DUTIE
OF
WOMEN
FPCOBBE
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GEO. H. ELLIS:
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Miss Frances Power Cobbe's 'Duties of Women' is in its fifth
Critic, Foly 11.148athousand. Translations of this book have appeared in France, Ger-
many, and Italy.
}
The Lowell Courier says: "Miss Frances
Power Cobbe, who has identified herself with
the cause of anti-vivisection, called on a distin-
guished man of science to endeavor to gain him
over to her cause. She had an ostrich feather in
her bonnet, a bird of paradise on or near her
muff, and an ivory-handled umbrella. The man
of science replied as follows: 'Madame, charity
begins at home; when you have given up wear-
ing ostrich feathers which are plucked from the
living bird, causing the most exquisite pain, and
birds of paradise, which, in order to enhance
their beauty and lustre, are skinned alive-when
you have abjured the use of ivory, because you
know that the tusks are cut out of the dying ele-
phant's jaw-then, and then only, come and up-
braid me with the cruelty of my operations.
The difference between us is, madame, that I in-
flict pain in the pursuit of knowledge and for the
ultimate benefit of my fellow-creatures; you
cause cruelty to be inflicted merely for your
personal adornment."" But the Detroit Free
Press observes: "As Miss Frances Power Cobbe
has not an umbrella with an ivory handle, never
wore a bird of paradise in her hat, never had a
muff, never went to a distinguished scientist to
protest against vivisection, she is inclined to
think there is some mistake in the story about
his telling her that the ivory, the feather, and
the muff were obtained at the expense of far
more pain to the creatures that originally
owned them than his vivisection for scientific
11
oses.


OTHER WORKS BY MISS COBBE.
RE-ECHOES. A Collection of Short News-
paper Essays. Cloth. $2.00.
ALONE TO THE ALONE: Prayers for
Theists. By several Contributors. Edited,
with a preface, by FRANCES TOWER COBBE.
Cloth. $1.50.
DAWNING LIGHTS: An Inquiry concern-
ing the Secular Results of the New Refor-
mation. Cloth. $1.50.
FALSE BEASTS AND TRUE: Essays
on Natural (and Unnatural) History.
Cloth. $1.00.
Imported and for sale by

GEO. H. ELLIS,
141 FRANKLIN STREET, BOSTON.



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Buston, 1866.
THE DUTIES OF WOMEN.
A COURSE OF LECTURES
BY
FRANCES POWER COBBE.
(AUTHORIZED EDITION.)
3131
"Whatever any one does or says, I must be good; just as if the
emerald were always saying this: Whatever any one does, or says,
I must be emerald and keep my color."-Marcus Aurelius, vii. 15.
BOSTON:
GEO. H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET.
LONDON: WILLIAMS & NORGATE.
1881.
(
;
на
1221
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1
Press of Geo. H. Ellis, 141 Franklin Street, Boston.
8-6- 31 AVA
PREFACE,
INTRODUCTORY,
•
CONTENTS.
LECTURE I.
LECTURE II.
PERSONAL DUTIES OF WOMEN,
LECTURE III.
LECTURE IV.
SOCIAL DUTIES,
DUTIES ARISING FROM RELATIONSHIP (Mothers, Daughters,
Sisters, etc.).
•
SOCIAL DUTIES (continued),
DUTIES BOUNDED ON CONTRACT (Wives, Friends).
DUTIES OF WOMEN AS MISTRESSES OF HOUSEHOLds.
LECTURE V.
SOCIAL DUTIES (continued),
DUTIES OF WOMEN AS MEMBERS OF SOCIETY.
LECTURE VI.
PAGE
SOCIAL DUTIES (concluded),
DUTIES OF WOMEN AS CITIZENS OF THE STATE.
5
13
53

85
. 119
152
. 17
PREFACE.
THE following Lectures, somewhat differently ar-
ranged, were delivered last winter in London to an
audience of ladies, and were repeated at Clifton in
the ensuing spring. The reader will kindly bear in
mind that they were prepared with a view to such
viva voce use, and not for perusal in a book; and also
that the plan of their delivery included many extem-
pore illustrations and lighter remarks. A few of
these only have been preserved in the foot-notes of
the present volume.
My purpose in delivering these Lectures originally,
and now in publishing them, will become sufficiently
apparent as the reader proceeds; but, to avoid the
risk of any possible misconstruction, I shall offer
here a short explanation of my locus standi as re-
gards the whole subject in question. I have been
for many years deeply interested in what is called
the "Woman's Movement," and have taken part in
pleading for the higher education of women, for
6
PREFACE.
the admission of women to university degrees, for the
protection of the property of married women, for the
employment of women, for the protection of women
from aggravated assaults, for the entrance of women
into the medical profession, and, lastly, for exten-
sion of the parliamentary suffrage to women pos-
sessed of the requisite property qualification. Of
the wisdom of many of these demands (so far as
they were then formulated), I was not in my earlier
life convinced. I was then of opinion that the happy
duties of a daughter and mistress of a household
which fell to my lot, together with village charities
and literary and other pursuits, sufficiently filled up
the life of a woman, without adding to them wider
social and political aims. It was only after I had
labored for some time with my honored friend Mary
Carpenter, at Bristol, and learned to feel intense
interest in the legislation which might possibly miti-
gate the evils of crime and pauperism, that I seri-
ously asked myself (under the upbraiding of that
good old abolitionist, S. J. May) why I should not
seek for political representation as the direct and
natural means of aiding every reformn I had at heart.
The answer was not long doubtful; and now, for
nearly a quarter of a century, I have, as I have just
said, associated myself, to the best of my ability,
more or less with nearly all the movements in Eng-
PREFACE.
7
land for the advancement of women. Looking back
over these years, I find I have not lost one jot of
faith in the righteousness or expediency of our de-
mands. On the contrary, I have seen every year
more reason to regard the part hereafter to be played
by women in public affairs as offering the best hope
for the moral and, still more emphatically, for the
spiritual interests of humanity. I think more highly
of women since I have watched them with the calm
eyes of middle age; and I have more confidence than
I had at first, both in their ability and in their sta-
bility.
But it would be idle to veil from myself that the
path of progress on which women have now entered,
and which we have done our best to open for them,
is a road which leads up a steep hill of difficulty,
and from which there are turnings to the right and
the left, running down into all manner of quagmires
and precipices. E many, indeed, and so give are
the dangers on either hand, that I cannot blame
those who see more to fear than to hope from the
movement in question, and raise around us rather a
cry of alarm than a cheer of encouragement. But
dangers must be faced whenever any time-honored
evil is to be swept away or any new good achieved.
The woman's movement could not now be stopped,
if we desired it; nor do we desire to stop it, if it lay
8
PREFACE.
}
at our option so to do. What we wish to accom-
plish, and what it is our imperative duty to strive to
accomplish with all our might, is to direct aright
the great progress in question, to set up sign-posts
of warning against those wrong turnings in the road
which can only lead to destruction, and to point all
eyes which we are permitted to direct up to the
straight, clear way before us,-the one only safe,
true way of progress, the way of DUTY.
In brief, then, in addressing my countrywomen in
this way, I have aimed at inciting them, in the first
place, to give deep and well-ordered reflection to the
subject of morals in general, and of their own duties
in particular; trusting that I might help them to
see the fallacy of several errors which have hitherto
misled us, and to recognize how noble and brave and
beautiful is the ideal of womanly virtue to which we
are bound to lift ourselves up. And, in the second
place, have striven co, way my hearers against
that neglect of social bienséances, that adoption of
looser and more "Bohemian
“Bohemian” manners, and, worst
of all, that fatal laxity of judgment regarding grave
moral transgressions, which have appeared of late
years among us as the inevitable extravagance of
reaction from earlier strictness. These faults and
mistakes constitute, I conceive, deadly perils to the
whole movement for the advancement of women;
•
PREFACE.
9
and with all my strength I would implore every
woman who sympathizes with that movement to set
her face like a flint against them. It is our task to
make society more pure, more free from vice, either
masculine or feminine, than it has ever been before,
not to allow its law to become one shadow of a shade
less rigid.
Men, especially Englishmen and Americans, are,
as a rule, wonderfully generous to women. Thou-
sands of them labor for their mothers, their wives, or
their daughters all their lives long; and the higher-
minded are full of chivalrous indulgence for all
women. If we count over with speechless indigna-
tion the hundreds of men who in our country yearly
beat and trample their wretched wives to death, we
must never allow that hideous fact
or any other
of the many wrongs of our sex to blind us to the
counterbalancing truth that the average Englishman
means well to women, and will make no small sacri-
fices for them; and that there exist at least as many
noble and high-hearted men, genuine champions of
our sex, in Parliament and out of it, as there are
wife-beating ruffians in the slums of Liverpool and
London.
But, with all their kindly feelings, their good in-
tentions, their readiness to labor and sacrifice them-
selves for women, men give us most rarely that which
10
PREFACE.
we really want, not favor, but-Justice. Nothing
is easier than to coax them to pet us like children,
nothing more difficult than to persuade them to treat
us like responsible human beings. Only a small
number of them, it would seem, can yet be brought
to realize that we have not only mouths to be fed
and hearts to be comforted by faithful affection, but
also brains to be cultivated, and wills seeking also,
like their own, for the free use of whatever powers
we may inherit. That a woman should really possess
public spirit, and that its exercise should be as enno-
bling to her as it is to a man,-this is a lesson which
it takes most men half a lifetime to learn.
It is not, then, to men, with all their kindness,
that we must look primarily for aid to climb the
ascent before us. Even if they were more ready
than they now are to help us, they could do very
little beyond encouraging us by their sympathy and
smoothing a few obstacles out of our way. Ours is
the old, old story of every uprising race or class or
order. The work of elevation must be wrought by
ourselves or not at all. At this hour there are, I
believe, in England hundreds of women of the high-
est social and intellectual rank who desire to see
better days for their sex, but who are sitting, wait-
ing patiently for some masculine Jupiter to descend
and lift our chariot out of the ruts of custom. It is
PREFACE.
11
in vain! They may so wait forever. Even if Jupi-
ter were to come down, women themselves would
drive the car into another rut the next moment.
Nothing but our own steady and simultaneous labor
can really elevate our sex.
Every woman who works wisely and well for any
good public cause (whether that cause directly con-
cern female interests or not) does her share in thus
lifting up the womanhood of the nation. And per-
haps that other woman does even more for the same
end, whose whole time is rightly absorbed in the per-
fect performance of her duties as daughter, wife, or
mother, but who, from her place of honor, simply
avows on all fitting occasions that she, too, shares
indignation for the wrongs, and sympathy with the
aspirations of her sisters.
Finally, I will only add that, greatly as I desire to
see the enfranchisement and elevation of women, I
consider even that object subordinate to the moral
character of each individual woman. If women
were to become less dutiful by being enfranchised,—
less conscientious, less unselfish, less temperate, less
chaste, then I should say: "For Heaven's sake, let
us stay where we are! Nothing we can ever gain
would be worth such a loss." But I have yet to
learn that freedom, which is the spring of all the
nobler virtues in man, will be less the ground of
12
PREFACE.
loftier and purer virtues in woman. Nay, it is in
firm faith that women will be more dutiful than they
have ever been,—more conscientious, more unself-
ish, more temperate, and more chaste,- that I have
joined my voice to the demand for their emancipation,,
believing also that in a wider sphere they will forget
many a fault and folly of the past, and will learn
yet other virtues which now they lack, or have not
enough learned to exercise,- Courage and Truth-
fulness, Justice and Public Spirit.
LECTURE I
INTRODUCTORY.
THE spectacle of the waste of precious things is
always one of the saddest in this mysterious world.
We are often called on to regret huge ships sunk in
the sea, famous old books burnt or lost, beautiful
temples shattered by shot and shell, harvests de-
stroyed by storm or drought, and men with splendid
gifts going down to an untimely grave, all their
training for a life of usefulness ending in silence and
oblivion.
But what are all these forms of waste compared
to that which has been going on, in all lands and
ages, of the lives of women,- waste as regards the
purposes either of their own moral growth or nat-
ural happiness, and waste of their faculties to make
the world happier and better? Think of women's
natures as meanly as we may, rank the powers
wherewith they are endowed at the lowest possible
14
LECTURE I.
estimation, still it is deplorable to reflect on the
spendthrift recklessness wherewith they have been
thrown away for no advantage to any living being,
but merely for some senseless prejudice. Iphigenia,
sacrificed to make the wind blow, was in truth a
typical victim of superstitious custom and mascu-
line selfishness. A lark born to sing its joyous little
song at leisure far aloft in the blue sky, caught and
shut up in a cage in a sordid city lane, scarcely
suffers a more grievous wrong than the souls of
myriads of our sisters cooped in gynecæums and
zenanas, and harems and convents, and in many a
home little better than a nunnery or a seraglio. *
There is in all young girls a touching capacity for
finding innocent enjoyment in the smallest and sim-
plest things, a capacity which, as we look back on it
in later years, fills our old hearts with yearning and
* A gentleman, long a missionary in India, has told me that it is
not at all an uncommon case for a Hindoo woman of the upper
ranks to be carried to her grave, never having put her foot to the
ground in the open air in her life. IIer entire existence has been
spent among the wretched puerilities and sensualities of the zenana.
Yet these are the women who, when they have a chance, display
(as Mr. Mill witnessed) exceptional powers of statesmanship; and
several of whom are now distinguishing themselves as poetesses
and novelists. The condition of a woman with such latent faculties
cramped into the zenana life under a tyrannical husband or mother-
in-law must be iniserable beyond conception. Her soul must ache
like a Chinese woman's foot in her shoe.
:
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
15
regret. But, while the similar pleasures of boys are
usually amply studied and provided for even at
their schools, it is not very often, except in the hap-
piest families and among the wisest parents and
teachers, that little girls are encouraged or per-
mitted to take their fill of the delights of air and
exercise, while their limbs yet crave, by Nature's
beneficent law, for free and incessant motion, and
their young hearts can drink in the joys of the sun-
shine and the flowers in all their May-morning
freshness. Probably English girls of the highest
classes have at this day more freedom of this kind,
more wholesome riding and rowing and tennis-play-
ing and mountain-scrambling, than any young ladies
ever possessed before in any case or country. But,
even for them, senseless fashions of dress often in-
terfere with health and pleasure; while, as they
grow older, the lesson is too often enforced by their
parents and governesses and all their teachers and
elder relations, that they must put a curb,—not on
their vanity and frivolity, not on luxurious self-
indulgence,—but on their physical and mental en-
ergy, their harmless animal spirits, their righteous
longing to be of some use in the world in which
they find themselves. To be content smilingly to
lie on a bed of roses while they know that thou-
sands around them sleep on thorns,- this is repre-
16
LECTURE I.
sented by all around them as constituting pretty
nearly the "Whole Duty of Woman." Thus prac-
tising meekly an aimless and unmeaning patience
and self-repression, they dwindle down year by year
into pettiness and inanity.
Nor is it only negative evil, the loss of the poten-
tial happiness intended for them, which women thus
endure. The positive suffering entailed on our sex
by purely artificial restrictions of one kind or other
is far worse. Among the upper classes there are
maladies and weaknesses innumerable directly due
to lack of healthful interests in life, and to enforced
obedience to hurtful customs of dress; and among
the lower classes of women there are other dis-
eases, due to excessive toil under the conditions of
their married lives, and to lack of proper nourish-
ment, which their ill-paid labor cannot earn. Hard
as poverty often presses on men, it is rare indeed
that they ever feel its iron grip as do women, for
whom so few fields of industry are open; and it
must never be forgotten that hunger and want for
women imply the dread temptation, unknown to
men, to earn money only too readily by the sin
which leads them down headlong into the abyss of
misery and shame. When we think of all this as
the outcome, in great measure, of artificial weights
added to their natural inferiority in the race of life,
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
17
and then of the wives trampled on by husbands
whom the law has taught to regard them as inferior
beings;* of the mothers whose children are torn
from their arms by the direct behest of the law at
the bidding of a dead or living father,—when we
think of these things, as I have said, our hearts ache
with pity and indignation.
But, dreadful as they are, I believe that even these
again are not the worst evils which women endure
in consequence of their false position. I think it is
worse to be poor in mind than poor in purse, to be
stunted and belittled in soul, made a coward, made
a liar, made mean and slavish, accustomed to fawn
and prevaricate, and "manage" by base arts a hus-
band or a father, I think this is worse than to be
kicked with hobnailed shoes.
And yet, again, what has not the whole human
race lost by the degradation of women?
Of all the precious things in this arid world, love,
tenderness, sympathy, are immeasurably the best;
and the very fountain of such feelings is in woman's
* According to the returns, it appears that there are in England,
on an average, four "aggravated assaults" by husbands on wives
every day in the year, counting alone the cases brought before
magistrates. An "aggravated assault" means a great deal more
than a simple blow. It means knocking out an eye, "clogging"
with hobnailed boots (i.e., kicking or standing on the woman),
setting her on fire, breaking her ribs, throwing a paraffine lamp at
her, etc.
18
LECTURE I.
breast. It is the "compassion of a woman for the
son of her womb," the potential Motherhood in every
true woman's heart, which has been the great soften-
ing influence, gradually through the ages melting
the hardness and selfishness of savage humanity.
But what narrow bounds have been placed by the
claustration of women on the exercise of this divine
power, aye, and of many another power, to guide
and heal and bless!
At last, after long ages, there seems to be a great
change coming over the destiny of women. Look-
ing back to the past, we seem dimly to perceive that
the lot of our sex has passed through three stages.
First there was the Savage Age, where woman
was everywhere (as she is still among Red Indians)
a mere beast of burden, the camel or ass of her
master, plus the endurance, with or without her
choice, of the pains of motherhood.
Secondly, out of the early civilizations of India
and Greece, of the Teutonic and Scandinavian
Nations, and very notably Judea, there seems to
have arisen, strangely enough, an Heroic Age for
women, when they were not only as free as they
now are in England, but specially honored. In the
days of the Vedas in India, and many centuries
later, when the great Buddhist Topes were built, we
find, from the poetry of the former and the bas-
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
19
reliefs of the latter, that women mixed freely and
unveiled at feasts and sacrifices; and the two great
Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayuna,
with some of the later tragedies, turn on chivalrous
stories wherein women play noble parts and are
nobly beloved,-stories which it would seem no
modern Hindoo, with his degraded ideas of woman-
hood, can properly understand.
In Greece again, as every one will recollect, the
Homeric age saw such women as Penelope, Andro-
mache, Nausicaa, Clytemnestra; and the tradition
went down for four centuries, till Sophocles, writing
in the time of the poor imprisoned wives of Peri-
clean Athens, yet looked back to the old heroic
time, and created such glorious types of womanhood
as Alcestis and Antigone. The latter (I must be
pardoned for pausing for a moment to note) is the
embodiment of the very highest moral ideal, mascu-
line or feminine; namely, obedience to a Divine Law
when it involves the penalty of death for disobeying
a human law. To me, it is one of the most wonder-
ful facts in the literature of the world that Sopho-
cles, living when he did, put into the mouth of a
woman that most magnificent speech of Antigone
concerning the "Unwritten Law Divine, immutable,
eternal, not like these of yesterday, but made ere
Time began." Again, the Hebrews had their
20
LECTURE I.
Heroic Age of Women, when Miriam and Debo-
rah were the types of that strength and courage
which King Lemuel afterwards described
ideal of a noble woman: "She strengtheneth her
arms; she girdeth her loins with strength."*
And lastly, not to dwell too long on this bright
gleam, falling on the dreary lot of women in one far-
off epoch, there was the well-known Heroic Age of
Women among the Britons and Germans, the age
to which Boadicea belonged, and of which Tacitus
wrote when he said that the Germans thought that
the minds of women were nearer to the Deity than
those of men, and therefore they were always con-
sulted with respect.
Bat
But the clouds gathered everywhere over this sun-
rise, why or wherefore in each country it boots not
to inquire. There arose, I suppose, with the growth
of luxury, a loss on the woman's side of the sterner
virtues, and on that of men an increase of jealous
and selfish passion and sense of proprietorship; and
then followed throughout all the East and South
the miserable claustration of women, their sequestra-
tion in their separate portions of the house, their
banishment from all social pleasures of the other
*See a most remarkable paper on this subject, "The Hebrew
Woman," by Mrs. Cyril Flower (Miss Constance de Rothschild),
reprinted from the New Quarterly Magazine. Hazell, Watson and
Viney: London and Aylesbury. 48 pp.
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
21
sex, the enforcement of veils, the employment of
eunuchs as guardians, and in China, the last extrem-
ity of all, the deliberate crippling of the feet of every
woman belonging to the higher classes.
This degradation of women, as we all know, never
prevailed in the West and North to the extent it
has done in the East and South. Whether Chris-
tianity alone has been the influence which saved
women from it, I have my doubts, seeing that the
Christian races of the Levant to this day keep their
women in almost Mahometan seclusion; while the
German races, whose women were free in the heathen
days of Tacitus, have been neither more nor less free
under Catholic or Protestant Christianity. The char-
acter of the women of each race seems to have more
to do with the matter than any form of religion. The
woman who is the slave of her own passions is every-
where the slave of man: the woman whose moral
nature is supreme over her passions everywhere
obtains a certain modicum of freedom. Nothing,
alas! explains a harem so well as a little acquaint-
ance with the half animal-natured women who are
shut up in one of them. The harem has made them
what they are, and their ungoverned passions afford
an excuse for maintaining the harem.
But, if the women of Europe have never sunk
entirely to the abjection of the women of the East,
22
LECTURE I.
they have suffered a subjection severe and stringent
enough. I shall not dwell on this painful subject.
We are come here to think of our duties, not of our
wrongs. The best and healthiest way to view all
the huge injustices of the past, all the many linger-
ing injustices of the present under which our sex
has suffered, is to consider that men (even good and
generous men) have treated women uniformly as
minors,― sometimes as petted children, sometimes
in the harsh and despotic way in which children
were commonly treated in former days,— but in any
case making obedience a virtue in a wife of forty as
it is in a child at four or fourteen, and compliance
with their masterful wishes pretty nearly the be-all
and end-all of the virtue of a woman, as it is of a
dog or a baby.
Now, it would seem at last we are on the point
of attaining our majority! An immense wave is
lifting up women all over the world; and, if we
"survey womankind from China to Peru," we shall
find in almost every country of the globe (by no
means excepting Japan) a new demand for educa-
tion, for domestic freedom, and for civil and political
rights, made by women on behalf of their sex.
I need not detain you by citing all the steps which
have been already gained, all which we hope to gain
ere long. When women. of my age look back on the
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
23
state of things which prevailed in our youth, we
seem to have passed under a new dispensation.*
There can be no doubt that a great change is
passing over the condition of women everywhere in
the civilized world. That is not our concern at this
moment; but it is our most vital concern to consider
how far that great change is likely to be a benefit
to our sex and to both sexes. That it will be an
immense benefit, I suppose most of us here present
are persuaded. But can we close our eyes to the
possibility that it may prove otherwise? Is it not
a contingency that so much disorder, so many dis-
graceful failures, such a pitiful fulfilment of our
large promises may come, and so many now common
womanly virtues be lost without the attainment of
any other moral gifts or graces, that, fifty years
hence, our epoch will be looked back upon as a
disastrous one, and either our reforms will be all
reformed back again, and the status quo ante re-
stored, or else a state of things inaugurated which
* Only seventeen years ago, I myself read a paper in Guildhall
at the Social Science Congress, pleading for the admission of women
to university degrees; and every newspaper in London laughed at
me (notably our now most friendly Spectator) for asking for what
would never be granted. Two years ago, when I had the honor to
go up on a deputation to Lord Granville, to thank him for this very
admission of women to London University, I placed in his hands,
to his amusement, my much ridiculed address.
24
LECTURE I.
we should weep to think we had helped to bring
about?
I confess that I see numberless threatening rocks
ahead. One of them is a growth of hardness and of
selfishness among women as their lives cease to be
a perpetual self-oblation, and they (very properly)
pursue ends of their own. Another is the occur-
rence of much social disorder before there is time for
a new code of bienséances to be formed, and before
the ultimate laws of the relations of the sexes have
themselves been first called in question, and are
then (as I believe they will be) re-established in the
morality of the future much the same as we find
them now. There are in fact dangers all round us.
The entrance obtained into the medical profession
is a danger. It is possible there may arise such a
monster as a woman vivisector, a female Schiff or
Bernard; though, thank God, as yet there are little
signs of such ignominy.
Here, as in many other directions, as I have said,
there are rocks ahead. Our course toward a free
and ennobled womanhood is by no means a secure
and safe one. Nor should we altogether condemn
those among us who see these dangers more clearly
than the advantages we promise, and deprecate the
changes to which we look so hopefully.
What is it which must determine whether this
G
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
25
great change, fraught with such infinite conse-
quences to humanity, will be a benefit or an injury,
a blessing or a curse? It must be the conduct of
women themselves during the great transition. Noth-
ing our opponents can do or say, nothing which
all men united together could do, would really de-
termine the character and results of the revolution.
It must be our work, the way we pass through the
process of emancipation, the tone we adopt, the
principles we choose to guide us.
Here is the point to which I am bringing you. It
depends on the ideas of DUTY held by the women
of our time, and their faithfulness to those ideas,
whether we shall enter into an era of true progress,
wherein our sex shall not only be infinitely happier,
but infinitely nobler, infinitely more useful than it
has ever been; or whether, after a brief blaze of
promise, our hopes are destined to die and end in
bitterest shame and disappointment.
And what women are they on whose ideas and
conduct so much must depend? Pre-eminently, it
must be, at least so far as Europe is concerned, the
women of England,- and among these necessarily
the women of the upper classes, the intellectual
women, the women who take part in the move-
ments of progress, and whose example will affect
those who follow. I fail to find words to say how
26
LECTURE I.
important it seems to me that at this crisis of
woman's history every one of us should, each in
her small way, begin to tread the new path care-
fully, giving no just cause of reproach or scandal
or ridicule, but, on the contrary, making the way
for all who come after us plainer and easier; and
always in the right direction, in the direction not
only of a larger and freer life, but of a life of
higher self-reverence, broader piety, more tender
goodness, purer purity, truer truth.
Does any one think we are either going to fling
aside all the old moral restraints, or, on the other
hand, that we can keep them all just as they have
been, under the new order of things? Both ideas
are absurd. The eternal principles of morality
must bind us forever, but the application of those
principles to practical duties must be revised and
reconsidered as the conditions of life are altered,
just as the duties of a boy and of a man are dif-
ferent. Women, as I have said before, have hith-
erto been treated as minors, and have been taught
the duties of minors,- unquestioning obedience and
a childlike ductility. Now they are to be Human
Beings of the Mother Sex (that is the best defini-
tion I can find for them), and their duties must
be human, including the whole circle of human virt-
ues, and applying them to the special obligations
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
27
of daughter, mother, wife, a female member of
Society and of the State.
Considerable care and thought, it seems to me,
are needed to adjust all the problems of practi-
cal womanly life to this higher and truer view of
woman's nature and obligations, and I wish that
some one better fitted for it than I had first un-
dertaken the task. However, as our clergy (though
they preach occasionally both to Men and to Chil-
dren) never seem inclined to tackle the subject of
Woman's special duties (and indeed would perhaps
generally lay them down on principles which few
of us here assembled would altogether accept), it
seems well that some woman should commence the
work; and, for lack of one better qualified, I have
attempted it, with a very keen sense of my own
presumption in so doing.
It would occupy more than the time allotted for
this whole course of Lectures, were I to preface
them, as would be otherwise desirable, by a state-
ment of the Theory of Morals on which I proceed,
and some exposure of the fallacies (as I conceive
them to be) of opposite systems. I must refer any
of you who desire to go further into this matter.
to my former treatises on ethics,* and now briefly
*In my Essay on Intuitive Morals, I have done what lay in my
power to work out a consistent Theory of Ethics, mainly on the
28
LECTURE I.
say that I assume those who hear me to accept the
following fundamental beliefs, without which much
which follows would be baseless.
First, I assume that you accept the fact that there
is such a thing as DUTY, and that it is supremely
sacred. Virtue is no empty dream, but the soundest
of all realities. How we come by our sense of duty;
how we know what is our duty; how, amid the coil of
the chain of phenomena we are enabled to exercise
that free choice of duty wherein Virtue consists,—
all these questions, which touch the deepest roots
of human thought, I must leave aside for the pres-
ent. Let it be enough that we recognize that there
is a holy Law demanding our obedience, and that
we are conscious of possessing the power to obey it
or to disobey. These are postulates of which the
acceptance is indispensable to any moral discussion.
Secondly, I assume that you believe in God and
in a life for the soul of man beyond the grave.
These great doctrines are not, indeed, like the
lines of Kant's Grundlegung der Sitten, in harmony with a defi-
nite Theism; and in my Darwinism in Morals, and the preface to
my Hopes of the IIuman Race, I have explained at length the rea-
sons for my entire dissent from the doctrines of the most recent
school of moralists, which trace our moral sense to the inherited
"set" of our brains,-the "capitalized experience of our tribe
(as Mr. Martineau has happily expressed it) affording us a slight
prejudice in favor of honesty and truth, and a certain distaste of
cruelty and lies.
"}
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
29
former, absolutely indispensable to the erection of
a theory of morals, but in the subsequent pages refer-
ence will be made to them as accepted truths.
Thirdly, I assume that you will grant readily that
the Motive of Virtue must always be Virtue itself,
and not any ulterior reward, here or hereafter. The
only reward of a right action is to have done right;
the only reward of duty is to have done our duty;
the only reward of obedience to God is to have
obeyed Him, and (perhaps we may add) to have the
better hope of obeying Him for evermore.
These few points indicate the outline of a very
old-fashioned system of morals, which yet I should
not despair of entirely commending to your accept-
ance, were time enough at our disposal. For the
present, you will please accept them, at least pro-
visionally, as the scaffolding of the practical part of
our subject which is to follow.
I have said the belief in God and immortality are
not absolutely indispensable to a system of morals.
Morals may be separated from religion, and it is
quite possible to erect a general scheme of duty on
the sole ground of the inherent necessary rightful-
ness of one class of actions and sentiments, and
wrongfulness of another. For those, then, to whom
in these sad days that Being whom our fathers well
named the "Sun of Righteousness "is hidden behind
30
LECTURE I.
a cloud of doubt, it is, I think, of inestimable value
thus to be able to separate in thought the obliga-
tions of morality from any and every religious creed;
and to recognize that Goodness remains good and
noble and beautiful, and Evil remains base and hid-
eous and abominable, and Virtue is still the law of
the higher will, the true self of man,-even suppos-
ing it to be true that there is no One in all this dark
universe in whom that goodness is impersonated, no
Guide to lead our faltering steps in the right way,
no Hope of a home beyond the grave, where the
poor, struggling virtue of earth may ascend into the
holiness and peace of Heaven.
It is well, I think, to recognize this possible sepa-
ration, and very fit that we should honor those whom
we see still marching resolutely along the thorny
path of duty, even though they have lost the faiths
which are like wings to the soul to bear it onward.
But as, in my view, these doubters are in uttermost
error, as I believe that there is indeed a God, the
Supreme, All-righteous Lord in whom we live and
have our being now, and with whom we shall live
forever after death,-I cannot look upon the great
laws of morals as dissociated from the idea of Him.
On the contrary, it seems to me that only with the
sunlight of His presence illuminating our vision of
the moral world do we obtain light on its dark
M
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
31
places, and warmth to stir our hearts to self-sacrifice.
It is when we think of the world as His kingdom,
and of our brothers as His children, that we can love
and labor with cheerfulness; and, when we trust Him
to do justice hereafter, we become able to endure the
spectacle of the wrongs and cruelties which surround
us now.
I shall not, then, waste the short time at our dis-
posal by any attempt to delineate a system of Athe-
istic Morals, but rather turn to a doctrine of Theis-
tic Ethics, which I cannot ask you to accept without
some farther explanation, but which I earnestly hope
you may be willing to adopt on reflection, seeing
that it throws (in my humble judgment) a wide and
glorious light over the whole moral horizon of
humanity.
In the eyes of an All-righteous God, who sees all
the evil of evil, all the goodness of good, all the
beauty and joy of a holy soul, and all the hideous-
ness and misery of a sinful one, everything else in
the universe, all the pains and pleasures of this tran-
sitory life, all human hopes and ambitions must seem
as dust in the balance compared to the supreme
realities of the moral world. In His view there
must be an absolutely boundless significance in the
free choice between virtue and vice. All analogies
known to us fail to express the difference between
32
LECTURE I.
a holy and loving soul and a soul wallowing in pol-
lution and cruelty. Taking in the vast scope of our
immortal existence, every other circumstance of our
lives must to Him seem trivial as the toys of an in-
fant. What then follows but that supreme Benevo-
lence must render the virtue of man, not his mere
happiness, the goal of his destiny, the underlying
purpose of all his education in this planet? I can-
not doubt, then, that in calling us into life, dowering
us with the awful gift of moral responsibility, and
placing us in a world of trial like this, our Cre-
ator has designed to lead us upward to the highest
possible good of finite creatures; namely, to that
Virtue which approaches ever nearer and nearer to
divine holiness. The end of creation I believe to be
the perfecting of souls; the training in virtue of the
human race (and doubtless of myriads of other
intelligent races in other worlds) through a thou-
sand lessons of struggle and effort, pain and pleasure,
trial and temptation, into higher and yet higher
moral conditions, wherein as we rise we shall come
nearer to the Father of our spirits, enjoy more of
His communion, resemble Him more closely in pu-
rity, love, and holiness, and at last be fitted to
enjoy a bliss of divine love and joy such as we can-
not picture now, but which "God hath prepared for
them that love Him"; aye, and for those who as yet
in their darkness love Him not or know Him not.
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
33
This is, according to my faith, the Destiny of Man,
the only purpose of creation which we can rev-
erently attribute to a good and perfect God, and
also the only one which, in a certain large and gen-
eral way, affords some rough explanation of the sin
and sorrow which surround us now. Accept then,
again I beg of you,-provisionally at least, while
we thus confer on our duties,- this doctrine (or
hypothesis, if you will not admit it to be more);
namely, that we are each of us made on purpose to
attain, by the performance of duty and the fulfil-
ment of God's will, a loftier stage of moral life than
we have now reached, serving as a step up an end-
less stair, upon whose higher flights, above the
clouds of earth and sin, we shall find unbroken com-
munion with God and the fulness of eternal joy.
We have advanced so far toward treating of the
Duties of Women that we have reached the broad
ground of the duties common to all moral beings in
all worlds forever,—namely, to choose the right and
eschew the wrong wheresoever there may be a right
and wrong betwixt which choice is possible.* Now
*The oldest text in the oldest part of the Zend-Avesta (the Gatha
Ahunavaiti, believed to be the address of Zoroaster himself at the
inauguration of his mission) runs thus: "There are two spirits,
the good and the base. Be good, and not base!" We shall never
see the day wherein those words do not contain the core of morals
and religion. I am not sure that I do not prefer the word rendered
34
LECTURE I.
assuming this broad stand-point of universal moral-
ity, we see manifestly that all virtues must be
really alike for all moral agents. It is only the field
in which the virtues are to be exercised,-by Marcus
Aurelius or Epictetus, by prince or slave, by the old
man or the boy, the rich or the poor, the man or the
woman, nay, if there be such creatures, by Arch-
angels, and by you and me,-in which there can be
any difference. The highest is not above, nor the
lowest below, the simple, universal obligation to do
the right whenever there is a right and a wrong
between which to choose. And the choice of right
in each department of life and conduct is the exer-
cise of the special virtue belonging to that depart-
ment. To choose right speech when a lie is conven-
ient is the virtue of veracity. To choose right
dealings is the virtue of justice. To choose to bear
any suffering rather than do wrong is the virtue of
courage, and so on through the whole round of
morals. This must sound to many of you as a
mere truism and platitude; but my experience con-
vinces me that it is not superfluous repeatedly to
affirm that virtue is essentially the same thing for
every moral being, and, among moral beings, for a
"base" to "bad," or its theological analogue, "sinful." Every vice
or wrong-doing, be it the "scarlet sin" itself, the domination of
the wills and lives of others, or ungoverned passion of any kind,
is essentially and supereminently base.
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
35
man and for a woman. Thus we recognize that, in
speaking of the duties of women, we are not con-
cerned with a different set of virtues from those of
men-heroes and men-saints, but with just the same
virtues exercised in a somewhat different field. We
learn to bear in mind that, whatever be the aim and
end of the creation of a man,
the end which he
ought steadfastly to contemplate, and toward which
he should guide the whole voyage of his life,— that
same aim and end is ours, and we too must keep it
prominently before our eyes. I think we women
have reason to thank Milton for having so distinctly
and lucidly set forth the opposite and prevailing
error, the great moral heresy (as I reckon it) on
this point, so that we can recognize it in a moment
and renounce it distinctly. Milton's doctrine, as
you all know, is that man only is made directly for
God's service:
"He for God only,- she for God in him,”
Or, as he elsewhere makes Eve say to Adam,—
"God is thy law,- thou mine ! '
Now, if we women are to advance one step for-
ward, our very first leap must be over this abomi-
nable and ridiculous doctrine! For once in my life,
I find myself able to avail myself of the words of the
Westminster Catechism, and I say that we are made
36
LECTURE I.
"to know God and enjoy Him forever," to live for
Him and make ourselves like Him, and advance His
kingdom, which means the reign of justice, truth,
and love, and all this directly and immediately, and
not for God "in" any man alive.
Here is the root of the misplacement of women,
that they have been deemed by men, and have
contentedly deemed themselves, to have only a sec-
ondary purpose in the order of things. Brigham
Young's doctrine that only a woman sealed to a
man in marriage can possibly be saved, is little
more than a carrying out of our British legisla-
tor's idea, that women who do not marry (and so do
not immediately contribute to the comfort of some
particular man) are "Failures." They have no
raison d'être in creation, any more, I suppose, than
the mistletoe without the apple-tree! The Hin-
doos formerly carried out this idea to its logical
conclusion by suttee. When the man died, it was
time to burn the widow. When we cut down the
tree, the mistletoe dies. Of course there is a sense
in which every created being is made for others.
Creation is like one of those vast suspension bridges,
in which every bar and chain tends to support the
whole structure. But in this sense man also is made
for woman, the father for the son, the daughter for
the mother, and so on ad infinitum. There is no
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
37
degradation to any, but honor to all, in this view
of the solidarity of the family, the State and Hu-
manity. And why? Because every one recognizes
that it is only the secondary purpose of each to
help the other. The primary raison d'être of every
one is his own existence, and only in a secondary
sense does he exist for others. As Tennyson beauti-
fully says in the grandest lines in "In Memoriam,"
his faith is
"That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivel'd in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.”
Even the poor moth cannot be contemplated as
only "subserving" another!
Let us take it once for all thoroughly to heart.
We women have before us the noblest end to which
a finite creature may attain; and our duty is noth-
ing else than the fulfilment of the whole moral law,
the attainment of every human virtue.
How shall we now, for our present purposes, map
out this vast field of morality? Necessarily, I must
do it merely in outline, that we may pass on to the
more special subjects of these addresses.
Practical Morality includes three branches of
duty: RELIGIOUS DUTY, PERSONAL DUTY, and So-
CIAL DUTY. All Duties are, in one sense, Relig-
ious. We owe it to God to lift our souls up to the
Bing⠀
38
LECTURE I.
blessed end of union with Himself for which He
has created us; and we owe it to Him to love and
serve our fellow-men who are His children, and to
be kind to the brutes which are His creatures. But,
in speaking here of Religious Duty as a branch of
ethics, I refer to the special Duties owed directly
by man to God, whenever he recognizes that there
is above him such a Being, his Creator and Bene-
factor, the Lord of Conscience, the absolutely Holy
One, the Alpha and Omega of his existence.
"Path, Motive, Guide, Original, and End."
These, strictly speaking, RELIGIOUS DUTIES may
be classified under the heads of Thanksgiving, Re-
pentance, Prayer, Faith, Adoration, and Self-conse-
cration, and may be summed up in the canon
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God."
The second branch of Morals is PERSONAL DUTY,
the duty directly concerning ourselves, the pursuit
of the proper end of our being; inward rather than
outward virtue; being good as distinguished from
doing good. These Personal Duties may be classi-
fied under the heads of Chastity, Temperance, Verac-
ity, Courage, and the conservation of our Freedom
(whereby alone any other duty can be performed).
They may be summed up in the canon "Be per-
fect."
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
39
The third branch of Morals is SOCIAL DUTY,
the duty which concerns all our fellow-creatures.
These duties may be classified in various ways. In
these Lectures, we shall treat them in order as re-
gards the objects of each Duty; namely, Duties of
the Family, Duties of the Household, of Society,
and of the State. All these Social Duties may be
summed up in the canon "Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself."
Now, of this great trinity of human duties, Relig-
ious, Personal, and Social, we need not concern our-
selves in these Lectures with the first, seeing that
no one in Christian countries has been silly enough
to suggest that there is any difference between the
Religious Duties of a man and those of a woman,—
unless, indeed, it be that a religious man is bidden to
let his "light shine before men, that they may glo-
rify his Father in Heaven," while a woman is gen-
erally counselled to place her divine light carefully
under a bushel!
There remain PERSONAL and SOCIAL Duty for
our consideration; and the first thing to be done is
to determine their relative rank in the hierarchy of
moral obligations, so that, if they ever seem to clash
(they cannot really do so), we may know at once
which of the two possesses the first claim on our
obedience.
40
LECTURE I.
Do not be shocked or startled if I lay it down
as an unquestionable principle that Personal Duties
have supreme obligation, and must never be post-
poned to Social ones. I must explain this doc-
trine fully.
Sing
We hear a great deal of Social Duty in these days
under the name of Altruism; and, as much of the
philosophy of the hour has relegated God to the
land of shadows and cut off from man that hope
of Immortality which gives to virtue its infinite ex-
tension, it follows of course that Social Duty must
come to be considered as the supreme and only real
moral obligation, and even the most sacred Personal
Duties end in being ranked and estimated according
to the influence they happen to exercise on the wel-
fare of the community.
I cannot too strenuously express my dissent from
this entire view of morality. As I believe that
Virtue is a far higher thing, a more desirable thing
even to the weakest of us, than Happiness, so (as I
have just said) I believe that we have been made
primarily for Virtue, and only secondarily, and, as
far as may be compatible with our primary end, for
Happiness; and I cannot listen to the base theory
of human existence which makes of such things as
Truth and Purity and Holiness of Heart only con-
venient characteristics tending generally to make
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
41
the community in which they abound a little more
orderly and comfortable. On the contrary, I be-
lieve that the individual himself, the community
itself, the very material world itself, all exist for the
purpose that human spirits may rise through the
paths of mortal excellence up into loftier regions of
purity, love, and holiness, to a beatitude compared
to which our poor Happiness of earth will be utterly
forgotten.
Therefore, I hold that, whenever Personal and So-
cial Duties seem to come into collision, the Personal
Duty must have the precedence. We must not sac-
rifice our Veracity or Chastity or Temperance, in the
vain hope of benefiting our neighbors, for these two
plain reasons: first, because as Virtue is the true
end of our being, and we can only choose virtue
for ourselves and not for another, and can never
make anybody else virtuous (only in an indirect way
help him to virtue), it follows that it is absurd to
postpone our own virtue to any lesser object. And,
secondly, because we can never really benefit any-
body by doing wrong on his behalf, and the truest
and surest way in which we can serve our fellow-
men is, not so much to do anything for them as to
be the very truest, purest, noblest beings we know
how. This is, I fear, a hard lesson to take to heart;
and you will pardon me if, in addressing women, I
42
LECTURE I.
dwell on it specially, because I think it is a mat-
ter on which the most generous-natured women
are most apt to err. There have been hundreds
of women who, like Judith of old, or like the pit-
eous, poverty-stricken mother in Les Misérables,
will sacrifice their chastity to serve their race or
their children. There are thousands, tens of thou-
sands of women, who, like the wife of "Auld Robin
Gray," have made unloving marriages (which are in
truth, though not in name, unchaste likewise) to aid
their parents in distress, and even to gratify their
wishes. And, again, there are thousands of women
(and of men also) who are ready to sacrifice their
veracity to do charitable actions; to conceal some
one's faults, or help some one to employment; and,
in short, to bear false witness for their neighbors,-
the reverse of the noble and sweet examples of Jean-
nie Deans and Mary Barton. And lastly there are
millions of women throughout the world whose free-
dom is wholly robbed from them, and who for all
moral purposes are little better than slaves, and who
submit patiently to this under the notion that it is
a duty to husband or father. Now, on every one
of these kinds of self-oblations, the same sentence
must be passed. They are mistakes,-often gen-
erous, affecting, heart-rending mistakes, but always
mistakes. No good can ever come of them. The
G
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
43
highest ends of human life are spoiled by them, and
the benefit they aim at is never worth that which
is forfeited." *
No, my friends, it is a mere truism, but at the
same time a profound truth, to say, "It can never be
right to do wrong." It is not even right to suffer
one kind of wrong,- that is the wrong which robs
us of our sacred birthright of moral freedom. The
*The following story was told to me by the gentleman to whom
it happened. He had a butler who fell into habits of intoxication.
After threatening him several times with dismissal, the gentleman
was compelled, after a very gross case of drunkenness, to send him
away. The man implored him to give him a character which would
enable him to obtain another place; but this Mr. S. conscientiously
refused to do. Time after time, the butler was on the point of ob-
taining employment, but was rejected when the silence of his late
master on the matter of sobriety betrayed the reasons for his dis-
missal. At last, the man, much impoverished and driven to the
wall, wrote a piteous letter to Mr. S., vowing that, if he would but
once recommend him, he would take the pledge; and adding that,
if he refused, he had resolved to make an end of himself, as he had
no further hope of earning his bread. The master was greatly dis-
turbed by this appeal, and only by most painful effort held to his
duty of veracity, for weeks afterward fearing in every newspaper
to read of some tragedy connected with his unfortunate servant.
Years, however, passed before he heard of him again, and then he
received a letter from Australia. The ex-butler had become a pros-
perous and sober man, and wrote to thank his old master for the
firmness wherewith he had refused his entreaty. Had you sent
me sir," he said, "to another place, I should have fallen again
under the same temptation. You compelled me to break away from
my old life, and I was saved."
""
44
LECTURE I.
only remaining fragment of the apocryphal Gospel
of St. Bartholomew contains this extraordinary text:
"If the neighbor of an elect person sin, half the
guilt of the sin belongs to the elect person, for, if he
had displayed before him the beauty of holiness, he
would not have sinned." Making allowance for
Eastern hyperbole, there is here a great truth. If
we could but thoroughly reflect the divine goodness.
in our hearts, we should be as moons in the sky of
mortal night. We all catch goodness and piety and
love from one another, or, on the contrary, catch cor-
ruption and cruelty, in a much more direct way than
we receive any influence from mere acts or words.
It is the living man or woman, himself or herself,
who lifts us up or drags us down, and in whose
"sphere" (as the Swedenborgians say) we are ele-
vated and purified, or polluted and degraded; made
nobler, larger, by the one, or belittled by the other.
All the greatest heroes and prophets and saints of
history have influenced mankind far more by what
they were than by what they said or did. The whole
moral life of the further East has been colored by
the mind and heart of Gautama Buddha; and the
stupendous change which has passed over humanity
during the last eighteen hundred years and which
we name Christianity has had for its mainspring
(acting to this hour through millions of hearts) not
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
45
so much the Sermon on the Mount, or even the mar-
tyrdom of Calvary, as the personal character of Jesus
Christ.
Now you will please cast a glance back over the
outline of Practical Morals we have just sketched:
1. RELIGIOUS DUTY; summed up in the Love of
God. Of this we shall say no more at present.
2. PERSONAL DUTY; summed up in the Lifting
of our own souls to God and goodness.·
3. SOCIAL DUTY; summed up in the Love of our
Neighbor.
The next Lecture will be devoted to the consider-
ation of Personal Duty, with special regard to its
bearing on the life of women, and to the mistakes
which prevail among women concerning it. The
four subsequent Lectures will be concerned with
Social Duty, in its ever-widening circles from the
Family to the Household, from the Household to
Society, and from Society to the State and the
World.
In conclusion, my friends, let me appeal to you, if
you have not hitherto thought of these great lessons
of morals in the light in which I have endeavored to
place them, and if now they strike you as true and
right, to take to heart practically what has been
said about our human rank and our human duties.
46
LECTURE I.
A great living teacher once made to me the curious.
observation that he had noticed that, when a woman
was persuaded that anything was right or true, she
generally tried to shape her conduct and creed
accordingly. "But" (he added with comic despair),
"when I have, as I think, entirely convinced a man
in the same way, and expect to see some results of
his conviction, behold! he goes on precisely as he
did before, and as if nothing had happened." Now,
will you not take heart of grace and thus act up,
womanlike, to any convictions which I may have been
happy enough to bring to you, and evermore hence-
forth bear in mind that you are not first women, and
then, perhaps, rational creatures, but first of all hu-
man beings, and then, secondly, women,- human
beings of the mother-sex?
Let me, if I may without presumption, speak to
the young ones among you, as a woman who has
borne somewhat of the battle and heat of the day.
Awake to recognize your true rank in creation, your
noble destination. Laugh at the doctrine that you
are a sort of moon, with no raison d'être but to go
circling round and round a very earthy planet; or
a kind of parasite,—ivy or honeysuckle in the for-
est. You may be, you probably are, less strong,
less clever, less rich, and less well-educated than
most of the men about you. But moral rank does
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
47
not depend on these things. You are a rational
free agent, a child of God, destined to grow nearer
to Him and more like Him through the ages of your
immortality. As such, you are the equal (ebenwür-
dig, as people say of royal alliances) with the loft-
iest of created beings, not one of whom can have a
higher destiny. Cast then aside, for shame's sake,
the faults and follies which have accumulated round
our womanhood through the long centuries of the
minority of our sex. Little girls may fitly play with
toys and dress dolls, and chatter in the nursery for
hours over some weighty concern of the baby-house;
but it is a pitiful sight to see grown women making
all life a child's play. Rise, I pray you, to the true
dignity of a human being to whom petty feelings
and small vanities and servile, wheedling tricks must
be repugnant and abominable. Respect yourself
too much to dress like a doll or a peacock, or to be-
tray that you must have spent hours in devising the
trimming of a gown. And respect other women,
also, and never join men in sneering at the deplora-
ble weaknesses which have followed from their
wretched circumstances and education. When I
see, in the street, a poor, threadbare, broken-spirited
woman, wearing that peculiar look of patient, hope-
less endurance, which belongs to women only, to
trodden-down wives or starving widows, my heart
aches for the hapless creature.
48
LECTURE I.
But when I see another woman, healthy and pros-
perous as the world goes, abasing herself to the
mean artifices and cajolings, the wheedlings and
subterfuges which some wives use to manage their
husbands, when I hear her tell lies to her lord and
master to avert his wrath, or to hide from him her
most innocent actions, then my heart burns with
indignation, not so much against the woman her-
self, as against the dead weight of life-long oppres-
sion which has warped her into this pitiful, superan-
nuated school-girl. I cannot laugh at these things.
I cannot heap scorn on such women. I scorn too
much the whole theory of woman's life which has
made them what they are.
I know it is a difficult thing to keep in mind
the true dignity of our womanhood in face of the
deep underlying sentiment of something like con-
tempt (or let us call it disprezzo) wherewith all but
the most generous of men regard us. Sometimes
it would seem as if the conventional courtesy and
excessive outward show of respect where with every
gentleman treats a lady adds the sting of irony to
the consciousness we feel that, at bottom, nine out
of ten of these bowing and smiling acquaintances
think our whole sex unfit to exercise the smallest
political right, or indeed to entertain a political or
religious opinion which it might be worth their
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
49
while to weigh against a feather. Of course, the
origin of this disprezzo is not far to seek. From a
child, a man has seen women debarred by law from
the exercise of those functions to which he is to be
admitted at the outset of manhood; and he has too
often, furthermore, seen his father treat his mother's
judgment about business of all kinds, as if he were
condescending to let her talk on matters of which
the ultimate decision must always rest with the
nobler sex. The very same men who will indite
most affecting things in prose and verse about the
sacred influence of a mother, and tell us that that
of a good mother over her son is something quite
divine, those same men do their very worst, by inces-
santly snubbing and setting down their wives, and
treating their opinions as of no consequence, to
reduce this "sacred influence" to a minimum. It
is all very well to teach a boy in his catechism to
"honor his mother" as well as his father. But
when he comes to find that his mother is classified
by the constitution of his country along with Crim-
inals, Idiots, Lunatics, and Minors, is it likely he
will honor her?
Of course there is no need to assume affected
gravity or to become a moral prig by way of assert-
ing our dignity. On the contrary, affectation of all
kinds is a contemptible foible which does our sex
50
LECTURE I.
infinite damage, whether it be the affectation of
timidity and overstrained modesty common twenty
years ago, or the newer fashion of affectation of
"fastness" and mannishness in dress and habits.
It must be from our inward sense that must radi-
ate the true behavior of dignified humanity. And
this true dignity is attainable by every woman,
young or old, rich or poor, clever or simple. Many
of us necessarily lead, what seem to outsiders, small
and narrow lives. We are poor,-alas! how many
women, even those living in splendid homes, are
miserably shackled in the use of a few pounds or
shillings!—many of us have feeble health, and very
limited powers of any sort. But all this need not
interfere with real dignity of character. People go
on repeating George Herbert's wonderful line:-
"Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws
Makes that and the action fine,"
but they do not note how it covers the whole mean-
ing of homely lives. She who does everything "as
for God's laws" brings an element of beauty, nay, of
true greatness, into the very humblest mortal lot.
It is a vast responsibility which lies on us, my
friends, to do whatever may be in our power to lift
up the Womanhood of the Future, to reclaim it from
the faults, and save it from the shame and suffering
of the past, and to help on our whole sex to lead
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
51
diviner lives-lives more blessed for themselves, and
assuredly also more blessed for men-than women
have yet led in any age or country. Progress, Civil-
ization, Christianity, will have done their work only
when this is achieved. Men can be truly civilized
and Christianized only when women are free and
ennobled, and woman can be truly emancipated
only when men are moralized and purified. The
two "rise and fall together," as our poet-philosopher
Tennyson says so truly. He who labors to lift
Woman labors in the most effectual way to lift
Man. He who does most to cure woman of her
weakness, her frivolity, and her servility, will like-
wise at the same stroke do most to cure man of his
brutality, his selfishness, and his sensuality. The
human race can only advance like the human body,
by the joint motion of both its limbs.
But if this rising tide of womanly energy and
freedom should indeed lift us permanently, if,—as I
fervently hope and believe, we are at the beginning
of a new era for our sex and for the world, then how
immeasurably important it is that we should each
and all take profoundly to heart the seriousness of
our womanly duty, the heavy obligation which rests
on us to do all we can to direct this great movement
aright, and to make it the blessing it ought to be,
and not a failure and a calamity! I know no better
52
LECTURE I.
way to do this than to cast behind us the faults and
follies of the past, and rise to meet our brighter,
nobler destiny,—even, my friends, as we would rise
up in a church to join a hymn of praise and prayer.
LECTURE II
PERSONAL DUTY.
In our last discussion, we classified human duty
under three heads, RELIGIOUS DUTY, PERSONAL
DUTY, and SOCIAL DUTY.
The wide and deep topic of Religious Duty we
leave aside in this Course. No one, in Christian
lands, holds that a woman's duties of Prayer,
Thanksgiving, Repentance, Faith, etc., toward
God, differ from those of a man. The books
devoted to such themes are equally addressed to
both sexes.*
The second great branch of duty, Personal Duty,
is the subject of our present consideration. In the
last lecture, you will remember, we advanced so far
as to rank these duties above Social Duties. In
*If any reader should care to learn the author's views on this
subject, they will be found in a volume entitled Religious Duty,
1 vol. 8vo, 2d edition, Williams & Norgate.
54
LECTURE II.
other words, whenever it would appear that a Per-
sonal Duty (such as Chastity or Veracity) clashes
with a Social Duty (such as Benevolence), the Per-
sonal Duty must, at all hazards, be chosen. It is,
for example, an offence to bear false witness in
favor of our neighbor, as well as against him.
An inquiry into the grounds and reasons why
each special personal virtue holds its place in morals
would carry us far indeed beyond the limits of these
Lectures. Very interesting and also very lofty
views on the subject may be found, by those who
may care to go deeply into it, in Kant's Metaphysic
of Ethics. All that I can here afford to do is to
mark those features of personal character which will
be admitted by every one to constitute that Moral
Perfection which is the aim of existence for a
rational free agent. I think no hesitation will be
felt in granting that this ideal of moral perfection.
includes the following five Virtues,— or, as we may
express it, the fulfilment of these five duties,-
Chastity, Temperance, Veracity, Courage, and the
Vindication of Rightful Liberty.
Merely to contemplate the opposite vices is
enough to satisfy us that any one of them must cast
down the soul from the heights of its upward flight
to the very mire of earth; and that neither the un-
chaste person, nor the drunkard, nor the liar, nor
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
55
the coward, nor the voluntary slave, can be fulfilling
the purpose of his existence, or ascending toward
the divine ideal. It is, however, a very poor and
inadequate conception of any virtue which we form
when we think of it only as the antithesis of the
opposite vice, the negation of the corresponding evil.
On the contrary, I beg you will carry with you
through all our future discussions, both of Personal
and Social Duties, the invigorating thought that
virtue is the positive thing, and vice the negative.
Both etymologically and philosophically, wrong
means "wrung from" the right. It is no less unsci-
entific to say, "Whatever is not wrong is right,"
than to say, "Whatever is not cold is heat." In each
case, the truth is that the "negative of right is
wrong," the "negative of caloric is cold." It may
seem to some of you that this distinction is a mere
logical quibble; but it has, I am deeply persuaded,
vast practical importance. So long as we look on
right as the mere absence of wrong, we can never
comprehend its affirmative importance and essential
vitality. To "do no harm" is the extent of our
moral ambition, not "do good and be good." In the
dawn of morality, it was inevitable that the first
thing perceived was the turpitude of the worst
kinds of offences; and accordingly the Hebrew and
Buddhist Decalogues, and the forty-two Command-
56
LECTURE II.
ments of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, are nearly
exclusively negative. Do not murder, do not steal,
and so on. It is one of the supreme characteristics
of the teachings of Christ that he converted the
negative Mosaic commandments into the positive
Christian law. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God;
Thou shalt love thy neighbor." The Rabbins had
long before had a golden rule (attributed to Rabbi
Hillel of the Babylonish captivity), "Whatever you
would not wish your neighbor to do to you, do it not
to him. This is the law, the rest is only an exposi-
tion of it." Christ said (Matt. vi., 12), "Therefore,
whatever you would that men should do unto you,
do ye even so unto them, for this is the law and the
prophets.
""*
Virtue then, the free choice of duty, you will
please always to bear in mind is here understood to
be the affirmative, the positive, thing. To fail in the
performance of a duty is, in strict ethical language,
a FAULT. To do that which is the opposite of the
duty is an OFFENCE.
Let us now turn to consider these various Personal
Duties, the sum of which, perfectly fulfilled, would
constitute Personal Virtue. Regarding them from
our particular stand-point in these Lectures on the
*The same maxim in its negative form is to be found in Isocrates
(in Nicoc), and in both its negative and positive form in the Yun Lu
of Confucius, Maxim 24.
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
57
Duties of Women, I suppose almost every one here
present will be struck by the fact that some of them
seem to have been set apart by public opinion for
the practice of women, and others for the practice
of men.
The honor of each sex is supposed to be
involved only in maintaining its particular virtues,—
chastity and temperance for women, and veracity
and courage for men; and neither is supposed to be
essentially disgraced by failing in the virtues of the
other. It is difficult to find words to express how
absurd is this idea,— as if the perfect human being,
either man or woman, must not unite all the virtues,
and as if the opposite vices were not equally dis-
honorable and degrading for either the one sex or
the other! The matter is too grave for a jest; but,
as I have thought of how to illustrate the abject
folly and stupidity of the prevailing view, nothing
better has occurred to me than the old Joe Miller
story of the two Irishmen who set off to walk from
Charing Cross to Hampstead Heath, and asked a
neighbor, "What is the distance?" "About four
miles," was the reply. "Ah, then," said the Irish-
men, cheerfully setting off, "as there are two of us
to get there, it is only two miles apiece!" When-
ever you hear of honorable men, who are only cour-
ageous and truthful, and not chaste and temperate,
or of virtuous women who are chaste and temperate,
58
LECTURE II.
but are cowards and liars, I beg you will bear this
little parable in mind: They have set out to walk to
Hampstead, and think it is only two miles apiece!
Notice also the pleasant compromise by which the
easiest duties for each have been chosen by the sexes
for their respective chevaux de bataille. It is small
praise to any woman to say she is temperate and
chaste. To feel any inclination to be otherwise is
already a disgrace. And, in the same way, it is no
special honor to a man to be courageous and to speak
the truth. The natural boldness and combativeness
which we see in all male animals should suffice to
make his bravery and veracity innate, and mere mat-
ters of temperament. As Aristotle justly says, such
virtues, and also generosity, ought always to be
spontaneous, and not acquired with effort. But for
a woman to be courageous and true, and for a man
to curb his passions and be chaste and temperate, is
really praiseworthy and honorable, and should ac-
cordingly be the ground of respect, the point of
honor for each sex, and not vice versa as the case
now stands.
C
1st. For the duty of chastity, you will not wish
me to undertake any elaborate discussion of its
grounds, nor will it be needful. No one, I presume,
will question that the ideal of a perfect human being
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
59
is wholly incompatible with that of licentious rela-
tions with the opposite sex. The perfect human life,
as conceived by the cultivated moral consciousness,
is essentially a life of chastity, not, of course, of
celibacy,—that is a grievous mistake which we owe to
the Christian Fathers and their violent recalcitration
from the corruption of their epoch,- but of real
chastity, fidelity in marriage or a pure single life.
There are, indeed, many difficult questions connected
with the relations of the sexes which must be opened
up soon, when every old belief is destined to be
questioned; and I fear there is much trouble and
many mistakes and disorders before us in this direc-
tion. But in the end, and after the needle of the
compass has swung backwards and forwards a little,
I am convinced it will point steadily to the life-long
union of one man and one woman, and to the stern
prohibition of unfaithfulness, male or female. Chief
of all, I trust will be condemned and abhorred that
venal vice which is the opprobrium of the male sex
and the desolation of ours. Let every woman who
is contented to accept the theory, that we are, in a
special sense, made for men, reflect that herein the
utter sacrifice, body and soul, of tens of thousands
of women in our land, and in all lands is the logi-
cal outcome of that vile doctrine. "Women are
made for men?" Ay! then what matters it if
P
60
LECTURE II.
hecatombs of them are destroyed in a destiny worse
than death, because men ask for them? Talk of
your refuges and your penitentiaries, my well-mean-
ing sisters! Try them all! You only gather in the
flotsam and jetsam of the relentless tide. Till you
lift womanhood itself, you will never arrest, nay, you
will never importantly diminish, that dreadful curse,
the great sin of great cities! Profoundly satisfied
am I of this, that the cause of the emancipation of
women is identical with that of the purification of
society.
I think that women who have never been tempted
to the borders of unchastity, either lured by passion.
or driven by the whip of poverty and want, are
bound to speak very gently and pitifully of the falls
of their sisters; unless they happen to be assured
that miserable vanity and pleasure-seeking, and the
dry, heartless wickedness we sometimes read of
in French novels, of the class of Madame Bovary,
have led them astray. But I see, with some alarm,
that the growing sense of the duty of such merciful
treatment of the fallen is leading not a few in our
day to speak as if there was really no "fall" at all,
no change worth mentioning in a woman's life
when she has descended from the pedestal of her
maidenly or wifely purity. It seems to me that this
view is even more dangerous and further from truth
Kad
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
61
than the too stern and relentless condemnation of
former times. It is a vast and almost immeasurable
slip downward from a life of chastity to one of law-
less passion, and the general declension of the char-
acter which usually follows it is a symptom of how
profound is the injury thereby wrought. The sin
can be redeemed, I entirely believe. Even the most
vice-enthralled poor wretch, reeling out of a gin-
palace, will cast off, some time or other in the
blessed future, all pollution as a snake casts its
slough. But it is no mercy to any misguided
woman, nor to the community, to speak as if it
were a small matter for the crown of womanly
purity to be cast in the mire.
But, my friends, is there no unchastity save that
of the women who bear the brand of adultery or of
the vice stamped as such by society? Surely, we
must confess, that there has been many a mercenary,
many a venal marriage, solemnized by a bishop in
the most fashionable churches of London, which has
been in truth nothing else than a deliberate sacrifice
of true chastity,— marriages made without a spark
of love, and perhaps endured with disgust for the
base sake of wealth or station.
I cannot pursue
this painful subject; but, as I am addressing women
to whom the temptation of a worldly marriage for
themselves or their daughters is almost the only form
62
LECTURE II.
in which an offence against the great duty of chastity
is likely ever to present itself as a temptation, I
must solemnly record my conviction that the princi-
ple we all justly accept, that marriage is needful to
hallow love, is no whit more true or binding than its
converse, that love is needful to hallow marriage.
I have just said that worldly marriages are almost
the only temptations of wealthy and well - born
women. But, alas! the history of the public scan-
dals of the last few years reminds me that there is,
in some shameful cases, another. The senseless
whirl of amusements in the highest circles seems
actually to make women dizzy, till they fall into the
arms of the first man who catches them. The poor,
fluttering, foolish creatures, with their heads full of
dress and pleasure, enter the world as if it were a
ball-room, and dance down it, wild with excitement
and flattery. Then suddenly opens under their feet
a dark and fathomless oubliette of shame. We hear
a shriek or two, a murmur of gossip of the by-
standers for a little while, and then they disappear
for ever, and the ball-room sees them no more.
2d. You will notice that in all this discussion I
have spoken of chastity as a Personal Duty, and I
shall do exactly the same of temperance. It is true.
that unchastity and intemperance do harm to the
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
63
community, and are thus also offences against social
duty. But far the worst part of their guilt is its
offence against the man's or woman's own soul,- the
pollution by unchastity of that which was made to
be a temple, or the prostration of the will in brutal
intoxication, whereby the power of self-control and
self-direction is lost, and the drunkard sinks below
the level of a hog. Some of you here present will
doubtless remember how admirably Channing speaks
of this subject. I do not remember his words, but
they were to this purpose: "Men point to the drunk-
ard's home, his disordered clothing, and maudlin,
besotted face and wasted health, and talk as if these
constituted the evils of drunkenness, the reasons
why it should be renounced. But they are only the
outward symptoms, the fitting and rightful symptoms
of the dreadful injury which the man's soul and
spirit are undergoing as he sinks lower day by day,
abandoning the rank of a moral and rational being."
It is the fashion just now to say that women are
learning to drink to excess. I believe the same
thing might have been said, with as much or greater
truth, fifty or a hundred or five hundred years ago.
As the proverb has it, "Any stone is good enough
to fling at a dog"; and so some men, and some
women also, think any accusation just which can be
levelled at women. I hope that all who have the
64
LECTURE II.
progress of women at heart will refuse to join in
this sort of wholesale slander of our sex. *
*The loudest in these declamations are the doctors, men who, if
I do not grievously wrong them, have much to answer for in the
way of demoralizing weak and impressionable women, in some
cases by ordering them stimulants in excessive quantities, and in
others by leading them to a deadly concentration of their thoughts
upon disorders and weaknesses of their frames, of which the less
any one thinks the better for soul and body. It is the fashion never
to speak of the medical profession without a sickening superfluity
of laudatory epithets, which must seem equally absurd and disgust-
ing to the really good and honorable doctors who know very well
that (as the Spectator remarks) we might just as well praise all the
men who pass over Westminster Bridge as all the variety of char-
acters who obtain medical degrees. For my part, I cannot lose this
opportunity of addressing my fellow-women to say with great seri-
ousness that I believe the old dangers implied in the words
"priests, women, and families," were less than the perils of the
newer triad, "doctors, women, and families "; and urging every
wife and mother to exercise care and vigilance in dealing with a
man (if she will have a man doctor) who holds to her and her
daughters a relation quite as influential as that of the old spir-
itual director, and, if rarely abused, yet assuredly liable to abuse.
For one single point, I would ask you to reflect upon your experi-
ence of that crying grievance and shame of our sex,- the valetudi-
narianism of innumerable fine ladies, who, if they were obliged to
scrub floors and nurse a dozen children, would probably be ruddy
and buxom dames to-morrow; and to consider whether, if their
medical attendants did their straightforward duty by them, we
should see these women for twenty years on the sofa, their wretched
husbands driven from their dispiriting homes, and their children
left to governesses and servants, while the doctor draws a comfort-
able income of fifty or a hundred or two hundred a year from the
unhappy household ?
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
65
That there are now and at all times peculiar
temptations for women to intemperance cannot be
questioned. The wonder seems to be that with their
fluctuating strength and spirits, and all the burdens
of suffering and poverty pressing upon the lower
classes of women, they yield much more rarely to
the goad of pain than men do to the lure of the
mere pleasure of intoxication. The fact that a
drunken woman is so ineffably disgusting a being
should not cause us to overlook the palliations
which, in the case of the poor, may be offered for
her miserable self-abandonment. It is one of the
numberless instances of the double harshness where-
with the sins of women are visited that, till very
lately, it has been commonly taken for granted
that female drunkards were irreclaimable, and that
it was useless to labor for their benefit. I am thank-
ful to hear that there is now in South London a
Home for Female Inebriates, which is accomplishing
miracles in the way of reformation, under the pat-
ronage of that "friend of all the friendless," Lord
Shaftesbury.
One word of practical caution I will venture to
say on this topic to my younger hearers who have
not yet tested their own constitutions or powers of
self-restraint. Whatever may be the oscillations of
your spirits or strength, I entreat of you never to
66
LECTURE II.
strive to level them up by what men now call "nips,"
which are, in plain language, drams. It is these
"nips," taken at odd times, or in secret, which cre-
ate the craving wherein lies the peril. No one, I
believe, becomes a victim of intemperance except
through dram-drinking; and it is very doubtful if
anybody can persist long in the habit without be-
coming intemperate. One word more.
Let not any
doctor or other adviser lead you often to seek relief
from pain or sleeplessness in chloral or any other
opiate. Be assured that we never play with our
brains and nerves without paying sooner or later
a heavy penalty in diminished mental power and
enfeebled will. These forms of intemperance do not
horrify refined women like common intoxication, and
do not seem to carry with them the same guilt and
degradation; but, for that very reason, they are more
dangerous, and, as a fact, they partake of the same
character, and may only too easily lead to similar
destruction.
3d. There is the great Personal Duty of veracity.
Again, I beg you to note that I classify the obliga-
tion to speak truth as primarily a Personal Duty, and
only in a secondary sense a Social Duty. Truth is,
indeed, the chastity of the lips. Simplicity, honesty,
veracity of speech and action, are all inevitably in-
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
67
cluded in the conception of a perfect human charac-
ter. Kant even considers lying as the worst personal
offence: he says (Elementology of Ethics, Book I.,
ch. ii.): “The highest violation of the duty owed by
man to himself, considered as a moral being, singly,
is a departure from truth, or lying. That every de-
liberate untruth in uttering one's thoughts must bear
this name in ethics is of itself evident, although in
law it be only styled fraud or falsehood, when it vio-
lates the rights of others,-ethics giving no title to
vice on account of its harmlessness; for the dishonor
(i.e., to be an object of ethical disdain) which it en-
tails accompanies the liar like his shadow.... We
say nothing here of the damage he may occasion to
other people, the damage being no characteristic of
the vice, for it would then be turned into a viola-
tion of the duty due to others; nor yet of the dam-
age done by the liar to himself, for then the lie
would be a mere error in prudence. . . . A lie is the
abandonment and, as it were, the annihilation of
the dignity of a man."
Starting from this nobler view of the law of ve-
racity, nothing is more pitiful than to hear the dis-
cussions which not unfrequently take place about
the lawfulness of saying that which is untrue in one
or another contingency. It is, of course, very easy
to imagine these casuistical cases, such as the famil-
68
LECTURE II.
iar stock instance of the wife of Hugo Grotius con-
cealing her husband from his enemies, and denying
his presence. But as the old Roman, Aulus Gellius,
asks pertinently: "If any one says that it is lawful
to tell lies on this or that occasion, let us ask him
where (if we may tell lies at all) he will draw the
line and stop? At one lie? or a dozen, which may
be needful to cover it? Or at sworn lies? Or at a
whole series of perjuries?" We may pardon a man
or woman who in a great and pressing emergency
uses a falsehood, just as we may pardon a man who
amid the roar of cannon loses his nerve and runs
away in battle, or a confessor who flinches from
the stake. But the true virtue of truthfulness
knows no exceptions. It is, as I have repeated, a
Personal Duty; and there is no use in showing that
it may be a social convenience to neglect it. The
personal law of truth cannot be abrogated for any
such reason, any more than the personal law of chas-
tity. Most of the disputes and casuistries which
have taken place about lies have arisen from the
disputants thinking of truth only as it regarded the
person spoken to. If they had thought first (as they
ought to have done) of the speaker, they would have
perceived that the facts on which they relied for can-
celling the obligations of truth only touched the
social and secondary obligation, and left the Personal
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
69
Duty as fixed as before. If we keep clearly in view
that we are dishonored by suffering a lie to pass our
lips (and the better we tell it, the more we are dis-
honored), we shall not feel much concern to inquire
whether the person to whom we may happen to ad-
dress our remarks has any right to have truth told
to him. It is a double sin to tell a lie to an honest,
trustful friend; but it is quite a sufficiently heinous
single (i.e., personal sin) to tell one to an enemy.
Here, again, we come on the traces of the misera-
ble heresy of the distinction between masculine and
feminine virtue. We are all agreed that a mascu-
line liar ought to be kicked. Why should not a
feminine liar be sent to Coventry? I do not know
whether the common accusation be just, and whether
women, on the whole, do tell more falsehoods than
men. I am glad to say I have very few friends who
tell lies! Still, I think women are not so indignant
when their word is doubted as they ought to be,
and that there is a certain inaccuracy and prevarica-
tion common enough among ladies which we do not
find to the same extent among the men of the same
class. When we descend in the social scale, I am
afraid veracity becomes more and more rare in either
sex, just as it is rare among all the Southern nations.
A clear-sighted friend once defined to me exactly the
sort of shuffling to which I allude, as practised by
70
LECTURE II.
English ladies, compared to the frank mendacity of
a Frenchwoman. Both an English and a French
wife, she supposed, wish to go to A (some place
which their husbands forbade them to visit). The
Frenchwoman goes, and on her return simply tells
her husband she has not been to A. The English-
woman likewise goes to A, but she also goes to B,
for the express purpose of being able to say she has
gone to B; and on her return she tells her husband
only of her visit to B.
I fear this kind of thing is only too common in
some sad lives,-the vice of a servile sex! God help
us out of it!
A good deal of confusion exists, especially in the
minds of some imperfectly educated women, as to
the precise line which separates truthfulness from
falsehood; and nothing is more common than to find
in a certain class what I am always inclined to call
the Pharisaism of veracity,— the straining at a gnat
of small verbal accuracy, while the whole spirit of
truthfulness is sometimes absent from the heart. Of
question about saying
this kind is the ridiculous
"Not at home" to visitors. Of course, it would be
simpler, if we were to adopt the French and Italian
form of asking whether a lady "received" that day,
and desire our servants to say that we did or did not
"receive," as the case might be. But the cordial
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
71
G
spirit of English society long ago established the
conventional phrase of "Not at home," as if cour-
teously to imply that, were we in our homes, we
should never shut the door on our friends; and this
old-fashioned formula has for a century, I should im-
agine, been understood by everybody to signify pre-
cisely the same as if we said, "Does not receive.”
What, then, has the question of veracity to do
with the matter? Words (it cannot too often be
repeated) have no absolute meaning, only the mean-
ing we agree to attach to them, and in which we
know they will be understood. If we use words lit-
erally exact, but conveying as we know a false im-
pression, we incur the guilt of a lie, often of a pecu-
liarly base kind of lie. If, on the contrary, we
use a conventional phrase, not exactly or literally·
describing the fact, but conveying, as we know, a
true impression, we shall incur no guilt, we have told
no lie. I shall return to this subject in discussing
the Social Duty of straightforwardness with our
neighbors.
But is it only in actual speech or written words
that we are bound to be truthful? To me, it seems
that for some people all life is a lie, though they
never actually utter a falsehood. Lift your thoughts
to what a truthful life must be, and see what it in-
cludes, and what a noble, splendid thing it would be
C
+
72
LECTURE II.
to live it out. In such a life there would be nothing
to conceal, least of all our convictions on the most
solemn topics of human thought. How many thou-
sands of men and women at this particular time keep
their opinions on religion a secret, and go on acting
as if they believed what they do not believe, it would
be impossible to calculate. Of course, I do not mean
to imply that it is any one's duty to make public, or
even to speak to their nearest friends of the vague
doubts, the endless weary questionings which tor-
ment nearly all thinking minds, at this time of tran-
sition. On this point, I am much of Goethe's opin-
ion: "If you have got any faith, for God's sake give
me a share of it; but you may keep your doubts to
yourself. I have plenty of my own." But when the
doubts cease to be merely gaseous or fluid, and when
they consolidate into crystallized forms of disbelief
on one side or belief on the other, then I think we
are bound to avow the change which has passed over
us. It is one of the bad signs of this age that no-
body seems willing to bear the smallest inconven-
ience or reproach or coolness from their relatives,
for the sake of convictions for which our ancestors
would have gone to the stocks or the stake. A man
or woman who spends his life with people from
whom he carefully conceals the very root and main-
spring of his own moral character is in a position
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
73
so false, so undignified, so warped and unnatural
that I am at a loss to see how he or she can keep
clear of actual mendacity. But, even supposing this
to be possible, little is gained; for the whole life is
mendacious. On the other hand, the advantage to
the heart and soul of straightforwardness in this
great matter is absolutely measureless. When this
is secured, then the "happy warrior" fights evermore
under his true colors; and the whole battle of life
becomes clear and simplified.
Again, in all our social relations there is the pos-
sibility of being guilty of wretched untruthfulness,
without actually telling any downright lie. Some
miserable people try to appear better born than they
are, or to move in better society than they really
frequent; and all they say in company is said avec
l'intention to convey some impression of their fashion
or importance. This seems a childish vanity enough,
but it is abominably base and little-minded. And,
again, women have acquired the shameful reputation
of being insincere and treacherous friends, because
they falsely make display of the outward tokens of
affection toward other women, whom they really do
not love at all, and whom they ought in candor to
treat only with courtesy, not with caresses. All
this will come more fully to be considered by and
by in speaking of woman's Duty in Society.
74
LECTURE II.
4th. COURAGE is a Personal Duty. To shrink
from pain and danger, when we are called on to bear
the one or confront the other, is to renounce our
moral obligations for a motive so base that even the
headlong pursuit of pleasure may be deemed less to
attaint the dignity of our nature. The reason why
courage is given its lofty place among masculine
virtues is because, like "Great Heart" in Pilgrim's
Progress, it is the guard and protector of the whole
company. In the absence of courage there can be
no security against any moral declension whatsoever,
since the coward may be bullied and frightened into
any crime.
There is no point wherein the great moral heresy
of the different nature of virtue in men and in
women has had more miserable consequences than
in this matter of courage; and now we who re-
nounce that heresy must make it one of our first
cares to develop among us this virtue of courage,
hitherto so neglected. We can never be respected
by men, can never, indeed, truly respect ourselves,
till we are conscious that in the presence of physical
danger we shall at least bravely strive to comport
ourselves well, and that browbeatings and intimida-
tions will not cause us to budge an inch from the
path of duty. Of course, no woman can be so dull
of observation as not to know that men are invari-
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
75
ably flattered by the abject appeal of a woman
(especially if she be young and pretty) to save
her from some transient peril,— a runaway horse, a
swaying boat, an irascible bull. Obviously, it makes
the smallest masculine soul swell with Herculean
glory to be clasped round the arms (or, in extreme
cases, the legs), and besought to exhibit the heroism
of his sex. Possibly, he may be shaking in his
shoes; and the application to help anybody but him-
self may be rather inopportune, especially if the
suppliant be plain or elderly. Still, it is rarely re-
sented; and clever women who lay themselves out
to charm are well aware of the fact, and never
fail to simulate cowardice, even if they happen to
possess brazen nerves and too much common-sense
to apprehend danger where no danger exists. Thus
it comes to pass that our sex bears the disgrace, not
only of a great deal of genuine poltroonery, but also
of much which is mere affectation.
Quite of recent years, I am thankful to note, many
young English ladies are beginning to take pride in
physical activity and vigor. They ride across coun-
try, take long walking tours, swim, run, play lawn-
tennis,― exhibit, in short, the types of the Dianas,
Hippolytas, and Atalantas of old. This is a glori-
ous physical reformation, which cannot fail to pro-
duce far-reaching, beneficial consequences on the
76
LECTURE II.
health and animal spirits both of future women and
of the men to whom they will be mothers. Nor
will the good results stop at the invigorated bodily
frames, but inevitably extend to the whole char-
acter of women, who will thus learn to laugh at the
affectation of timidity, and take pride in steady
nerves and unflinching "pluck."
Meanwhile, whether you can or cannot share the
benefits of wholesome athletic exercise, there is a
rule which I would earnestly commend to your adop-
tion. Never allow yourself to talk as if it were
possible for you, when danger comes, to play the
coward. Assume it as a matter of course that you
will always behave bravely, calmly, unselfishly.
Then, when the moment of trial comes, you will at
least feel the impulse to do the courageous and
heroic thing. It is possible, of course, that you may
flinch. "The flesh will quiver when the pincers
tear"; but it will be against your resolution and
intention, involuntary failure, not a deliberate base-
ness. If, on the contrary, you permit yourself to
share the horrid habit, common now even among
young men (more shame to them!), of proclaiming,
with a grin of superior wisdom, that they never
mean to risk their valuable lives for anybody or
anything, you will have prepared yourself to be a
dastard, and, when the moment arrives, you will
probably show yourself such, as a matter of course.
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
77
It is quite true that in several departments of
courage it costs us women more effort to be brave
than it costs those iron-nerved, bull-natured men
who are born with the boldness of lions or bull-dogs,
and have all their lives been trained to make cour-
age their grand point of honor. In place of all this,
we have very sensitive frames and easily excited
nerves, and, instead of being trained to make cour-
age our point of honor, we have been caressed and
petted in proportion as we have behaved without
self-command or dignity. But what inference must
we draw from these facts? Simply that we ought
to take more pains than men to steady our nerves,
to calm our excitement, and to determine resolutely
on courageous action wherever we are liable to fail.
The virtue which is innate with them must be ac-
quired by us. Let us glance over three or four
forms of courage, and observe how women stand as
regards them.
First, for the form of passive physical courage
which consists in patient endurance of bodily pain,
as, for example, that of disease, or of a surgical oper-
ation. Probably, we are here on a par with men in
courage, or even before them. The female patients
in a hospital, I fancy, will generally be found to
complain neither more often nor more loudly than
the male patients, perhaps less so. I once asked a
--
.78
LECTURE II.
dentist whether gentlemen or ladies gave him most
trouble, and he replied: "Oh, gentlemen, beyond
question. I operated upon a great many officers
just before they went to the Crimean war, and I
assure you that many of them who are now Bala-
klava and Inkerman heroes behaved in a very unhe-
roic way indeed in the chair in which you are sit-
ting! Women scream a little, but are always
ready to thank me for what I do for them. Men
moan and groan and abuse me!" It would be
amusing to inquire whether other dentists make
similar reports. Any way, this passive courage is
a grand and beautiful virtue. All honor to the
women who exhibit it, and make many a sick-room
seem like a cage where God's bird is practising the
songs of heaven.
Next, we have active physical courage, the cour-
age which confronts danger and rushes into battle
or fire or water, or amid the plague-stricken, or
which preserves presence of mind amid great acci-
dents, and does calmly and steadily whatever may be
possible in self-defence or for the defence of others.
This is the order of courage in which women are
specially deficient, but it is instructive to ask fur-
ther, How and when do they betray the lack of this
active physical courage? If I am not mistaken, it
will be found that on great occasions they are wont
M
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
79
to exhibit as much of it as men, and that it is
the small, insignificant occurrences and accidents
wherein they betray themselves so deplorably as
cowards. Let us reflect! Were the early Christian
women who allowed themselves to be thrown to the
lions, or were tortured in a thousand hideous ways,
were they dastards? Or the female martyrs in
the persecutions of later ages? Or the patriot
women like Judith or Zenobia or Boadicea, or Joan
of Arc or Charlotte Corday? To whatever line of
heroism men may point, there also we may almost
surely find a woman deserving of the same Cross of
Honor. I recollect my father telling me that in the
old Mahratta wars he had scaled the walls of for-
tresses while the enemy were hurling stones on their
assailants from the battlements above, and shooting
at them on the ladders from a dozen loop-holes ;
and how at Assaye he charged with his regiment
(the once famous 19th Light Dragoons), a mere
handful of men, against an almost numberless host,
dashing up again and again to the mouths of the
enemy's cannon. But these things, he said, made
little demand on courage. It was when he and his
troop were once ordered to halt where they had been
stationed on a hill-side by mistake within the ricochet
of the enemy's balls; and for four hours they re-
mained still, while one after another the men fell
80
LECTURE II.
from their horses, cut in twain or left headless
corpses, as the shot struck them. This, he said, was
a strain, such a strain that, when the command to
"Charge" was given at last, the roar wherewith the
soldiers responded revealed the tension they had
undergone.
But courage like this, or let us say the ever-
memorable noble behavior of the soldiers on the
sinking "Birkenhead," was not greater than was
that exhibited by the twenty poor nuns who, in the
French Revolution, stood together on the scaffold
chanting the Te Deum, till one by one the sweet
voices dropped in silence beneath the axe of the
guillotine; still the survivors sung on with unfal-
tering lips, till the Abbess, left alone, gave forth the
last "Amen," and the glorious hymn was over. Or,
to take another phase of courage, what man or
woman is there who would not have found it easier
to ride with the Six Hundred in broad daylight into
the Valley of Death at Balaklava than to have
spent a night in the dark in that awful tête-à-tête of
which we have all lately read, of Sister Dora and
the man dying of small-pox? Even the supreme
climax of courage, that of enduring to see the death
rather than the dishonor of those we love, has been
attained by a woman. The mother of the seven
martyrs, whose story is told in the Books of the
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
81
Maccabees, may be justly estimated, I think, as the
bravest human being on record.
Thus, then, we may be allowed to boast that, when
great demands are made on the physical courage of
women, it has not been found lacking. It is before
little trials, and when there is nothing to call forth
the heroism of enthusiasm or patriotism or religion,
that women fail while men preserve their courage.
Sir John Bowring once vividly described to me the
scene in the wreck of the "Aden" in the Red Sea.
He said, he left the crew on deck, blaspheming and
screaming, mad with terror; but, on going down
into the cabin, he found all the ladies on board qui-
etly kneeling round his daughter, who was leading
their prayers. Nothing, he added, had ever so forci-
bly impressed him as an instance of calm courag-
eousness. Yet many of those very women, so nobly
brave and self-possessed in the imminent prospect
of immediate death, would, I have little doubt, have
behaved in quite another way if they had been
merely in a pleasure-boat, in danger of capsizing in
a shallow lake, or in a carriage with a runaway pony,
or perhaps in a field with a herd of cows!
Now, as great dangers very seldom knock at our
doors and permit us to display our latent heroism,
and as small dangers occur every week, I implore
my sister-women to screw themselves permanently
82
LECTURE II.
to the sterner pitch, and, like men, make it a rule
once for all, not to "show the white feather" on any
occasion, be it little or great.
Lastly, beside passive and active physical courage,
there is moral courage to be measured. And here,
again, I believe it will be found that the courage of
women on great occasions is equal to that of men,
but that at ordinary times they are more timid and
easily overcrowed and bullied. To dare to speak
the truth when it will be turned to our detriment,
to support publicly an unpopular person who is ma-
ligned, to follow conscience through thick and thin
in spite of Mrs. Grundy and probably of a husband
who is bound hand and foot to Mrs. Grundy's char-
iot wheels, this is a hard lesson; and, when we re-
flect how much heavier are the penalties exacted
from women than from men for such independence,
we can scarcely wonder that it is more rarely exhib-
ited by our sex. Yet here is undoubtedly a field for
the exercise of courage of greater importance in
ordinary and civilized life than any display of physi-
cal bravery.
My friends, whenever you hear a silly woman say
in the usual idiotic manner, "I am such a coward!
Oh, dear, I hope there is no danger! I am so great a
coward!" will you please remember henceforth, for
my sake, to ask her, "Good gracious, my dear
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
83
madam! are you also a liar or a thief? Why should
you confess the one disgrace more than the others?"
And, for yourselves, practise courage, I beseech you,
at least as diligently as you practise the piano. Re-
gard screaming as a lèse-majesté against womanly
dignity. Make it a point of honor to be cool, col-
lected, self-reliant, on all occasions. Do all this only
for a few years, and you will be surprised to find
that, after all, in the small concerns of our smooth
English lives, bravery, like cleanliness, is a cheap
virtue. All the greater the shame when we fail to
exhibit it!
Fifthly and lastly, there is a great Personal Duty
of which some of you may never have thought, the
duty of MAINTAINING your own lawful Freedom,
neither voluntarily abdicating it nor suffering it to
be wrested from you. Remember what we have
assumed to be the purpose of life, and consider that
the Creator has made us moral free agents, with all
the long train of mistakes and sufferings and school-
ings which that freedom involves, for the sake of the
great end of free virtue,- eternal advance in good-
Remember that our work in life is to set up
His kingdom, first within us, and then all round us,
in our homes, in society, and in the world, and then
reflect whether we dare permit any human being,
ness.
84
LECTURE II.
whosoever he may be, to rob us of that freedom
whereby alone that purpose of God in our creation
can be carried out. We cannot do it, my friends,
without incurring almost suicidal guilt. The obedi-
ence of the child, while he is a child, is right and
holy, the proper training for the future self-control of
a virtuous life. But there comes a time when child-
hood is over, and when the man or woman enters on
the solemn responsibilities of adult life, and of a
moral agent made free by God's own decree. After
that hour there is no shifting the responsibility of
our actions, or of our forbearance from action, on an-
other's shoulders, be that other who he may. Free-
dom is the indispensable condition of the whole
moral life, and it follows that the preservation of
that freedom is one of the first of our duties. We
shall have need presently to recur to this subject,
and estimate the bearings of the principle now laid
down upon many problems of social duty. Chaste,
temperate, truthful, brave, and free, that is the ideal
of PERSONAL VIRTUE for woman as for man.
H
LECTURE III.
SOCIAL DUTIES.
DUTIES OF MOTHERS, DAUGHTERS, Etc.
I NOW quit the subject of Personal Duties, beg-
ging you always to bear in mind that no other obli-
gation can ever come before them; and that in their
high practice lies not only our hope of fulfilling the
end of our own creation and lifting ourselves nearer
to God and goodness, but also our best and most
unfailing method of blessing and helping our
brother men.
I shall, for the remainder of this course, treat of
the third great branch of Morals, namely, Social
Duties; and these I shall classify, not subjectively,
as we classified Personal Duties, according to the
virtues to be exercised, but objectively, according to
the persons to whom Social Duties are owed. Such
duties as regards women will fall into the following
86
LECTURE III.
groups: 1. The Duties of a Woman as a Member
of a Family,- Mother, Daughter, Sister, Wife; 2.
The Duties of a Woman as Mistress of a Household;
3. As a Member of Society; 4. As a Citizen of the
State and Member of the Human Race.
Viewing the vast expanse of Social Duty before
us, and its ever-widening horizon, we may bear with
us two guiding thoughts as general directions to our
efforts.
One thought is that, as Virtue is a higher end of
human life than Happiness, so whenever we can con-
duce to the virtue of our rational fellow-creature,
then that is the proper mode to do our duty by him.
He "that converteth a sinner from the error of his
way," or trains youth to a noble life, does a higher
kind of good than he who nurses the sick or feeds
the hungry. Second to the helping of our neigh-
bor's virtue (we cannot make him virtuous, remem-
ber: we can only conduce to his virtue) comes the
helping of his happiness,― the relief of his pains and
wants, and the production of his pleasure. And,
lastly, there is a duty owed to those who have still
claims on us, but, having no free-will, can have no
virtue to be aided; namely, the lower animals. For
these, all we can do is to shield them from pain, and
to make their little lives as pleasurable as we may.
You will remember Bishop Butler's magnificent
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
87
statement of the principle at the root of all social
morality: that it is on the simple fact of any creature
being sentient —i.e., capable of pain and pleasure
that our obligation to save it pain and afford it
pleasure is founded.
Again, we may take with us through all the range
of duty this other guiding thought,— that in doing
our duty we are fulfilling the blessed task of estab-
lishing" God's Kingdom," the Kingdom of Justice,
Truth, and Love. Our Personal Duty is the setting
up of a little divine kingdom in our own breasts:
our Social Duty is the extending of that kingdom,
first making our homes a province of it, then spread-
ing it as best we may, and as our poor powers may
permit, in all directions, looking forward to the time,
far off perhaps down the ages, but still drawing
nearer, when "the earth shall be full of the knowl-
edge of the Lord as the waters cover the seas,” and
when (as the Parsees say every morning in their
prayers) "Ormuzd shall conquer, and Ahrimanes be
subdued and converted, and hell be abolished, and
love and joy reign forever,"
the
"One far-off, divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.'
Now we labor toward that blessed end, often in
darkness and sorrow; but out of the cloud there
88
LECTURE III.
comes to cheer us many a ray of hope, if we be of
those
"Who, rowing hard against the stream,
See distant gates of Eden gleam,
And do not dream it is a dream."
I confess I love this thought of working for the
"Kingdom of God," and find it infinitely cheering
and comforting. We are beset and harassed in
these days with doubts of every sort. But this idea
of a Divine Kingdom comes home to us all. Even
if we have been so unhappy, so infinitely unhappy,
as to lose sight for a time, behind the clouds which
veil His throne, of the King Himself, we can still
labor to promote what we meant of old by "His King-
dom." We may join hand in hand, all of us who are
working for any kind or sort of good, to relieve
want or pain, to teach truth, to stop cruelty, to
obtain freedom, to bestow innocent happiness,-
each and all we may recognize each other and our-
selves as fellow-laborers in God's vineyard, servants
and soldiers of the same Kingdom. And whether
we are able in words to pray together or not, we
may feel that we are all living the prayer, "Thy
Kingdom come," the central clause of the world's
great prayer,—which we effectually offer whenever
from our hearts we desire to see JUSTICE done and
TRUTH prevail, and LovE be Lord of all.
M
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
89
To clear the ground for the solution of several
difficult problems of social duty, which will by and
by come before us, we must begin by defining, as
accurately as may be, the nature and order of Social
Duties. The canon already quoted, "Love thy
neighbor as thyself," gives us the spirit of the whole.
For more accurate ethical terminology, it will be
useful to take the word "Benevolence" (the best
translation in this context of the Pauline "¿yáæŋ”)
and make it the corner-stone of our edifice. We
may say, "We owe benevolence to all our fellow-
creatures," and use this as a fundamental axiom or
canon, from which all that is to follow may be
deduced.
66
-
The old Schoolmen very properly distinguished
between Love of Complacency (or what we should
call affection) and Love of Benevolence. The former,
from the nature of things, must be free and sponta-
neous, and it can be no duty to feel it toward any
one. The latter alone, the Love of Benevolence, is
a sentiment owing to all mankind, which we can
and ought to feel to every creature. This is a very
deep and important ethical distinction, to which I
shall often have occasion to refer. I must remark,
however, that whenever Love of Benevolence rises.
to its true pitch, and becomes the enthusiasm of
humanity, or heartfelt altruism, it has a blessed ten-
90
LECTURE III.
66
dency to get transformed into Love of Complacency.
If it be surely true (in spite of Mr. Darwin) that
we hate those whom we have injured," it is happily
at least equally true that we love those whom we
have benefited, or wish to benefit, with something
exceedingly like affection.*
*To those among us who have not bowed to the new moral
system of Darwin and Spencer, there is something almost pathetic
in the ignorance both of the passions and also of the spiritual part
of human nature which these philosophers unconsciously betray.
Mr. Darwin, engaged in an inquiry concerning that very curious
thing, repentance, and the question, "Why does man regret that
he has followed one natural impulse rather than another, and why
does he feel that he ought to regret his conduct?" arrives at the
conclusion that the selfish passions, once gratified, always fade,
and the social ones resume their influence. (
Thus, as man cannot
prevent old impressions from passing through his mind, he will be
compelled to compare the weaker impressions of, for instance, past
hunger, or of vengeance satisfied, with the instinct of sympathy
and good-will to his fellows, which is still present, and ever in some
degree active in his mind," and so he will feel dissatisfied with
himself. (Descent of Man, p. 90.) Surely (as, in reviewing this book
at the time of its appearance, I ventured to remark), "the reader
might be excused who should figure to himself the author as a man
who has never in his lifetine had cause seriously to repent a single
unkindly or ignoble deed, and who has unconsciously attributed
his own generous and placable nature to the rest of his species, and
proceeded to argue as if the world were made of Darwins." Where,
we ask, in bewilderment, where are the people to be found in
whom "sympathy and good-will" to all their neighbors exist in the
state of permanent instincts, whose resentful feelings die out as a
matter of course after every ebullition, and leave them in perfect
charity with their neighbors, not as the result of repentance, but as
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
91
Benevolence, then, is to be accepted as the univer-
sal principle of Social Duty, and to be understood in
its preliminary? In what Island of the Blessed may we find the
men and women for whom the precept "Love your enemies" is a
mere platitude, and Tacitus' remark a calumny, that "Humani
generis proprium est odisse quem laeseris ?" (It is natural to hu-
man beings to hate those whom they have injured.)
This whole system of morals wherein the two greatest forces at
work in man's life seem equally ignored, the enormous brute
force of the physical and irascible passions on one side, and the
power of divine spiritual might on the other, the flesh which lusts
against the spirit, and the spirit which lusts against the flesh,- has
been well summed up by one of its latest and most clear-headed
disciples, M. Alfred Fouillée, in the Revue des Deux Mondes. I
beg to extract the following passage from his brilliant articles, as
touching to my mind the very nadir of morals, and embodying as
nearly as possible all that I think to be most false, debasing, and
perilous in the speculations of this now paramount school :-
•
"On le voit la doctrine de l'évolution telle que l'entendent MM.
Darwin et Spencer, remplace l'obligation morale du spiritualisme
par une sorte d'obligation physique ou de nécessité naturelle qui en-
traîne l'individu d'abord à son bien propre, puis au bien commun.
... Il faut montrer (et c'est ce qu'a essayé M. Spencer) par quelle évo-
lution inévitable des êtres dont chacun cherche son propre bonheur
finiront par chercher nécessairement le bonheur de tous. Pour ob-
tenir ce résultat, c'est moins aux préceptes abstraits qu'il faut faire
appel qu'à l'entraînement de l'éducation, à la puissance des lois
publiques, surtout à l'action lente de l'hérédité et de la selection
naturelle; car ce n'est pas une moralité métaphysique qu'il s'agit
de produire chez les hommes, c'est 'une moralité organique,' ct en
quelque sorte physique, qui sera présente aux organes et inhérente
à la constitution même du cerveau humain comme la douceur est
devenu inhérente aux animaux apprivoisés." "La Moralité Con-
temporaine," par Alfred Fouillée, Revue des Deux Mondes, July,
1880, p. 123.
M
92
LECTURE III.
the double sense of an inward genuine good-will and
of a practical readiness to carry out that good-will
in beneficent action. I hope it is needless to dwell
on these last points. There are, indeed, people.
who imagine they do all that is required when they
give this or that, or do something or other for their
neighbor. Nay! but I hold that nobody has a right
that it is an insolence and a presumption to
give or do anything for our fellow-man, unless we
entertain in our hearts a genuine wish to serve him.
If we do anything of the kind from any other
motive, from ostentation, or as a hard piece of jus-
tice, or for the purpose of self-training and disci-
pline, we are absolutely insulting our brother.
I remember once, in visiting that awful place, the
hospital degli Incurabili at Rome, in the Via dei
Greci, being implored by scores of wretched, dying
creatures to give them money to buy coffee and
other things which might in some degree have as-
suaged their misery, but which the hospital could
not provide. As one ghastly figure after another
sat up in bed, as I passed down the vast ward, and
exposed with vehement gestures and cries for pity
the dreadful sores and cancers of which each was
perishing, I felt like Dante passing through one
of the giri of hell. Naturally, I turned to the
placid nun who accompanied me, and asked, “Are
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
93
there no Italian lady-visitors to the hospital?
'Yes, there are very many saintly ladies,- the
Contessa So-and-so, the Principessa So-and-so."
"And do they not give what they want to these
poor souls?" "No: they do not come for that
purpose." "In Heaven's name, what do they come
for, then?" "Per pettinarle, Signora." It was
some time before I could be made to understand.
These fine ladies came to mortify themselves by
performing the disgusting office of combing the
dishevelled and filthy hair of the hapless creatures!
Of the idea of affording them such relief as their
sufferings might receive, they were wholly innocent.
No, my friends: we must not "make our salva-
tion" in the next world, or make our reputation in
this, out of our fellow-creatures' needs and our
largesses and services. That will never do. We
must begin with the sympathy, and then and then
only-feel at liberty to perform the divine and
blessed task of helping our brother.
Secondly, there comes the practical action of be-
neficence; and here our subject naturally ramifies
under the different heads under which I have classed
these addresses. Benevolence, true charity, must
indeed "begin at home." On the universal law of
benevolence, we must place the natural rider,— that
we owe benevolence, first, a precedency, of all its
""
94
LECTURE III.
manifestations, to those nearest to us; and that
their claims must be satisfied (so far as may be)
prior to the extension of our efforts to satisfy those
further off. This precedency of claims must of
course follow the circumstances of life.
First, there is the supreme priority founded on
the natural ties of proximity in blood, the recipro-
cal first claims of Parents and Children, and then of
Brothers, and so on. The fulfilment of these claims.
constitutes Parental, Filial, and Fraternal Duty.
Second, there is precedency founded on Contract,
the mutual claims of Husbands and Wives, founded
on the great formal contract of marriage; and the
claims of Friends, founded on an informal,— but, in
some cases, scarcely less morally sacred,— tacit con-
tract. The fulfilment of these claims constitutes
Conjugal and Friendly Fidelity.
Thirdly, there is the precedency founded on the
claim of prior indebtedness; the individual having
already exhibited benevolence toward us, and hav-
ing a just right to expect the same in return. The
fulfilment of this claim is Gratitude.
Lastly, there are the remoter claims of local Pro-
pinquity, by which the dwellers under our roof, our
immediate neighbors, and our countrymen have a
certain right to expect that we shall not pass over
them to attend to the (similar) wants of remoter
persons and nations.
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
95
1
We begin to-day with the special claims to be-
nevolence founded on the natural ties of blood, and
first with the reciprocal claims of Parents and
Children.
There is to many of us something painful and
harsh in attempting to define as stern duties the
conduct and feelings which spring spontaneously
from our hearts. Most of us are happy enough to
feel or to have felt that we needed no law to com-
mand us to do all that in us lay, to sacrifice health
or wealth or anything we possessed, for a be-
loved parent or an idolized child. Love has been
to us the fulfilling of the Law; and the law conse-
quently became superfluous, making it seem almost
an impertinence to refer to it. This is surely the
natural state of things. It does not generally need
(happily for us) any transcendent virtue on the
part of the parent to make the child love it, nor
any special gifts or graces on the part of the child
to make the parent cherish it. It is "Nature's
law divine" that those she has so closely united
"cannot choose but love." Each sacrifices to each
without moral effort, in the pure spontaneity of
complete affection,— the aim of the other's welfare
the only rule, and the idea of having promoted it
the only possible reward.
96
LECTURE III.
Let those among you who are too young to know
all that family affection means (and nobody can
know it till they are able to compare it with other
social sentiments) take my word for this, that
nothing is ever like it, nothing will ever take its
place. When the last duty of filial love is paid,
and there remains nothing more for us to do for the
beloved one forever; when the form we cherished
and sheltered from every breath lies out away in its
lonely grave, round which the snow is falling and
the winter winds are raving, then it seems as if
all other duties are in comparison so remote, so in-
different, so devoid of all sacredness that it is hard
to rouse ourselves to fulfil them, save by the thought,
My father or my mother-would have wished it.
And again, on the other side, the parental love
which fills a woman's heart, when she holds her
little child in her arms, is, as even we childless ones
must see, something so divine, so pure from all
selfishness where it is felt aright, that every care
and fatigue and sacrifice comes to the mother as
a matter of course. Even the brutes show this.
The cat will burn herself to save her kittens from
the flames. The timid bird confronts danger, and
even invites the cruel sportsman to follow her, that
he may leave her nest undisturbed.
Our task, however, is not to dilate on parental
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
97
and filial affection, but to define the underlying lines
of duty which, when the affection is unhappily de-
fective or misguided, must afford to both parent and
child the permanent rule of conduct.
Referring to the canon of Social Duty, we find
that the claim of children on parents and vice versa
is a supreme claim to benevolence; that is, each is
bound to seek the other's welfare before all other
objects, or, in other words, to endeavor to conduce
to their virtue and to produce their happiness.
For reasons which will hereafter appear, we shall
discuss first the Duties of Parents.
A conscientious Mother, aiming before all things
at the moral good of her child, and feeling the tre-
mendous responsibilities which rest on her as regards
all its future life, for weal or woe, must, I should
think, often be nearly overwhelmed with her task.
Poor Margaret Fuller, recording in her diary the
event of her child's birth, must have expressed the
thoughts of thousands: "I am the mother of an
immortal being! God be merciful to me, a sinner!
The sense of her own unworthiness and incapacity
for her sacred task was probably, however, the very
best preparation for performing it well. The woman
who thinks herself quite equal to the duties of
motherhood almost betrays by that fact that she
has only the meanest notions of their nature and
extent.
""
98
LECTURE III.
I hope you, my friends, who are mothers, and
possess the experience which I shall never know,
will pardon my presumption in laying down before
you what appears to me the leading outlines of pa-
rental duty. If these could be generally agreed
upon, the correlative duties of children, about which
so much doubt and friction at present prevail, would
become more clear.
Let me say something very serious to you at this
point, something which I think we ought to bear in
mind, not only in considering parental, but all other
social duties. We often refer to the love of God as
the supreme love, and most justly; for all the holy
love which ever swelled in a mother's breast can
only have come from Him,—a drop from the fount-
ain, a ray from the sun. But have you ever re-
flected that, in that awful love of God for his poor
children of clay, there must be mingled at once
infinite tenderness and pity, and at the same time
a severity which never shrinks from any suffering
needed to recall us from sin, or purify or sanctify
us? That is the ideal of all love,- the norm toward
which we should strive to lift our poor, feeble, short-
sighted, selfish affections, and which it above all
concerns a parent to strive to translate into the lan-
guage of human duty. This is the truest love, the
love which attaches itself to the very soul of the
Maou
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
99
child, which repents with it, with tears bitterer than
its own, for its faults, and, while heaping on it so far
as may be every innocent pleasure, never for an in-
stant abandons the thought of its highest and ulti-
mate welfare. I think that till a parent's love for a
child is of the same character with that divine love
of which we learn somewhat in life's supremest
hours of communion, till then his or her love is
poor and faulty.
We
But, oh, what a wondrous, what a sublime thing it
is for a mother to be able to feel toward her offspring
something like what God feels to us all! Kepler
said one of the grandest things ever uttered when
he discovered the law of the planetary distances,
and bowed his head and said in awe-struck tones,
"O God! I think thy thoughts after thee."
do, effectually, "think God's thoughts," whenever
we study nature. But it is higher still (if I may
dare to use the words) to feel God's feelings, to
love even one little child as He loves it. And such
divine sort of motherly love has this exceeding glory
that all through life it will remain as the token, the
assurance to the child, that there is such a thing as
perfect love in the universe. He has felt it, he has
been cradled in its arms, he has learned to trust it
absolutely, and to know that, however often or how-
ever miserably he may fail, that love will never
Uor M
100
LECTURE III.
forsake him, but will lift him up and restore him at
last.
A mother's love, then, ought to be attuned to the
very note of the love divine, to be, in fact, its echo
from the deep cave of her heart.
But, with such super-earthly love to light her way,
what does she see before her? There is, first, the
duty of conducing to her child's moral welfare, the
highest of all her duties; secondly, of securing his
bodily health; thirdly, of giving him that intellect-
ual training which will enlarge his being and make
his moral nature itself more robust and capable of
fulfilling his duties in life; and, lastly, of making him
as happy as she may. These are each and all most
complicated problems to many a good mother, work-
ing perhaps against wind and tide, with feeble
health or limited means, or possibly with a hus-
band who thwarts and opposes her endeavors. It
would require not half a lecture, but a whole trea-
tise, to deal with such a subject fitly, even if I pos-
sessed the experience or insight needful for the task.
There is only one point on which I think ethical
science may be of some utility. That point is the
problem of obedience. How far ought it to be en-
forced?
Madpla
Three things are commonly confounded in speak-
ing of filial obedience:
Maou
Anta
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
101
1st. The obedience which must be exacted from a
child for its own physical, intellectual, and moral
welfare.
2d. The obedience which the parent may exact
for his (the parent's) welfare or convenience.
3d. The obedience which parent and child alike
owe to the moral law, and which it is the parent's
duty to teach the child to pay.
If mothers would but keep these three kinds of
obedience clear and distinct in their minds, I think
much of the supposed difficulty of the problem
would disappear. And, if children as they grow up
would likewise discriminate between them, many of
their troubles would be relieved.
For the first, the excellent old Dr. Thomas Brown
lays down (Lectures on Ethics, p. 287) a princi-
ple which seems to me exactly to fit the case. He
says that parents "should impose no restraint which
has not for its object some good greater than the tem-
porary evil of the restraint itself." For an infant,
the restraint is no evil; and at that age everything
must be a matter of obedience, the babe possessing
no sense or experience for self-guidance. But, as
childhood advances, so should freedom advance;
and, even if the little boy or girl does now and then
learn by sharp experience, the lesson will generally
be well worth the cost: whereas the evils of over-
102
LECTURE III.
restraint have no compensation. Each one is bad
in itself, checking the proper development of char-
acter, chilling the spirits, and also in a cumulative
way becoming increasingly mischievous, as the mis-
erable sense of being fettered becomes confirmed.
In all this matter of the child's own welfare, the
mother's aim ought to be to become the lifelong
counsellor of her child; and a counsellor is (by the
very hypothesis) one who does not persist in claim-
ing authority. Nobody thinks of consulting another
who may conclude their "advice" by saying, “And
now I order you to do as I have advised." To drop,
as completely and as early as possible, the tone of
command, and assume that of the loving, sympa-
thetic, ever-disinterested guide and friend,- that is,
I think, the true wisdom of every mother, as it was
that of my own. Of course, there are cases so grave
(especially where girls who little understand the
need of caution are concerned) that it is absolutely
necessary, nay, the mother's pressing duty, to pro-
hibit her daughter from running into danger. To
apply Brown's rule, the evil of the restraint is more
than counterbalanced by immunity from deadly
peril. Perhaps it is one of the principal causes of
the dissatisfaction of young girls with parental con-
trol that they do not and cannot understand what
horrible dangers may overtake them in the still foul
condition of society.
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
103
2d. It is too little remembered that a parent has a
moral right to exact obedience as a form of service
from his child. The parent has, in strictest ethical
sense, the first of all claims on the child's special
benevolence; i.e., on his will to do good. The double
ties of gratitude and of closest human relationship
make it the duty of the child to pay that sacred debt
from first to last; and it is entirely fit and greatly
for its benefit that the parent should claim that
duty. The parent's direction in such cases, properly
translated, is not a command, to which the response
is blind obedience, but an indication of the way in
which the person to whom the debt is due desires that
it should be paid. There ought to be nothing in the
slightest degree harsh or dictatorial in such direc-
tion. On the contrary, I cannot but think that the
introduction by parents of much greater courtesy to
their children would be an immense advantage in
this and other cases. We all ask our servants po-
litely to do for us the services which they have con-
tracted to do, and for which we pay them. How
much more kindly and courteously ought we to ask
of our children to perform services due by the
blessed and holy debt of nature and gratitude, and
which ought, each one, to be a joy to the child as
well as to the parent! When it is rightly demanded
and cheerfully paid, how excellent and beautiful to
104
LECTURE III.
both is this kind of filial duty! When, for example,
we see little girls of the working classes taught to
carry their father's dinner to the field as soon as
they can toddle, and helping their mother to "mind
the baby," even if it be a "little Moloch" of a
baby, we witness both the fulfilment of a legiti-
mate claim on the part of the parents, and a most
beneficent moral training for the child. I think
this sort of service of the child is sadly lacking
among the richer classes, and that it would be an
excellent thing if mothers, however wealthy, found
means of making their children more useful to them-
selves. Nothing can be worse for a child than to
find everything done for her, and never to be called
upon to do anything for anybody else. Indeed, any
fine-natured child, like a dog, will find much more
real pleasure in being of use, or fancying it is so,
than in being perpetually pampered and amused. Of
course there would be moral limits to such claims
on the parent's part, as, e.g., when they would inter-
fere with the child's health or education. But there
is no natural termination in point of age to the
parent's right to give such directions for his own
service. On the contrary, the time when the adult
son or daughter has come into the full possession of
his or her faculties, while the parent is sinking into
the infirmities of age, is the very time when filial
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
105
duty is most imperative in its obligation; and the
fact that aged parents rarely attempt to give to
adult sons and daughters the same directions for
their comfort as they gave them when children
shows how little the real nature of these sacred
rights and duties is commonly understood.
3d. There is the obedience which both parent and
child owe to the eternal moral law; and this obedi-
ence again ought to be kept perfectly distinct from
that which is exacted either for the child's personal
welfare or the parent's convenience. The old and
most important distinction between a thing which is
malum in se and a thing which is only malum pro-
hibitum ought never to be lost sight of. Even in a
very little child, I think, a moral fault, such as a lie,
or cruelty to an animal, or vindictiveness toward its
companions, ought to be treated with gravity and
sadness; and, as the child grows, an importance
ought to be attached to such faults wholly incom-
mensurate with any other sort of error, such as indo-
lence about lessons or the like. The one aim of the
parent must be to make profound impression of the
awfulness and solemnity of moral good and moral
evil.
But even here the difficulty haunts us, When is
this enforcement of obedience to moral laws to cease?
So long as a child is absolutely compelled to do right
106
LECTURE III.
by sheer force and terror of punishment, its moral
freedom can have no scope, and its moral life conse-
quently cannot even begin. It cannot acquire the
virtue which results from free choice. All that the
parent can do (and it is an indispensable prepara-
tion for virtue, though not virtue itself) is first to
teach the child what is right,- to draw out its latent
moral sense, and inspire it with the wish to do right,-
and then to help its steps in the path which has been
pointed out. Once a child grasps the idea of Duty,
and begins in its little way to try to "be good,"
and displays the indescribably touching phenomena
of childlike penitence and restoration, it becomes
surely the most sacred task for the mother to aid such
efforts silently, indeed, for the most part, and too
reverentially to talk much about it with tenderest
sympathy. It would be no kindness, of course, but
cruelty, to open up hastily ways of liberty before
moral strength has been gained to walk in them.
The "hedging up the way with thorns" is a divine
precaution, which a mother may well imitate. But
the principle must be, as in the case of directions in
matters not moral, gradually and systematically to
exchange directions and orders for counsels and
exhortations.
Mag
And here, in closing these, perhaps, too tedious
remarks on the moral training of children, I shall add
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
107
a word which may possibly startle some who hear
me,- Beware that, in earnestly seeking your child's
moral welfare, you do not force the moral nature
with hot-house culture. To be a sturdy plant, it
must grow naturally, and not too rapidly. It seems
as if it were not intended by Providence that this
supreme part of our human nature should be devel-
oped far in childhood and early youth, lovely as are
the blossoms it sometimes then bears,- too often to
drop into an untimely grave, or wither away in the
heat of manhood without fruit. Dr. Arnold, of Rugby,
undoubtedly made a great mistake in this matter, as
one of his very best disciples, Arthur Hugh Clough,
was able in later years to see. Mothers should not
be unhappy, if boys are honorable and kindly and
affectionate, if they should, at fifteen, prefer a game
of football to a visit of charity; and I should not
blame at all severely any of my young friends, if
such there be here present, who may be at this mo-
ment wishing that she were playing lawn-tennis,
instead of sitting still to hear a dull dissertation on
moral philosophy!
But, when all is done that can be done by human
wisdom to help the moral growth of the young, there
is a vast space left for the other and easier parental
duty of providing for their happiness. Of course, to
nine parents out of ten, high and low, it is the joy
108
LECTURE III.
and delight of their lives to make their children as
happy as possible. There is no virtue in this. Nat-
ure (or, let us say frankly, God) has so made us
that in middle life nearly all direct pleasures to be
enjoyed on our own account begin to pall. We are
too busy or too indifferent to care much for a score
of things which, when we were younger, we found
quite entrancing.
"It is the one great grief of life to feel all feelings die."
But, just as our sun goes down to the horizon,
a moonlight reflection of pleasure, purer, calmer
than the first, rises to give a sweet interest to the
lives of all who are happy enough to have young
creatures around them. The pleasures we can no
longer taste for ourselves we taste in our children's
enjoyment. Their glee, their eagerness, their fresh-
ness of delight, stir our pulses with tenderness and
sympathy. I do not know anything in the world
which pulls one's heartstrings so much as the sight
of a little blue-eyed, golden-haired, white-frocked
atom of humanity clapping its hands and crowing
with ecstasy at the sight of a kite soaring up into
the summer sky.
Are we to ask parents to deny themselves and
their children in the stern old way, and turn their
young lives into dreary rounds of duty and work,
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
109
till they hate the very name of either one or the
other? God forbid! Does GOD, the great Parent,
Father and Mother of the World, lead us up to
himself by any such harsh and stern tuition? Nay,
but has he not made earth so beautiful, and
planted flowers by every wayside, and gladdened
our hearts by ten thousand delights of the intel-
lect, the senses, the tastes, and the affections?
Fear, my friends, to make your children unhappy,
and to love them too little. But never fear to make
them too happy or to love them too much! There
is a great, deep saying, that we must all enter the
kingdom of God as little children. Surely, the
converse of it is true also; and we should prepare
in our homes a kingdom of God,- of peace and
love and tenderness and innocent pleasure,-when-
ever a little child is sent to us out of heaven to
dwell in it.
TERS.
We now come to speak of the DUTIES OF Daugh-
The ethical grounds of the duty of supreme
benevolence toward our parents are clear. They
are nearest to us of human beings. We owe them
life and (nearly always also) endless cares and
affection. In the case of a mother, her claims on
her child-founded on the bodily agony she has
borne on its behalf, and the ineffably sweet office
110
LECTURE III.
of nursing (when she has performed it), her care in
infancy, and love and sympathy in later years —
make together such a cumulative title to gratitude
and devotion that it is impossible to place on it
any limitation.
This claim is, of course, happily usually admitted
in the case of daughters who do not marry. It is
understood that they are bound to do all they can
for their mother's and father's comfort. But, may I
ask, who absolved the daughters who marry from the
same sacred obligation? In Catholic countries,
young women often quit their aged parents, no
matter how much they need them, to enter “relig-
ion," as it is said; and we Protestants are very indig-
nant with them for so doing. But, when it comes to
our Protestant religion of matrimony, lo! we are
extremely indulgent to the girl who deposits her
filial obligations on what the Morning Post calls the
"Hymeneal Altar!" The daughter practically says
to her blind father or bed-ridden mother: "Corban!
I am going off to India with Captain Algernon, who
waltzes beautifully, and whom I met last night at a
ball. It is a gift by whatsoever you might have
been profited by me.
""
Is this right or justifiable? Public opinion con-
dones it; and the parent often consents out of the
abundance of unselfish affection, thereby in a cer-
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
111
tain formal way releasing the daughter from her
natural debt. But I do not think, if the parent
really wants her services, that she can morally
withdraw them, even with such consent, and cer-
tainly not without it.
We all see this remarkably clearly when the ques-
tion is not of marriage, but of a girl of the higher
class devoting herself to charity or art, or any kind
of public work which requires her to quit her par-
ents' roof. Then, indeed, even if her parents be in
the full vigor of life, and have half a dozen other
daughters, we are pretty sure to hear the solemn
condemnation of the adventurous damsel, "Ange-
lina ought to attend to her father and mother, and
not go here or there for this or that purpose."
Surely there is a very obvious rule to cover all
these cases. If either parent wants the daughter,
she ought not to leave him or her, either to marry
or to go into a nunnery, or for any other purpose.
If her parents do not want her, then, being of age to
judge for herself, she is free either to undertake the
duties of a wife, or any others for which she may feel
a vocation?
This may sound very hard. It is undoubtedly the
demand for a very high degree of virtue, where the
sacrifice may be that of the happiness of a lifetime.
But every duty may sometimes claim such sacrifices.
112
LECTURE III.
Parental duty does so perpetually. How many thou-
sands of mothers and fathers toil all their days and
give up health and every enjoyment for their chil-
dren's interests! Why should not filial duties like-
wise exact equal sacrifice? The entire devotion to
the parent when the parent really needs it, and the
constant devotion of as much care as the parent
requires, this, and nothing short of this, seems to
me to be the standard of Filial Duty.
A very difficult question arises in the case of the
abnormal and scarcely sane development of selfish-
ness which we sometimes sadly witness in old age.
I think, in such deplorable cases, the child is called
on to remember that, even in her filial relation, the
moral welfare of the object of benevolence is before
all other considerations, and that she is bound to
pause in a course which obviously is tending to pro-
mote a great moral fault. Gently and with great
care and deference, she ought to remind the parent
of the needs of others.
The great difficulty in the lives of hundreds of
daughters of the upper ranks just now lies in this:
that they find themselves torn between two opposing
impulses, and know not which they ought to follow.
On one side are the habits of a child, and the assur-
ance of everybody that the same habits of quiescence
and submission ought to be maintained into woman-
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
113
hood. On the other hand there is the same instinct
which we see in a baby's limbs, to stir, to change its
position, to climb, to run; to use, in short, the mus-
cles and faculties it possesses. Every young bird
flutters away from its nest, however soft; every little
rabbit quits the comfortable hole in which it was
born; and we take it as fit and right they should do
so, even when there are hawks and weasels all around.
Only when a young girl wants to do anything of
the analogous kind, her instinct is treated as a sort
of sin. She is asked, "Cannot she be contented,
having so nice a home and luxuries provided in
abundance?" Keble's fine but much-misused lines,
about “room to deny ourselves" and the "common
task" and "daily round" being all we ought to re-
quire, are sure to be quoted against her; and, in
short, she feels herself a culprit, and probably at
least once a week has a fit of penitence for her in-
corrigible "discontent." I have known this kind
of thing go on for years, and it is repeated in hun-
dreds, in thousands, of families. I have known it
where there were seven miserable, big, young women
in one little house! It is supposed to be the most
impossible thing in the world for a parent to give
his son a stone for bread or a serpent for a fish. But
scores of fathers, in the higher ranks, give their
daughters diamonds when they crave for education,
114
LECTURE III.
and twist round their necks the serpents of idle lux-
ury and pleasure when they ask for wholesome em-
ployment.
Pardon me if I speak very warmly on this subject,
because I think here lies one of the great evils of
the condition of our sex and class at this time; and
I feel intensely for the young spirits whose natural
and whose noble aspirations are so checked and dead-
ened and quenched through all their youth and
years of energy that, when the time for emancipa-
tion comes at last, it is too late for them to make use
of it. They have been dwarfed and stunted, and
can never either be or do anything greatly good.
In short, the complaint we women make against
men, that they persist in treating us as minors when
we have attained our majority, is what daughters
too often can justly make against both their fathers
and mothers. They keep them in the swaddling-
clothes of childhood, when they ought to set free
and train every limb to its most athletic and joyous
exercise. Dangers, of course, on the other side
there are, of over-emancipated and ill-advised girls
who sorely need more parental guidance than they
obtain; but, so far as my experience goes, these
cases are few compared to those of the young women
(ladies, of course, I mean, for in the lower classes
such evils are unknown) whose lives are spoiled by
Med
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
115
over-restraint in innocent things. They are left free,
and encouraged to plunge into the maëlstrom of a
fashionable season's senseless whirl of dissipation
and luxury. They are restrained from every effort
at self-development or rational self-sacrifice, till, for
the very want of some corrective bitter, they go and
beat the hassocks in a church as a pious exercise, or
perhaps finally lock themselves up in a nunnery.
Small blame to them! Ritualist nunneries at pres-
ent offer the most easily accessible backdoor out of
fine drawing-rooms into anything like a field of use-
fulness.
Now for SISTERS. That brothers and sisters
should give one another in an ordinary way the
first-fruits of their benevolence follows obviously
from the closeness of their Propinquity. Usually
there has also been from childhood the blessed
interchange of kindnesses which accumulate on
both sides into a claim of reciprocal gratitude.
Miss Bremer remarks that "it is the general char-
acteristic of affection to make us blind to faults of
those we love, but from this weakness fraternal
love is wholly exempt." Brothers are indeed ter-
rible critics of their sisters, and, so far, irritating
creatures. But otherwise, as we all know, they are
the very joy and pride of our lives; and there is
116
LECTURE III.
probably not one duty in our list which needs less
to be insisted on to women generally than that of
bestowing on their brothers not only Love of Be-
nevolence, but also a large amount of Love of
Complacency. It is usually also a truly sound.
moral sentiment, causing the sister to take profound
interest in the religious and moral welfare of her
brother, as well as in his health and happiness.
One mistake, I think, is often made by sisters,
and still more often by mothers, to which attention.
should be called. The unselfishness of the sisters,
and the fondness of the mother for her boy, and
the fact that the boy is but rarely at home, all con-
tribute to a habit of sacrificing everything to the
young lad's pleasure or profit, which has the worst
effect on his character in after-life. Boys receive
from women themselves in the nursery, and when
they come home from school in the holidays, a
regular education in selfishness. They acquire the
practice of looking on girls and women as persons
whose interests, education, and pleasures must al-
ways, as a matter of course, be postponed to their
In later life, we rue and their wives may
rue the consequences!
Own.
p
g
The duties of sisters to sisters are even more close
and tender than those of sisters to brothers. I hardly
know if there be any salient fault in the usual be-
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
117
havior of English sisters to one another which any
moral system could set right. Perhaps the one qual-
ity oftenest deficient in this, and other more distant
family relationships, to which we need not further
refer, uncles, aunts, cousins, and so on-is cour-
tesy. "Too much familiarity," as the proverb says,
"breeds contempt." The habit of treating one an-
other without the little forms in use among other
friends, and the horrid trick of speaking rudely of
each other's defects or mishaps, is the underlying
source of half the alienation of relatives. If we are
bound to show special benevolence to those nearest to
us, why on earth do we give them pain at every turn,
rub them the wrong way, and froisser their natural
amour propre by unflattering remarks or unkind ref-
erences? For once we can do them a real service
of any kind, we can (if we live with them) hurt, or
else please, them fifty times a day. The individual
who thinks she performs her duty to sister or niece
or cousin while she waits to do the exceptional ser-
vices, and hourly frets and worries and humiliates
her, is certainly exceedingly mistaken. Genuine
benevolence the "will to make happy" - will take
a very different course.
It will not be necessary here to pursue further the
subject of the duties arising from the ties of natural
118
LECTURE III.
relationship, holy and blessed things that they are!
I am persuaded that even the best and happiest of
us only half-apprehend their beautiful meaning, and
that we must look to the life beyond the grave to
interpret for us all their significance.
In the next Lecture, we shall discuss a very diffi-
cult question indeed, the Duties of a Wife, and
then the Duties of the Mistress of a Household.
:
LECTURE IV.
DUTIES OF CONTRACT.
WIVES. FRIENDS.
PASSING from duties arising from the ties of
Blood-Relationship (Parents and Children, Sisters,
Brothers, and so on), we reach the exceedingly
important class of duties founded on Contract,-
pre-eminently on the great contract of MARRIAGE.
The formal Marriage Contract of most civilized
nations includes two natural and one artificial
obligation.
':
First, there is the mutual promise of Conjugal
Union, to which is added a mutual engagement of
exclusive fidelity of each to each. This is, strictly
speaking, the Marriage Vow, the one essential prom-
ise among monogamous races.
But the entrance into this bond brings the con-
tracting parties so much more closely together than
any other human connection that it follows that
120
LECTURE IV.
A
they ought to afford primary Benevolence to one
another, and seek each other's welfare before all
others, reservation being made of the rights of
those to whom they already owe debts not an-
nullable by the new contract. Most properly and
wisely, then, a second promise to "honor and
cherish" each other in sickness and health, poverty
and riches-is almost universally added to the
original simple vow of fidelity. The obligation is
acknowledged and re-enforced by the vow; but it
arises independently from the nature of the rela-
tionship.
A third vow of the wife is added by the English
Church and by many other churches; namely, the
Vow of Conjugal Obedience. Of this, I shall speak
in its turn.
All the world acknowledges the sanctity of the
first of these vows,-emphatically, in the case of
the wife. The offence of adultery, which is the
infraction of the vow, if no longer judicially pun-
ished in Europe as it once was, is yet commonly
visited by the penalties of social ostracism. Long
may this so continue! Many of you will think me
harsh for saying it; but it is my deliberate opinion
that when a woman has committed the enormous
double crime, personal and social, of violating the
law of chastity, and doing her husband the mortal
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
121
wrong of breaking her marriage oath, it is fit and
right that the society which she has outraged should
close its doors to her. Of this, we shall say more
hereafter.
Passing now to the pleasanter subject of the
Duty of Wives to give special and primary Benevo-
lence to their husbands (and vice versa), we meet of
course the invariable obligation to seek first the
Moral Good of the object of our benevolence.
Wives cannot be generally charged with neglecting
the religious interests of their husbands (as they
understand them). On the contrary, I fear, they
often worry them about believing what they con-
sider necessary to salvation in an unreasoning way
which prevents thoughtful husbands from seeking
with their pious wives that refreshment of spiritual
life which they would find, were not all these
dogmas in the way. But the higher moral good of
the husband occupies most wives comparatively
little; and often a man who starts with a great
many lofty and disinterested aspirations deterio-
rates, year by year, in a deplorable manner under
the influence of a sufficiently well-meaning and
personally conscientious wife. If you ask, How
can this be? the answer is that, the wife's affection
being of a poor and short-sighted kind, she con-
stantly urges her husband to think of himself and
122
LECTURE IV.
66
his own interests rather than of the persons and
objects for which he was ready to sacrifice himself.
"Do not go on that charitable errand to-day: you
have caught a cold. It will answer as well to-mor-
row." "Do not invite that dull old friend." "Do
not join that tiresome committee." "Pray take a
long holiday." By all means, buy yourself a new
hunter." "Do refrain from confessing your unor-
thodox opinions. This kind of thing, dropped
every day like the lump of sugar into the breakfast
cup of tea, in the end produces a real constitutional
change in the man's mind. He begins to think him-
self, first, somewhat of a hero when he goes against
such sweet counsel, and then a Quixote, and then
a fool. And a curious reciprocity is also established.
The husband cannot do less than return the wife's
kindness by begging her not to distress and tire
herself by performing any duty which costs a little
self-sacrifice; and she again returns the compliment,
and so on and so on, till they nurse each other into
complete selfishness. I am sure that many of my
audience must have seen this exemplified. But if,
on the other hand, the wife from the first cherishes
every spark of generous feeling or noble and disin-
terested ambition in her husband, and he, in his turn,
encourages her in every womanly charity and good
deed, how they will act and react on each other
""
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
123
month after month and year after year; each grow-
ing nobler, and loving more nobly, and being more
worthy to be loved, till their sacred and blessed
union brings them together to the very gates of
heaven! That is what marriage ought to be, what
it is to a few choice and most happy couples, and
what it might be to all.
I should like to have said much on the many ways
in which, I think, enlightened moral ideas might help
wives to make their husbands more happy, but I can
detain you only to name one of them. Tact is an
excellent thing, a precious gift to cultivate where it
can be used with perfect openness and honesty. But
it is one of the worst consequences of the subjection
of women that, in thousands of cases, this tact is
developed into the art of managing a husband.
Manœuvres, crafty ways, wily little concealments,
insidious flatteries and coaxings with an object,
these are the miserable and disgraceful means by
which many a well-meaning wife and mother is
driven to carry out the most innocent plans, the
most useful projects for the family welfare, and
her children's education. Do not fall into them,
my friends! Do not, whatever be the difficulties
of your position, descend to such arts. You may
think you make your husband happy by "man-
aging" him so cleverly for his good; but, you may
M
124
LECTURE IV.
depend on it, though his thick masculine brain does
not detect Monday's little ruse nor Tuesday's small
circumvention, yet that he has a constant and
uneasy sense that he is not treated openly and
in an above-board fashion, and that you are "too
deep" for him. He at once mistrusts, fears, and
despises such a wife. The whole sincerity of the
married life is spoiled; and, in short, whatever
number of tricks you may score, you actually lose
the game. If you could win it a hundred times.
over, it would not be worth degrading yourself
into a domestic Mrs. Machiavelli for the purpose.
But now opens upon us the very crux of our sub-
ject,― the third vow which a wife makes when mar-
ried by the rites of the Church of England or those
of most other churches, the promise to obey.
Of course, a reason must be forthcoming for de-
manding such a vow, though we may privately sus-
pect that all such reasons did not precede, but follow,
the simple fact; and that, wheresoever la loi du
plus fort prevails, wives are compelled to obey ; and
the vow only adds a mental fetter to the already
existing natural chain, and registers a fait accompli.
Some people tell us that it is incumbent on a
woman to take and keep this vow, because she is
exhorted by St. Paul to "obey her husband in the
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
125
Lord." I cannot fairly argue this point, being too
far outside the pale of orthodoxy to consider a moral
problem to be solvable by a text. But I would re-
mind those who quote this passage in one Epistle of
the great apostle to remember that they are bound
to attach the same authority to a parallel passage in
another Epistle, wherein the same apostle commands
slaves to obey their masters, and actually sends
back to his chain a runaway who in our day would
have been helped to freedom by every true Christian
man or woman in America. The whole tone of
early Christian teaching, indeed, was one of entire
submission to the "powers that be," even when they
were represented by such insane despots as Tiberius,
Caligula, and Nero. In our day, men habitually set
aside this apostolic teaching, so far as it concerns
masters and slaves, despots and their subjects, as
adapted only to a past epoch. I am at a loss to see
by what right, having done so, they can claim for it
authority, when it happens to refer to husbands and
wives.
Next to cutting the knot by authority, I believe
the advocates of obedience rest their argument
on expediency, an expediency they think almost
amounting to a necessity, and sanctioned by the
practice of ages. "How can two walk together
except they be agreed?" was a pertinent question
126
LECTURE IV.
of old; but "How can two walk together, unless one
of them have it entirely his own way?" is the query
put to us by these persons now. They have become
so accustomed to the notion of one ruling and the
other obeying, that any other kind of arrangement
seems to them fraught with peril of domestic anarchy.
My dear friends, will you please to tell me, did
you ever hear of any sort of despotism, great or
small, spiritual or temporal, public or private, which
was not justified by those who exercised it on these
same grounds of its expediency, its convenience, its
necessity for the benefit and safety of the governed?
Does not the Church of Rome exert its tremendous
sway over the intellects and consciences of men, in
the honest persuasion of its hierarchs that it is good
for these sheep to be entirely guided by their shep-
herds? Has not every empire in history been founded
on the presumption that one supreme and irrespon-
sible ruler or autocrat could govern a nation much
better than a nation could govern itself? Nay, has
it not been the work of ages, not yet accomplished,
to make mankind understand that all the benefits
and conveniences of a paternal government are too
dearly bought by keeping the nations in perpetual
childhood?
How is a church to go on without a supreme head
to determine doctrines? How is a State to go on
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
127
without a despotic ruler at the helm? How is a
household to go on without an autocrat to settle all
questions by his simple volition? These questions
are all very much on a par. Nay, it ought surely to
be much easier for a little household, united by the
tenderest ties, to "get along" peacefully, harmoni-
ously, and prosperously as a miniature republic,
than for churches to flourish on Congregational
principles, or States to rise to glory and prosperity,
like that of our blessed England, on the basis of
some millions of independent wills.
Again, after authority, and after expediency and
necessity, obedience is vindicated by some persons
on quite another ground: not its utility to the family
generally, or to the State, but its comfort to the obey-
ing party; the relief it offers to her conscience; the
short cut it affords for getting rid of her "responsi-
bilities."
Now, I fear, I must have a dreadfully hardened
conscience; for it has never once occurred to me in
life that my responsibilities were things which (if I
could only induce somebody to marry me) might
thus be slipped off and laid aside like old shoes.
What responsibilities, I ask, are they which I could
get rid of, if I were not a wretched "failure," and
had a husband to love, honor, and obey? For exam-
ple, if I saw a child drowning in a pond, and my
128
LECTURE IV.
husband said, "Don't pick it out of the water on
any account," should I get rid of my "responsibil-
ity" by sweetly taking my spouse's arm and walk-
ing away, saying, "Just as you think right, dear
John"? Of course, by the law of England, if John
had thrown the child into the pond himself, and I
stood by, aiding and abetting him, I should be held
scot free, as acting under marital authority; but I
scarcely fancy that my conscience would be alto-
gether relieved of the sense of "responsibility."
Or, again, a much commoner case: I have an old
aunt, we will suppose, a very tiresome person (as
elderly aunts, I find, alas! are generally considered
to be), but she was infinitely good to me when I
was a child, and I owe her a debt of gratitude which
I can never repay. Now she is old and deaf and
stupid, and bores my husband to extinction, and he
forbids me to invite her to our house, or give her the
little cheer and comfort which her lonely old age
can receive. Shall I get rid of my "responsibility
toward poor old Aunt Dorothy by writing her a
little note and telling her, "I am sorry to observe
that my husband wishes me to drop you, and of
course it is my duty to obey"? Here, again (and,
in short, in every imaginable case of a crime to be
avoided or a duty to be performed), I find there is
no getting rid of that Man of the Sea on my shoul-
Gay
""
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
129
ders,— namely, responsibility. My husband or father
cannot take it off for me, even if we both desire it.
And why? For this reason, my friends. Because
GOD has laid it on me, when he made me a rational
free agent, not a dog or an idiot! No vow I can
take at any altar can make it thereafter right for me
to do wrong, or wrong to do what is right. There
may be sin in making the vow,-I believe there would
be sin in making any vow which should make it
more difficult for me thenceforward always to do
right; but no form of oath can bind me not to do it,
any more than Herod's rash vow ought to have bound
him to cut off the Baptist's head.
Let us, then, clear this matter away. Responsi-
bilities, in the sense of moral answerability, cannot
be shifted from one to another on any plea of Obe-
dience after the human being has reached the age
of full moral accountableness. You will bear in
mind this latter definition. In the case of filial
obedience, the young girl must justly defer to the
moral judgment of her parents (rather than to their
authority), in all save the most obvious matters of
right and wrong. I suppose even the greatest stickler
for parental authority would admit that, if a parent
bade a child to steal, he ought not to obey.
What, then, are the responsibilities which can be
deposited in a husband's or parent's hands? They
130
LECTURE IV.
can only be those which concern matters not moral,
matters concerning the pecuniary or other interests
of the family. On a great many of such points,
the husband will usually be wisest, and may most
properly be treated, as Mr. Mill suggests, as the
senior or acting partner in the firm. And if things
go wrong, bad investments be chosen, and so on,
and the wife finds it any comfort to remark after-
ward that all the responsibility rested with Mr.
Smith, and that she had entirely washed her hands
of it, by all means let her soothe herself with such
consolation! Probably, however, if she be an able
and sensible woman, she will have preferred to incur
the "
responsibility" of strongly advising Mr. Smith
not to invest in Egyptian bonds or Peruvian mines.
Still more will it be impossible for any mother, I
should think, to relinquish any control she may pos-
sess over her children's nurture and education by
way of relieving herself of "responsibility." It
would be little consolation when Charley has broken
his neck, and Edith is in her coffin, that she had left
with their father the whole "responsibility" of tak-
ing Charley out riding on a vicious hunter, and
bringing Edith to visit a family in scarlatina.
I cannot pursue these arguments in defence of the
principle of Conjugal Obedience. To me, that prin-
ciple seems irreconcilable with the fundamental
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
131
basis of morality (namely, the full and independent
moral responsibility of every adult human being),
and (I may add) antagonistic no less to the very nat-
ure of that love and affection which it is so foolishly
supposed to guarantee. Love naturally reverses the
idea of obedience, and causes the struggle between
any two people who truly love each other to be not
who shall command, but who shall yield. There is
in the world no harder duty than to oppose the will
of our heart's best friend. I would go further, and
remind you of a beautiful and wise couplet of Chau-
cer, which somehow has been repeated almost ver-
bally by Spenser (Spenser of the Fairy Queen, not
him of First Principles!), a couplet I advise you all
to commit to memory:
Ma
"When mastery cometh, then sweet Love anon
Flappeth his nimble wings, and soon away is flown.”
It is an insult, a wrong, a deadly wound to love, for
one of the lovers to turn round on the other and
claim, not the sweet right to serve, but the bitter
right to command and control. Practically, we
know, in happy marriages, this claim rarely crops
to the surface; but the mere fact that it is sous-
entendu in any discussion seems to me to take the
bloom off conjugal love.
Nor are the actual consequences of this doctrine
132
LECTURE IV.
anything short of disastrous. We see one class of
wives, of noble, free natures, fretted and galled all
their lives by the fetters which some mean-souled
man causes to clank whenever he is in an ill-temper.
On the other side, we see another set of women who
become perfectly passive and silly and "sweetly de-
pendent." And at sixty, when their husbands die,
they are no better able to manage their own affairs
than they were at six, but betray by their childish-
ness that the whole moral work of life has been
stopped for them for half a century. My father
(who highly approved of wifely obedience) used
nevertheless to laugh at such widows, and said they
reminded him of clocks with the weights taken off,
which instantly set off, buzz, buzz, buzz! till they
ran down.
Are the husbands any the better or the happier
for this monstrous idea, that they have a right to
their wives' obedience? Certainly not. It cannot
and does not fail to encourage their worst faults of
selfishness and despotism, and to inspire them with
contemptuous ideas of the very woman whom it
ought to be the joy and elevation of their souls to
honor. When a man does really honor his wife, we
see how beautiful and happy is their married life;
but he does it in sheer despite of their legal relation;
and a very hard achievement it must be to honor a
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
133
person who is actually bound body and soul for life
to obey your orders, and whose very children are
not hers, but yours, to tear from her arms, if you
think fit. How many of the awful crimes perpe-
trated daily in England by brutal husbands against
their wives would never have been committed, had
not the ruffians been taught by law and custom to
regard their wives as their obedient servants, their
property, we cannot compute; but I am convinced
that such outrages on women, such wife-torture and
wife-murder, will never cease, till the whole notion
of wifely subjection be radically changed.
I cannot pursue these arguments respecting obedi-
ence further, but will simply rehearse the conclu-
sions which we seem to have reached on the matter.
Adult human beings, whether men or women, owe
special benevolence, that is, special service, to those
persons to whom they are bound either by ties of
birth, of gratitude, or of contract. These services
may be so far before all others that, while those
persons need them, they are bound to pay them
before seeking to benefit any other human beings.
As a part of such service, it is their duty to yield
pleasantly and easily in all the small affairs and
habits of life, to be perfectly unselfish, affectionate,
and considerate, and never to thwart or oppose the
other unnecessarily. They are also bound to listen
134
LECTURE IV.
to the counsels and wishes of father or mother, hus-
band or wife, not only with courtesy and patience,
but with an honest wish to agree with them, and
meet them, if it be possible.
Beyond this, no adult human being ought to go
in the direction of obedience. To do so would be
not service, but slavery, or the immoral obedience
of the Jesuit to his superior,- a moral suicide, not
to be justified on any plea, whether of authority or
precedent, or expediency or comfort.
If marriage necessarily involved any such obedi-
ence and abnegation of moral responsibility, then I
should hold that it was not lawful for any woman to
marry; just as I think it is not lawful for any man
to become a Jesuit and take his vow of obedience.
But, of course, this is the very matter of our present.
contention. It is not in the least necessary that
the marriage oath - which ought to be a reciprocal
promise of fidelity, and a reciprocal promise of spe-
cial benevolence should have superadded to it a
vow that one of the parties is to be thenceforth not
only devoted to the other's welfare, but obedient to his
will.
But, if moral freedom be, as I have tried to show,
so sacred and solemn a charge that we must never
lay it aside even for the closest and tenderest human
ties, how great is the obligation which lies on us to
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
135
use it aright! How monstrous would be the posi-
tion of any woman who should claim her exemption
from filial or conjugal obedience on the strength of
her moral responsibilities, and then should exhibit
in her selfish, idle, useless, or worldly life an utter
ignorance or disregard of all which those awful
responsibilities to God involve! No, my friends.
Better a thousand times remain the most servilely
obedient of wives, in perpetual childhood and depend-
ence, than claim your rank as human beings, moral
free agents, and then show yourselves no better
than monkeys and parrots, or wilful, self-indulgent
children!
You must awake, if you mean to be the pioneers
of a nobler career for your sex, to the charge which
lies on you not to use your liberty for a cloak for
license. There are women who call themselves
"emancipated" now, who are leading lives, if not
absolutely vicious, yet loose, unseemly, trespassing
always on the borders of vice,- women who treat
lightly, and as if of small account, the heinous and
abominable sins of unchastity and adultery. For
God's sake, my young friends, beware of such
women! Shun them, and repudiate them as repre-
sentations of any emancipation which you desire to
share. Whether in the highest ranks, among the
"fast" ladies of fashion, with their indecorous and
136
LECTURE IV.
undignified habits (smoking with the men of their
society at night in smoking-rooms, and so on), or in
the middle class, the Bohemianism which, to young
girl-students, seems so enchanting after the plodding
ways of home,-in both, this pseudo-emancipation
is equally to be condemned and denounced as hav-
ing absolutely nothing in common with the move-
ment for the true progress of women.
Beside the duties arising from the great formal
Contract of Marriage, there are undoubtedly others.
arising from the informal and tacit contract of Friend-
ship. In the older Greek Church and among the
Bedouins, there are regularly appointed rites to sol-
emnize the mutual adoption of friends. Such cere-
monies, however, are by no means indispensable to
give sacredness to the bond of every true and noble
friendship of the closer sort, or to elevate its offices
of fidelity and mutual service to the rank of moral
obligations. I shall return to this subject a little
further on.
DUTIES OF WOMEN AS MISTRESSES OF HOUSEHOLDS.
After treating of Duties arising from Blood Rela-
tionship and from the Contract of Marriage and
Friendship, we come to treat of the Duties which
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
137
concern us women, when we are MISTRESSES OF
HOUSEHOLDS; and, to begin, I must say at once that
I have no sympathy at all with those ladies who are
seeking to promote co-operative housekeeping,- in
other words, to abolish the institution of the Eng-
lish Home. There may be, indeed, specially gifted
women, artists, musicians, literary women,- whom
I could imagine finding it an interruption to their
pursuits to take charge of a house. But, strange to
say, though I have had a pretty large acquaintance
with many of the most eminent of such women,
I have almost invariably found them particularly
proud of their housekeeping, and clever at the per-
formance of all household duties, not excepting the
ordering of "judicious" dinners. Not to make per-
sonal remarks on living friends, I will remind you
that the greatest woman mathematician of any age,
Mary Somerville, was renowned for her good house-
keeping, and, I can add from my own knowledge,
was an excellent judge of a well-dressed déjeuner
and of choice old sherry; while Madame de Staël,
driven by Napoleon from her home, went about
Europe, as it was said, "preceded by her reputation
and followed by her cook."
Rather, I suspect, it is not higher genius, but
feeble inability to cope with the problems of domes-
tic government, which generally inspires the women
138
LECTURE IV.
who wish to abdicate their little household thrones.
Some sympathy may be given to them, but I should
be exceedingly sorry to see many women catching
up the cry and following their leading to the dismal
disfranchisement of the home,— the practical home-
lessness of American boarding-houses or Continental
pensions. I think for a woman to fail to make and
keep a happy home is to be a "failure" in a truer
sense than to have failed to catch a husband.
Assuredly, the Englishwoman's home is the Eng-
lishwoman's kingdom; and those homes, with all
their faults and shortcomings, are the glories of our
country,- better glories, I think, than if we could
transport the Louvre and Saint Mark's, or St. Peter's
itself, across the Channel. Out of the English home
has sprung much of that which is most excellent in
the national character; and with the abolition of it
would follow, I cannot doubt, a dissipation of child-
hood and a loosening of family ties, whereof the
evil consequences would be measureless. Let me
entreat you, then, while doing all you can to amend
the many and serious defects which cling around our
home system, to lift no hand to break it down.
Make your homes better and happier and freer than
they are, but do not even speak of the alternative of
forsaking them and turning ourselves into Bedou-
ins of the lodging-house. For Englishmen, such
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
139
a change would be very injurious: for Englishwomen,
it would be simply disastrous.
The making of a true home is really our peculiar
and inalienable right,— a right which no man can take
from us; for a man can no more make a home than a
drone can make a hive. He can build a castle or a
palace; but-poor creature!-be he wise as Solomon
and rich as Croesus, he cannot turn it into a home.
No masculine mortal can do that. It is a woman,
and only a woman,- a woman all by herself, if she
likes, and without any man to help her, who can
turn a house into a home. Woe to the wretched
man who disputes her monopoly, and thinks, because
he can arrange a club, he can make a home! Neme-
sis overtakes him in his old bachelorhood, when a
home becomes the supreme ideal of his desires; and
we see him him who scorned the home-making of
a lady - obliged to put up with the oppression of his
cook or the cruelty of his nurse!
But it is our privilege, our faculty, to turn any
four walls, nay, even a tent under which we take shel-
ter as we wander about the plains of the East, into a
home, if we so please. And shall we relinquish the
use of this blessed faculty, and be content henceforth,
like mere men, to be only quartered here or there,
not to be at home anywhere? Why, even the little
beavers, left in a drawing-room, set about making a
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
140
LECTURE IV.
dam, a beavers' home, out of the coal-scuttle and
the rug and the fire-irons! Shades of our grand-
mothers, keep us from such degeneracy.
But, not to pursue this spectre, let us take our
stand pro aris et focis, and see what duties belong to
us in right of our home-rule. (We women are the
true home rulers: Parnell and Co. are impostors.)
In the first place, if home be our kingdom, it must
be our joy and privilege to convert that domain, as
quickly and as perfectly as we may, into a little prov-
ince of the Kingdom of God; for remember what I
have said all along: that we may look on all our
duties in this cheering and beautiful light,— first, to
set up God's Kingdom in our own hearts, making
them pure and true and loving, and then to make
our homes little provinces of the same kingdom, and,
lastly, to try to extend that kingdom through the
world, the empire of Justice, Truth, and Love.
We are entirely responsible for our own souls, and
very greatly responsible for those of all the dwellers
in our homes; and, in a lesser way, we are answer-
able for each widening circle beyond us. How shall
we set about making our homes provinces of the
Divine Kingdom?
Sp
1st. Nobody must be morally the worse for living
under our roof, if we can possibly help it. It is the
minimum of our duties to make sure that tempta-
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
141
tions to misconduct or intemperance are not left in
any one's way, or bad feelings suffered to grow up,
or habits of moroseness or domineering formed, or
quarrels kept hot, as if they were toasts before the
kitchen fire. As much as possible, on the contrary,
everybody must be helped to be better,- not made
better by act of the drawing-room, remember,— that
is impossible, but helped to be better. The way
to do this, I apprehend, is neither very much to
scold, or exhort, or insist on people going to church
whether they like it or not, or reading family prayers
(excellent though that practice may be), but rather
to spread through the house such an atmosphere of
frank confidence and kindliness with servants, and
of love and trust with children and relations, that
bad feelings and doings will really have no place, no
temptation, and, if they intrude, will soon die out.
One such point out of many I may cite as specially
concerning us women. Is it not absurd for a lady
who spends hundreds of pounds and thousands of
hours on her toilet, and takes evident pleasure in
attracting admiration in fashionable raiment not
always perfectly decent, to turn and lecture poor
Mary Ann, her housemaid, on sobriety in attire, and
set forth to her the peril and folly of flowers in her
bonnet? The mistress who dresses modestly and
sensibly may reasonably hope in time that her ser-
142
LECTURE IV.
vants will dress modestly and sensibly likewise; but
certainly they will not do so while she exhibits to
their foolish young eyes the example of extravagance
and folly.
2d. Next to the virtue of those who live in our
homes, their happiness should occupy us. In the
first place, no creature under our roof should ever
be miserable, if we can prevent it. In how many
otherwise happy homes is there not one such miser-
able being? Sometimes, it is the sufferers' own
fault: their minds are warped and despairful, and
our utmost efforts perhaps can only cheer them a
little. But much oftener there is to be found in a
large household some poor creature who has fallen,
through no fault, into the miserable position of the
family butt, the object of ill-natured and unfeeling
jests and rude speeches, the last person to be given
any pleasure, and the first person to be made to
suffer any privation or ill-temper. Sometimes, it is
a poor governess or tutor; sometimes, an old aunt or
poor relation; now and then, but rarely in these
days, a stupid servant; most often of all, a child,
who is, perhaps, a step-child or nephew or niece of
the mistress of the house, or, alas! her own child,
only deformed in some way, or deficient in intellect.
Then, the hapless, frightened creature, afraid of pun-
ishment, looks with furtive glances at the frowning
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
143
faces about it, tries to escape by some little trans-
parent deception, and only incurs the heavier penalty
of falsehood and the name of a liar; and so the evil
goes on growing day by day. It is astonishing and
horrible to witness how the deep-seated, frightful
human passion, which I have elsewhere named hete-
ropathy, develops itself in such circumstances,— the
sight of suffering and down-trodden misery exciting
not pity, but the reverse, a sort of cruel aversion
in the bystanders, till the whole household some-
times joins in hating the poor, helpless, and isolated
victim.
My friends, if you ever see anything approaching
to this in your homes, for God's sake, set your faces
like a flint against it! If you dislike and mistrust.
the poor victim yourself, as you probably will do at
first, never mind! Take my word for it, the first
thing to be done in the Kingdom of God is to do
JUSTICE to all,- to secure that no creature, however
mean or even loathsome, should be treated with
injustice. If you are, as I am supposing, mistress
of the house, stop this persecution with a high hand;
and if you have been in any way to blame in it, if it
be your dislike which you see thus reflected in the
faces of your dependants, repent your great fault, and
make amends to your victim. If you are not mis-
tress, only a guest perhaps, or a humble friend, even
I
144
LECTURE IV.
[
then you can and ought to do much: you can look
grave and pained whenever the butt is laughed at
and jeered; and you can deliberately fix your eyes
on him or her with sympathy, and treat him with
respect. Even these little tokens of condemnation
of what is going on will have (you may be sure) a
startling effect on those whose custom it has become
to treat the poor soul with contempt; and they will
probably be angry with you for exhibiting them.
You will never have borne resentment for a better
cause.
Nor is it only human beings who are thus made
too often household victims. You must all know
houses where some unlucky animal,- a cat or dog,
beginning by being the object of somebody's sense-
less antipathy, becomes the general souffre-douleur
of masters and servants. The dog or cat (especially
if it happens to be cherished by the human victim)
is spoken to so roughly, driven out of every room,
and perhaps punished for all sorts of offences it has
never committed, that the animal assumes a down-
cast, sneaking aspect, which inevitably produces
fresh and fresh heteropathy. You attempt, perhaps,
to give it a little pat of sympathy, and the poor
frightened beast snaps at you, expecting a blow, or
runs off to hide under a sofa. Mistresses of homes,
don't let there be a dog or a cat or a donkey or any
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
145
other creature, in or about your homes, which shrinks
when a man or woman approaches it. And here
I may add that, without thus specially victimizing
the animals through dislike, a household frequently
makes the life of some poor brute one long martyr-
dom through neglect. The responsibility for this
neglect lies primarily with the mistress of the house.
She must not only direct her servants, but see that
her directions be carried out, in the way of affording
water and food and needful exercise. A pretty
"Kingdom of Heaven" some houses would be, if
the poor brutes could speak,- houses, possibly, with
prayers going on twice a day, and grace said care-
fully before long, luxurious meals, and all the time
the children's birds and rabbits left untended in foul
cages, without fresh food; mice thrown out of the
traps on the fire, aged or diseased cats or superflu-
ous puppies given to boys to destroy in any way their
cruel invention may suggest, fowls for the consump-
tion of the house carelessly and barbarously killed;
and, worst of all, the poor house-dog, perhaps some
loving-hearted little Skye or noble old mastiff or
retriever, condemned for life to the penalties which
we should think too severe for the worst of malefac-
tors: chained up by the neck through all the long,
bright summer days, under a burning sun, with its
water-trough unfilled for days, or through the win-
146
LECTURE IV.
ter's frost in some dark, sunless corner, freezing with
cold and in agonies of rheumatism for want of straw
or the chance of warming itself at a fire or by a
run in the snow. And all this as a reward for the
poor brute's fidelity! When this kind of thing goes
on for a certain time, of course the dog becomes
horribly diseased. His longing to bound over the
fresh grass, expressed so affectingly by his leaps and
bounds when we approach his miserable dungeon, is
not merely a longing for his natural pleasure, but
for that which is indispensable to his health,—
namely, exercise and the power to eat grass; and,
if refused, he very soon falls into disease: his beau-
tiful coat becomes mangy and red; he is irritable,
and becomes revolting to everybody, and the nurse
cries to the children, who were his only friends and
visitors, "Don't go near that dog!"
I say it deliberately, the mistress of a house in
whose yard a dog is thus kept like a forçat — only
worse treated than any murderer is treated in Italy
is guilty of a very great sin; and till she has
taken care that the dog has his daily exercise and
water, and that the cat and the fowls and every
other sentient creature under her roof is well and
kindly treated, she may as well, for shame's sake,
give up thinking she is fulfilling her duties by read-
ing prayers and subscribing to missions.
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
147
I assume that the master of the house, where there
is one, will, as usual, look after the stable depart-
ment. Where there is no master, or he does not
interfere, the mistress is surely responsible for hu-
mane treatment of the horses, if she keep any.
Further, I think every lady is bound to insist that
any horse which draws her shall be free from the
misery of a bearing-rein. She ought not to allow
her vanity and ambition to be fashionable to in-
duce her to connive at her coachman's laziness and
cruelty.
When the mistress of a house has done all she can
to prevent the suffering, mental or physical, of any
creature, human or infra-human, under her roof,
there remains still a delightful field for her ability
in actually giving pleasure. We all know that life
is made up chiefly of little pleasures and little pains;
and how many of the former are in the power of
the mistress of a house to provide, it is almost impos-
sible to calculate. But let any clever woman sim-
ply take it to heart to make everybody about her
as happy as she can, and the result I believe will
always be wonderful. Let her see that, so far as
possible, they have the rooms they like best, the
little articles of furniture and ornament they prefer.
Let her order meals with a careful forethought for
their tastes and for the necessities of their health,
148
LECTURE IV.
seeing that every one has what he desires, and mak-
ing him feel, however humble in position, that his
tastes have been remembered. Let her not disdain
to pay such attention to the position of the chairs
and sofas of the family dwelling-rooms as that every
individual may be comfortably placed, and feel that
he or she has not been left out in the cold. And,
after all these cares, let her try not so much to make
her rooms splendid and aesthetically admirable as to
make them thoroughly habitable and comfortable
for those who are to occupy them; regarding their
comfort rather than her own æsthetic gratification.
A drawing-room bright and clean, sweet with flow-
ers in summer or with dried rose leaves in winter,
with tables at which the inmates may occupy them-
selves, and easy chairs wherever they are wanted,
and plenty of soft light and warmth, or else of cool-
ness adapted to the weather, this sort of room
belongs more properly to a woman who seeks to
make her house a province of the Kingdom of
Heaven than one which might be exhibited at South
Kensington as having belonged to the Kingdom of
Queen Anne!
A
Then, for the moral atmosphere of the house,
which depends so immensely on the tone of the mis-
tress, I will venture to make one recommendation.
Let it be as gay as ever she can make it. There are
numbers of excellent women -the salt of the earth
pią
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
149
who seem absolutely oppressed with their con-
sciences, as if they were congested livers. They are
in a constant state of anxiety and care; and per-
haps, with the addition of feeble health, find it diffi-
cult to get through their duties except in a certain
lachrymose and dolorous fashion. Houses where
these women reign seem always under a cloud, with
rain impending. Now, I conceive that good and
even high animal spirits are among the most blessed
of possessions,— actual wings to bear us up over the
dusty or muddy roads of life; and I think that to
keep up the spirits of a household is not only indefi-
nitely to add to its happiness, but also to make all
duties comparatively light and easy. Thus, how-
ever naturally depressed a mistress may be, I think
she ought to struggle to be cheerful, and to take
pains never to quench the blessed spirits of her chil-
dren or guests. All of us who live long in great
cities get into a sort of subdued-cheerfulness tone.
We are neither very sad nor very glad; we neither
cry nor ever enjoy that delicious experience of help-
less laughter, the fou rire which is the joy of youth.
I wish we could be more really light of heart.
A few words must suffice upon the vexed question
of servants.
I do not represent to myself a household as a des-
potism, so much as a community, wherein some
150
LECTURE IV.
persons (the servants) have contracted, on certain
terms, to perform a certain class of services for the
heads of the house, their children and guests. The
mistress (it is part of the contract) is authorized to
give directions at all moments how those services
are to be performed; and she is also authorized (it
is understood) to give such farther directions respect-
ing the dress and habits of the servants, their hours
for coming home, the persons they shall admit into
the house, etc., as may appear necessary for the
order and safeguard of the house. But, with these
directions, I think her claims to authority are ex-
hausted. Into the employment of any leisure time
her servants may have, and their private affairs gen-
erally, she has no right, in virtue of their contract,
to intrude at all; and I cannot but think that the
recognition of this line of demarcation, the formal
relinquishment of the patriarchal relation (which
can now be really maintained only in exceptional
cases), and the careful observance of the contract,
would be the safest, as it is the truest, basis for our
future relationship with our servants. When this
basis is fairly laid, I think servants can be better
brought to respect their side of the contract; to do
us just and honest service for honest wages; and,
metaphorically and literally, "to sweep under the
mats." There remains, outside of their actual ser-
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
151
vice, or of any assumption of authority on our side,
an actually limitless field for the exercise of our
natural influence as their immediate superiors and
friends.
One word in concluding these remarks on woman's
duties as a Hausfrau. If we cannot perform these
well, if we are not orderly enough, clear-headed
enough, powerful enough, in short, to fulfil this im-
memorial function of our sex well and thoroughly,
it is somewhat foolish of us to press to be allowed
to share in the great housekeeping of the State.
My beloved and honored friend, Theodore Parker,
argued for the admission of women to the full rights
of citizenship and share in government, on the ex-
press grounds that few women keep house so badly
or with such wastefulness as Chancellors of the Ex-
chequer keep the State, and womanly genius for
organization applied to the affairs of the nation
would be extremely economical and beneficial. But,
if we cannot keep our houses and manage our ser-
vants, this argument, I am afraid, will be turned the
other way; and we shall be told that, not having used
our one talent, it is quite out of question to give us
ten. Having shown ourselves incapable in little
things, nobody in their senses will trust us with
great ones.
LECTURE V.
DUTIES OF WOMEN AS MEMBERS OF SOCIETY.
IN the Second Lecture of this Course, I spoke of
the Personal Duties of Women. In the Third Lect-
ure, we discussed their Social Duties generally, be-
ginning with their duties as members of families,
mothers, daughters, sisters, etc. In the Fourth Lect-
ure, I spoke of the Duties of Wives and Mistresses
of Households. We now come to the consideration
of the Duties of a Woman as a Member of Society;
reserving for our last lecture her Duties as a Citizen
of the State and Member of the Human Race.
In this lecture, I beg you to take note that I shall
use the word "society" in its narrower conventional
sense, implying the association of equals for pur-
poses of pleasure, mutual hospitality, visits, enter-
tainments, and so forth. The larger sense of the
word "society," as applied to all human intercourse,
is not here intended.
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
153
66
wom-
If the home be, as it is often well called,
an's kingdom," every drawing-room is woman's
throne-room. Modern civilized society all proceeds
on the assumption, not only of woman's right to
share in almost all kinds of social pleasures (a con-
cession already surprising to an Oriental), but to
hold in them, conventionally, the position of the
superior. Practically, we all know that there is a
good deal of ko-towing to men, in drawing-rooms as
elsewhere; but, theoretically, a woman in society is
queen. She may acknowledge or cut her male ac-
quaintance as she sees fit, and every man is bound
to pay her that tribute of little civilities - bowings
and uncoverings and openings of doors and handing
of chairs which some foolish women deem so inex-
pressibly valuable that they would not have us lose
them for the sake of civil and political equality (a
choice which reminds me of the fable of the Dog and
the Bone and the Shadow). This being the case, it
would surely seem that we ought, long ere this time,
to have fulfilled our unquestionable duty, and have
made society a good deal better and happier. It is
true that we go to our friends' parties, and invite
them to our own, for pleasure and not to preach
morals. We very properly should eschew the invi-
tation of any lady who should treat her dinner-table
as a pulpit; and, I confess, I even feel resentful
154
LECTURE V.
against those good souls who sometimes come to
parties with malice prepense, determined to do phil-
anthropic business, and spend the time in button-
holing one influential man or woman after another;
asking Mr. A. to vote for a deaf and dumb, and Mrs.
B. for an idiot, and Miss C. to attend the committee
of the Up-at-Six-Every-Morning Society, and Profes-
sor D. to join the new Association for the Promotion
of Perpetual Ratiocination. This turning of a draw-
ing-room into a little benevolence exchange is quite
unpardonable, I think (though I am afraid I have
sometimes been. guilty of it myself). But surely it is
not to go thus into society on false pretences, to carry
with us into it our genuine moral feelings,- our love
and enjoyment of "whatsoever things are honest,"
whatsoever things are lovely and kindly and pure
and true; and our disgust and antipathy for whatso-
ever things are the reverse? If instead of the banal
smile, wherewith we commonly equally greet a fine
sentiment or a bit of true humor or a pretty story,
and also a spiteful remark or an anecdote verging
on the scabreux, we were to welcome the first with
the sympathy we really feel, and treat the latter
with a coldness which should effectually mark our
disgust, the results in the long run would be consid-
erable. There is, for example, in almost every soci-
ety a detracting way (that is the exact word) of
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
155
treating absent persons which it behooves every
good-natured woman to check by the simple, well-
bred expedient of merely looking bored. Nothing
more is necessary: merely look bored, and you will
not often be pestered with this kind of stupid spite-
fulness. For once that anybody resorts to it from
real malice, it is twenty times employed by dull, half-
cultivated people, as the best way they know of ex-
citing interest in their chatter.
And, once again, I think it behooves us women
to use our immense social influence in utterly dis-
couraging and putting down those attacks upon our
sex generally, which in Parliament and in certain
newspapers afford just the same refined and elevated
amusement which our ancestors found in the public
recreation for which the pious Alleyne liberally con-
tributed; namely, "Whipping of the Blind Bear."
Those debates in Parliament wherein certain face-
tious speakers distinguish themselves, are they not
very like "Whipping of the Blind Bear"? We are
up in the ladies' gallery of the House of Commons,
like the bear, tied to its stake, unable to deal our
tormentors even a dab with our paws, while they
are diverting themselves, giving us the heaviest cuts
which their cart-whips can inflict. Truly, it is a
gallant and gentlemanly sport, and one of which it
appears these members of Parliament will not soon
156
LECTURE V.
tire. But is it quite consistent with our dignity as
women that the men who say and write these things
should be just as welcome to us, just as free to enter
our drawing-rooms, as those generous friends who
stand by us year after year, and bear for our sakes
and the sake of justice the scoffs and sneers lev-
elled at them as our champions? There is, it seems
to me, a terrible want of esprit de corps among
women; an unmeaning readiness to smile equally at
every man, or, perhaps, I ought in some cases to
say, rather a base and servile willingness to flatter
men by pretending to agree with them in their con-
tempt for the claims of women. Were women only
united in common feeling, and the insult done to the
sex generally felt by every woman as a wrong and
insult to herself; did every woman say (transposing
the old Roman poet's words), "I am a woman, and
nothing which concerns women is alien to me,”—then
this sort of thing would be put down very shortly.
But there is a still graver order of offences which I
believe it is the high duty of women to discounte-
nance, by driving out of society those who are guilty
of them. I speak of offences either against the
great laws of chastity or of honesty or of humanity ;
and I maintain that it is the duty of every woman
to refuse to associate with persons who are notori-
ously guilty of them. Remember I say "notoriously
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
157
guilty." It is not our business to pry into
any one's
secrets; but, when vices and crimes are secrets no
longer, when men or women stand convicted of adul-
tery, seduction, swindling, or cruelty, I insist that
they are no longer fit to join in social pleasures,
that their presence is a blight on them, and that no
woman ought either to receive them in her own
house or consent to meet them at the entertain-
ments of her friends.
I have been greatly blamed for pronouncing this
judgment; and, when I first delivered these lectures
in London, more than one of my audience treated
me as hard-hearted, and argued that, after a certain
interval had elapsed, such offenders ought to be rein-
stated in their social privileges. It was indeed
strange to me thus to be accused of harshness, see-
ing that I believe none can desire more than I do to
treat tenderly repentant guilt of every form, but
most of all in the piteous form of ruined woman-
hood. But the misunderstanding arose from two
causes. I spoke of society exclusively as the scene
of social amusements: my critics insisted on talking
of the whole range of human intercourse. They
thought of humble and repentant guilt; while I
thought of the spectacle (alas! much more common)
of triumphant and insolent vice, flaunting itself in
every haunt of pleasure. The matter is of such
7
**
158
LECTURE V.
great importance that you must suffer me to speak
upon it more at length.
It was almost my foremost object, in undertaking
the somewhat audacious scheme of addressing my
fellow-countrywomen on our duties, to do all that
might be possible for me to separate the sacred cause
of the social and political emancipation of women
from certain modes of thought and action which it
has been the business of false friends and open ene-
mies to confound therewith. The preachers of the
hateful and disgusting doctrines of free-love have
been the bane and calamity of our allies in America.
We have nothing quite so bad here; but we have, in
the highest circles, a new development of "fastness,"
very nearly akin to profligacy, and quite akin to the
neglect of all decorum and womanly dignity; and
we have, in the middle classes, also, a new tone, if
not of behavior, yet of opinion,—a tone of laxity in
discussing breaches of the law of chastity which
must prove no less disastrous in its results than it is,
in my opinion, erroneous in principle.
We have attempted in these studies (as I may
call them) to treat ethical questions as they ought
to be treated; namely, with as near an approach
as possible to a scientific method, deducing them
from principles upon which we have (I hope) all
agreed. Now, one of the most important of these
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
159
principles is that virtue must always be a higher end
than happiness, and that we must never postpone
the end of virtue for the end of happiness. When,
therefore, we are considering a point which must
affect closely the moral welfare-the virtue of so-
ciety at large, I might justly refuse to entertain the
plea that it would be more kind, more for the happi-
ness of certain erring individuals, that the course
best suited to promote that highest end should not
be adopted.
But, my friends, I do not think we need have
recourse to this painful alternative between justice
to society and mercy to offenders; because I hold
with uttermost conviction that it is not mercy, this
pseudo-charity, this easy condonation of enormous
sin; not mercy to the offender himself, whose con-
science is falsely soothed and pacified, and who is
led into a life hollow and unreal, utterly unfit for
his true moral condition, and the very reverse of
mercy to the innocent members of society who have
a right to be shielded from the contagion of vice.
I am not now speaking exclusively of sins against
chastity. I have already placed in the same cate-
gory great sins of fraud, and also, emphatically, sins
of cruelty. Let us review, then, once more the
question, "How ought society to treat persons noto-
riously guilty of any enormous sin?" Does mercy
160
LECTURE V.
or charity ask of us that we should, after a given
interval, receive them back into the circle of our
social pleasures? Are the amusements of the inno-
cent fitted for souls blasted and marred by crime,
and (at the best) seared by the hot iron of remorse?
Is admission to such pleasures the proper guerdon
of repentance? Bah! Repentance rewarded by invi-
tations to dinner-parties! A broken and a contrite
spirit comforted by a card for a ball!
Such quiet intercourse as may be shared in the
privacy of their homes is another matter, and is very
proper for those who believe they can thereby con-
fer a benefit. But, by the very hypothesis, IF the
offender be really repentant, he or she will not seek,
but rather shrink from noisy pleasures; and the
manifestation of a desire to re-enter the scene of
them with a blighted reputation is nothing else than
a betrayal of total callousness and unrepentance.
As to the idea that a limit in time could be fixed,
after which these social ostracisms should come to
an end and the banished persons be readmitted
and rehabilitated, a sort of moral quarantine, I con-
fess it seems to me purely illusive and nugatory.
When should the act of condonation be passed?
Ought it to be after five years? Or three years? Or
one year? Or one month? Whatever period might
be first adopted, it would inevitably be shortened in
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
161
one case after another case. The principle that it
was merciful and kind to readmit the sinner being
once accepted, nobody would be willing to incur the
odium of insisting on a longer banishment. Very
soon we should have simply the shortest eclipse
(little more than the evil honeymoon of vice itself),
and then the triumphant offenders would reappear
as the petted returned prodigals of their circles of
acquaintance.
This is not my idea of mercy; still less is it my
idea of truth and straightforwardness. From the
first of these Addresses, I have tried to convey to
you my sense of the infinite sanctity of veracity as
a personal virtue, never to be postponed for any
motive of benevolence or good-nature; and I have
exhorted you, with all the power I possessed, to
endeavor to make your whole lives straightforward,
and all your social intercourse simple and upright,
-to be dans le vrai in all your relations. What,
then, shall we say of the appeal to us to treat great
and notorious offenders as they must be treated if
they are to be restored to society at all,- that is,
with respectful courtesy and cheerful cordiality ?
Certainly, nobody can wish them to be brought
back to be met with "the cold shoulder" of con-
tempt. The tone of society must be uniformly
courteous, and they must benefit by it if they enter
}
162
LECTURE V.
society at all. But how are we, consistently with
any veracity, any self-respect, any straightforward-
ness, to treat swindlers and adulterers and men
guilty of hideous cruelties with respect or cordial-
ity? If I must smile at the smooth jests of the
fraudulent director, and shake the hand which an
hour ago was engaged in the devilish work of animal-
torture, and treat as "hail fellow, well met," the
profligate destroyer of the happiness of a family,—
then society must be for me one huge sham and
falsehood, a dismal piece of play-acting in a dull
farce; and I should beg to renounce it forever, and
expect every honest man and woman to do the same.
I will not,— I say it deliberately,—I will not, for any
good-nature, or even any mercy,- supposing it to
be mercy, act a living lie, pretend to treat as
friends the men and women whose deeds I loathe,
and pay the semblance of honor to those to whom
I know that honor is not due. I will not laugh and
exchange the comradeship of an innocent jest with
men over whose deeds angels might weep and God
must frown. I will not pollute my hand by placing
it, knowingly, in that of a villain.
Turn we now from the vice and wrong which
women, as members of society, are bound to dis-
countenance, to the virtue and happiness they may
assist.
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
163
My great panacea for making society at once
better and more enjoyable would be to cultivate
greater sincerity. In my Second Lecture, I spoke of
Veracity as a great Personal Virtue. I left its
discussion as a Social Duty-i.e., its secondary and
minor obligation for this occasion.
A great many well-meaning persons are puzzled
between the rival claims of veracity and politeness.
in ordinary social intercourse; and we see some
manifestly postponing veracity to what they con-
sider to be the demands of politeness, and be-
coming odious flatterers; and others postponing
politeness to what they think the demands of verac-
ity, and becoming insufferably rude and brusque.
It is not then useless to try to get at the real
moral principles which ought to decide our con-
duct in every case wherein the two principles seem
to clash.
J
I must remind you here of what I remarked be-
fore, that words have no absolute meaning. Their
meaning is the sense which we agree speaker
and hearer to attach to them. To speak truly
is to speak so that the person we address shall
understand the truth. To speak falsely is to speak
so that he may be deceived. It is the intention
and effort to deceive wherein alone lie the guilt
and disgrace of lying. Bearing this obvious rule
164
LECTURE V.
in mind, you will see at once that in every lan-
guage a considerable number of phrases are used,
not in a literal but a conventional sense, and can
deceive, and are intended to deceive nobody. We
sign our letters "Yours truly," without in the least
intending to signify that we belong, in any sense
whatever, to the person we address. Our grand-
fathers wrote they were their correspondents' "hum-
ble and obedient servants," when they were neither
"humble nor "obedient" nor their "servants" in
any sense. A Spaniard assures you his house be-
longs to you, but would be very indignant if you
took him at his word for a farthing rushlight. An
Italian addresses you as "Pregiatissima," and sub-
scribes himself your "Divotissimo," without anybody
supposing you are "most prized" or he "most de-
voted." To what, then, do all these phrases amount?
Simply to expressions of courtesy; and when you
use them, if you mean to be courteous, you are
perfectly truthful. There is no deception, and no
intention to deceive. Once for all, then, let us
set apart all phrases which are in common use as
conventional expressions of civility, and recognize
that there can be no infraction of the laws of ve-
racity in using them in the ordinary way.
ww
But now comes the pinch! Women who are of
a "gushing" disposition, or very anxious to ingra-
""
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
165
tiate themselves with others, are exceedingly apt
to overleap these conventional phrases of courtesy,
and make use of other terms which are not conven-
tional, but are commonly employed in their natural
sense as expressions of much stronger sentiments,
sincere affection or respect or gratitude, real joy
or genuine sorrow. They write these words, and
they act them; they press the hand tenderly, where
courtesy requires only a bow or an ordinary shake
of the hand; or they kiss,- an act which nobody
short of the Queen is bound to do except from gen-
uine sentiment. Can there be any doubt that here
is falsehood, in every case wherein the woman does
not genuinely feel more than courtesy,- some real
affection or respect or sympathy? A great deal
of this kind of thing is done by women, and has
gained for our sex a bad name for sincerity. I do
not think it is always so insincere as it seems, or
that it is always a Judas-kiss which one Woman
offers, in public, to another of whom she is not
particularly fond. It is more often, I think, the
habit of exaggerating everything they say and do,
into which weak persons are very apt to fall, just as
all weak writers affect strong language, and heap up
epithets to give intensity to washy sentences. But
the evil is considerable, and must always be an
offence against strict simplicity and sincerity, even
166
LECTURE V.
if it do not amount to intentional deception. Thus,
I would urge every woman who has any tendency to
this kind of thing to overhaul her vocabulary, and
make up her mind which phrases she may safely
use as mere conventional courtesies, and which
others (including her kisses) she must reserve to
express only her genuine sentiments.
Be true, my friends, I implore you,- true to your-
selves, true in your family relations, true in so-
ciety. Believe that old Chaucer said well : —
"Truth to thine own heart thy soul shall save."
Go through life straight ahead, fearing nothing so
much as to incur the deadly disgrace of crooked
ways and flattering words and false-hearted caresses
and mean stratagems and manœuvres. The day in
which women renounce all these basenesses, and
learn to resent the imputation of them as a mortal
insult, will be a better day for us than the one
which sees our political emancipation.
I shall say no more now of the special ways in
which women may use their power to purify and
amend society. If a woman be herself pure and
noble-hearted, she will come into every circle as a
person does into a heated room who carries with
him the freshness of the woods where he has been
walking," the smell of the field which the Lord
hath loved."
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
167
Matka
There is one general principle which may, per-
haps, better be insisted on here than anywhere else.
It is this: that in our whole social intercourse with
our fellows in the family, the home, in society, and
in all public work the power of any individual to
do good must depend almost measure for measure
on the extent of that individual's power of sympa-
thy, the wideness and the warmth of his heart.
The power of thinking, the capacity of his head, is
but a secondary matter. I have often quoted before,
and I cannot repeat too often the words of a man
who himself most marvellously united the great
heart and the strong head,- the late dear and ven-
erable Matthew Davenport Hill. "It is difficult,"
he said, "to estimate sufficiently the aggressive
power of love and kindness." That is the true
word the aggressive, the invasive, the irresistible,
tide-like power swelling up through every stream
and rivulet — of love and kindness. Never think
G
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
you who are young and glorying, perhaps, in the
grand new fields of intellectual culture opened be-
fore you that the intellect is nobler than the heart,
that knowledge is greater than love. Not so! A
thousand times no! The vilest of beings - devils,
if there were such creatures might very easily
know more than all the men of science in Europe
put together, and be devils at the end of it, with
168
LECTURE V.
every cruelty, every baseness and bitterness in their
miserable souls. Mephistopheles knew a great deal
more than Faust, Claude Bernard than the dog he
tortured; but Faust was nobler than his tempter,
the dog than the physiologist. It is here, in the
faculty of noble, disinterested, unselfish love, that
lies the true gift and power of our womanhood,-the
power which makes us, not the equals of men (I
never care to claim such equality), but their equiv-
alents, more than their equivalents in a moral sense.
This is the Godlike thing in human nature, the
divine breath of the higher life; and it is "in this
sign," the sign of self-sacrificing love, wherein we
conquer.
In picturing, then, the ideal life of woman in her
home and in society, I should utterly fail if I did not
convey to you my sense that it must be supremely
a loving life,— a life of tender, multiform, perennial
sympathy with the pleasures and sorrows of all
around her, and of the deep joy of fervent personal
affection. I can imagine nothing more miserable, no
social life a more wretched failure, than that of a
certain lady in London of whom I have heard it said
that she has "five hundred people on her visiting-
list, and not a friend among them." My ideal of
life would be very different from this. It would be,
first, the closest love of one; then, true and tender
affection for many; then, kindly good-will to all.
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
169
I think that every one, at least some time or other
in life, must have the chance offered to them of form-
ing a true marriage with one of the opposite sex or
else a true friendship with one of their own, and
that we should look to such marriages and friend-
ships as the supreme joy and glory of mortal life,—
unions wherein we may steep our whole hearts, love
such as that of which some poet says that it
"Like an indivisible glory lay on both our souls,
And dwelt in us, as we did dwell in it."
This is our natural inheritance of comfort and
delight, of which we need scarcely be cheated save
by our own fault. We women have been always
told to look for it in marriage; and truly I believe
(indeed it is impossible to doubt) that, in a thor-
oughly happy and worthy marriage, it must be real-
ized in its uttermost perfection. But I think it is
time (especially now, when a fourth of the women in
this country never marry, and considering, also, that
a woman cannot seek to marry the man who might
best fill her heart) to let all women from girlhood
bear in mind that, although a perfect marriage be a
perfect ideal of friendship, it is not the only form
in which friendships can be perfected, nor the only
relation in life wherein the demands of our hearts
can be fulfilled. There are, I suppose, some women
170
LECTURE V..
(rather perhaps of the clinging order) whose natures
could never find their complement or be quite satis-
fied, except in marriage; and for these I can only
wish a good husband! But, if I am not mistaken,
there are a considerable number who are capable of
being quite as completely satisfied by friendship, and
not a few whose dispositions are such that they are
better suited for friendship than for marriage,—
women of the character described by Emerson as
the true types of friends, who do not need to lean,
but to clasp hands along the journey of life. More
and more, I expect, as time goes on, women who
have not the blessing of sisters who can live with
them will form these lifelong sisterly friendships
with other women, and find in them the affection
and the comradeship which will fill their hearts and
cheer all their later years.
M
And then, beyond such closest and most endur-
ing bonds, there lie open in this rich world to every
loving heart the most wonderful variety and wealth
of possible friendships, with old and with young,
with our contemporaries and with children, with men
and with women, with the wise and good and great,
to whom we look up with tender reverence; and
with the pure and fresh young creatures, who cling
around us like honeysuckles round a gnarled old
tree.
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
171
Social Duty, in short, my friends, as we were
taught long ago, is summed up in the second com-
mandment of the law. Love in the family, in the
home, in society, and in the world, is "the fulfil-
ment of the law"; and there is no fulfilling any
law, however small, of social duty without it. He
or she who leads a thoroughly loving life, not only
"lives in God," but shares something of God's own
power to move and bless the world.
LECTURE VI.
WOMAN AS A CITIZEN OF THE STATE.
THE share which women have hitherto been per-
mitted to take in the public affairs of nations has
singularly oscillated. Our sex always seems to be
in the zenith or at the nadir, on the throne or no-
where, at the goal or out of the running. There
have been two or three dozen great female rulers in
universal history; and the proportion of able and
prosperous sovereigns among them, compared to the
proportion of similarly able and prosperous mon-
archs among the many hundreds of kings, is a most
astonishing fact. Semiramis, Nitocris, Artemisia,
Deborah, Zenobia, Cleopatra, Boadicea, Elizabeth,
Isabella of Castile, Maria Theresa, Catherine the
Great, Anne, and Victoria,-many of these women,
semi-fabulous or historical, virtuous or vicious, were
yet, to all seeming, so gifted with the special govern-
ing faculty that they have each made an epoch in
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
173
history; while France, the only country in Europe
which has held to the Salic law and refused to admit
a lawful queen regnant, has been punished by
Nemesis in the shape of a score of female harpies,
Diane de Poitiers, Madame de Pompadour, Madame
du Barry, et hoc genus omne.
Mr. Mill says that, when he was at the India House,
he observed that whenever a province in India was
particularly well governed by a native prince he
found, in three cases out of four, that it was some
woman, some Begum or Ranee who had emerged
from the zenana to wield the sceptre with a vigor
and good sense rarely paralleled among the Rajahs.
At this moment, our ablest and most faithful ally
among the native princes in India is a woman; while
Ranavalona, Queen of Madagascar, is the paragon
of African sovereigns, as Pomare was, in her time,
of Polynesian chiefs.
Historians when they deign to notice this curious
preponderance of ability among female rulers have
been wont to explain it in a way delightfully sooth-
ing to masculine pride. They say that a queen is
well guided by her male ministers, while a king is
too often misguided by bad female favorites. I will
only remark that the power of choosing able minis-
ters is the very first qualification of a sovereign, and
that, unluckily for the theory, a great number of the
174
LECTURE VI.
most prosperous queens kept the reins tightly in
their own hands, and employed secretaries rather
than ministers. On the other hand, a king who
chooses bad favorites, and allows himself to be
guided by them, appears to exhibit the very worst
and most mischievous weakness which could beset
a sovercign.
Again, beside the great queens, we find all down
the stream of history, when a nation has been in-
volved in extreme peril, it has happened that some
woman some Jael or Judith or Esther, some Maid
of Saragossa or of Orleans-steps forth and saves
the situation; and she has been duly lauded for her
heroism to the skies, though occasionally left by her
chivalrous countrymen to be burned at the stake.
But between these heights of royalty and heroism
and the abasement of political nonentity, there
seems to be no mezzo termine for our unfortunate
sex. Public spirit is a quality which we are not
encouraged to cultivate; and it is almost by a figure
of speech that I have spoken of our duties as Citi-
zens of the State. The dignity of citizenship (as
understood by the old Romans, for example) cer-
tainly included more than our particular privilege;
namely, that of paying all the taxes without pos-
sessing any corresponding rights! It has been
assumed that not only should a woman's charity
0
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
175
begin at home, but stop there; or, at the most, make
the round of the parish under the direction of the
parson, distributing tracts and soup tickets.
But, at last, womanly charity and public spirit
have broken their bonds. An immense breach
was made in the invisible hedges wherewith our
mothers and grandmothers were surrounded within
the memory of many of us, when Miss Nightingale
and the late regretted Mary Stanley went out to
the Crimea to nurse the soldiers. Mary Carpenter
also, of blessed memory, managed by sheer dint of
volition and continually acting the widow to the
unjust judge, and with the help of Recorder Hill
and others, to force so many legislative reforms
through Parliament and cut such a quantity of mas-
culine red tape, that M.P.'s and heads of Depart-
ments began to recognize women's ideas as things
which might actually deserve attention. Mr. Stans-
feld (all honor to him from all of us!) took a step
which would have led to indefinitely important
results, had he remained in office,-in appointing
the first woman to an office of public trust under
Government; that woman being the beloved and
admirable Mrs. Nassau Senior. Then came the
school-board election and representation, by far
the greatest bound forward our cause has made.
Who would have thought, my dear contemporaries
176
LECTURE VI.
here present, who would have thought, when
you and I were young, that we should live to
see the day when elections of women, for what is
practically a great Civil Parliament, should be
going on now all over England, and everywhere
with such extraordinary and triumphant success
that the newspapers complain peevishly of the use-
less waste of votes in showing how determined the
electors are to return female candidates! The pos-
session of votes for municipal elections and the
occasional election of women (like the excellent
Miss Merrington) as Guardians of the Poor are
also vast strides in the direction of public useful-
ness for women. Further, as the safeguard and
basis of the whole movement, we have the enor-
mous improvement, I might call it revolution,
which has been made of late years in the educa-
tion of women,- fitting them to undertake all their
tasks on equal terms with men. The pioneers of
this great reform, Mrs. William Grey and Miss
Shirreff, Miss Buss, the founder and head of the
North London School, the head of Cheltenham
College, the founders of Girton and Newnham, of
Somerville Hall, and Lady Margaret's Hall, have
not only helped hundreds of young minds to all
the joys of high intellectual pursuits, and lifted
them out of the dreary round of the old showy and
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
177
frivolous "accomplishments" wherein the youth of
my contemporaries was tormented, but they have
prepared the way the only safe and sound way
- for all the future achievements of our sex in the
fields of literature and public work.
By their aid, at last the education of women has
been pushed so far that it became impossible longer
to refuse to recognize its success by university de-
grees; and henceforth women may stand not only
actually (as they have sometimes done before) but
admittedly on a level, as regards knowledge, with
men.
P
Having gained so great a vantage-ground on our
upward way, it can, I think, only depend on women
themselves how far their entrance into public and
political life shall proceed. One thing only can stop
us; and that is the appearance of such disorders and
scandals, the betrayal of such a lack of good sense
among us, as shall make men (and the wiser
women also) cry : "Hold! Let us go no further!
The opinion of men, Eastern and Western alike,
has hitherto been that, unless women were re-
strained, kept in the narrowest grooves of custom
and authority, they would infallibly run into out-
rageous folly and vice; and the example, unhappily,
of some ages of comparative emancipation (notably
that of the Roman Empire) has tended to corrob-
""
178
LECTURE VI.
orate this view. Women used the liberty they then
acquired as a cloak- or rather as a facility, without
any cloak at all for licentiousness.
Be it our part, my friends, I implore you, to aid
with all our power of example and voice to show
that liberty now, for the women of England, shall
have a different result, and that, as it has been the
nurse of noblest virtue for men, so it shall be
the nurse of purest virtue for us.
And let us, as
the needful beginning of such a true liberation, take
uttermost precaution that we adopt no habits, as-
sume no freedoms, which, even if they might be safe
for ourselves individually, might be unsafe for other
women. Better to forego for a time some of the
privileges which our sex shall hereafter enjoy than
imperil by any laxity, any want of caution and
wisdom now, the whole character of this great
reformation.
Ja
We now turn directly to consider how stands the
Duty of Women in England as regards entrance into
public life and development of public spirit. What
ought we to do at present, as concerns all public
work wherein it is possible for us to obtain a share?
The question seems to answer itself in its mere
statement. We are bound to do all we can to pro-
mote the virtue and happiness of our fellow-men
and women, and therefore we must accept and seize
!
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
179
every instrument of power, every vote, every influ-
ence which we can obtain, to enable us to promote
virtue and happiness. To return to the thought
which to me seems so beautiful and fertile, we
must, if we desire to spread the "Kingdom of God,”
necessarily desire and seek the means by which we
can extend it far and wide through the whole world.
I am unable to imagine such a paradoxical person
as one who should earnestly wish that justice and
truth and love should prevail, and yet should de-
cline to accept the direct and natural means of in-
fluencing the affairs of his country in the direction
of justice, truth, and love.
All true enthusiasm of humanity, all genuine love
of justice, it seems to me, must spur those who feel
it to do what in them lies, not merely to exert the
small powers they may find in their hands, but also
to strive to obtain more extended powers of benefi-
cence.
When one of us women sees a wrong needing to
be righted, or a good to be achieved, or a truth to
be taught, or a misery to be relieved, we wish for
wealth, for influence, for the tongue of an orator, or
the pen of a poet to achieve our object. These are
holy wishes, sacred longings of our heart, which come
to us in life's best hours and in the presence of God.
And why are not we also to wish and strive to be
180
LECTURE VI.
allowed to place our hands on that vast machinery
whereby, in a constitutional realm, the great work
of the world is carried on, and which achieves by its
enormous power tenfold either the good or the harm
which any individual can reach, which may be turned
to good or turned to harm, according to the hands
which touch it? In almost every case, it is only
by legislation (as you all know) that the roots of
great evils can be touched at all, and that the social
diseases of pauperism and vice and crime can be
brought within hope of cure. Women, with the ten-
derest hearts and best intentions, go on laboring all
their lifetimes often in merely pruning the offshoots
of these evil roots, in striving to allay and abate
the symptoms of the disease. But the nobler and
much more truly philanthropic work of plucking up
the roots, or curing the disease, they have been
forced to leave to men.
You will judge from these remarks the ground on
which, as a matter of duty, I place the demand for
woman's political emancipation. I think we are
bound to seek it, in the first place, as a means, a
very great means, of doing good, fulfilling our Social
Duty of contributing to the virtue and happiness of
mankind, advancing the kingdom of God. There
are many other reasons, viewed from the point of
expediency; but this is the view from that of duty.
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
181
We know too well that men who possess political
rights do not always or often regard them in this
fashion; but this is no reason why we should not do
SO. We also know that the individual power of one
vote at any election seems rarely to affect any appre-
ciable difference; but this also need not trouble us,
for, little or great, if we can obtain any influence at
all, we ought to seek for it; and the multiplication of
the votes of women bent on securing conscientious
candidates would soon make them not only appre-
ciable, but weighty. Nay, further, the direct influ-
ence of a vote is but a small part of the power
which the possession of the political franchise con-
fers its indirect influence is far more important.
In a government like ours, where the basis of repre-
sentation is so immensely extensive, the whole busi-
ness of legislation is carried on by pressure, the
pressure of each represented class and party to
get its grievances redressed, to make its interests
prevail. The non-represented classes necessarily go
to the wall, not by mere wilful neglect on the part
of either ministers or members of Parliament, but
because they must attend to their constituents first,
and to their pressure (they would lose their places
and seats, if they did not); and the time for attend-
ing to the non-represented people, amid the hurry
and bustle of the session, never arrives. To be one
:
-
182
LECTURE VI.
of a represented class is a very much greater thing
in England than merely to drop a paper into a ballot-
box. It means to be able to insist upon attention
to the wants of that class, and to all other matters
of public importance which may be deemed deserv-
ing of attention. It is one of the sore grievances of
women in particular that, not possessing representa-
tion, the measures which concern them are forever
postponed to the bills promoted by the represented
classes (c.g., the Married Woman's Property Bill
was, if I mistake not, six times set down for read-
ing in one session in vain, the House being counted
out on every occasion).
Thus, in asking for the Parliamentary franchise
we are asking, as I understand it, for the power to
influence legislation generally; and in every other
kind of franchise, municipal, parochial, or otherwise,
for similar power to bring our sense of justice and
righteousness to bear on public affairs. To achieve
so great an end, we ought all to be willing to incur
trouble and labor and the loss of that privacy we
some of us so highly value, with the ridicule and
obloquy of silly men and sillier women.
What is this, after all, my friends, but public
spirit,-in one shape called patriotism, in another
philanthropy, the extension of our sympathies be-
yond the narrow bounds of our homes, the disinter-
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
183
ested enthusiasm for every good and sacred cause?
As I said at first, all the world has recognized from
the earliest times how good and noble and whole-
some a thing it is for men to have their breasts filled
with such public spirit; and we look upon them when
they exhibit it as glorified thereby. Do you think
it is not just as ennobling a thing for a woman's soul
to be likewise filled with these large and generous
and unselfish emotions? Do you think she does not
rise, even as man does, by stretching beyond the
petty interests of personal vanity or family ambi-
tion, and feeling her heart throb with pride for the
glory of her country, with indignation against wrongs
and injustices and perfidies, and with the ardent
longing to bring about some great step of progress,
some sorely needed reform?
Nay, my friends, so infinitely valuable and enno-
bling does it seem to me for women to partake of
these public interests that, were it only for the
moral elevation of women themselves, I should de-
sire them to do so. The necessarily narrow and
personal way of thinking of all subjects; the invet-
erate and stupid habit of forming judgments, not
on large and general principles, but on one or two
chance examples known to themselves, and bringing
in what Mr. A. or Mrs. B. did, or this person or the
other said, whenever such subjects are under debate;
184
LECTURE VI.
the small rivalries for small social distinctions; the
hollow friendships founded on mere idle companion-
ships; the miserable, endless, domestic squabbles
filling up time and thoughts, -all these and many
another deplorable weakness of our sex seem to me
curable only by the influx of fresh and noble inter-
ests, interests neither concerning our own aggran-
dizement nor that of our husbands and children.
For petty thoughts and small aims, here are large
ones; for trivial companionships, here are almost
sacred friendships, founded on the community of
noble and disinterested aims.
I have often thought how strange it is that men
can at one and the same moment cheerfully consign.
our sex to lives either of narrowest toil or senseless
luxury and vanity, and then sneer at the smallness
of our aims, the pettiness of our thoughts, the pueril-
ity of our conversation! Are we, then, made of
different stuff, that the régime which would make
Hercules pusillanimous and effeminate should make
us courageous and noble-minded?
But there is a special reason why we women of
the upper classes in England should at this time stir
ourselves to obtain influence in public affairs. That
reason is the miserable oppressions, the bitter griefs,
the cruel wrongs our sister women are doomed to
suffer, and which might be relieved and righted by
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
185
better legislation. I have explained just now how
every unrepresented class in a constitutional coun-
try must be neglected by ministers and members of
Parliament; and, in the case of women, there are
such enormous arrears of bad laws regarding them
lying over from far-off times of barbarism, and need-
ing now to be revised, that this difficulty of obtain-
ing attention to our concerns is a double cruelty.
Instead of needing no legislation because their inter-
ests are so well cared for (as some senators have
audaciously asserted), I boldly affirm that there is
no class of men in England who could not better,
and with less consequent injustice, forego the fran-
chise than women.
-
There are thousands of poor women who suffer
the worst of these wrongs,—some who are placed
legally at the mercy of savage husbands, or who
are driven by misery and ill-paid, hopeless labor into
the Dead Sea of vice, and some, of a little higher
class, whose children are torn from their arms, per-
haps to satisfy a dead or a living husband's religious
fanaticism. These most piteously wronged of all
God's creatures are breaking their hearts day by
day and year by year all around us; no man much
understanding their woes; no man having leisure
to seek their remedy. And can we sit patiently by,
and know all these things, and long to relieve all
186
LECTURE VI.
this agony and stop all these wrongs, and yet accept
contentedly as a beautiful dispensation not of God,
but of man- the law which leaves us tongue-tied
and hand-bound, unable to throw the weight of one
poor vote into the scale of justice and mercy? Can
we think our wretched drawing-room dignities and
courtesies, and the smiles and approval of a swarm
of fops and fools, worth preserving at the cost of the
knowledge that we might do something to lift up this
load, and do it not?
Needless, I hope, it is to add that we must come
to these public duties, whenever we may be per-
mitted to fulfil them, in the most conscientious
and disinterested spirit, and determined to perform
them excellently well. Approaching them from the
side I have indicated, this can scarcely fail to be
the case; and we must all bear in mind that for
a long time to come every step women take in the
field of politics will be watched by not unnaturally
prejudiced spectators of the innovation, and that to
show either indifference toward the acquirement of
new powers, or misuse or neglect of those we al
ready possess, cannot fail to be recorded in damning
characters against our whole movement.
Practically, I think that every woman who has
any margin of time or money to spare should adopt
some one public interest, some philanthropic under-
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
187
taking, or some social agitation of reform, and give
to that cause whatever time and work she may be
able to afford; thus completing her life by adding
to her private duties the noble effort to advance
God's Kingdom beyond the bounds of her home.
Remember, pray, that I say emphatically "adding
to her private duties," not subtracting from them.
I should think it a most grievous and deplorable
error to neglect any private duties already incurred
for the sake of new public duties subsequently
adopted. But, in truth, though we read of "Mrs.
Jellybys" in novels, I have failed yet to find, in
a pretty large experience of real life, a single case
in which a woman who exercised public spirit, even
to the extent of self-devotion, was not also an ad-
mirable and conscientious daughter, wife, mother,
or mistress of a household. This spectre of the
female politician, who abandons her family to neglect
for the sake of passing bills in Parliament, is just
as complete an illusion of the masculine brain as the
older spectre whom Sydney Smith laid by a joke,-
the woman who would "forsake an infant for a
quadratic equation."
One point, however, I ought to touch upon here.
The question is, Who are the women who should
consider themselves free to devote any considerable
time to what we may call out-door work,- philan-
188
LECTURE VI.
thropic or political? Daughters living with their
parents in easy circumstances, wives, or mothers?
My own view (founded on the principles on which
we have proceeded all along) is this:-
I think nearly all women of the educated classes
might afford at least so much time to politics as to
be able to form an intelligent opinion and give an
intelligent vote in every constituency, parochial or
educational, municipal or Parliamentary, to which
they may be admitted. Men who perform the most
arduous professions find time to do this; and there
seems no adequate reason why the busiest house-
wives or daughters should not do the same. At
all events, there need never be more women than
there now are men, who neglect to use their political
rights.
de
Then, I think that the great majority of grown-up
unmarried women, living in their parents' homes,
would surely find time at least to begin some philan-
thropic work, and train on to public usefulness, if it
were (as it ought to be) assumed in their families
that it was natural and proper for them so to do.
There would always remain a considerable propor-
tion of young women whose whole energies must be
devoted to the sacred cares of aged or blind or inva-
lid parents, or of one parent alone when the other
is dead; and there are, perhaps, straitened means
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
189
to be eked out, or infant brothers and sisters to be
tended and taught. But, outside of these, there are
(as we all know) hundreds of ladies between the
ages of twenty and forty or fifty, whose whole filial
duties do not occupy an hour or two a day. The
parents of daughters of this class are now, at last,
generally awakening to the duty of allowing and
encouraging them to find such work as they may
well and safely perform (not always an easy selec-
tion!); and this awakening, I trust, will go on till
the whole stupid notion of "genteel idleness" be
swept from the world. But Rome was not built in
a day, and we must have patience to see this refor-
mation carried out by degrees. Among parents
of only moderate fortune, who cannot leave their
daughters in thorough comfort and freedom as re-
gards money, I confess I think the first thing to be
done is to give them such special training as may
be needed to put them in the way of earning money
for themselves. When this is needless, it ought to
be a no less imperative duty to help them to use the
wealth they will inherit, and the leisure at their
disposal, in some gratuitous labor of love for the
poor, the sick, the ignorant, the blind; for animals;
in short, in any cause of humanity; but, above all,
in the cause of their own sex, and the relief of the
misery of their sisters.
190
LECTURE VI.
When it comes to the question of married women,
during the years wherein they frequently become
mothers, devoting themselves to any considerable
extent, either to earning money for their families.
or performing gratuitous out-door public service, I
must say my opinion is different. So immense are
the claims on a mother, physical claims on her bodily
and brain vigor, and moral claims on her heart and
thoughts, that she cannot, I believe, meet them all,
and find any large margin beyond for other cares
and work. She serves the community in the very
best and highest way it is possible to do, by giving
birth to healthy children, whose physical strength
has not been defrauded, and to whose moral and
mental nurture she can give the whole of her
thoughts. This is her function, public and private
at once,—the profession which she has adopted. No
higher can be found; and, in my judgment, it is a
misfortune to all concerned, when a woman, under
such circumstances, is either driven by poverty or
lured by any generous ambition to add to that great
"Profession of a Matron" any other systematic
work, either as bread-winner to the family or as a
philanthropist or politician. Of course, all this
ceases when a woman's family is complete, and her
children are grown up and no longer need her devo-
tion. She may then enter, or return, to public life,
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
191
with the immeasurable gain of rich experience of a
mother's heart. But, as I have said, till her chil-
dren no longer need her, I look upon it as a mistake
and a calamity if a mother undertake any other
great work, to interfere with the one which would
be enough to absorb the largest and noblest woman's
nature ever created.
It is time that these Addresses should now con-
clude. You have done me much honor in coming
to hear me, and much favor in hearing me so pa-
tiently. I thank you heartily for your kindness,—
you, my old friends, whose dear faces smile on me
on every side; and you who were before unknown
to me, but between whom and myself there will be
henceforth, I hope, always some bond of sympathy,
even if I have failed to carry you with me in every
step of this long journey which we have now made
together. Our hearts must surely have touched at
many points, and we have at least been conscious of
meeting for a good intent,— that of studying our com-
mon duties. I have felt it to be very presumptuous
on my part (probably fulfilling those duties less well
than half of you, certainly less well than many I
know) to offer thus to address you; but I fear, if I
waited till I had better learned my own lesson, the
years of vigor to speak at all (now so quickly pass-
192
LECTURE VI.
ing from me) would all have run. The night cometh
when no man can work. I spent many a day and
many a long night studying the science of ethics,
and learning what the greatest minds of all ages
have thought about it, years before many of you,
here present, were born, and in
years when
you, who
are my contemporaries, were perhaps more naturally
engaged in dancing and playing, and thinking of
love and marriage. If I have succeeded in leading
you to think a little more distinctly than you have
hitherto done on this great subject, and induced you
to bring your more or less vague impressions into
shape, and to test them by the larger principles of
morality, I shall have done something, since an opin-
ion otherwise formed is not, in truth, a judgment,
but only a prejudice, a pre-judgment.
But it is not only to think out the problems of
duty, but surely also to act upon your conclusions,
whereto all these poor exhortations of mine should
lead you, had I the power of persuasion. I want to
lure you to lead a dutiful life, not merely to talk and
think soundly of duty. None of us, I am sure, real-
ize how blessed a thing we might make of our lives
if we would but do this, if we would but give our-
selves, heart and soul, to fulfil all the obligations,
personal, social, and religious, which rest upon us;
to gain the strength –
DUTIES OF WOMEN.
193
To think, to feel, to do
Only the holy Right,
To yield no step in the awful race,
No blow in the fearful fight;
to live, in purity and truth and courage, a life of
love to God and to man, striving to make every spot
where we dwell, every region to which our influence
can extend, God's Kingdom, where His will shall be
done on earth as it is done in heaven.
We are, many of us, in these days wandering far
and wide in despairing search for some bread of life
whereby we may sustain our souls, some Holy Grail
wherein we may drink salvation from doubt and sin.
It may be a long, long quest ere we find it; but one
thing is ready to our hands. It is DUTY. Let us
turn to that in simple fidelity, and labor to act up to
our own highest ideal, to be the very best and purest
and truest we know how, and to do around us every
work of love which our hands and hearts may reach.
When we have lived and labored like this, then, I
believe, that the light will come to us, as to many
another doubting soul; and it will prove true once
more that "they who do God's will shall know of
his doctrine," and they who strive to advance his
kingdom here will gain faith in another divine realm
beyond the dark river, where Virtue shall ascend
into Holiness, and Duty be transfigured into Joy.
IN PRESS FOR IMMEDIATE PÚBLICATION.
FAITH AND FREEDOM.
SELECTED SERMONS
By STOPFORD BROOKE.
INTRODUCTION.
CONTENTS:
FAITH.
GOD IS SPIRIT. I.
GOD IS SPIRIT. II.
THE CHILDHOOD OF GOD.
THE LIGHT OF GOD IN MAN.
THE GRACE OF JESUS CHRIST.
THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF CHRIST.
THE FITNESS OF CHRISTIANITY FOR MANKIND. I.
THE FITNESS OF CHRISTIANITY FOR MANKIND.
THE CHANGED ASPECT OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY.
BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
II.
THE ATONEement.
DEVOTION TO THE CONVENTIONAL.
THE RELIGION OF SIGNS.
THE NATURALNESS OF GOD'S JUDGMENTS.
LIBERTY.
THE INDIVIDUAL SOUL AND GOD.
IMMORTALITY. I.
IMMORTALITY. II.
IMMORTALITY. III.
IMMORTALITY. IV.
SALT WITHOUT SAVOR.
LETTER TO THE CONGREGATION OF Bedford Chapel.
Cloth, 12mo. Price $1.50.
GEO. H. ELLIS, PUBLISHER, BOSTON.

L
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GRADUATE LIBRARY
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DATE DUE
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Jul 03.1989
MAR 0 8 1993
Tamm pli", "> krkameraat ja
NOV1 3 1989
JUN 2 2 1997-
JUN 1 9. 1991
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
NOV 12 1991
NOVO 5 1991
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