.
Such women are worthy to be called God’s beneficences. They are like the
beautiful rose tree, scenting the atmosphere with fragrance and making
all the world aware of June and summer and all bright things. And unless
we do sometimes “chant in thoughts and paint in words,” even though it be
in our secret soul of souls, we can never hope to be numbered with such.
We forget that a wise prophet once said there is a time to think, as well
as a time to work and a time to sing and a time to dance. And we need to
stop and think more than we need to do any of these other things.
Ruskin’s words should be emblazoned on a card and hung before the eyes
of every restless woman. “And to get peace, if you do want it, make
for yourselves nests of pleasant thoughts. Those are nests on the sea,
indeed, but safe beyond all others. Do you know what fairy palaces you
may build of beautiful thoughts, proof against all adversity? Bright
fancies, satisfied memories, noble histories, faithful sayings, treasure
houses of precious and restful thoughts, which care cannot disturb, nor
pain make gloomy, nor poverty take away from us; houses built without
hands for our souls to live in.” Why not take this for our rule, and
devote some little time every day, say a half hour at dusk or even at
night after the house is still, to building ourselves nests of pleasant
thoughts? Surely it would pay.
It rests with the individual woman whether she will be like a rose tree
full of brightness and fragrance, a help and an inspiration; or whether
she will waste herself in a mad endeavor to keep up with the pell-mell,
hop, skip and jump of modern life. Shall we stop occasionally long enough
to plant the seed germs that will blossom later into flower and fruit?
Or shall we degenerate into mere replicas of other women who wear good
clothes, do and say the conventional, commonplace thing, and are as
uninteresting as a sunset without a flush of color?
No; let us give ourselves pause. Let us take stock of ourselves and see
if we are making the most of our talents, “building for ourselves fairy
palaces, proof against all adversity.” And let us not do it for ourselves
alone, but that we may give others that “which care may not disturb nor
pain take away.”
And let me whisper a way to keep in the attitude of serenity. Commit to
memory some helpful verse and say it over to yourselves whenever you have
time, or, more important even, whenever you get cross. If you cannot pin
it to your memory, pin it to your mirror, or on your pin-cushion, if you
are so old-fashioned as to use one.
I will tell you a secret. On my mirror is hung a ribbon banner with the
following printed thereon:
MY SYMPHONY
To live content with small means;
To seek elegance rather than luxury,
And refinement rather than fashion;
To be worthy, not respectable;
And wealthy, not rich;
To study hard, think quietly,
Talk gently, act frankly;
To listen to stars and birds,
To babes and sages
With open heart.
To bear all cheerfully,
Do all bravely, await occasions,
Hurry never;
In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious,
Grow up through the common.
This is to be my symphony.
—_William Ellery Channing._
VIII
ON THE ESSENTIALS OF HAPPINESS
“That’s a pleasant cemetery, isn’t it?” asked somebody of an old lady on
a railroad train one day.
“I don’t know,” was the answer, “I am not looking for cemeteries. I am
looking for flower-gardens; I find lots of beautiful ones, too.”
There was a whole sermon in the old lady’s remark. How often we go
through life watching out for cemeteries, forgetting that flower-gardens
are much more numerous as well as far saner, pleasanter and healthier. We
get into such a habit of noticing the uncomfortable conditions of life
and ignoring the other kind that are always so much more plenty, that we
forget our mercies. A teacher once told me of a school-boy who was so
optimistic in his attitude toward life that he never saw the unpleasant
side of things. If he is given ten problems, and after laboring
patiently all the morning over them, seven are incorrect, he smiles
triumphantly and says, “Well, I got three of ’em right, anyhow.” Would
that there were more of him!
It all depends on our view of life. Happiness is a condition of the mind;
we are happy if we train ourselves to think so; not to expect too much
of life or of other people, and to keep the sun shining in our heaven.
On the contrary, if we allow ourselves to worry and fret, to miss the
joy of little things, to lose sight of all the greatness and nobleness
that come into every-day life (if only we train our eyes to see), we can
easily lose the best happiness in the world, that of realizing the beauty
of humility, unselfishness, good temper, right living, high standards and
purity of heart that lies all around us. There are plenty of mental and
moral flower-gardens on every side, if only we are not blind, if only we
do not look for cemeteries.
Now, let us make up our minds whether we care to be happy all the time
or not. “Why, of course we do; how foolish such a question!” Then let us
see how small a matter happiness is, and then decide whether it is worth
having. If your definition of happiness is an ecstasy, a delirium of
joy, a flood of emotion that shall engulf you in an occasional paroxysm,
you might as well give up asking for a steady diet of happiness. But
after we arrive at years of discretion we generally know that waves of
delirium do not constitute pure happiness. It is not until we cease
looking for impossible sustained attitudes of mind that we come to
realize what happiness is. Not until we have lived long enough to accept
the possibilities and let go of the impractical.
The clouds are a blessed place for our heads, but the earth is the only
legitimate place in this incarnation for our feet. Antæus, you remember,
who had such victory in wrestling with Hercules, was the son of earth,
and it was not until Hercules succeeded in getting him off the earth and
into the air that he was able to throttle him. It is very important that
woman should pay a good deal of attention to her circulation to prevent
her feet going to sleep or her head getting giddy.
We talk altogether too much. Hundreds of women (to estimate it modestly)
chatter from the moment they open their eyes in the morning until they
close them after everybody else is tired out for the night. They cannot
bear to be alone for a moment, facing the emptiness of their own hearts
and brains, and so they talk, talk, talk the precious hours away, without
ever saying anything. Oh, what would I give for the hours these women
waste in talk that amounts to nothing but fruitless sound?
Again, we read too much. Every new volume of history, essay, science (in
easy doses), bibliography, and especially of fiction, filters through
our minds like water through a sieve. We take in an enormous amount of
fuel, but it all goes up the intellectual chimney in smoke. Reading
does no good unless it teaches us to think and gives us something
new to think about. If we read so much that our intellectual powers
become inoperative, to what end is it? We need to think more; and to
think to any purpose we must learn to face ourselves alone. And it is
only by seeking and finding our true selves that we can come into a
full comprehension of what a full, wide every-day sort of thing true
happiness is, and how easily it may be obtained, after all. We may have
flower-gardens in our own souls, an’ we will.
Said the Rev. Dr. Burns: “To simply perpetuate low aims, frivolous
characters, mammon-worshipping beings, is to curse rather than to bless.
This is not the end nor kingdom to which woman has been called. A message
has gone forth—not to a favored one, but to every woman, whatever may be
her position. Some are faithfully and heroically striving to obey the
command; others are indifferent. They are asleep. But sleep must give
place to work, indifference to interest, selfish ease to self-sacrifice.
Littleness, worldliness, must all give way to the execution of the
command.
“Knowest thou, O woman, that thou art come for such a time and work as
this? If indifferent, thou wilt sink into insignificance and another
will take up the crown and sceptre which might have been thine.” Donald
Mitchell says: “Man without some sort of religion is at best a poor
reprobate, a football of destiny.” But a woman without religion is worse.
She is a flame without heat, a rainbow without color, a flower without
perfume. That sweet trustfulness, that abiding love, that endearing hope
which man needs in every scheme of life, is not then hers to give. But
let the love of Christ take full possession of a woman’s heart, and under
its inspiration let her grow in purity, in character, till at last she
come to a perfect woman, “to the measure of the stature of the fullness
of Christ”; then from all human lips, and from Him who sitteth upon the
throne, will come the benediction, “Blessed art thou among women.”
Man hunts after God with his understanding and fails, often, to find
Him; science reaches after God with its lenses, and its face seems like
a blind man trying to help his sight by using a glass eye; logic tries
to soar toward God, and waves its wooden crutches in mimicry to witness;
woman sees Him, feels Him within, discerns Him above, sees Him in Christ.
She feels Him in the deepest experiences of life, and then she sees Him
in all the providential history of the world, in all creation. It is by
the heart of woman filled with the Divine power and beauty that the world
is to have everywhere and retain immortally the vision of God. One of the
most foolish questions ever asked is: “What is going to be the sphere of
woman when she is so educated?” The sphere? If she don’t make her own
we may stop prophesying. You see the little ridge among the mountains,
a thread of water, and you see it arrested by rocks, and you see more
and more as it fills the chasm behind them till it cuts its way across
the rock, and through the rock, and at last you go into the gorges and
see the mighty chasms that have been cloven through the rocky hills, and
there is the power that has done it. That little stream has made its
sphere.
If we were all thoughtful, high-minded, serious, charitable,
broad-minded, loving, tender, patient, self-sacrificing, forgiving and
Christ-like; if we lived the best of which we are capable every day of
our lives, “you in your small corner and I in mine,” what a power for
good would we be!—not possibility, but power. Whose fault is it if we do
not accomplish all we might?
Again, we put such false estimates on life. Lady Henry Somerset once
said: “It would be interesting to analyze how much real happiness comes
to the man who has made or inherited a large fortune, and feels it
necessary to live in what is called ‘adequate style.’ He builds himself
a palace, engages a troop of servants, begins to collect pictures,
furniture and objects of art, and he little knows that he is heaping upon
himself a world of trouble. A man with a moderate income, who has no
requirements beyond those which he can well supply, who lives in a house
where his things give him no anxiety, but in refined, tasteful and simple
surroundings, who can afford to see his own friends because he cares for
them, and not a host of people who have to be asked because it is the
right thing that they should be seen at his house, is the really happy
man.” When shall we learn that it is not the things we possess, but the
thing we are that makes or unmakes our life?
It is only in the last hundred years that we have come to judge men
and women in proportion to their personal contribution to humanity.
Now we see that our aim must be to live, not to make a living; that we
must get our culture out of our work, instead of leaving it till we
grow too old or too rich to work; that we must make our work a medium
for self-expression, and finally that we must make it an opportunity
for serving others. Vocations tend to become matters of such routine
that it is often hard to see any ideal or inspiration in them, and this
holds true of much more of women’s work than of men’s. There’s so little
inspiration, so little of the outlook into the bigger world.
Again, it is so much easier to see the deadness in your own life than
in other people’s. We see their brilliant achievements; we don’t know
anything about the drudgery that has gone to produce them.
This life is no lottery. Nothing worth while comes without work. What
comes easily goes easily. That which seems to be done most easily is
bought with the hardest work. There is no royal road to anything worth
while. We have to do many things that seem like the merest drudgery; but
to do any blind, dead work loyally and faithfully without protesting is
to build character and to get culture. For what is culture but patience,
fidelity, quiet wisdom, loyalty to trust—those simple, primitive
qualities on which human life is based? And when trouble comes on us, to
whom do we go? Sometimes to our physician. Sometimes to our minister.
But often we go to some woman who has lived quietly and brought up her
children, but is able to give us the help that comes from a hand-grip
with life.
Here’s a verse for you:
“Somebody did a golden deed;
Somebody proved a friend in need;
Somebody sang a beautiful song;
Somebody smiled the whole day long.
Somebody thought, ‘’Tis sweet to live’;
Somebody said ‘I’m glad to give’;
Somebody fought a valiant fight;
Somebody lived to shield the right;
Was that somebody you?”
“There are,” says Margaret Deland, “as many opinions of happiness
as there are people in the world, but the first and most important
distinction which we must make is this: happiness is a spiritual
possession and is independent of material things. Happiness is thinking
straight and seeing clear and having a true perception of the value of
things.”
It takes us a long time to find out that happiness is a state of mind
which can be cultivated rather than the result of conditions outside
ourselves. The little child does not know that it is seeing its happiest
days, the school-girl does not understand how happy she is, the young
mother seldom realizes her own happiness; they are all looking forward
with eagerness to some happiness to come. Contentment is the truest
happiness, and yet if we were always simply content with our lot from
babyhood up, where would be the world’s progress? It is the eager
reaching forward for something better that brings progress, which, alas!
is not always synonymous with happiness.
But it is our duty to cultivate happiness, just the same. We can form the
habit of cheerfulness and hopefulness and a courageous spirit which shall
become, in time, the very essence of happiness, or at least a very good
substitute for it. The woman who goes whining through life, the woman who
is envious or self-conscious or unloving may fasten herself into a steel
armor of endurance of this life, but she cannot hope to be happy; but the
woman who accepts gladly the work close at her hand, and thanks God for
it, plants sunshine in her own soul and radiates happiness from the heart.
More than ever women are learning to find and give out their happiness
in the home. I once heard some excellent advice given by a speaker on
domestic science: “I hold that it is the duty of every woman to make of
her own body the strongest, best machine possible; and I believe that
one of the great lessons to be taught to the women of America to-day is
care of themselves. I wish I could reach out, not only to all the girls
in the land, but to all the mothers as well, and could say to them, ‘It
is your duty to your family, to your neighbors, to your Maker, to give
yourself the strongest body possible.’
“I wish the mothers would hear this, and could understand that the work
which gives them too little sleep, or allows them no time for quiet
eating of their food, which crowds them daily with nervous anxiety as
to whether or not the work will all be accomplished, is the work which
fills our insane asylums with broken-down women, that makes our mothers
unable to give to their daughters the love, the care and attention that
girls need in their growing years. A great good might be accomplished
if it could be proved to women that kitchen utensils cost less than
coffins, and that money paid for necessary help in the household is more
profitable than money paid to doctors and nurses.”
No mother has a right to wear herself out physically so that she cannot
be the central sun of the little system known as the family. My mother’s
cheerfulness and courage and faith in God are my richest inheritances,
and if I have any faculty for happiness it is owing to her wonderful
example. The average woman worries too much and fails to hold herself in
the atmosphere of peace which is her rightful sphere if she chooses to
enter in and possess it. “The art of growing old gracefully” is mastered
when a woman realizes what true happiness is, and growing old has no
further terrors for her.
There are plenty of shadows to be seen if we fix our vision on them
instead of on the sunlight beyond and around them; but why not fasten
our gaze on the glowing, life-giving sunshine instead? There is sorrow
and grief in the world and some of it has come first or last to you and
me; but why let it darken all our days, when Infinite love surrounds us
and will give us everlasting peace if we but claim it? Adversity may
come, but it cannot take away the serenity of the soul. Let us see to it
that we fortify ourselves with that inner sense which constitutes true
happiness.
“The duty of happiness” is something we owe to our own souls as much as
to those around us. Let us find that centre of the whirlpool of life
where perfect calm ever prevails.
“Let nothing make thee sad or fretful,
Or too regretful,
Be still;
What God hath ordered must be right,
Then find in it thine own delight,
My will.
“Why shouldst thou fill to-day with sorrow
About to-morrow,
My heart?
One watches all with care most true,
Doubt not that He will give thee, too,
Thy part.
“Only be steadfast; never waver;
Nor seek earth’s favor,
But rest.
Thou knowest what God’s will must be
For all His creatures, so for thee
The best.”
IX
ON WORRY
“In my life,” said a woman, “I have worried much, but never have I
worried about the right thing or the right situation. The thing to worry
about always turned out something different from what I spent my energy
upon. One day this view of the worry question occurred forcibly to my
mind, and the ridiculous waste of time and strength appalled me. I have
never had a worry since.”
Another woman whom I know came to a realization of the same truth a
few years ago in much the same way. She worried all the time about
something—and there is always a Something to be worried about if we
give way to it. She found one day that this habit of crossing a bridge
before she came to it—and perhaps it would never be come up to—was making
her old before her time. She realized suddenly that she was living
at a tremendously high tension—that she was in a perpetual hurry—that
she could no longer enjoy a good play or a good book or a good concert
without a guilty look every now and then at her watch—that she could not
even ride in a horse-car without bracing herself, as if by that she could
propel the thing and reach her destination sooner.
And then she realized that she was wasting Life—that she was missing
half of all the daily beauty that lay around her, and that existence
had become for her merely tension. Just then Annie Payson Call’s “Power
Through Repose” fell into her hands, and she decided to adopt a new
motto, “Relax.” She stopped worrying, teaching herself to remember that
worrying helps no cause and no event, until she actually comes up to it,
and then it is too late. She began to look for enjoyment and beauty in
the little things of life. She began to relax, even on horse-cars. To-day
she is the embodiment not only of calmness, but of courage. She has
forgotten that she ever had nerves. She is happy. She relaxed.
In that way we can keep our youth and defy wrinkles. Doctors can tell
you—if complexion beautifiers won’t—that ninety-nine hundredths of the
wrinkles and the unwelcome crow’s-feet on women’s faces are caused by
Worry. So are one-half the illnesses—wherein lies the power of mental and
“Christian” science. We can imagine ourselves into heaven if we will,
or we can worry ourselves into that other place—unmentionable in polite
circles—but we cannot reverse that process. The spirit with which we
accept life makes all the difference. We can take up burdens groaning,
“Oh, how shall I ever bear you?” or laughing, “Don’t think you can get
the better of me.”
Most women live in a state of mental turmoil the greater part of their
lives. Self-poise seems to be the rarest of virtues among women. We allow
ourselves to be continually stirred up over trifles, to be annoyed by
things not worth minding. We allow petty criticisms to burn into our very
souls. A disparaging word, a thoughtless remark, the slightest opposition
to our pet scheme, are allowed to disturb the unruffled peace that is our
birthright, and we either suffer agonies in silence or we let ourselves
down to undignified wrangling.
Or, if we have no immediate cause for trouble outside ourselves, we
worry. As Helen Watterson Moody neatly puts it: “Women are disposed to
take things too seriously and to dissipate vital force in that nervous
debauch known as worrying.” And she very wisely goes on to say that
every woman ought to be obliged by some law to spend an hour or two a
day absolutely alone and unrelaxed, that the whirling mind and quivering
nerves might hush themselves with the blessedness of silence.
Self-poise would be the natural result, however impractical the
proposition may appear. Some women are born with the gift of self-poise;
but most of us have to acquire it or, worse, get along the best or the
worst way we can without. It is never thrust upon us.
Once in a while we come across a woman who is blessed with it; and oh,
what a comfortable creature she is—comfortable and comforting. Trying
situations and trying people are as nothing to her. Some one has likened
this power to keep one’s poise to an oil which makes the machinery of
life run smoothly. Better than that, it is an elevated plane that holds
those who walk thereon far above the mire of petty smallnesses of wrong
living and thinking.
There is a man in Boston who has, naturally, a quick, irritable temper,
but who is noted for his uniform gentleness and patience in dealing with
the hundreds of people with whom he comes in contact every day. In his
office hangs a placard with the following inscription, which I recommend
to housekeepers, mothers, business women and everybody else. It runs thus:
“An American poet has said:
“‘It’s easy enough to be pleasant
When life flows along like a song;
But the man worth while
Is the man who will smile
When everything goes dead wrong.’
“P.S.—This applies to women also.”
After all, it is a question of mind-discipline. Let us once realize that
we lack this power over ourselves and determine to acquire it, and we are
in a fair way to be sweeter and better.
There might be classes established for the teaching of self-poise to all
the wrangling women, all the sensitive women, all the over-ambitious
women, all the selfish women. But, dear me! how many of us could say
we are beyond the need of joining? And, besides, there are no Marcus
Aureliuses in the teachers’ bureaus, just now, either.
We are placed in the scheme of life just where we were meant to be. Now,
then, let us live it out. What is meant for us to do, let us do; but let
us not worry over what is not meant for us. It depends on us whether we
take this for a world of honest, cheerful work, or a world of hard labor.
It is all character-building. Ever think of that? All character-building.
All the world needs of us, all God asks of us, is that we live out our
own lives truly, faithfully, earnestly and the best we possibly can. It
is for us to find out how—not sit down or hamper our work with worrying
about the how.
There are two ways of walking through the world—plodding dejectedly along
with our eyes on the muddy road, seeing only the obstacles in our way and
feeling only the burdens on our backs; or holding our heads high, seeing
the beautiful broad sky above, smelling the scent of flowers, tasting the
delights of living and feeling the love of God. Which shall we choose?
A pleasant face carries joy and sheds sunshine. A worried, harassed
countenance may make a whole roomful miserable. Every happy thought
lends a pleasant line to the face, and there is no excuse for looking
otherwise. All girls are more or less pretty at twenty; but it has been
her own fault if the woman of fifty has not the best kind of beauty—that
indefinable sweetness of graciousness that reflects itself in every
feature of the face. Happiness is ours if we will but reach out for our
small share and make the most of it. But if we reject it, saying, “What
have we in common with thee?” we deserve to be miserable, and we are.
More than that, we are disagreeable to other people; and in this world
that is a thing we ought to consider.
Nothing that other people say or do can affect us much unless we let
it, and it is much easier not to be troubled by outside worries—and all
worries are outside our true lives—than to nurse trouble.
Did you ever try to help a person who will not be helped? To shed
sunshine into a soul that will not empty itself or be emptied of shadows?
Is there anything more discouraging? But after all, the best thing we
can do for our friends is to be good and fine and true. Nothing tells
like living. “The kingdom of heaven” is within. When we truly desire the
best, we lose the certainty that it is revealed only to us and to those
who agree with us.
God opens a great fountain of truth, that shows itself in many springs;
we hold our cups for its waters of life, and our cups are of many shapes,
molded by our own hands and decorated with our own thoughts; but they all
hold living water, and the shape or pattern of the cup signifies nothing.
If we keep this thought in mind, we shall not be overmuch disturbed that
we cannot rule our world. As time goes on we change our cups; we learn to
make them of larger mold and of more beautiful pattern, but however much
we may draw from the fountain, its flow does not diminish, and no one is
denied the water of life.
It is of no importance whether you or I see first the vision for which
the world waits. The important thing is that we do not insist that others
shall see it before their time. Emerson says: “God screens us evermore
from premature ideas. Our eyes are holden, that we cannot see things that
stare us in the face until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened;
then we behold them, and the time that we saw them not is like a dream.”
We wait for the child. We are tenderly patient while he stumbles in
learning to walk, patient also when we find that he must develop his
character by his own experiences, and not by ours. Let us be patient with
each other and with the world.
Nobody can make us happy. It all depends upon ourselves; and by the same
token nobody can make us unhappy. What will you take from life’s menu? a
strengthening feast of joy and sweetness, or the blighting, unsatisfying
fare of bitterness and discouragement? It’s just for you to choose.
And always remember that your song may cheer some one behind you whose
courage is sinking low.
“Dear restless heart, be still, for peace is God’s own smile,
His love can every wrong and sorrow reconcile;
Just love and love and love and calmly wait awhile.
“Dear restless heart, be still; don’t fret and worry so;
God hath a thousand ways His love and help to show;
Just trust and trust and trust until His will you know.”
X
ON SOLITUDE
It is the custom to cry out against the lack of originality in woman;
and it is quite true that those who have achieved it have first known
the blessedness of solitude. It is the only way. It is difficult for the
average woman to realize it, but she either takes too much from or gives
too much to her friends. But the best and truest friendships are perhaps
those which cannot stand the crucial test of a perpetual companionship.
Just because one happens to know the power of giving out much, of feeling
intensely, of being for the time so very much to those for whom she
cares—precisely for this reason will she need at times to draw into
herself, to go away, to be alone, to rest.
Especially is this true if those friends have the sympathetic temperament
which takes its color partly from its surroundings. Your happiness,
then, becomes partly theirs; they share in your anxiety, your sorrow,
your depression—in everything, in fact, that belongs to you. In like
manner they compel you to feel with them; and the result, perhaps,
hardly recognized at the time, is to make you aware that you have been
interested most intensely, that you have given out without intending it,
something almost too intimate and too much your own to be so given.
Some of the bitterest lessons in life are learned through such
intimacies. Sometimes we refuse to recognize those friends who take all
and give nothing, until they have absorbed everything and we are left
like a dry sponge to realize their unfaithfulness. But it is through such
lessons that we come to know the chaff from the wheat and to realize
the need of an inner strength which shall enable us to stand upon our
own feet. Hence it is that even friends who know each other through and
through, and who are congenial down to the very lightest mood, ought
still to shun a life that will bring them into too close relationship and
prevent their individual development.
Women have been slow to realize this. For generations women have been
sheltered, protected and cared for until they have been contented to
dwell in a state of contented babyhood. Think for an instant of a boy,
surrounded from infancy with the influences that have enveloped girlhood.
Keep him done up in cotton wool throughout childhood and youth, taught
never to raise his voice for fear of being “unladylike,” never to assert
his rights, never to be himself and to accept without question the
decision and opinions of others on all topics outside the nursery. Repeat
this experience with successive generations of boys, and where would your
“superiority of man” be?
On the other hand, let your girls out into the sunlight and air, teach
them the free use of muscles and mind, and reprove them not if, in the
beginning, they are crude, and women will cease to be the complacent and
gregarious beings they have been; they will cease to worship the fetish
of Who is Who and What is What; they will cease to fear the awful and
unblinking eye of Society and be ready to seek and find themselves.
Women are needed in all good work more to-day than ever before. Let us
remember, then, the more we are in ourselves the more we can do for
others. There is nothing greater in life, nothing greater in Christianity
than this great principle of service and love for others. Kindliness,
helpfulness, service; these three were never more needed than now. The
great-hearted, sympathetic, charitable, brave, intelligent woman is
needed everywhere, in the home as much, yes, more than in public service.
It is hers to enlarge her own horizons and to lose her pettiness by
loyal, intelligent service. The narrow, self-centered mother cannot do
for her family what the mother does who possesses a trained and logical
mind. It is not only the value of the moral judgment which suffers from a
lack of privacy and individual freedom; it is the quality of the feminine
mind itself which degenerates by overcrowding.
The hearthstone is no less sacred because intelligence reigns there; the
touch of woman’s hand is no less tender because she studies Shakespeare
and proposes measures for the beautifying of her town and the alleviation
of the sufferings of its people; the press of baby fingers upon the
mother’s brow will ever be dearer than the plaudits of the multitude.
But we should not forget that we need to have our horizons broadened. We
need to accustom ourselves to larger views of life and of work. So long
as our lives are bounded by our towns, or even our own States—so long
are we neglecting our opportunities. Naturally, we are most interested
in the things around us, and our own particular kind of work seems to us
the greatest thing of the kind. But if we shut ourselves up in that, we
cannot grow. We must be interested to know what others are doing, and if
they are getting more out of life, or, more important yet, putting more
into life, than we.
We cannot do this by confining our interests and sympathies to the
territory which is actually bounded by the geographical horizon that
surrounds our home. We may not be able to actually _do_ much for ours,
but there is no limit to what we may be interested in. And the larger
our interests the larger are we. It is impossible for us to accustom
ourselves to large views of life and broad sympathies for the world’s
charities and remain narrow and petty ourselves.
Of course, it was a little Boston girl, sitting at the family dinner
table while her father and his friends carried on a serious discussion as
to the child of nowadays. They were lamenting the fact that the children
to-day seem so blasé, so little affected by things grave or gay. “Why,”
said the father, “my children read without a tear, books that used to
make me weep! It seems as if all emotion has gone out of them.” Whereupon
our little friend looked up and remarked, with overpowering dignity, “Oh,
papa, it is not that emotion has gone out, but self-control has come in.”
Wasn’t the child right? This is an age of self-control. It is supposed to
be the correct thing to hide our emotions, and, like most correct things,
it is often carried too far. How often we hear people wax eloquent, even
to tears, over the help they have received from some friend who is no
longer with them on earth—some quiet, unseen personality, whose power
over their lives they now fully realize. Are we not sometimes tempted
to wonder, in listening to such tributes, how often in their lifetime
they received such devotion, such recognition? Do we not catch ourselves
hoping that they used sometimes to put their arms about their mother and
say, “What a good mother you are to me!” But how sadly true it is that
the glowing tribute, the costly monument, the piled-up roses, are often
attempts to atone for lost opportunities.
He was a wise man who said, “Give me a little taffy now rather than a lot
of epitaphy later on.” Not “taffy,” but honest appreciation is due the
woman who goes patiently day after day about her business, not worrying
about the future, not getting easily discouraged, and knowing just how to
conserve herself for their best interests.
We might all be helped by adopting the following, which was put forth
some years ago as a “Business Man’s New Year Endeavor,” although I cannot
see why it will not do for an every-day endeavor for every woman:
“To be joyous in my work, moderate in my pleasures, chary in my
confidences, faithful in my friendships; to be energetic but not
excitable, enthusiastic but not fanatical; loyal to the truth, as I see
it, but ever open-minded to the newer light; to abhor gush as I would
profanity, and hate cant as I would a lie; to be careful in my promises,
punctual in my engagements, candid with myself and frank with others; to
discourage shams and rejoice in all that is beautiful and true; to do my
work and live my life so that neither shall require defence or apology;
to honor no one simply because rich or famous, and despise no one because
humble or poor; to be gentle and considerate toward the weak; respectful
yet self-respecting toward the great, courteous to all, obsequious to
none; to seek wisdom from great books and inspiration from good men; to
invigorate my mind with noble thoughts, as I do my body with sunshine
and fresh air; to prize all sweet human friendships and seek to make at
least one home happy; to have charity for the erring, sympathy for the
sorrowing, cheer for the despondent; to leave the world a little better
off because of me; and to leave it, when I must, bravely and cheerfully,
with faith in God and good will to all my fellow-men; this shall be my
endeavor during the coming year.”
When a woman learns to turn her back upon the common, the regular, the
accepted, and prove for herself the blessedness of solitude, she learns
to find her mental balance.
“The love or hatred of solitude,” says Schopenhauer, “does not depend
on the good or evil disposition of the heart, but on the natural wealth
or poverty of the mind.” Let us go farther and say it depends also upon
the amount of mental discipline and the habit of standing upon one’s
own intellectual feet. We need to love the silence of the stars and the
blackness of midnight. We need the courage to face ourselves in the
blessedness of solitude. What the crowd gives is only an average, a
commonplace goodness; let us be strong enough to seek acquaintanceship
with the highest by the only legitimate path, which is marked “Solitude,”
and be thankful if it be not hedged about by thorns and thick darkness.
To the woman who would be individual, who wants to be an inspiration
and a beneficence, there is but one message: Be not afraid of yourself;
get acquainted with the deeps of your own nature; face the shortcomings
of your own spirit. Go into the open country alone if you can; if not,
take a little time out of every twenty-four hours to think. Just as
the observance of the Sabbath is a wise thing from a physiological
standpoint, so are self-communion and its breathing spaces a blessing to
the individual.
As I have said before and say often, it rests with the woman herself
whether she will be like a rose tree, full of brightness and fragrance,
a help, a comfort and an inspiration; or whether she will degenerate
into a mere replica of other women who wear good clothes, do and say the
conventional, commonplace thing and are as uninteresting as a sunset
without a flush of color. Are we “building ourselves fairy palaces
proof against all adversity?” Are we learning the continuous habit of
serious consecutive thought and clearing our minds from the loose-fibred
accumulations of generations?
If girls could be left to themselves as boys are, and allowed to know
from childhood the blessed privilege of unconscious self-companionship,
and the solitary communion of earth and air and sky, would not the other
side of their natures be developed? Would not they learn to form their
own opinions, and hold independent ideas, just as naturally as boys? To
those occasional seasons when a woman seems to have lost her hold on life
is owing some of the most helpful work ever given to the world. Take the
case of Helen Hunt. What poet has ever given us more real heart-lifting
words, more soulful encouragement and inspiration than she? And yet,
not until after grief and bereavement had swept in a perfect storm over
her life and left her prostrate, not till after she had for months
blankly faced the problem of a seemingly blasted life, did she begin to
realize the object of her existence—the message of help for the world
which must come through bitter pain and trial. Not until after she knew
the blessedness of solitude, and had wrestled alone with her angel of
renunciation did she see the lesson of life and experience the strength
that comes after drinking the cup of disenchantment.
There is no such thing as standing face to face with our inmost selves,
of divesting ourselves of all pretense and sham while in the company
of others, even the most intimate friend. “We do not speak our deepest
feelings—our inmost thoughts have no revealings.” A certain sensitiveness
debars us, even when we would do so, from showing either our best or our
worst qualities. We even keep them veiled from ourselves, except when
some exigency of sorrow or surprise reveals them momentarily, or we face
ourselves alone in the blackness of night. It is then that real thought
begins, that independence of intellect is generated, that the power of
concentrated, serious mentality begins. A prominent woman writer, in an
account of her travels in Scotland, tells of a half-hour in which she
was left behind in a rough climb, by her companions. “To see the falls
was of small account,” says she. “But just once in a lifetime to have
a few blessed moments all to one’s self in those sweet, wild Highland
solitudes, would not that be worth the having?” That half-hour was
worth more than a whole week of castle-seeing in company with a crowd
of tourists. A good digestion is as necessary to a hearty dinner as the
viands composing it. And there are plenty of thoughtful women who can
say with truth, “I should die if I could not sometimes be alone.” We may
love our friends never so well, but there are times when we must face
ourselves and “take account of stock” intellectually and morally.
There is a delight beyond expression in the realization of mental and
spiritual individuality. To know and to feel that one is an independent,
thinking being with the divine right to judge for herself, and the
capability for sustained mental work, is an inheritance which woman is
now coming into with deep and holy joy.
The world needs strong women more than ever before; it needs them as the
established rule, not as the exception. What have you and I to do about
it? Let us have less “gabble” and more real gain; less noise and flurry
and more of the benefits of heart-stillness.
Be still; the crown of life is silentness.
Give thou a quiet hour to each long day.
Too much of time we spend in profitless
And foolish talk—too little do we say.
If thou wouldst gather words that shall avail,
Learning a wisdom worthy to express,
Leave for a while thy chat and empty tale—
Study the golden speech of silentness.
XI
ON WOMEN’S CLUBS
It has been the fashion, and is still with a certain class of people, to
disparage the woman’s club. They say the club is a place where gossip and
backbiting flourish, and the virtues of love and charity and tolerance
are chiefly conspicuous by their absence. I have even known a brilliant
lecturer, who depends for her audiences on these same women’s clubs, to
refuse to lend a hand in any active work, saying she “did not believe in
women’s clubs, because the members are selfish, self-seeking and trivial;
because the club women are all envious and uncharitable.”
Now, isn’t this sweeping accusation rather unjust? When we look about
and see what women have accomplished for their own sex since the
clubs were established; when we look about and see what the clubs
are really doing to-day for their communities; when we count up the
libraries, the improved sanitary conditions of towns and cities, the
increased educational advantages; when we realize the increased average
intelligence of the average woman who belongs to current events classes
and literary clubs; when, in short, we note the broadening of character
in the average individual club woman, is this a fair statement?
To be sure, there are narrow-minded, envious women in clubs. Alas! we
all know them. One such woman is enough to injure seriously the work of
a small club; half a dozen of her can give a large club a bad name—a
reputation for backbiting and all uncharitableness. Half a dozen such
women can keep a club in a chronic quarrelsome state, and by spreading
evil reports outside can destroy all its usefulness in a community. But
in the most notorious of such affairs the trouble is caused by a mere
handful of narrow-minded women, while nine-tenths of the membership
sit sadly by in shamed silence. Shall they be condemned because of the
quarrelsome few?
But in the vast majority of clubs the spirit of petty rivalry and
self-seeking which is sometimes noticeable in individual cases is
fast disappearing, or has never materialized. There is such a great
and splendid work for the women’s clubs to do that the earnest, noble,
unselfish woman becomes absorbed in something beyond self-seeking. She
ceases to care whether her name stands first on the list of committees,
or, indeed, whether it is there at all. She ceases to mind if she is left
off the list of after-dinner speakers at the annual banquet. She ceases
to suffer an envious pang because her enemy is asked to write the club
poem, for the simple reason that she has ceased to be conscious of an
enemy.
She has ceased to feel the slights which may have grieved her in the
past, because she has ceased to “wear a chip on her shoulder.” She has
come to rejoice and be glad in any good thing that may befall any good
woman because she has grown broad-minded enough to recognize that honor
and glory falling to one woman mean honor and glory for the cause of
all women; that in these days the advancement of woman and the glory of
womanhood comes to all and for all and through all of us. For such is
the real sisterhood of woman. The club movement was never more serious,
perhaps never so earnest as it is to-day. It may be because women are
finding how much better it is to do than to talk, to be than to vainly
imagine. As one bright woman said: “It doesn’t always mean that a woman
is growing because she talks a great deal.”
The ordinary club woman who is a busy wife and mother seeks her club as a
rest and a change from the activities of home; the friendships she forms
there make an added interest to her life and help to get her out of the
treadmill of her daily existence. The ordinary wife and mother has plenty
to do in her own family, to be sure, but she can do that plenty ten times
as well for the change that is afforded by an hour or two at the club
each week; for there she is transported to a different environment, sees
through another pair of eyes and comes in contact with another set of
minds. She goes home rested, refreshed and stimulated through her club
friendships. She has not belittled herself with club gossip, but she has
enlarged her sympathies and taken a fresh outlook on life.
If this is true of the woman who has her days crowded full with home
ties and home interests, how much more is it true of the woman who has
no home ties; and unfortunately we have hundreds, yes, thousands of such
women in this country. In the club memberships there are not only many
unmarried women, but there are widows who have been bereft of their
families, and a goodly proportion of comfortable matrons whose children
have grown up and left home, either to establish nests of their own or to
go into business for themselves. The club has been the salvation of all
these women and has prevented their growing old before their time. “There
are no old women nowadays,” says some one, and it is largely because we
have women’s clubs, where women keep young without thinking about it.
There is nothing that develops a woman better, or that broadens her
character more than a club life. Give her something to think about,
something to take away with her when she comes into the club; she will
soon be willing to do her share of the work, and then she will begin to
grow. Many a fine president of to-day can recall the time when she was
afraid of her own voice, when she accepted her first bit of committee
work with fear and trembling. And she knows that the years between have
been years of growth and helpfulness and work for others. For, after
all, that is the true secret of the good club woman—helpfulness to
others. She who goes on to committees and works her way through the lower
offices and up to the president’s chair simply from personal ambition and
self-seeking pride, is not the good club woman, nor the really successful
one. For in these modern days personal ambition is more plainly discerned
than it used to be, and the woman who climbs into the presidential chair
merely for personal glorification is not destined to sit there long.
There must be a higher, a more altruistic purpose. The best president
is she who is so full of plans for the elevation of the club and the
development of every member that she forgets herself. And so she becomes
at once the servant and the queen of clubs. In short, the club movement
is to-day one of the greatest factors in the world’s progress; and he or
she who proclaims a disbelief in it because of the shortcomings of some
few club acquaintances lacks the faculty of a comprehensive perception of
the things of to-day as well as of prophetic insight into the future.
But when your club begins to be a bore, it is time to leave it. It is
a mistake to hold that by staying in it with a sense of resignation you
are discharging any sort of a duty to yourself or anybody. The fault is
either with you or the club, of course. If it is the former, you can
drop your connection with it without formality, with the understanding
with yourself that it is to be taken up again after a little; if it is
the latter, you would do better to go to work so to change the aspect
of the club that it will hold all of its old interest for you. But
if you do take a vacation in this fashion yourself, you need not be
afraid of losing interest altogether. The certain result will be only
a feeling of being outside everything and alien in interest to that of
your friends, and the end so brought about will be the one you want. You
will go back to your club with a new appreciation and be of new service
to it. When a club gets to be an unpleasant duty its best function is
missing. The self-seeking, ambitious woman, the woman who uses the club
merely as a pedestal on which to pose before an admiring world, or as
a stepping-stone to get into a higher grade of society than she has
previously known, having only her own selfish aims at heart, has only a
short-lived success, and appears with less frequency every season. The
club does not want and will not keep such women as leaders. To-day the
club leader must have a higher aim and a broader culture, and, added
unto these, a genuine desire to help humanity to better things than the
superficial woman who “must stand in the full glare of the footlights at
any cost.”
More than that, the woman who sees in the club movement of to-day
nothing beyond that very primitive stage when women wrote papers from
encyclopediac notes, or when they begged or hired some other person to
write them, has not passed the a b c class of the women’s clubs. It is
a beautiful idea, isn’t it? that to-day women are reaching hands across
mountains and plains and establishing hearty, whole-souled friendships
in every part of this great country. What would our grandmothers have
said at the very idea of corresponding freely and intimately with women
of whose ancestors they knew nothing and whose names, even, they had not
heard a few months before? It is one of the beauties of the club movement
of to-day, that we are opening our hearts to each other in this way:
that our ideas of helpfulness make us forget the old conventionalities
and that the broader outlook which belongs to the woman of to-day is
contagious. For it is impossible to get drawn into this larger view of
club life and remain contented with a narrow horizon. We are bound to
grow and to throw off the shackles of prejudice and pettiness. We cannot
help it.
Of course, there are certain dangers connected with club life. Our
activities multiply and we are in danger of being drawn into a vortex
that will threaten to swallow us. When the club season begins some of
us will venture into the outer edge of a whirlpool that, unless we can
manage to hold ourselves steady and keep our mental poise, will suck
us under, and we shall go on and on in the concentric circles until
we are wrecked, nerves and mind. There is little doubt that overwork
in so-called “club-duty” has reduced more than one woman to nervous
prostration. This is a gloomy view of the case, I know, and I shall
be blamed for giving utterance to it; but is it not the truth? Are we
not too apt to take ourselves too seriously? If we are individually of
“greater value than many sparrows,” are we not individually of greater
value, to ourselves and our families at least, than many clubs?
Not but what the club stands for a serious part of our life-work; not but
what we should be willing to bring to it the best of ourselves and most
earnest labors and affection. But what I deprecate is the mistaken view
of club work which we are in imminent danger of taking. When we allow
ourselves to be drawn into the whirling vortex made up of club classes,
too many clubs with the varying interests, too great a multiplicity of
club committees, receptions and club teas by the score, until the very
name of them nauseates us, the scramble for office (either for ourselves
or our friends) and the numerous petty trials and tribulations that
follow in the wake of all these things; then we are not getting the best
results from club work ourselves, nor giving them to others, either.
“There is but one way to become a perfect, all-round club woman, and that
is by being a perfect all-round woman.” And the first essential for that
is, to find and keep our mental poise—to make ourselves something more
than a social chatterbox or a bundle of nerves.
Those writers who are fond of descanting on the injury to the home that
attends club membership seldom understand their subject. As one woman,
responding to a toast on “The Club Husband,” puts it:
“The unwritten law of the ideal women’s club is: This club exists for the
happiness of the whole family. When that ceases, the club’s reason for
existence will cease. So long as we are thus considerate, never allowing
our club life to absorb the attention that belongs to our home life, just
so long may our club husband snap his fingers at the people who try to
pity him. Let the critics carp. They are like the young girl who walked
through her uncle’s chair-factory, and gazed at the rows upon rows of
chairs, saying, ‘Why, uncle, what can you ever do with all these chairs?’
“‘Don’t you fret, Maria, settin’-down ain’t goin’ out o’ fashion!’
“The making of homes and cherishing those in them is not going out of
fashion, and the club husband would be the first to agree to it.”
The club is meant, primarily, for all classes of women. The constitution
of about every club in the land will tell you that it is banded together
for the elevation of women in its own community and for the purpose of
bringing them together for moral and social advancement—or words to
that effect. If this means anything, it means that the butcher’s wife
and the baker’s wife and the candlestick-maker’s wife are on a level
in the club with the wives and daughters of millionaires, should the
latter condescend to become members; though, for that matter, in these
latter days some of our greatest millionaires are butchers and bakers
and candlestick-makers, dignified by the names of pork-packers, biscuit
producers and silver manufacturers. And yet in our clubs are a great many
women who find it hard to make both ends meet. Many of these are quite
as well educated as any member of the club to which they belong; others
are not; but in any case the club idea places all on an equality, and it
is in every club member’s power to contribute something to the permanent
happiness of all the others.
There are some women to whom the club brings all of social life they ever
know; indeed, in these days of hurry and worry this is coming to be more
and more true of all of us. Therefore let us give out all the sunshine
on club days that we possibly can. Let us then radiate sweetness and
light, and cease from taking our pleasures too sadly or too seriously.
And the paragrapher who looks to women’s clubs for material for his
never-satisfied hopper, finds here the same attitude and converts it into
cause for mirth. We should take life seriously, because it is a solemn
thing; but on the other hand there is no need of letting our Puritanic
inheritances of mind and training tinge all existence with gloom. When
we set out to have a good time, let us have it. And let us have it all
the time. Happiness is more a habit of the mind than anything else.
If we keep ourselves in that mental frame, admitting nothing but the
sunlight of existence, sunshine will become such a habit with us that we
can no more help shedding sunlight around us than we can help breathing.
Isn’t that worth while? And the club, where we come to meet our sisters
who have the same kind of trials and difficulties as we do, is one of
the places where we should not only seek to gather up sunshine, but to
scatter it. For we cannot reap what we do not sow, nor reflect what is
not in the soul.
Above all, let us cease here all sorts of petty criticism. The club
should be so charged with the atmosphere of kindliness and good-will
that those who come to it shall receive a new baptism of love for
their fellow-creatures. Have you ever belonged to a club where the very
spirit of things was so charged with wrangling and petty criticism and
smothering hatred that you have gone home feeling that nothing but a
Turkish bath and an old-fashioned revival prayer-meeting could ever get
you clean again, body and soul? Alas, that there are such clubs and women
enough in them to keep them alive. But if you or I belong to such an one,
it is our duty first to try to improve matters, and failing in that, to
resign membership in it. We owe it to our immortal souls not to smirch
them with hatred and wrangling and ill-temper, whenever we can help it;
and we usually can.
It is so easy to see the faults or the ridiculous side of other people.
In the average club, the actual working force is seldom over ten per
cent. of the membership. The thinking for the club is done by a few,
while the remainder come in to reap the results of what has been
prepared, often by actual “sweat of the brow” and almost the life-blood
of that small remnant which constitutes the working force and is rewarded
only by having its several names recorded as a committee. Would it not
seem, then, that the least we could do—those of us who leave the work to
others—is to be lenient to the shortcomings of the committee, if there
seem to be any? It is so easy to criticise. The duty of extracting motes
from other people’s eyes is very attractive, but there is excellent
advice on the subject of neglecting the beam in our own eye which the
average woman may well read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
If the club is not making us better women in every way, broader-minded
and more liberal in our judgment towards the rest of the world, more
tolerant of other people’s views, more fond of our home and more
interesting to those who have to live with us in it, more hopeful of
the future and less satisfied with our present mental and spiritual
acquirements, more interested in the uplifting of humanity, yet less
willing to cut off our home ties, more loving in our relations with each
other, more tolerant of the failings of our fellow-members and more
intolerant of gossip pertaining thereto; if the club does not mean all
these things and more, then we would better give up our membership and
take up the duties of home exclusively.
If we are not the more attractive at home for the broadening and
developing influence of the club, then are we failing to grasp the
significance of what the club should mean. If a woman comes home fresh
and smiling from a club meeting, full of interest in matters outside
the four walls of her home and ideas regarding them, she can do so much
more for her family. The woman who was heard to say that she was saving
her money to go and hear a performance of Mozart’s Twelfth Mass because
that was the regiment her husband enlisted in, was not a club woman
and had lacked the opportunities which the club affords for picking up
knowledge on subjects which her previous education had lacked. We need
more perfectly rounded and thoroughly developed characters, and that is
exactly what the club should mean to us as individuals.
They say women have no sense of humor. At least, they—and, of course,
it was a masculine “they”—said it in former times. How would it work to
put more humor into our meetings? Say, have a funny programme once in a
month or a winter? Look at the year books, for instance. The subjects in
some are appallingly heavy: “Slavery—Its Rise and Extinction,” “Rise of
Political Parties,” “Evils That Menace a Republic.” Two-thirds of the
women attending come from homes where there is constant care and worry.
They need lightening and heartening. They need a hearty laugh. On the
contrary, everything is planned to “stimulate thought” and improve the
mind. Why not have one afternoon a month devoted to everyone telling the
very funniest thing she ever read, saw, or heard? Or have one member
relate some mirth-provoking story? There will surely be some one who,
like Artemus Ward, was so “patriotic as to sacrifice all his wife’s
relations to the cause of liberty”; and the funniest things that happen
are not always told. Sometimes because there is no one to appreciate
them. Somebody suggests that “if any sedate member object to such levity
she could have the next meeting of a grim character and discuss ‘Whether
the increase of cremation would affect the price of pottery’ or ‘Should
a funeral be held in the morning or the afternoon?’ Women’s clubs are a
good thing and their price is above rubies, but put a few pickles and
salads in your solid repast, and let the drawn lines of thought relax
over a little bit of nonsense.”
Anyone who has appeared on the platform before women’s audiences, with
a strain of humor showing through the talk, can appreciate their plaint
that we do not respond quickly to satire or to mild “hits.” Wit must be
sharp to catch the average woman. Why is it that we do not laugh more,
and laugh more heartily? “Have we gotten the idea in some cobwebbed
corner of our brains that it is wicked to be merry,” says one club-woman
on this subject, “or are we indeed the ‘serious sex,’ so called, and
hopelessly so; or is our humor, as Mr. Harry Thurston Peck says it is,
‘entirely superficial’—that is, put on for the occasion? No one questions
that there is plenty of laughter, at least of smile, among women, but it
lacks sincerity; it has not the earnest ring of genuine merriment. If we
stop to question the reason why, and if we are scientifically inclined we
cannot fail to do so, as a lack of humor assigns a race to a lower order
of development, we find the answer to be one of two causes. First, women,
as a whole, look at life in all its relations from an intensely personal
standpoint. For example, if you ask one to admire a gown, a carpet or a
picture, she will do so, and then add (as a rule) either that she has or
did have one almost exactly like it. If you tell her of some personal
experience, she usually grows impatient with the desire to relate a
corresponding one of her own. She does not seem to be able to put herself
out of the equation. For this reason, when anything genuinely ludicrous
occurs, she must first think of her own relation to it, whether by any
possibility the laugh can be turned against herself, and by this time the
spontaneity of the laughter, its genuineness, has vanished. This, I find
to be one cause. Another is her persistent clinging to the small burdens
of life. Men, most of them, seem able to drop even very heavy business
cares when they enter the home life; but woman too often carries these
everywhere—in her pleasure excursions, to her afternoon teas; even, and
perhaps more often than anywhere else, to her couch. One woman told me
that she arranged all her plans and all her meals for the next day after
she was in her bed at night. How, then, can women help being serious,
when the mind is always heavily burdened, when it carries about with it
an unconscious, but real, weight, which it never discards, and which
never leaves it free and open to impressions?”
Once in a while you find a woman who does not, like the snail, carry
her house on her back. The ability to cast it off is certainly an
accomplishment which every one should cultivate, and the more she gets
interested in outside affairs—world interests—the less likely she is to
become narrowed. That there are still clubs which devote themselves to
the pursuit of culture as obtained from encyclopædias and who take their
mental pabulum from the mouths of babes and sucklings, and that there are
still women who make a fetish of their clubs, erecting false standards
of life until their homes are left unto them desolate, must be admitted.
It is a significant fact, however, that women are being called upon to
consider problems, civic and social, which require a broader training
than it was possible for them to obtain a generation or more ago.
This training the woman’s college and the woman’s club, when properly
conducted, supply, the latter, especially, giving to women who have
missed a college training the opportunity of keeping up intellectual life
and of putting newly acquired knowledge to practical use in some line of
economic endeavor or social service, for the day has not yet passed when
the woman’s club may be styled the “middle-aged woman’s university.”
No; let us have our clubs and work in them together, for so shall we gain
new ideas and a more thorough understanding of the real sisterhood of our
sex. We shall renew our strength as the eagles, and our belief in each
other as actual living factors in the world’s work. And if the club has
an altruistic basis, if it has a clause in its constitution about being
the means of “elevating this community,” if it is really working for some
actual barriers, then let the public know it by every possible means. One
of the hopeful signs of club-work is that there are few clubs left that
consider their papers and discussions too sacred to be shared with common
folk.
Of course, there is danger of running to the opposite extreme. Those
clubs whose most laborious efforts seem to lie in serving tea once a
month and providing a literary programme that is indeed milk for babes
are too often inclined to rush into print with elaborated accounts of
table decorations and good gowns, but even that shows a hospitable
spirit, does it not? At least, they are setting a good example to clubs
whose discussions and papers, if accurately reported, would be of immense
value to younger clubs and to the outside world of women who cannot
attend the meetings. For even the occasional woman who boasts that she
never belonged to a club reads the club column in her favorite newspaper.
Exclusiveness, after all, is only another name for selfishness. And
selfishness is utterly and thoroughly incompatible with the idea of
women’s clubs. The club motif is helpfulness, and that is a quality
diametrically opposed to selfishness. We might go further and say that
the sensitiveness which so many of us plead is only another phase of
selfishness—and none of us have a right to plead that. Why is it that
some words we roll as a sweet morsel under our tongues, while their
definitions we abhor?
Let us, as club-women, make some good resolutions and then keep them.
Whereas, we are all human and therefore love gossip, let us resolve:
That we will cultivate a spirit of love and patience for every woman in
the club.
That if we hear a single word of criticism on her words or actions or
dress or face or figure, we will not repeat it.
That we will not answer such criticisms, except to say something good of
the assailed.
That we will make the club a place where helpfulness and kindliness go
hand in hand with inspiration.
That the Golden Rule is just as good a guide to club life as to home life.
And that we will adopt it and practice it.
And let us reflect that if the club movement were not a good thing we
would not find a million of the best women in our country in it.
I have seen many club mottoes and club platforms in my day and
generation, but the following seems to me the best. It originated with
the Lincoln (Neb.) club-women:
“Ours is an inclusive, departmental club. Since its object is to help and
be helped, the following women are invited to become members:—
1. The university graduate.
2. The woman of common school education.
3. The self-educated woman.
4. The woman who belongs to other clubs.
5. The non-club woman.
6. The woman who does not believe in clubs.
7. The woman who does not wish to join a department.
8. The woman who wants to attend the club meetings but twice a
year.
9. The woman who wants to be a member for the name of it.
10. The tired woman, full of domestic responsibilities, who
wants to be a sponge, fold her hands, take in what the bright
free woman who needs an audience, has learned, and then go home
refreshed to her treadmill.
11. The woman without companionship.
12. The young woman and the young-old woman.”
XII
ON THE ETHICS OF CLOTHES
This is not a chapter on “What to wear and how to wear it.” It is not a
question altogether of becoming and fashionable attire. It is, rather,
of our clothes and their relation to the rest of the world that I would
speak. We talk a great deal about art; is it not just as desirable in
dress as anywhere? God meant women to be attractive just as He meant
flowers to be lovely and birds to sing. Why, then, should women of
earnest purpose think it advances their work to make frumps of themselves?
Is there a shy, poorly dressed woman coming to your church, always taking
a back seat and slipping off like a frightened lamb when the service
is over? Hunt her out and say something pleasant to her. And remember,
especially if you can afford gorgeous raiment yourself, that that very
woman may have something for you. Try it and see. I have often been asked
if I do not consider it wrong for a rich woman to wear better clothes to
her club than the average member can afford. I say No. As long as women
are women half the pleasure of going out anywhere, even to church, lies
in the opportunity it gives for seeing what other women wear. And it does
not follow, because we cannot wear rich clothing ourselves, that we are
unable to bear the sight of it displayed on the person of another woman
without that secret stirring of pride and all uncharitableness of which
Saint Paul speaks so eloquently. On the contrary, most of us delight in
beautiful things, and it is a pleasure to see fine clothes, even if we
cannot behold them under our own roof-tree and in our own wardrobes.
Another thing. No woman likes to feel that she is being dressed down
to, or that some other woman is pitying her because her raiment is not
costly. If the choice lies between feeling that some other woman can wear
better things than I do, or the consciousness that this other woman feels
that she can and is trying to dress down to the limits of my purse, give
me the former; I will try to bear the sight of her fine clothes with
patience and to believe that my soul is above the glitter of outside
adornment. For a woman’s a woman for a’ that.
The time is coming—we see it already around the corner—when clothes do
not make the woman. The plain little woman whose garb is just about
as noticeable as the feathers of a little brown sparrow is quite as
apt to be the leading spirit in her club or town or State, as the one
with reception gowns from Felix and tailor suits from Redfern. And yet
why should anybody speak or think disparagingly of a woman because she
follows Shakespeare’s advice, “Costly thy raiment as thy purse can buy”?
May there not be just as much uncharitableness among women in this
direction as in the other? Possibly a woman is abundantly able to wear a
tailor gown that costs a hundred dollars or more, and her husband is more
than particular about her dress. Some husbands are. Is it her duty to
wear a cheaper gown because some of her sisters must?
Here is a nice question in club ethics. One’s husband may count his money
by the hundred thousands or even the millions; both he and the children
may be strenuous about the mother’s clothes. What is her duty? Shall
she go against the wishes of her own family, not to mention her personal
taste in the matter, and studiously avoid wearing good gowns when she
goes to the club—simply because there are women there whose husbands can
scarcely afford the “ready-made tailor” or the home-seamstress-made silk
which they are wearing?
And as some woman has already said, should it be inconsistent with
the Federation idea for the woman who can afford it, and who has
always dressed well, to appear elegantly gowned at the conventions?
Inconsistency would lie in the discarding of her usual apparel for the
time being, and the substitution of plainer garments, and by so doing she
would prove conclusively that she was not really democratic.
Should Robert of Lincoln’s Quaker wife—pretty and sensible and plain and
brown—wish to change the brilliant plumage of the oriole when she flits
into her range of vision? I think not; it would not be natural or fair or
kind. And is it necessary in order to be effective in social service, in
order to be consistent, in order to reach fulness of power, that we be
so serious about it all? I like the expression which one of our ablest
women used when she spoke of working “in gay self-forgetfulness.” My
mother used to tell me that the best-dressed women were those who, having
donned their pretty clothes and satisfied themselves that they were all
right, thought no more about them, but went out into company with other
women with no more consciousness of clothes than the flowers and birds
seem to have of their colors and music. It is true that we should work
hard for what is most dear to us, but not so seriously that we cannot see
God’s beautiful sunshine and brilliant coloring of sky and field.
And so I contend, from a purely æsthetic standpoint, for the continuation
of the wearing of pretty gowns and rare jewels by the possessors of them.
Sidney Lanier, in “My Springs,” one of the poems addressed to his wife,
after speaking of the “loves” she held for everything in the great world,
says:
“And loves for all that God and man
In art and nature make or plan,
And lady-loves for spidery lace
And broideries and supple grace.
“And diamonds and the whole sweet round
Of littles that large life compound,
And love for God and God’s bare truth,
And loves for Magdalen and Ruth.”
“We are all living in a kindergarten for the blind,” said a prominent
divine at Mr. Anagnos’ beautiful institution in Boston. “Having eyes,
perhaps we do not see that best and highest life of the divine which
awaits us just beyond our ken.”
The French gown and gorgeous hat which we envy, or at best admire, may
cover a nature full of courage and healing for our secret woes, if we
were not so blind we could not see; and in our turn we might supply some
stimulus which she lacks. And the woman in the ill-fitting, home-made
gown in the corner might, possibly, bring positive blessing to both of us
and others. We each have something for the other. Have we given our share?
“Why don’t you bring some of your fine gowns up here with you?” asked
the country relatives of a rich woman. “We like to see them even if our
meeting-house and rag-carpeted sitting-rooms don’t seem just the place
for them.” A great many women feel the same way. They like to see
pretty clothes, even if they cannot wear them. So let us not worry over
this matter of dress. It will right itself. If the woman who is apt to
overdress—to whom dress is the main object in life—comes into contact
with higher-minded women, she will soon absorb a higher ideal and come
to feel that there are greater purposes than are covered by the Paris
fashion plates, and worthier subjects of contemplation and discussion
than whether to ruffle or not to ruffle the skirt. And do these not need
such help just as much as those that dwell in low places and perhaps long
ago learned to combine high thinking with plain living?
Oh, sisters, we none of us realize one another’s needs. How do we know
that she whom we have been envying as possessing everything heart could
wish, is not the most miserable of women? How do we know that the quiet,
insignificant woman in sparrow-like raiment has not exactly the help
which we are silently craving? Let us come out of our shells and see. Let
us make of life something more than a series of good times, when we have
gone forth arrayed in gorgeous attire and in search of amusement only.
Have we been of those who shirk duty by leaving it to those who like to
work, while we have acted as sponges to soak up the waters of gladness
set running by the untiring efforts of others?
Or have we, through unselfish and self-forgetting labor for the
advancement of all, grown up to a broader outlook on life, a more
tolerant eye for the shortcomings of others and a wider charity for
humanity everywhere? Only by losing ourselves do we find our best selves.
There are so many things we can do to brighten the life-path for others,
and almost without effort on our part. A kind word, a helpful suggestion,
a pleasant smile in answer to a cross look; these cost nothing, and if we
cultivate the habit we shall carry them unconsciously wherever we go; and
they often mean so much.
There is the sister who comes from a home where the most rigid economy
must be practiced, or where the children, dear as they are, wear
on overworked nerves and brain; where death has brought havoc and
desolation; where the husband is surly and penurious; where scandal
or disgrace has been, or where sorrows worse than death have brought
darkness and continual heartache. Do you think it does not matter to
such whether you give them cordial greeting, whether your presence is
like the blessed sunlight, whether your life of un-self-conscious faith
and hope beams across their way, even for a half hour? How seldom it
occurs to any of us to ask ourselves what is our real, unconscious
influence among our sisters.
Somebody has said that to be warped unconsciously by the magnetic
influence of all around is the destiny of even the greatest souls. If
this is true, how much more is it likely that we common souls shall be
swayed by outside spiritual forces. Let us see to it that we are not like
Hosea Bigelow’s character who
“Might be a marvel of easy delightfulness
If he would not sometimes leave the r out of sprightfulness.”
Let us, also, recall Dorothea’s motto in “Middlemarch”:
“I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me, that by desiring what is
perfectly good, even when we do not know what it is, and cannot do what
we would, we are a part of the divine power against evil, widening the
skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”
A good motto for us all, isn’t it?
XIII
ON THE AVERAGE WOMAN
The position of woman seems to be worrying a lot of people a great
deal nowadays. Whether she is or is not psychologically inferior to
man, whether “emancipation” is a good thing for her, whether it is
better for her to vote intelligently or stay at home and knit stockings
mechanically, whether she should be mentally and physically capable
of supporting herself or be content to be the more or less beautiful
appendage of some man; these are questions that are considered weighty
enough to fill newspapers, magazines and even books with arguments pro
and con. And woman continues to spell herself with a capital W.
Dyspeptic men and dyspeptic women with a literary tendency are rushing
into print, and both long and short-haired logicians are taking to the
platform in the vain endeavor to put woman where she belongs—although
the exact location of that place has not been clearly determined nor
concisely defined. And there is considerable doubt extant as to her
remaining there, when the learned disputants have succeeded in putting
her in the right spot. The modern woman seems to be more uncertain, coy
and hard to please than those, even, that puzzled the poet.
But the most encouraging thing about it is the position of the average
woman on these questions. The world is made up—let us devoutly thank
Heaven—of average women, and it is the sanity of these that will save
the situation. Nothing ever interested me more than the discussion at
a State Federation Convention a few years ago on this very topic. One
afternoon was given up entirely to the discussion of the position of
woman—not by experts and psychological students, but by the reading and
thinking average club women themselves. And it was indeed “happifying,”
as the good old Methodist used to say, to behold the good sense and sweet
reasonableness of these women. The erratic notions of Charlotte Perkins
Stetson Gilman, the erotic ideas of Mme. Marholm, the vagaries of Olive
Schreiner, and the dyspeptic pessimism of some of our recent novelists
all came up for consideration, and it was with pious joy that I noted
that the distorted views of woman in the economic and the domestic world
have little weight with the average woman who reads and who has fallen
into the pernicious but enjoyable habit of thinking for herself and
forming her own conclusions.
It may be that what we are told is true and not one woman
in five thousand is fit to bring up her own children, but
it looks to me as if the aforesaid average woman with a
mind-which-doesn’t-hurt-her-because-she-knows-how-to-use-it, belongs
to a class which makes a serious matter of child-study when God sends
her children. It may be that woman’s place is still at the loom and the
spindle and the mending-basket, but judging from the average woman’s
remarks she has other duties of more importance in the economic world in
these days of machinery.
Once upon a time a woman, writing for a foreign review, bewailed the
absence of serious concentrated thought among women, and advanced as the
reason therefor their gregarious habits and crowded life, and their utter
disability to apply to themselves the benefits of solitude. Women as a
class do depend on each other or upon the men of their acquaintance for
their opinions, whether on social or political themes.
And yet women are not, all of them, so absolutely without properly
correlated opinions as certain writers would have us believe. That she is
often defective in consecutive mental training derives from influences
beginning with the embryo woman in her cradle. She is tended by a nurse
who is not allowed to “turn her off” in the slightest degree. As soon
as she can talk she is provided with a nursery governess and later with
chaperones and companions, tutors and governesses, and is finally sent to
boarding-school, where she lives, moves and has her being in “her set.” A
boy may be taught to amuse himself before he walks. A boy may play alone
and his elders are only too thankful if he will. When older, a boy may go
off alone for delightful half days in the woods or follow the bent of his
nature or his own sweet will.
But the girl imbibes with her mother’s milk an indefinite idea that she
must not be alone. Whether it be the effect of injudicious nursery tales
or the early development of her social nature, she is trained with a
certain deference to that idea, and instead of a healthy, natural being,
capable of standing on her own feet, intellectually and morally, she
grows up, unavoidably, with an unconscious habit of leaning on others. Is
this solely due to the unbiased woman-nature? May it not be attributed,
as we say in New England, to her bringing up?
Sometimes she never experiences, in her sheltered and measured existence,
any lack, mental or spiritual. Sometimes, indeed, this great universe
with all its mighty forces of life and death and love and passion and
hatred, is nothing to her but a pretty background for the display of
fashions. But sooner or later comes to more women than are dreamed
of in the philosophy of the world a great crisis, a time when human
nature stands stripped of all false, meretricious pretences and the
disillusionment of life comes upon her.
“There is scarcely,” says our review writer, “one man in a thousand who
at some time in his life has not felt and indulged the impulse to step
out from the rank and file of his familiars and contemporaries, and
envisage his own nature. Not a man, worthy of the name, but has searched
for and found himself—has borne out his own convictions, and wrestled
through the long nights of his own youth with the stern-browed angel of
some revelation.”
The same thing, we venture to assert, happens to thousands of women. The
dreary time of disillusionment comes and the cutting contrast between the
real and the ideal makes itself painfully felt. Friends die, hopes are
shattered, the inexorable facts of life force themselves upon us and we
awake from the golden dreams of early life. The more delicately organized
a woman is the deeper the springs of truth in her lie, and the more is
it a necessity of her nature that, when the spell is broken, she shall
stand face to face with the inner meaning of life, that she shall search
and find herself. Long nights are spent in passionate protest, in earnest
struggling for light, in eager searching for truth. Call it morbid,
unhealthy, if you will; you do not say so of man. Many a thoughtful,
earnest woman of to-day, under whose calm demeanor no one suspects an
extinct crater, dates the development of her intellectual self from just
such battles, which resulted in the conquest of self and petty aims. The
soul-writhings of such women in books are overdrawn and unnatural. Not
one woman in a thousand would be guilty of writing such self-accusing,
self-revealing scenes; but hundreds of women readers recognize the state
of mind, and although they may not have writhed bodily all night on
the floor like some heroines of recent novels, they have bidden, after
reading of such, long forgotten ghosts to be quiet.
The secret of our late President McKinley’s strength was his mastery
over self. He had himself under thorough control. He did not fear
self-communion, for he was sanely balanced. The quality in him which
appealed the most strongly to women, of course, was his unselfish
devotion to his womenkind. His mother and his wife always stood first
in his heart, and he was the good son and ideal husband before he was
the soldier and the statesman. Some men seem to be ashamed of being true
to their women-folk; President McKinley was great enough to respect all
women and to love with a singularly unselfish devotion those belonging to
him.
How much better this world would be if there were more such characters;
if people were content to be simply true and faithful to their highest
ideals, or rather were equal to the effort of living up to them. It is
easy to lie awake at night or sit by the fire and dream of grand and
noble deeds; it is another thing to carry those ideals right out into the
workaday world and face the battles of life with them. So much depends on
the way we carry them, however; if we carry the high ideals as a burden
on our backs, they are not a success. Let us try using them as a shield.
There is one little book that I wish could be put into the hands of every
woman. And then I should demand a promise that each one should read a
chapter in it on retiring every night. It is called “The Magic Seven” and
was written by Lida A. Churchill, who has struck a helpful chord in this
little book that might go far toward transforming the world, if the world
would stop long enough to read it.
The great need among women is to acquire self-poise and to learn
self-control. This book comes nearer to teaching these than anything I
have yet seen, although, of course, it all depends on the woman herself
whether she will be calm and strong and self-reliant. As Miss Churchill
says: “God Himself cannot give you anything which you are unwilling or
unready to receive.”
Here is one of her formulas. Try it, and after saying it over every day
in the quiet of your own room, or on the car, or in the midst of crowds,
see if you are not more calm, more sure of yourself, more trustful of God:
“I am still of heart and of tongue. I invite, and I hold myself in the
attitude to receive, the Intelligence which teaches, the Love which
satisfies and protects, the Power which invincibilizes, the Peace which
blesses. I admit nothing into my life which would prevent or hinder the
greatest soul-receptivity. I wait in the silence with and for God.”
But we must not forget that it is the average woman who makes or unmakes
life for us. She may not write books, nor paint pictures, nor become
famous; but she is the home-maker—the mother of the world. And the
Average Woman will continue right along at the old stand as wife and
mother, but with an enlarged sense of outside responsibilities. She
will vote wherever the law will let her and yet mind her baby. She will
study polemics in clubs and higher mathematics all by her lonesome and
yet continue to order the dinner and, if necessary, cook it herself; and
owing to the spread of cooking schools and domestic science departments,
it will be better cooked and more daintily served than of yore.
No; let us cease to worry about ourselves or fret our souls with the
arguments of men who know next to nothing about us. Every man has his
opinion about women as a class, but in nine hundred and ninety-nine
cases out of a thousand his premises are all drawn from the women of his
own household. So that if he sets us down as weak-brained, fickle, and
vastly inferior to MAN, we can easily judge of the women of his immediate
circle, and pity him accordingly.
The nineteenth century has seen a wonderful change in the position of
woman all over the world. This remark is so trite that my pencil blushes
to record it. The twentieth century is ushering woman in as a very
decided factor in the world’s progress and will doubtless bring her
into greater activities and prominence than ever; but God instituted
woman a number of years ago, when He set certain limits to her physical
development, and He has not yet shown any decided intention of changing
her mental qualities into replicas of the biped He created a short time
previous and called man, and we shall continue to be just plain women
when all is said and done.
Not but what that greatest room in the world—the room for improvement—is
still open to us; but the fun of it is that so many more are all
the time crowding up to its doors. Women as a class are growing more
intelligent every year; realizing their own responsibilities, inside and
outside the four walls of home; learning to balance themselves and to
walk steadily along untried paths; rejoicing in this discovery of their
own mental powers and yet clinging tightly to the old family loves and
home ties.
So let us not worry ourselves over the dismal prophecies of great men as
to the position of woman. We will continue to meander along the pleasant
paths of improvement, but spell ourselves with a small w.
God made us all; may He help us to realize our limitations as well as to
develop our utmost. Selah.
XIV
ON PUBLIC DUTIES
One of Mary E. Wilkins’ delightful heroines remarks, in speaking of
certain would-be leaders of social reform in her village: “I don’t know
that I think they are so much above us as too far to one side. Sometimes
it is longitude and sometimes it is latitude that separates people.”
“This is true,” says President Roosevelt, “and the philosophy it teaches
applies quite as much to those who would reform the politics of a large
city, or, for that matter, of the whole country, as to those who would
reform the society of a hamlet.” But the active woman of to-day—and
much more the woman of to-morrow—is not in danger of separating herself
by either latitude or longitude. She is eager to help, and meets her
problems half-way with outstretched hands. She is taking hold of all
sorts of municipal matters and working against unsanitary conditions,
defective sewerage, poor drainage, impure drinking water and the practice
of making backyards, alleys and even streets the dumping-ground of those
who are too negligent, or too indolent to consider the appearance of
their immediate locality.
“The poor ye have always with you,” and as Dr. Babcock has said: “To take
care of the lower orders is essential to social safety, though the words,
‘Inasmuch as ye did it to the least of these,’ had never been spoken, and
the thought of helping humanity should be some little comfort, though the
recognition of a ‘cup of cold water’ had never been dreamed of. To help
poor children to learn to sew cannot compromise you in any way. To prick
your finger in the sewing-school and draw one little red drop, is in the
line of the world’s redemption, at least from ignorance and incapacity.”
But to this mission of woman from simply altruistic motives we can add
that divine commission entrusted to Mary at the door of the sepulchre on
that Sabbath morning nineteen hundred years ago, so that she is working
everywhere to lift little children out of degradation, to teach them, to
make of them good citizens, to abolish child-labor. And is it not true
that every woman working in a quiet way for the improvement of those in
her immediate neighborhood is manifesting the spirit of the scriptural
injunction, “Bear ye one another’s burdens”?
“The women’s clubs of the period, with their classes for intelligent
study of the great questions of the day, are creating a new political
economy,” says the Hon. Carroll D. Wright, late chief of the Bureau of
Labor Statistics in Washington, and no man in this country is better
fitted to judge of the economic conditions that attend any great
movement. One of the significant features of the club movement is that
our deepest thinkers, our most far-sighted men recognize in it one of the
great forces of the age. It is all well enough for one or two brilliant
women writers who pride themselves on belonging to no women’s clubs
whatever, to direct their powers of sarcasm against the movement and to
flippantly observe that women’s clubs are a fad, or to inveigh against
our taking ourselves seriously. We can even bear that Mr. Bok or Mr.
Cleveland should warn his readers against being led unwillingly into
public life, to the utter neglect of buttonless husbands and starving
children; these things are outside the pale of serious consideration.
What does the earnest, thinking woman who reads Drummond’s “Ascent of
Man” and Ruskin’s “Unto This Last” care? What does the woman who is
studying the great humanitarian problem of to-day—whether singly or in
classes—mind if a magazine writer who cares more for brilliancy than for
accuracy takes her to task because she takes the fact of organized effort
for bettering present conditions, and ministering to great human needs,
seriously? For men who think and read and observe what is going on in
the world to-day, men who come nearest to seeing what are the present
economic forces and whither they are tending—such men are the quickest to
recognize women as an important factor in the world’s progress, and are
the most cordial in extending a hand-clasp of sympathy and “God-speed” to
any specialized movement among us.
The day has gone by when it is fair or safe to arraign men for conditions
which hedge in a woman; by which I mean that the men of this country
are ready and willing to extend a helping hand to women who really want
anything. When the women of this country or any part of it rise up and
declare in a body that they want the ballot, for instance, they will get
it; for it is not the men who are keeping it from us. When the women of
America come forward ready for concerted action on any subject, the men
are with them as a rule. Of course this refers to mankind collectively,
not individually, and I leave it to any woman if the men of her household
are not, as a rule, quite in sympathy with her outside interests and
work. The average man sees in some measure the value of the club
movement. The thinking man and the one who sees below the surface in this
restless, changing, hopeful age goes farther and recognizes that with all
our shortcomings and superficialities we have at heart an unquenchable
desire to do our part of the world’s work; moreover, that there is a
tremendous psychological significance in the banding together of several
hundred thousand women all actuated by the same purpose, even if the
movement be slightly chaotic and not always well directed.
The fact that thousands of earnest club-women all over this great country
are studying its social conditions is of tremendous significance. We
began in club life by studying literature, present and past. Then we
took up history, and from comparing causes and effects in the past we
naturally come to studying the economic conditions of to-day. Once take
up this question and we become a powerful factor in its evolution. Women
can create and maintain public sentiment, and it is the thinking women
who usually become club women. The new political economy, which means
the care and culture of mankind, to-day demands our attention. There are
many phases of it, but most of our studies bear upon it in one form or
another. It is not pleasant to hear about women who make shirtwaists for
forty-eight cents a dozen and ruffled skirts for nineteen cents apiece,
and thankful—poor creatures!—to get even that. It is heart-breaking to
hear of the girls who work in laundries at three to six dollars a week,
and at a risk of having hand or foot crushed in the mangle. It is quite
heartrending to be told of the hardships that befall a girl who has lost
her hand and must find some way to earn her scanty living. But when we
are told how we can help these conditions the matter becomes practical.
When we are shown that by patronizing bargain counters and buying
cheap shirtwaists and petticoats we encourage these conditions, and it
is explained how we can improve matters for the laundry girl, then our
feelings have not been harrowed in vain.
When we come to realize that it rests with us to create a demand for
better conditions we are ready for our part of the work. We may deplore
the existence of “yellow journals,” but if we buy them we encourage their
sale and contribute to their support. We may believe the sweatshop to be
a pet institution of Satan, but if we buy its products we are encouraging
the men who keep up its existence. One of the most hopeful auguries for
the future of the concerted “woman movement” is the fact that it has
definitely recognized its duty with respect to industrial conditions.
Thousands of women and children are suffering from the lack of
intelligent sympathy as well as from scanty wages, impure air, improper
food and all the other things that are attendant on grinding poverty.
Shall we—because fate has cast our lot in happier conditions—ignore these
sisters of ours? Shall we not, rather, set about the earnest study of our
duty in the premises?
You remember the story of Henry Ward Beecher, who hired a horse at a
livery stable to go for a drive. Before starting he said, “That is a
fine-looking animal; is he as good as he looks?” The owner replied, “Mr.
Beecher, that horse will work in any place you put him and do all that
any horse can do.” And Mr. Beecher eyed the animal still more admiringly
and remarked, “Well, I wish to goodness he was a member of my church.”
Now, that is the way we ought to work if we would find all that modern
opportunities mean for us individually—“Work in any place we are put and
do all that a woman can do.” But not restlessly, strenuously.
The truest and best philanthropic work tends to broaden the sympathy and
widen the conception, if not of the brotherhood of man, at least of the
sisterhood of woman. There is really no end to it—this question of what
women may accomplish for the public good. And one of the most hopeful
signs of this close of the nineteenth century is that women are no longer
content with hiding their light under a bushel. They think very little
about the position of the light, so that it is shedding bright rays over
the dark places of the earth.
There is still here and there a woman who feels that she is of no value
because she has not money or some special gift. Let her take heart.
Whatever she is of herself, whatever she can do in the way of personal
service, is of inestimable value. There is nothing else to compare with
it. Christ gave Himself. It is the highest gift, and its noblest form is
personal service in small things.
XV
ON HOME-LOVING AND HOUSEKEEPING
There are people in the world in this enlightened age who are worrying
about the relation of the woman of to-morrow to the home. They argue
that the new woman, with her opportunities, her relation to the business
world, her college education, her mental development (which they delight
in referring to as “so far ahead of their physical development”)—that
this woman of the future is sure to cut asunder from all home ties; that
we are to become a race of nomads, who roam desolately from one hotel
or boarding-house or lodging-house to another, with no taste or desire
for the old-fashioned home. But this is now, as it always was, sheer
nonsense. Ever since Eve hugged her first baby to her heart women have
been proud and happy mothers. Ever since she urged Adam to partake of
the fateful apple woman has been enticing man with dinners, good or
bad. Think you that after thousands of years we are going to change our
natures entirely because of a little college training, a little “advanced
thought”? Not while women are women.
Woman’s life for centuries has been narrowed to a compass bounded by
four walls; it is true that she has now stepped out and demonstrated her
fitness to do her part of the work beyond those confines. She has learned
the beauty and usefulness of association, the part that sustains the
great whole. She has found out the meaning of the word “coördination”
and the beauty of community work. She knows how to make the right
connection between home life and world interests, and her family are the
better therefor. She realizes what relation a good home bears to the
good school, the influential church and pure society. She even begins to
comprehend the immense bearing a good home and an upright community have
upon a healthy industrial system.
I suppose I am optimistic, but it seems to me that things are going very
well for our sex and that we have very little to complain of; also,
that the opposite sex has very little to complain of as well, for he is
still far from a buttonless state, and he acts as if he enjoyed having
intelligent companionship from or with his womenkind. Few women are yet
so “advanced” as to wish to bring up their babies on the coöperative
plan. Many young women persist in getting married every year, and also in
having babies. And what do they do about it? In the beginning they pin a
little band around them and see that their milk is maternally sweet, and
look confidently to God for the rest. And so far as we can judge, they
seem to enjoy motherhood. Oh, I know it is the fashion to cry out “race
suicide,” and all that, but let us not take to heart too seriously the
dismal state of affairs bewailed by certain sensational reformers. For
the world is rolling on towards the good—still swinging out to the light.
The most enduring element of our national strength lies in the fact that
our American life centres around the home fireside. We are proud to boast
of the goodness and bravery of our men, the beauty and purity of our
women, and they have these qualities because the home is their school and
the mother their teacher. The wise Creator, when He made woman, gave
her the two highest offices in His gift—those of wife and mother. Kings
boast of reigning by right divine, and inscribe “Rex Dei Gratia” upon the
laws of their land, but woman is the only creature who may truthfully use
those words, and she may say, “I am a woman by the grace of God, and rule
in a kingdom of kingdoms.” She makes no laws, leads no armies, governs no
enterprises, but she forms those by whom laws are made, armies led, great
enterprises managed. I often think the wife and mother who lives quietly
at home and looks well to the ways of her household; who still pursues
the simple art of making her husband happy (I trust I do not misuse the
word “simple”) and of bringing up her children to be good citizens—I
often think that this woman feels that her life is wasted. She reads
and hears of the public work of women, and sighs that her life is being
thrown away. Not so. This woman is fulfilling the mission of her being,
and the old-fashioned wife and mother will not go out of fashion as long
as the world stands. Neither do those of us who do not happen to be
wives and mothers do right in belittling their work and arrogating unto
ourselves all the glory. I have never known a more splendidly developed
woman, spiritually and intellectually, than my mother; and I have chanced
to know most of the prominent women of the last quarter of a century. And
I cannot go back on her work, although had the Lord seen fit to place her
in the ranks of the care-free, or in the present day and generation, she
would have gained far wider recognition.
Collectively, women may have been weak, mistakenly zealous, or wofully
deficient in method, but in this modern association of all grades in
society they are coming to know themselves and their possibilities
as well as their limitations. And they are beginning to realize that
collectively they are only beginning their education.
The men and women who by their lives have influenced the world, have
been those who lived simple, earnest, honest lives. What was it that
endeared the late Queen of England to her humble subjects? It was her
interest and participation in the common things of every-day life. Her
love of children, tenderness toward animals, even her relish for oatmeal
porridge was a virtue in their eyes. The homes of the nation mean the
life of the nation. No stream can rise higher than its fountain, and as
we build our homes so our land will prosper. God has given us a picture
of what Heaven may be, and He has given it in the shape of a perfect
home. When we learn to give our girls the training for home life which
will give them such power over their work that each day’s tasks will come
to willing and able hands, then we shall have solved many of the problems
that confront us at the beginning of this twentieth century. And right
here, although it may not seem apropos, how many mothers are educating
their sons in the matter of newspaper reading? How many wives say to
the husband who brings home a pink or a yellow or a green, or even some
of the white newspapers, “Please do not bring such papers home for the
children to read”? Some women do this, it is true, but more are utterly
thoughtless about it. Hosts of good women read the sensational papers
themselves—because, perchance they cost only a cent, while perhaps the
better ones cost two; and hosts of others allow their children to read
the sensational, unreliable paper without ever giving a thought to the
fact that those young, eager minds are being subjected to a lowering of
taste and a lowering of moral and mental tone. They are particular about
the associates their children select; they are even particular about the
books they read; but a newspaper is an ephemeral thing, read to-day and
forgotten to-morrow, and it does not occur to them that the effect upon
the child’s taste is morally and intellectually the same as if they were
allowed to come under the influence of a teacher with low morals.
I say this because the modern newspaper has a direct influence on the
home and the people that dwell therein. The woman who used to spend her
evenings picking out the rules for crocheting a cushion cover from the
woman’s page has learned how to read good books, to write papers without
a too free use of the encyclopedia, how to use her brains, how to think.
Just as the woman who used to edit the page has come into her own and
convinced the editor that women’s whole existence is not bounded on the
north by angel cake, on the east by baby’s afghans, on the south by her
pet dog, and on the west by her husband’s dinner; and that the magnetic
needle which points her compass is not a crochet hook. Women everywhere
are learning that scientific or simplified housekeeping is not beneath
the attention of the refined nor beyond the comprehension of the
uncultured. It is the duty of the rich and the salvation of the poor. We
are all agreed that as our lives are now ordered we have too many things
to care for, too much show and too little comfort.
“We have exchanged our stage coach for the electric motor, our tallow
candles for the incandescent light, and our simple living for nervous
prostration, so that inductive science, the new gospel, must come to our
aid,” says a bright woman. “If we would save our bodies as well as our
souls, and if the knowledge of household economics means anything to
us, it means we must get back to nature’s heart and be content to live
simpler lives.”
And we must remember that for every bad woman, every erratic woman, every
cold and selfish woman in the world, there are a thousand good and true
and faithful unto death. Only the cynic and the critic do not consider
the latter worth talking about. They only emphasize the abnormal woman,
thinking all the time they are holding the mirror up to nature and
proving something; which they are not.
Domestic science is domestic sense, and domestic sense is common sense.
Women should have the best and highest education they can obtain, and
more especially if their lives are to be rounded out in the limited
bounds of a four-room cottage; and while she may have caught the spirit
of the times and become an expansionist by invading new territories, and
may have been masquerading as the “eternal feminine” or the “new woman,”
these little excursions and diversions only make her prize the more her
old dominion, and the complexities of her nature find full play in the
evolutions in the American home.
Statistics have already proved that the college-bred woman marries in
the same proportion and infinitely better than the simpering sister who
cares nothing for education. And she not only has as many children, but
is manifestly better fitted to train them up to good citizenship. It
is also evident that woman’s experience in the business world—while it
makes her more cautious about marriage—renders her a more sympathetic,
appreciative and sensible wife than the girl who waits at home for a
husband, who, she has been taught to believe, must ever after be her
body-slave. And although modern conditions make it possible for a woman
to be self-supporting, and therefore not to marry unless she does it
for that greatest reason in the world—_love_—the business of marrying
and having children is going right on, age after age, generation after
generation, long after you and I are forgotten. So there is no real cause
for worry. Even the rankest pessimist may take heart if he will. And to
all I commend the lamented Frank Norris’ definition of a “womanly woman,”
a term we all love to use:
“To be womanly? It’s to be kind and well-bred and gentle mostly, and
never to be bold or conspicuous; and to love one’s home and take care of
it, and to love and believe in one’s husband, or parents, or children, or
even one’s sister, above any one else in the world.”
XVI
ON GROWING OLD
It is often said that we have no old women nowadays, that modern
conditions and modern dress keep us young until we drop into our graves.
And when we look at women, marvelous women, indeed, like Julia Ward
Howe and Susan B. Anthony, and Mary A. Livermore[1] and others whose
activities and beneficences have kept them young, we are inclined to
believe all this. But how is it with the most of us? Have we learned the
true art of “growing old gracefully”? In this age of hurry-scurry let us
give ourselves pause, once in awhile, long enough to remember that we owe
ourselves something, and also those around us. I know a woman who broke
down under the strain of club life a few years ago; she was one of those
willing creatures who do everything anybody asks of them, and she finally
had to withdraw from everything and remain in quiet seclusion for some
years. I thought she had learned her lesson, but no. I met her again,
almost breathless in her chase about the city on some mission or other.
“Why do you do it?” I asked. “You have broken down once under the strain
of all this excitement. Why don’t you keep out of it now? Or, if you must
be in the midst of things again, why not let others do the hard work?”
“Oh,” she replied, “I must do it. It has got to be done, and who else
will do it?”
“My dear, good friend,” I asked her, “did you ever stop to ask yourself
what would happen if you and I were to die?”
“Oh,” she exclaimed hurriedly, “nobody else will do my work; and it is
very important—I really _have_ to do it.”
“No, you don’t have to,” I answered. “If we were to die to-night
the waters would close right over our heads, and after saying the
conventional things about us, and passing suitable votes of condolence,
somebody else would take up our particular line of work; these things
we think nobody else could possibly do so well would get done just as
quickly and possibly a great deal better than if you and I kept wearing
ourselves out with them. You just try it and see.”
She thought a moment and said: “You are right. I know you are right, and
I am going to stop now.”
But she didn’t. And I suppose she will keep on, strong in the belief that
the work she is doing could not possibly be done if she did not wear
herself out with it, until she lands in a sanitarium again with nervous
prostration. I see her now and then, always daintily dressed, always
refined and delicate-looking, but with a wild air, a restless, hunted
look, when she might be so pretty and attractive.
Are we not all overdoing this matter of public work? I have done my share
of burning the candle at both ends—yes, and in the middle, too—and have
had to “give myself pause.” And I have come to see that there is nothing
to be gained by hurrying through life without a moment’s stop to consider
the real meaning of it. It is sometimes a difficult thing to be in the
midst of much work without overdoing. There is scarcely time enough to
accomplish half what one sets out to do, is there? Then do not map out so
much, but try to do your “stint” more leisurely. What is to be gained by
rushing through life as though a whirlwind were on our path?
We get to a point where we feel ourselves so necessary. We find so many
things that need to be done, and we are sure nobody else can do them
so well as we. And so we go on straining every nerve until the tension
becomes too great, and we either go under—and discover that the world can
and does move just as well without us—or we become so arbitrary that our
usefulness is ended. And then we discover that we are only one of many
just as capable as ourselves.
I know of no one who has given better advice on this subject than
Caroline Bartlett Crane, who also “speaks whereof she knows.” In talking
once on the subject of overwork, she said:
“If we will not be forewarned against overwork, let us at least be
certain that what goes by that name is the real thing. Above all, dear
ladies, let us not make our lives vain, vainglorious and in vain, by
fancying that all busyness is business; by hugging a merely cluttered
existence with ecstatic and debilitating self-consciousness, which is one
of the deadliest banes to be guarded against as long as ‘woman’s work,’
‘woman’s mission,’ ‘woman’s institutions’ and the ‘woman question’
agitate the air. Let us strive for more of that poise which experience
and a stable nervous organization has given men; let us remember that
there are absolutely no safeguards against fussing and worry; and let us
question whether, if the deeps of nervous prostration could give up its
half dead, it would not thereby appear that lack of system and synthesis
in what we do, apprehensions for what we are about to do, regrets for
what we did or did not do, omnivorous yearning for what we have no call
to do, fretting distaste for what fate ordains we shall do, doing all the
little unimportant things first under the delusion that then we will get
unencumbered leisure for the things really worth while, doing things a
hundred times in imagination before they are done, and doing them as many
times again in retrospect, with carking concern for how the doer appears
in the doing—let us ask ourselves if such travesties upon the dignity
and simplicity, the singleness and wholesomeness of real work are not
responsible for a very considerable share of the evils we commonly lay at
the door of overwork; and are not such things unworthy of us?
“Let us strive to realize that we influence more by what we are than
by what we do or what we say; and that what we say and do derives its
quality from our quality. And quality is felt _in toto_, while of
quantity a census and appraisal must needs be made.
“And let us remember, too, that when we rob a day of order, beauty,
peace, we rob life of these things. How can we live our days one way and
talk of living our lives another way? ‘As thy days so shall thy strength
be.’ We must live so as to praise God all the days of our lives, if we
would praise Him. Let us find some time in every day to lift unencumbered
hands and heart, and exclaim with the psalmist, ‘This is the day which
the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.’”
It rests with us and no one else to strike the notes that give the purest
melody. There is the life of pretence, with its artificial standards, and
the life of honest endeavor, where every note rings true; in other words,
a whole world of real people, where each man and each woman is measured
by their own true work, where friendships are honest, where laughs are
hearty and tears are real, where lives are happiest because they are
lived simplest, where the air is pure and the clothes you wear do not
signify.
Then, too, think what trouble might be avoided if we only mastered the
power of silence. Especially is this true when some controversy arises.
It is hard indeed to be at all interested in and to sit still when a
heated discussion is on. But it is a good discipline. Next time just
shut your teeth together and say to yourself, “After all, what does
it matter?” You will soon find that other people are doing all the
quarreling. It is wonderful how small a compass many controversies can be
crowded into when you really stop to consider how much of them are worth
while.
We all know how impossible it is to do our best in the home if we have
to live in the spirit of criticism. If there is some one in the family
whom it is impossible to please, who stands ready to ascribe to us
motives unworthy of any good woman, and to deny that we have anything
but self-seeking and selfishness behind all our actions, it becomes
impossible for us to live out the best that is in us, or to keep anger
and jealousy and suspicion out of our own hearts, after a time at least.
Few women there are but know or have known what it means to have such
an element somewhere in the family connections. But, even if some one
says hard things about you, the most powerful weapon is silence. The most
contemptuous or stinging retort has not the force nor the strength of
simply saying nothing. For there is nothing which you could say that is
so hard on your adversary as to ignore her argument.
Vanity enters so largely into the make-up of most mortals that it must be
recognized. When a gossip brings a tale about some friend, there is no
rebuke so keenly felt as a dignified and sober silence. When such a story
is brought and you ask some question, or even seem to acquiesce, you are
pretty sure to be reported as having told the story. We all have days,
too, which seem to be filled with petty trials and miserable crosses.
The woman at home as well as the man in business has to bear these until
every nerve seems bare. Small things assume huge proportions, and life
seems almost unendurable. We cannot see a bit beyond the little circle
of our trials, and discouragements loom large on our horizon. Nothing is
right simply because we are not right.
Do not give way to ill-temper and snap up those around you. Go where you
can be alone—out-of-doors if possible; if not, in a room by yourself. Say
a little prayer. Relax your muscles. Think of the country, the mountains,
the sea, a starry night—anything but your troubles. Stay in the silence
fifteen minutes. There is wonderful magic in it.
“Bear ye one another’s burdens” may mean much, but there is a far greater
nobility in silently bearing your own. One need not be unfriendly nor
unsocial, but one should cultivate the power of silence and the habit of
silence. If you do not read another book get into the habit of reading
daily bits from Miss Call’s “The Power of Silence,” and her “As a Matter
of Course,” and Lida Churchill’s “The Magic Seven.” These preach the
gospel of relaxation which, translated, means the habit of not caring.
That man succeeds best who flings his soul into his life-work and does
his level best, and then does not sit up nights worrying over the result.
Throw off your cares and anxieties. Drop everything and go out-of-doors.
You remember what the immortal Samantha Allen said about worrying at
nights? “Why, how often have I laid for hours worrying about things and
made ’em out like mountains, only to see ’em drop off and fade away by
the morning light, dwindlin’ down to mere nothin’s.” We have all been
there. If we could live over again, now, all the time we have spent in
fruitless worrying, in sleepless nights, we should have several years
added to our three score and ten. Worry means always and invariably
inhibition of associations and loss of effective power. The sovereign
cure for worry is faith—religious faith, or, if you prefer to call it so,
optimism; perhaps it all amounts to the same thing. The turbulent billows
of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and
to her who has a hold on vaster and more permanent realities, the hourly
vicissitudes of personal destiny seem relatively insignificant. Whether
one is really a “professor of religion” or not, the really religious
person is that one who is unshakable and full of equanimity and calmly
ready for anything that may come.
As the psychologist would tell us, if we wish our trains of ideation and
volition to be copious and effective, we must form the habit of freeing
them from the inhibitive influence of egoistic preoccupation about
results; and such a habit can be formed if we will set ourselves to doing
it. Prudence and duty and ambition and self-regard have their places in
our lives and we need not banish them, but do not let them interfere
with our real selves. In other words, when we have decided on a plan of
action, stick to it and do not worry about the outcome. Unclamp your
mental machinery and let it go without fret or worry. It is the people
who fling worry to the winds and keep up their nervous tone that succeed.
All of which is applicable to growing old, even if you do think I have
wandered from my subject.
Women have been too long trained to the need of feeling responsible about
something. Some women cannot buy a paper of pins without a long argument
with themselves as to whether they shall be sharp-pointed or blunt. Most
of us fritter away our strength in useless fussing over nothing at some
time in our day. What we need is the toning down of our moral and mental
tensions.
Some women, a few, are born with the gift of self-poise; others acquire
it, and many never know the meaning of the word; but self-poise is
never thrust upon any of us. What a comfortable sister she is who has
it. How safe and happy we are in her presence. For she looks upon life
calmly and with such a large vision that we forget how great the petty
affairs of every-day living had loomed on our horizon before we came to
know her. She has learned to close her eyes to such unpleasant things as
cannot be helped and to smooth away those that can; she closes her ears
to words that insidiously steal away one’s peace of mind and to utter the
soft words that turn away wrath. Outside influences are never allowed
to canker or to disturb the serenity of her soul; and, if she is a
housekeeper, her family are allowed to dwell in comfort. In other words,
she is not the kind of woman who chases through life with a dust-cloth
in one hand and a fly-killer in the other, and a poorly swept room or a
spot on the tablecloth at breakfast table are not the excuse for making
the whole family miserable for the day. So many women seem to think that
anything that causes them uneasiness to them is sufficient cause for
making everybody else around them unhappy.
She has the secret of “how to grow old gracefully,” and there is no
better nor surer way to avoid wrinkles than to keep out of one’s life and
heart the demon of worry. If you choose, you may call this power an oil
that makes the machinery of life run smoothly and noiselessly. I call it
living on a plane where the mire of petty smallness, the hurt of wrong
living and the danger of wrong thinking cannot reach us.
But, after all, why should we dread growing old? It seems to me that life
should be brightest, like the sunset, just before the night—if it is
night. I prefer to think of it as the real morning. When we have learned
to drop worry and undue haste, and fretfulness and all disagreeableness,
we are only just fitted to enjoy the serenity of age. Let’s stop right
here with Hamilton Aide’s comforting verses on “Old Age.”
“There comes a time when nothing more can hurt us.
The winds have done their worst to strew the shore
With stranded hulks; no power can convert us
Into the buoyant barks of youth once more.
“But we can sit and patch the sails for others,
And weave the nets for younger hands to trawl;
And spin long yarns to listening boys and mothers,
While sea and winds do one another call;
“And point to perils, when our bark lay tossing
In that dread passage which we here call Life,
And betwixt shoals and rocks we steered our crossing
Unto the shore, where we have done with strife.
“From seas tumultuous the sands have barred it;
From there we watch the white sails fleeting by.
Old age is never drear, if we regard it
As the safe harbor where the old boats lie.”
[1] Died since this was put in type.
XVII
ON THE OUTLOOK
What, then, of the woman of to-morrow? What part will she play in affairs
of public interest? What will she do with the home? What will she do and
be as an individual?
As I write, the robins and orioles and bobolinks are singing around the
house, out in the orchard. Mingled with their notes comes the strain
of a catbird, the “northern mocking-bird.” They are all beautiful, and
combine to make a perfect harmony of music in the May sunshine; but it
is the catbird’s song that the ear strains to follow, with its sweet and
sudden changes, its low guttural notes and its pure, uplifted tones as
it tries to catch and mimic the strain of the bluebird, the thrush, the
oriole. And I willingly forget the others in trying to keep count of her
bewitching changes. And I wonder if it does not typify the modern woman.
The others, lovely, melodious little creatures, are woman as she has been
for years, woman of whom we know what to expect. But the catbird! Here we
have the woman of to-day outdoing all the others, catching their song,
putting forth all their captivating graces, and making herself heard
and felt wherever she goes. It is the unexpectedness of her song, the
spontaneous uncertainty of it combined with the knowledge that it will be
well worth listening to, that holds us captive, as with strained ear we
watch for what she will do next. And if she puts forth guttural or harsh
notes now and again we can forgive and forget them for the sake of the
sweet, entrancing ones that we know are sure to follow.
It is so with the work woman is doing outside of the home. She is
doing everything and doing it in her own way, imitative, perhaps,
but still so different from men’s way or from her sisters of the day
before yesterday as to render her and her methods always an object of
interest. She is establishing libraries, improving streets and villages
and municipalities, raising the standard of education, fighting against
oppression in the form of sweatshops and child labor, and getting bills
introduced to legislative bodies—and still she is the same captivating,
lovable and loving woman as of yore. We flatter ourselves that women have
done a great deal for the public good, but fifty years hence shall we
not look back at our achievements of to-day as the merest beginnings—a
thing of shreds and patches? For so long as the world stands its women
are going to do their best to uplift humanity. They have found out that
the mere stayer at home, content with the _Laissez faire_ of other days,
helps only those in her immediate circle (let us hope she always does
that!). To-day the woman who helps reaches across the State with her
libraries and her child-labor bills; even clear across the continent
is modern associated womanhood stretching her influence. The women of
Massachusetts send books and money to establish schools in Georgia; the
women of Minnesota and Michigan scatter literature and manual training
across the plains of Arizona. If the woman of to-day cannot go over
into Mesopotamia in person, she can send the cheering word, the helpful
dollar, the influence of thousands of good women across the intervening
spaces. It is the sisterhood of women awakening to a sense of what
humanity requires of them. And when this is fully awakened the way is
made clear for the woman of to-morrow; a way she is sure to follow and
will, and make to blossom as the rose while she is about it.
But while she extends her work out and beyond she will not forget the
home. Let extremists advise as they will, they can never make the
ordinary, home-loving woman, born with all the primal instincts of
womanhood, believe that in fulfilling her natural duties as wife and
mother and daughter and teacher she is wasting her life in drudgery. The
woman of to-morrow will fall in love and marry and have children just as
the woman of yesterday did; only let us hope she will be more careful
about whom she falls in love with, at what age she marries and how she
brings up her children. In this time of steam-driven spindles, cutting
and sewing machines and the general lightening of labor, more leisure
comes to the average woman which she will not be content to fill with
mere selfish or social pleasures. She will wake to the knowledge of how
to use her time most wisely. With greater leisure and greater wealth and
comfort we may expect more and not less of the sharing with others of
the best we have. Great economic changes are taking place in the home
life. The family, at one time almost a self-sufficient economic unit, now
satisfies fewer and fewer direct economic wants. It is not so many years
since there were well-to-do New England families in rural districts which
did not spend fifty dollars a year for the satisfaction of family wants.
They produced everything themselves, raised and prepared for use all
their food supply, even the materials for clothing, the tools for their
work, the furniture for their homes, and they provided within themselves
all the essential services for the social and educational life of the
home. All is different now, even in the most primitive rural districts.
The farmer buys all his clothing, no longer makes his shoes or clothes,
buys a large part of his food supply, even many of the most common farm
products, such as milk, butter and eggs. The farmer’s wife buys her
dresses and children’s clothes ready-made, and too often does not bake
her own bread or pastry. Laundry work is given out, and in many cases all
the washing as well, and the good Hausfrau has no longer an excuse for
irritability on two days of the week. Ladies’ tailoring promises fair to
eliminate the necessity for periodical family disturbances caused by the
visits of the dressmaker and seamstress. Is not the increase of family
goods and services not long since provided within the family itself,
and constituting the bulk of the time-consuming burden of the wife and
mother and daughters in each individual home, but now provided for by
organized effort outside the home, really remarkable? All these economic
changes more directly affect the life of women than that of men. And we
can but remark that in the resultant increase in leisure, women as a
class have been relatively greater gainers than men, partly because in
the shifting of their activities somewhat of their economic productive
functions have been undertaken by men. It is a matter of congratulation,
however, that all the economic changes in the position and work of women
have been accompanied by the most remarkable expansion this country has
ever witnessed, an expansion alongside of which our political expansion
is a mere bagatelle, an expansion in woman’s educational interests and
aspirations. The higher education and a more diversified education has
brought woman inevitably into the arena of public duties and large
social responsibilities, and must needs lead her to demand a specific
training and equipment for social service.
The day has passed when Martin Luther could say: “No gown or garment
worse becomes a woman than when she would be wise.” Women must educate
themselves to-day, not merely for their own sakes, but for the sakes of
others, for whether they will or not they must educate others. Let them
keep high ideals and live up to them, for as wife and mother, sister and
daughter, an influence indirect and perhaps unconscious is shaping some
character and building for the weal or woe of our country. Benjamin Rush
once said: “A philosopher decided, ‘Let me make the ballads of a country
and I care not who makes its laws.’” He might with more propriety have
said: “Let the ladies of a country be educated properly and they will not
only make and administer its laws, but form its manners and character.”
We have not yet taken kindly to the earnest suggestion of the greatest
philosopher of the ancient Greek world to farm out our children (more
recently adapted by Mrs. Stetson-Gilman), nor is there any monopolistic
combination for the propagation and perpetuation of the race. Barring
the increasing activities of the home in its care for the welfare of
its children, activities increasing in importance and in their demands
proportionately with the advance of civilization, find women with more
time for the larger life and more inclination to learn how to use it
wisely and effectively. As to the character and kind of this outside
work, it seems to me that it will be best directed along these lines:
The promotion of public health and sanitation.
The protection of the highest attainable standard or plane of living for
the various classes in society.
The attainment of a progressively better type of education for all,
guaranteeing a better adjustment to both our economic and social
environment.
The enlargement of our sympathies and of our general moral and spiritual
outlook as expressed in our ideals of conduct and life.
The housekeeper of the future, too, will know how to make the best
use of her time and understand how to save her strength. She will
discriminate between what is necessary work and what unnecessary. It is
inevitable that our twentieth century women will make good wives. They
will understand their husbands’ business and regulate their expenditures
accordingly. At the table the talk will not be limited to complaints
about servants and gossip about friends and neighbors, but topics of the
day will be intelligently discussed, and the husband will receive the
intelligent coöperation of his wife in all his affairs.
We are all interested in public health and sanitation, in the prevention
of the spread of disease, in the lowering of the death rate, in immunity
from exposure to disease, in the protection of the sources of our water
supply, of our milk supply and of the meat diet offered in our markets.
In all of these things women are by nature and experience better
qualified to lead than men, and not until women do undertake their full
share of such social work will our community standards of health and
cleanliness compare with those that woman has evolved in the home, and
will those of the home be still further improved. Still, the average
workingman’s cottage to-day is in a better sanitary condition than the
palace of the rich was fifty years ago, and the ordinary artisan’s
family lives with more consideration for the rules of hygiene. This is,
of course, due to the development of science, but it is also due to the
awakening of womankind. But in no other way is woman heir of all the
ages in the foremost files of time than in her motherhood. With all that
child study has discovered, with all the experience of her mother and
grandmother to draw from, with all the discoveries of science at her
womanhood, and with a fuller sense of her moral responsibility than ever
before, good mothers are inevitable.
God designed women primarily to be mothers of the race, and all the talk
of the ultra reformer, all the cryings of pessimists, will not change
this unalterable fact. In this connection I wish to second most heartily
the wish uttered recently by a prominent Western woman of wide experience:
“I wish every childless home might be filled with homeless little
children who lack a father’s loving care and a mother’s fond
devotion—that immortal souls that are perishing in helplessness, want and
vice might be rescued and loved and trained to virtue. On this beautiful
earth there should never be a homeless child, there should not be so many
foundlings’ homes and orphan asylums, as beautiful as those charities
are! The most precious gift of God, a fresh and innocent soul to love, to
rear and train for usefulness, is not given to every woman, but there is
none among us so busy, so burdened by care or lack of means, who would
not be the better for such an angel ministrant in her home, for such a
check upon the self-absorption or selfishness that men and women grow
into without the loving pranks and clinging caresses of innocent little
children.
“Alas! for the starved heart of a woman who expends all her mother love
and tenderness upon a pampered pug or an elongated dachshund.
“Alas! for the stifled soul who, for love of ease, can pass by unheeding
the need of Christ’s little ones who are denied by circumstances the
right to be well born and well bred. How many luxurious mansions never
hear the music of childhood’s voices! How many homes of comparative
comfort in the middle classes never resound with the tread of childish
feet, or know the gladness of the trusting love of a little child,
sweetest of earthly joy! Is it a risk to take an alien child or
introduce strange blood into the family which may produce ingratitude
or disobedience? One may meet the same faults in their own children
who develop strange traits of character from long-forgotten ancestors,
or wring a parent’s heart with unkindness, indifference or neglect. I
would say, take the risk, leaving the issues to God, and do your duty
faithfully for some other mother’s darling, as faithfully and even more
so than if your own, and your later years will be brightened and blessed
by grateful affection and devoted filial care.”
And if this were done the problems of the poor and the degeneracy of the
race would be far on toward solution.
Then let us be brave women and true, with no taint of unfairness or
dishonor in our methods or ambitions, but the resolve that we who have
been privileged to be alive to-day, and privileged to march with the
great army of those who serve, will strive to share what we possess,
whether of wealth, intellect or affection, with those who are our sisters
in God’s family.
Let us be charitable, believing in the sisterhood of women. Thoughts are
things according to the New Thought, and the law of attraction will bring
just what we desire, whether we think charitable, loving thoughts or the
reverse.
Let us insist on doing our share of work, and only our share. When we do
less we are shirking our duty; when we do more we are letting somebody
else shirk. Let us adopt the “I can and I will” motto; but let us use it
with discretion and “will” only what is right.
Let us keep a steel-rod vertebra instead of an india-rubber one in
our back-bone, especially when we have disagreeable things to do. For
back-bone is what too many women—and men, too—lack.
Let us believe there is much more of good than of evil in every human
being; and let us help every one with whom we come in contact to bring
forth the good.
Let us remember that Evil is but Ignorance, and that to “know all is to
forgive all”; and let us think of this every time we are inclined to
condemn another woman.
I came across a little poem in a newspaper one day, unsigned and
uncredited. I am going to adapt it for every-day use:
“If I should see a sister languishing in distress,
And I should turn and leave her comfortless,
When I might be a messenger of hope and happiness;
If I might share a sister’s load along the dusty way
And I should turn and walk the other way;
If I could sing a little song to cheer a fainting heart
And I should sit and seal my lips apart—
“How could I kneel at eventide to pray
For light along my own heart-weary way?
How could I hope to have my time of grief relieved
If I kept silent when my sister grieved?
How could I ask for what I wanted most
If all these opportunities were lost?
“So, Lord, help me to know
That day is lost wherein I fail to lend
A helping hand to some good friend,
Or bring a bit of sunshine to some suffering heart
That walks apart.”
There is no “new woman.” We are all identically the same as Eve and Sarah
and Ruth and—I say it with all reverence—Mary, the carpenter’s mother. We
have the same natures, the same intuitions, the same love of family and
home, the same desire to be of use to others that women have always had;
only in these wonderful modern times we have kept pace with the age, and
are developing, both as individuals and as a whole. And now that we have
stepped forth and won places as physicians and lawyers and ministers,
now that we are widening the ranks of every profession as we go forth on
the road to higher achievement, it behooves every woman-soul of us to
ask ourselves—What have _I_ to do about it? Am I doing my duty to the
rest of mankind? Am I bearing my share of the burden of the world? Or, if
this last is denied me, am I possessing my soul in patience and living up
to the splendid present? Am I sweet and gentle and strong and helpful?
Am I critical of no one but myself? Am I loving towards my family? my
neighbor? my friend? my enemy? Am I helping the cause of the woman of
to-morrow by working out my own life problem with the child-heart and
the Christ-love to sweeten existence for all around me?
“Life is too short to waste
In critic peep or cynic bark,
Quarrel or reprimand;
’Twill soon be dark.
Let us up and mind our aim,
And God speed the mark!”
THE END
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