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OURSELVES
ESSAYS ON WOMEN
E. LYNN LINTON

ARTES
1837
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OURSELVES
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THE MAYFAIR
LIBRARY.
THE NEW REPUBLIC. By W. H. MALlock.
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THE TRUE HISTORY OF JOSHUA DAVIDSON. By E. LYNN
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CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY, W.

OURSELVES
Essays on Women
Alizabeth
By E. LYNN LINTON
<<
AUTHOR OF "JOSHUA DAVIDSON," PATRICIA KEMBALL,' ETC.

A NEW EDITION
London
CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY
[All rights reserved]
1884
Ballantyne Dress
BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CỌ., EDINBURGH
CHANDOS STREET, LONDON

Libronian
Thir
12-39-26
13915
PREFACE.
N putting forth these papers, which deal chiefly
with the faults and follies of women while
leaving their virtues comparatively untouched, I would
have it distinctly understood that I by no means wish
to strengthen the hands of the enemy; but, on the
contrary, I have endeavoured to do the cause of
women real good by showing where their weak points
lie. It is this very belief in their possibilities which
makes the evil into which they have suffered them-
selves to drift appear to me so deplorable-my hope
in the future which makes me so unsparing towards
the present; feeling as I do that if women could be
brought to see their faults they would amend them.
The silly idea of their own quasi-sacredness has
to be first overcome before any real good can be
done: that idea which makes them so indignant
iii
PREFACE.
when they are rebuked, and so
They must not be criticised.
difficult to influence.
If it is a man who
writes hard things of them, he is unmanly; if it is a
woman, she is a traitress and a slanderer. All the
foolish flattery which has been showered down on us
since the days of chivalry, when it took its rise, has
come to be a moral necessity and the absolute truth,
with many of us; and women alone of all creation
must be held exempt from sin and above hostile ob-
servation.
Against this sickly degradation, this sentimental
absurdity, all honest women should set their faces
firmly and distinctly-it does us no good, and it makes
men impatient with our claims and contemptuous of
their results. Believing then, that women are like all
other intelligent creatures, noble or ignoble according
to their power of self-education, I have written these
Essays pointing out what seems to me to be amiss as
things are; holding this a better thing to do than
adding to the flattery in current use, and speaking
of ourselves as creatures too ethereal for common
life, too refined for homely duties, and whose worst
misfortune is the inability of the coarser man to under-
stand us aright or appreciate us as we deserve.
iv

CONTENTS.
OURSELVES
FINE LADIES
EMANCIPATED WOMEN
OUR SMALL SINS
MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
TACT AND TEMPER
MARTHAS AND MARYS
THE FOLLIES OF FASHION
FEMININE EXTREMES
MODERN MAIDENS
MODERN MATRONS
WOMANLY DEPENDENCE .
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
THE OLD MAID
PAGE
1
20
40
61
86
108.
•
131
•
151
•
171
• 190
•
1207
224
•
239
258

OURSELVES.
E women get rather hard knocks in these latter
W
times. We were born into hard knocks indeed,
and, since the world began, have been used to them,
if not always content to receive them. But then,
neither are eels content with their treatment at the
hands of the cooks, though by this time as well used
to their scalping-knives as we are to our hard knocks.
In the beginnings of civilization everywhere, we are
physically ill-treated because we are the weaker, and
because the ill-treatment of the weaker is natural to
the stronger. Witness the painted brave, to whom his.
bowbacked squaw is simply a beast of burden born.
into the world to minister to his needs. Witness our
own roughs, who beat their wives with no more com-
punction than if they were thrashing their donkeys or
kicking their dogs. Witness the small nursery tyrants
OURSELVES.
in knickerbockers, who thump their little sisters, break
their dolls, and sweep off their "goodies," by virtue
of the masculine fibre in their flesh and the divinity of
their inchoate manhood. This is the kind of thing to
be found in the beginnings of society everywhere ; and
it is only by degrees that, as civilization advances,
tyranny gets itself checked by protection, protection
gets itself enlarged into rights, and women are allowed
to have an individual existence, and to be more than
the mere reflex of their husbands. Still our position
is by no means what it should be; and if we have
gained much, we have yet more to gain, and a long
lee-way of injustice to make up.
If we, of the educated class at least, are not per-
sonally ill-treated, as in the rude old times, we are not
handled morally with much gentleness. Of whatever
goes wrong, we must bear the blame. It is said of the
Duke of Wellington, among others--for this is one of
the universal anecdotes that have many men and all
nations for fathers-that when told of a misfortune or
crime, his first words were, "What is her name?"
No mishap could come without a woman at the bottom
of it. Money, the root of all evil? No! Poll the
world of men, and see if you do not get WOMAN as
the radical disaster of creation! Who was weak
2
OURSELVES.
towards forbidden fruit?
Who opened the Box of
Pains and let all the miseries of human life abroad?
Who caused the siege of Troy? Who invented the
Aqua Tofana? Was not Brinvilliers a woman? And
which was the greater villain of the two, Lady Mac-
beth or her husband? There is not an historical mis-
adventure of which we are not somehow the cause, and
there is not a crime in which we have not been the
supremest criminals. With or without that qualifying
grain to clear the sediment of exaggeration, we are
held responsible for almost all the ills of life; and men
forget that, nine times out of ten, we are only
secondary causes, with their own passions as the
primary.
A literary friend of ours hits us very hard about
every Saturday now. I say friend despite of his
bludgeon and the tremendous blows resulting, because
plain-speaking is, in a general way, a more friendly
proceeding than flattery, though a mortifying one.
Besides, wicked wags do say that the hardest of those
papers are written by certain of ourselves, and that if
the foe has spied out the nakedness of the land, it is
a woman who has bound the red thread across the
window. If the Frisky Matron is scarified, and the
Girl of the Period castigated, and small follies gene-
3
B 2
OURSELVES.
rally held up to ridicule and reprehension, there are
not wanting bold tongues to declare that the hardest
thing said can only be the truth, seeing that it is said
with that connaissance de cause which only sex can give.
Is it so? And is our hebdomadal flayer a woman like
ourselves, pointing out our evils for the good to follow,
and sternly calling us into the way of righteousness,
with an accompaniment of lashes well laid on? Is
she-or they cruel only to be kind? Perhaps.
Frisky matrons are an abomination to true woman-
hood, and whoever wields the knife to cut out such a
sore, wields it to the good of society at large, no mat-
ter what the individual discomfort it may occasion ;
and a girl of the period is only a frisky matron in her
first stage, with even more startling potentialities. I,
who am a matron myself, with pleasant brown-haired
girls as yet innocent of aqua amarilla and Madame
Rachel, I solemnly swear that I would rather see my
daughters dead now in their youth and beauty, tham
in the way to become girls of the period, and frisky
matrons to follow.
These characters are no mere fictions of the Satur-
day journalist's brain. They exist; and they make
their existence a loud and staring fact. In the Park,
the streets, the drawing-room, you see their painted
OURSELVES.
cheeks, their dyed red hair, and liberal expanse of bust
and back, and you hear their spicy talk, well-seasoned
with slang and always hovering about that doubtful
line of topics at which bold men laugh and modest
women blush. We may wince as much as we like,
and flounce and flutter and deny, but the fact re-
mains the same. Here, in the very heart of what is
called good society-here, as the companions of our
laughters, the wives of our brothers, the playfellows
of our sons, and the friends of our husbands, is a sect
of women, young and mature alike, who have taken
the Hetaire of the day for their models, and who
paint and dress and talk and make up their lives as
near after the pattern set by their prototypes as is pos-
sible to them. How can we deny it, when we see the
archpriestess of the sect living in that wealthy temple
of hers in Bond Street, whence every now and then
some deluded votary, more indignant than wise, turns
round against her Cyprian abbess, and denounces and
exposes? The guilt and the shame of such things do
not lie with those who speak of them, but with those
who do them; not with the writers of those slashing
articles in our weekly censor, but with the models who
stand in the way to be slashed. For my own part, I
only hope there will be no holding of the hand yet
5
OURSELVES.
awhile; and that so long as these sins exist among us,
there will be found faithful friends to use the knife and
the actual cautery, and so to cut out and to burn un-
sparingly while one corrupted fibre remains.
But passing from what has been said of us by others,
let us look a little at ourselves, and what we really are ;
speaking of our shortcomings without any of the sen-
timental folly which would make of woman a semi-
sacred creature, to be worshipped but by no means to
be discussed. In the first place, we women have
faults; we are not angels to whom has been given
exemption from the general lot of a fallen humanity ;
and amongst these faults, I would speak to-day of two
—the first, that, not understanding the nature of man
nor sympathizing with his needs, we yet interfere with
his life and attempt to influence what we cannot share ;
the second, our exceeding frivolity and devotion to
fashion.
As to the first, there is no doubt but that one of
our natural duties is to refine the masculine creature,
who, without us, would be given up to drink and hob-
nailed shoes. If we do not do this, we fail in our
most important social function, and are good for
nothing instead of being better than all. But refining
and weakening are different things; and, as a rule, we
6
OURSELVES.
do not see this difference. And the practical outcome
of our not seeing it is by no means satisfactory. For
we go to work on false principles, and for the most
part want to make men more like ourselves, instead of
encouraging them to be the best of what God and
nature made them capable of being. The model we
hold up for the imitation of a great, rough, hirsute
creature, is often nothing but a saintly maiden looking
at life in the great market-place through the painted.
glass of the church window.
Being the kind of thing
that seems good for ourselves, we hold it to be the
right kind of thing for men; and feel aggrieved when
they choose otherwise, and take their life as a drama
to be acted out in the market-place with the others,
and not only as a stage-play to be looked at through
the painted glass of a church window.
One of the oddest things about us is the blind
tyranny of this sense of right. If we like anything,
and think it good and wholesome for ourselves, we
can admit no argument against it, and would make it
absolute on every one else to receive. To us there is
one absolute right-our own-and the converse is as
absolute wrong.
There is scarcely a woman who does
not think herself a minor St. Peter with the keys of
heaven and hell at her girdle; and the more con-
7
OURSELVES.
scientious she is, the narrower the door she unlocks,
and the smaller the number of the elect allowed to
enter. Liberality is latitudinarianism with us; for
whatever our characteristic sins, they are certainly not
those of Laodicea; and, in spite of our natural soft-
ness, I believe we would all rather belong to a per-
secuting church than to an indifferent one-those of
us, at least, who have convictions. Very few of us are
really broad while earnest ; able to think that meadow-
walks are lovely if we hold to the special beauty of the
shrubbery paths, and that the moral convictions of our
opponents are as sacred as our own. The "unbelieving
husband of a believing wife" has a hard time of it in
general; and I have seen the poor fellow suffer things
for conscience' sake-perhaps I ought to say for no
conscience' sake-which have made me very sorrowful
on his account. No one gets more snubbed than the
miserable man whose moral tether is longer and wider
than his wife's, and who thinks those things lawful
which to her are accursed. But spiritual pride, and
uncharitable surmises, and moral self-satisfaction, do
not seem to our fair Procrustes evils to be avoided;
and dissension from an opinion is no sin-only the
opinion which she does not share is a sin. Wherefore
she leads her husband a life which would make a
8
OURSELVES.
halter at times a pleasant relief, and by way of guiding
him to heaven industriously creates for him a hell.
This is what the believing wife does for her unbelieving
husband; and what heart, not quite of stone, would
refuse to pity the poor victim, and to denounce the
oppressor?
We are tyrannical towards men in other things be-
sides moral convictions; and especially tyrannical
towards their pleasures, so far as we have the power
to be. Take any section of masculine pleasures you
choose, from hunting to smoking, from cricket to
billiards, and you will hear how loftily we despise the
whole range, and how we wonder at you men for
giving time and energy to anything so foolish! There
is no use in arguing with us. Tobacco may be a
divine solace to you-almost equal in potency with
our tatting and crochet-but to us it is an abomina-
tion, and therefore you ought not to smoke.
cannot hunt; perhaps we are elderly in age, and pon-
derous to match, and cannot even ride; consequently
we know nothing of the thrilling pleasure which in-
spires you when the hounds give tongue, and you are
off and away like a covey of flamingoes streaming
after that little brown beast stretching ahead. To us
the sport is cruel, or dangerous, as we think more of
We
9
OURSELVES.
the beast or of the man; and we would rather take you,
each individual Nimrod, in our quiet brougham for a.
little drive along the safe highway, than see you in
pink, hopping over hedges or tearing through the
open. And as for cricket, billiards, pool, and all that
kind of thing, what pleasure can you have in knocking
a few balls about, that should keep you half an hour
away from your home with us and the dear children?
We have nothing to talk about when you do come,
beyond the merest trivialities of the day's small occur-
rences. Perhaps we have only disagreeables to discuss
with you, and a certain amount of nagging energy to
dispose of that will make you angry before bedtime
comes; still we think ourselves ill-used that you should
have enjoyment while we are moping at home-though
it is an enjoyment in which we could not take part,
and a home-born moping which your presence would
not dispel. I am afraid it is not so much love as
jealousy, and not jealousy so much as envy. It is the
dog and the manger over again; and very snappish
disagreeable little dogs we make ourselves!
I have often wondered at the unconscionable de-
mands of some among us,-say the sickly wives of
jovial and robust husbands, who make their own
weakness the measure of the man's strength, and think
IO
OURSELVES.
their inability for active pleasures reason enough why
he too, should live the life of a cloistered ascetic.
Stupid, is it not? And yet how many of us women
are stupid in this way! This especial manifestation of
womanly stupidity is not so hurtful towards husbands
as it is towards sons. A man can fend for himself, but
a boy is comparatively helpless while his boyhood
lasts; and when that is over the mischief is done. Of
all pitiable sights in the world, that of a nervous,
cowardly woman regulating the life of a vigorous boy
is about the most pitiable. The one law of her ma-
ternal management, poor body, is fear. She sees death
or danger wherever she looks. If her boy wants to
learn to ride, he will be thrown and will break his
neck; if he wants to learn to swim, he will get the
cramp and be drowned; if he wants to learn to shoot,
guns and things" have the diabolical property of
going off by themselves, and he will infallibly be shot
through the body when he least expects it; at cricket,
he will get his shins broken; the ice will give way
under him, though it has borne thousands before him
if he goes for a day's excursion among the mountains,
he will be lost in a mist or dashed down a precipice;
there will be no chance for him if he attempts to row,
save in a tub with a retinue of care-takers. At every
II
OURSELVES.
turn of a youth's natural desire for experience and
adventure, he is checked by the groundless fear of a
fusionless woman; the end whereof is that he becomes
an effeminate milksop not worth his salt, or else gives
his mother care enough to break the heart of the tradi-
tionary cat. This is by no means a fancy sketch. We
may see it painted in living lines wherever we choose
to look.
But indeed, we Englishwomen are rapidly becom-
ing miserable cowards all through. As for anything
like heroic sacrifice of affection for public duty in us
of modern times, scarcely such a thing exists. Woman
for woman, we would rather the whole manliness of
the nation went to water than that our own belongings
should suffer. We cannot rise from individuals to
generals, from house to nation, from family to race:
we cannot merge our own loss in the gain of the com-
munity, nor give our beloved as the sacrifice by which
the true good of the whole is to be secured. I know
the answer to this is that woman is the conservative
force of humanity, and that it is given to her to pre-
serve, in contradistinction to the destroying propensity
of man. Still, in greater times than these, all forms of
womanly love, whether for the husband or the son,
were subordinated to the general good and national
I 2
OURSELVES.
honour; and it would be well for us if we could go
back to the spirit of those times, and especially if we
women could get a tithe of the Roman patriotism and
Spartan strength which once made the world so great.
This then, is the first fault or folly of us women
towards men and common sense-this endeavour of
ours to dwarf the masculine life down to the standard
of the feminine one; to narrow under the name of
refining; to weaken and call it purification; to inter-
fere by the euphemism of influence.
Our second fault is comprised in our excessive
frivolity, our insane adherence to fashion, and our
habit of judging by the mere outsides of things. It
seems impossible for us to understand any question
whatever by its own intrinsic merits, and not on the
score of its personal convenience to ourselves, or on
that of our private liking for it, or on the mere ques-
tion of custom and usage. Look at us in relation to
fashion and dress: can anything be more silly than we
are? If that mysterious something which goes by the
name of Fashion, but which in reality is only the fancy
of a manufacturer or a milliner, says that we are to
come out one year in crinolines which make us look like
huge bells, with our feet for a twin clapper, straightway
we all run a race in rivalling each other who shall be
13
OURSELVES.
the biggest bell with the shortest petticoat, and at the
greatest cost of convenience or decency. If this same
misty tyrant says, another year, that we shall have
skimpy dresses not much wider than pillow-cases,
well! we have skimpy dresses, and look like so many
bolsters set on end. If we are to have tapering skirts
ending in a long wreath at our feet, away we all scam-
per, dropping our crinolines as if they were red-hot,
and cutting off the circumference to stitch on to the
length-sweeping the streets instead of showing our
legs, and exchanging the bell for the serpent's train.
One year sees us all red-headed; another, olive-
skinned; sometimes we are like the young lady of
Leeds whose head was infested with beads, and break
out into a general state of shiny pimples; and some-
times we hang ourselves about with chains everywhere,
and put our greatest pride in making a jangle as we
go.
One fashion bids us build up a fabric that towers
half a yard above our heads; another sticks a couple
of inches of lace on the top of our touzly hair and calls
that a bonnet, though the final cause of a bonnet
proper is the protection of our heads from wind and
weather. Now we are all draped in long cloaks that fall
to our feet, at a frightful waste of material; and then
we cut them up into brief yachting jackets that come
14
OURSELVES.
just below the waist; or we bind ourselves across the
chest in what it pleases us to call Marie Antoinette
fichus—but which I confess are pretty, and for the
time of year marvellously suitable. We strangle our
fingers and wrists in the tightest of gloves, and we in-
duce corns and enlarged joints by the most uncom-
promising of boots, on which we further put narrow
heels a couple of inches high, and run the risk thereby
of falling flat on our faces should we walk heedlessly
or too quickly; or we think it unladylike to protect
our feet from wet and stones, and go about in paper
soles that would not carry us dry-footed if a teacup of
water was spilt on the road before us.
ugly, nothing too irrational for us.
and we will make ourselves more hideous than the most
hideous set of squaws to be found among the hills and
prairies of America; because we are too silly to stand
out against anything sheltered under that august name,
and because we cannot go below the surface of life.
Nothing is too
Call it fashion,
This is for ourselves; while as for men and our
dealings in the way of dress with them, we are even
more stupid; and the manner in which we cramp all
our social life by the terrible bondage of finery and
fashion is a mixture of folly and suicidal selfishness
utterly inconceivable.
Club-life is one result of this
15
OURSELVES.
tyranny of tailordom.
companions, but from the finery, the conventional re-
straints, the petty thraldom which our society entails, that
men rush off to the smoking-room at their club, where
at least they are delivered from the service of starch.
To admit us among them anywhere, is to put them-
selves into the fetters of costume, and to cumber their
hours with ceremonial. Hence our exclusion from
much where there is nothing unbecoming for us to see
or hear, but where men are afraid to let us enter be-
cause of the trammels and extremes we should bring
with us.
The only set of educated women who live
with their men as good comrades, tolerating what they
do not share, and neither excluding nor imitating, are
artists' wives and daughters. And no one who has
ever been admitted into good artists' society can say
that the association is a mistake. At the present time,
when certain among us are making a stir for the recog-
nition of rights and privileges hitherto disallowed, it
seems to me a pity, to use no stronger term, and a bit
of contradiction fatal to our cause by that inexorable
process called "the logic of facts," that we should be
so narrow, so interfering, and so full of finery, as we
are, in our home and social life. If we wish to show
men that we are earnest and capable, with more reason
It is not to escape from us as
.6
OURSELVES.
than instinct, and more womanliness than fine-ladyism,
that is, if we wish to show them that we are strong
enough for the place we claim-we are not going quite
the right way to work. If we want their extra respect,
we ought to prove ourselves extra worthy; instead of
being the poor weak creatures we are, with our inces-
sant demands for protection and equality and greater
deference and more responsibility, and a bigger share
of the prizes only to be got by hard work and self-
denial-with, at the same time, less inclination than
ever for the sacrifice of even a whim, a folly, or an
injustice. Madame Rachel is not the best supporter
Mr. Mill could have had; nor are her victims quite
the kind of persons to be entrusted with more power
than that which they have exercised-namely, that of
ruining themselves by their own folly.
The chief thing wanting between men and women,
as it seems to me, is friendship. Of love and poetic
admiration there is abundance, of course, and to spare.
The world could not go on without these pretty
amenities; but we want friendship far more than all
these the affectionateness which has no relation to
love, but which would insure equitable treatment from
each to each. We could have no better gift than the
reception and bestowal of such a feeling. But to ob-
17
C
OURSELVES.
tain it we ought to make ourselves more fit for it than
we are at present. For though we were certainly not
sent into the world solely to supplement men's lives
and to have no original objects of our own, still, we
cannot do without their liking and it is only right
that we should set our watches by their time. They
are clearer-headed than we; less prejudiced if less.
conscientious; more generous when generous, and
more tender when tender. Being the stronger they
are larger in all things-even in their love. When
they love they love better than we love, but less ab-
sorbingly. We give the whole of our lives to love,
they keep one portion of theirs for work, and another
for ambition. Still, the half measure of a gallon is
more than the full measure of a pint; and weight for
weight the man's love is greater than the woman's.
This is a tremendous heresy I know, but it is a truth
notwithstanding; and we ought to be able to recognise
all truths when we see them, how disagreeable soever
they may be to our prejudices or our pride.
One of the fundamental differences between us and
men lies in the difference there is between instinct
and passion. We are instinctive and men are pas-
sionate. Now passions admit of the modifying power
of reason better than do instincts, because of the
18
OURSELVES.
periods of cessation. The most passionate man is not
always at blood-heat, raving and ramping about the
world like an unloosed demon; but instinct never
ceases. It is eternal, continuous, unchanging; deaf
and blind to all but itself—a great amorphous giant,
with only one eye in the midst of its forehead, and that
eye turned inward. Reason regulate instinct?—as
much as an infant may lead a lion! And is not this
complete subjugation by instinct one of the reasons why
women are so difficult to manage, and so possessed by
any affection they may have?
I should not like to be in the hands of sundry of my
sex at this moment! I do not think there would be
much doubt of the direction their instincts would take if
they could get hold of one whom they would style false
to her sex and so traitorous! But it is because I love my
sex that I speak as I do; it is because women are greater
than their follies, and nobler than their prejudices, and
might be so much better than they are, that I think it
worth my while to tell them the truth. I have uglier
things to say yet, and a few harder raps in store.
Enough for the present. Quassia and aloes must be
"exhibited" in small doses; and the dose to-day has.
been both large and bitter.
19
C 2

FINE LADIES.
HERE are ladies and ladies-ladies who are
gentlewomen and ladies who are fine
ladies; and the terms are not convertible. On the
contrary, it seems to me that they are quite opposed
to each other, and that as the true gentlewoman is
never the fine lady, so is the fine lady never the true
gentlewoman. Fine-ladyism is a disease of long and
steady growth, but of specially rapid development in
these latter days. There never was a time, save per-
haps during the reign of the Fourteenth Louis and
onward to the French Revolution, when women made
it so confessedly a point of pride to be absolutely use-
less to themselves and their generation, as they do
now-never a time when the highest test of ladyhood
was the lowest mark of womanhood. Indeed, just in
proportion to the spread of the new doctrine called the
20
FINE LADIES.
Dignity of Labour, has been the fine lady's abhorrence
of the very mildest forms of practical usefulness; and
in exact ratio with the advocacy of the theory of
Emancipation has been the proof of her unfitness for
its practice.
In early times kings' daughters and noble ladies
The pa-
were among the most capable of their sex.
tent of their nobleness was in their capacity; and as
the true lord or leader was the man who could do best
and lead most worthily, so the true lady was the one
who could serve with most knowledge of means and
most success in application. The curse of idleness
had not then fallen on the world; and women had not
as yet conceived the apotheosis of finery. Nausicaë
was a king's daughter, but she washed the family linen
in the running stream all the same as any little Elsie or
Maggie in a simple north-country farm; and Penelope
sat at home and wove and sewed as diligently as if she
had been a Blackburn mill-hand helping in the family
bread-winning. And though we do not want our
kings' daughters at the present day to go out on the
highway and wash their royal linen in the running
brooks, yet even kings' daughters and crowned queens
have their duties; and duties include some form of
work.
21
FINE LADIES.
But Fine-ladyism ignores both work and duties. A
fine lady is one who imagines herself to be born into
this great, suffering, toiling world of ours, for her own
pleasure only; and in nowise for more than this.
What relations she holds with her fellow man or woman,
she holds for herself not for him-still less for her
;
for such good and advantage as she may be enabled
to draw out of the association, but in no sense whatever
for any good that she can bestow. It is a reciprocity
all on one side, according to the famous formula—a
debtor and creditor account between herself and hu-
manity, with the debtor column crossed out and only
the items of the creditor account marked to her good.
People owe to her, not she to them. They owe her
attention, thought, care, toil; and she owes them ac-
ceptance of their gifts. Lady Mary Wortley Montague
said that the world was made up of men, women, and
Herveys: she might have added fine ladies as a branch
of the human family sui generis, and happily not re-
peated as a necessity in every country where the sons
of Adam and the daughters of Eve are to be found.
But to be found in all countries which have come up
to a certain stage of artificial civilization-to be found
wherever a leisure class has consolidated itself into an
idle one, and the fruits of toil have blossomed anew
22
FINE LADIES.
into the flowers of fortune-to be found where there
are more labourers to do the work than there is work
to be done.
A characteristic of Fine-ladyism, as striking as its
disdain of moral obligations, is its horror of all handi-
craft-taking the word in its original meaning of the
craft, or cunning, or knowledge of the hand. Appa-
rently one of the principal objects with a fine lady is
to reduce her hands to the condition of fins or flippers
which can neither grasp nor hold, and which are
beautiful in exact proportion to the closeness of the
likeness. A fine lady would be ashamed, in the first
place, if she had capable hands at all; in the second,
granting the capability, she would be ashamed to put
them to any rational use. If by chance she con-
descends to employ them, she takes care to em-
ploy them only on worthless work, and never suffers
them to wander into utilities. If she does what is
absolutely of no more good than harnessing butterflies
to acorn cups, she does not hold herself to have lost
caste; but if she qualifies her labours ever so faintly
by practicality, she has committed a social sin for
which she is degraded, at least temporarily, to the
ranks of the outside vulgar. She may embroider
purses which no one wants; make bad imitation of
23
FINE LADIES.
old point-lace; set beads awry on squares of canvas ;
spoil quires of unoffending cartridge paper with daubs
that go by the name of sketches; but she must not
make a flannel petticoat, nor any other garment that
would give warmth or protection to the wearer ; she
must not concoct a stew, nor dust a room, nor wash a
china ornament, nor carry a parcel; she may trifle
with dainty inutilities, if it so pleases her, but she
must do no real work, however slight, under pain of
that caste degradation spoken of before.
:
Imagine a fine lady washing, dressing, or nursing
her baby; imagine those soft white hands plunged up
to the rounded wrists in flour and milk for the family
pudding picture her, if you can, with a duster in her
hand polishing up the spoons and making the dinner-
table doubly graceful by that last extra rub of the
glass. I am afraid our struggling, naked, slippery
babe would go unwashed to the end of its days if it
depended only on its fine-lady mother for its morning
bath; while the family might dream of puddings never
to be eaten this side the grave; and silver and glass
would be left to the grace of tarnish and the fine artistic
shadows of dust, if those fair taper hands were the only
things to touch them. As for the nursery, there
even more than elsewhere, the fine lady is essen-
24
FINE LADIES.
tially strange and out of place. She may have a dozen
children, and she may go to the length of embroidering
little cloaks and braiding bigger jackets, but here she
stops. She never takes kindly to maternity anyhow;
and at the most cannot get beyond a languid æsthetic
interest in the little creatures, strong in proportion to
their good looks. If they are ill, it is the nurse, not
she, who manages them; it is the nurse, not she, to
whom the doctor gives his orders—that is, if he has
the perception necessary to his profession, and is able
to read characters as well as symptoms. Our fine-lady
mother told to put on a poultice, to spread a plaster,
to dress a blister, to regulate a warm bath, to weigh
out so much rhubarb or aloes! Why, she would never
get her hands into right order again if she were to
steep them in such abominations; besides being so
utterly fusionless that she would mistranslate the
orders, and make her applications at random! Ex-
tremes meet, says the old saw. It is an odd irony of
circumstance that one of the characteristics of a real
savage, namely his pride in the smallness and unused
look of his hands-his squaw doing his dirty work-
should also be a characteristic of the English fine lady:
in her own esteem the highest point of perfection that
humanity has yet reached, or perhaps ever will reach.
25
FINE LADIES.
And this is the supreme grace to which Fine-ladyism
has attained-identity in point of pride with a
painted, yelling, scalp-hunting savage of the American
forests; and the oriflamme under which her ladyhood
advances to victory over all things base and mean is
a French kid-glove, number six and a quarter! Iden-
tity with a savage, and a certain mark stamped on the
inside of a white kid-glove, the life-objects of a nine-
teenth century English matron!
A fine lady never carries a parcel. What the craze
against a little screw of whity-brown paper may be, I
cannot tell, and I doubt if any one else can; but it
exists, like many other things of which we can neither
track their roots, nor utilize their fruits. It may be
because of the snobbishness which confounds gentle-
hood with riches in England, or rather denies the
gentlehood where there are no riches to back it up.
Wherefore every lady must, of necessity, if a lady,
possess a carriage and a footman, to either of which
machines she would naturally delegate the transport
of her parcels. Having neither, the public feeling
would go against the supposition of her being a lady.
For it is a hard saying, and difficult to be received in
this wealthy mother-country of ours, that a woman can
be refined and yet poor; of undeniable breeding and
26
FINE LADIES.
yet forced to work; shabbily dressed, and living up
two pairs of stairs, and yet a gentlewoman-every inch
of her; a gentlewoman with her hands in the flour-
tub, or even in the wash-tub; a gentlewoman forced
to carry her own parcels because she is too poor to
pay for others to carry them for her; a gentlewoman
of perhaps better blood and nobler bearing than the
rich parvenue who looks on her disdainfully as a
nobody. This is because of the coarse materialism
in our Anglo-Saxon blood, which cares less for the
spirit than the form, and which believes in nothing it
cannot appraise at the goldsmith's and the auctioneer's.
In France no such finery exists, save among the
nouveaux riches—snobs always, whatever their nation-
ality. But in elder times, when blood and breeding
ranked far above wealth, and a lady was too secure in
her state to fear the shadow of appearances, you might
see one of the oldest of the St. Germain nobility
tranquilly carrying home the pair of boots she had
just bought on the Boulevard, or the pot of flowers
she had chaffered for, not weakly, at the flower-
market by the Madeleine. She was of the old blue
blood, and every one knew how blue; and she was
none the less grande dame because she condescended
to her humanity, and acknowledged the fact that
27
FINE LADIES.
nature had given her hands, with fingers, which were
meant for other purposes beside ring-stands and glove-
stretchers. I think the chances would be that, if one
of our fine ladies ever attempted to carry a parcel, she
would let it drop out of those feckless fingers of hers,
and then would not find out that she had a spine
which was made to bend, and prehensile powers
which would enable her to pick it up again.
For no fine ladies hold things with an honest grasp.
They have all the same mode of using their hands,
bending just the tips of the fingers, and holding every-
thing with a loose, drippy touch, as if really it was too
great an effort of the will, too great a show of mus-
cular power, to grasp firmly; as if there was a special
beauty in things being dropped rather than put down,
and a special evidence of womanly sweetness in a
manual action painfully resembling that of an idiot.
For my own part, I have never quite understood the
relation between beauty and weakness, womanly
sweetness and womanly silliness; to my mind indeed,
that woman being the most beautiful who is the most
capable, while weakness and silliness can never by
any chance be other than unlovely.
It is only comparatively of late years that this fine-
lady uselessness has come to be a badge of refine-
28
FINE LADIES.
ment. In Mrs. Delany's memoirs we read of jam-
making and still-room work, of millinery even, and
home-work generally, as part of the normal life of a
lady. Traditions of the brave and practical old times,
when women were not ashamed to own that they had
duties, and were not afraid to perform them, still hung
in the atmosphere of the upper ten thousand; and
even a titled lady, two generations ago, thought it no
shame to keep her own house and to know the cost of
provisions and the value of money. Now, the wife of
a successful tradesman, without an aspirate to bless
herself with, who can scarcely write her own name,
and cannot certainly write good grammar, holds her-
self demeaned if she does more than "give her
orders;" and if you ask her what she pays a pound
for a sirloin of beef, will look at you blankly, and
refer you with an air to her housekeeper, or her cook.
She began life herself as a servant; perhaps she was
a housemaid, perhaps a more aristocratic lady's-maid
who had learnt a few secrets of personal adornment;
she married my lord's valet who had saved money
and was lucky in speculation, or perhaps she cast
in her lot with a thriving young chemist, or a briskly
selling draper with ideas beyond the tapes and buttons
or ordinary haberdashery. Anyhow she and hers came
29
FINE LADIES.
to money and with money to Fine-ladyism. In fact,
it seems to me that Fine-ladyism has sprung out of
this self-made, successful class-these women who,
not being ladies by birth, habits, or education, put on
the appearance of excessive refinement, and make
their gentility to consist in their idleness and useless-
ness.
Speech is another vehicle of Fine-ladyism. To call
a spade a spade and nothing more, is the height of
vulgarity in the minds of certain of the finer sort;
but to call it an agricultural implement is a periphrase
betokening correct taste and nice feeling. But then
the fine lady always uses dictionary words in place of
the more colloquial; and whenever she has the chance,
multiplies her syllables as so many ornaments to her
parts of speech. She commences a thing and she con-
cludes it, but she neither begins it nor ends it; she
always says that she requires something, never that
she wants it; she reserves, she does not lay by; she
derives pleasure from, and is not pleased; and she re-
tains a thing in her memory, she never simply remem-
bers or learns by heart. These are only examples of
the whole staple. But if she is fine in her choice of
words, she is finer still in her choice of topics, which
she subjects to a winnowing process, as she herself
30
FINE LADIES.
would say, that effectually takes the coarse bran out
of them. All natural things are taboo to the fine
lady; all questions of disease and suffering are in-
finitely shocking to her attenuated senses, and to be
spoken of only under the breath, as if they were crimes
or indecencies. The sins and tragedies of human life.
are beyond her pure soul to comprehend, save when
she can whisper away a character, or hint at the im-
moralities she is much too fine to speak of openly.
For it is one of her peculiarities not to hesitate about
conveying bad ideas; it is only at words she falters.
-only at shadows, not the substance. As for any-
thing like womanly pity for the frailty of the evil-doer
-look for figs on thistles, and for grapes on thorns, as
soon as this from the fine lady! Charity and Fine-
ladyism do not go together; for true charity, like true
ladyhood, is strength, and Fine-ladyism is the very
dregs of weakness. The woman whose soul is strong
and pure can afford to be pitiful to the tainted; but
the woman who only affects purity, and who is weak in
her faith, cannot.
Nothing is more thoroughly characteristic of the
fine lady than this repulsion of hers to all things
natural. I myself have known some who have rebuked
the more out-spoken of their sex for using the word
31
FINE LADIES.
"natural" at all, and who have called it "indelicate."
God help them! They were-they are-of the kind
who "wonder" at certain ordinances of Providence-
certain laws of nature which even the finest lady of
them all cannot quite get over; and who think things
infinitely shocking which God has made imperative.
They would have managed matters very differently;
and beyond all question infinitely better, they say
substantially by their disdain, though they do not put
their thoughts into so many plain words. But then,
plain words are not in their line at any time; and de-
monstrating a principle or extending it is just what
they cannot do. It is very funny to listen to a woman
of coarse imagination and fine-lady education when
on a denunciatory raid against certain human and
natural facts. Her conversation, stripped of peri-
phrase and euphemism, reduced to its core, followed
out to its ultimate, and put into homely language,
would be about the coarsest that we could hear be-
tween dawn and dusk. It would have the appearance
of wonderful refinement and propriety; but the fine
lady is like that old abomination, "a nice man of
nasty ideas;" and her keenness in tracking out im-
proprieties where no one else can see them, shows a
self-consecration to the search more eloquent of sym-
32
FINE LADIES.
pathy than abhorrence. Things which would not
raise a blush to the cheek of the most modest woman,
or of the most innocent girl, are caught hold of with
fie-fie energy by the fine lady in the clairvoyance of
her transcendental morality, and denounced by her as
something quite shocking and horrible. It is the
"limb" of the fowl and frills round the legs of the
piano in another form; and which was most improper,
the naked audacity of the wooden leg, or the prudish
imagination which put it into cambric leggings for
modesty's sake? Faugh! As the tender mercies of
the wicked are cruel, so are the sensitive proprieties of
Fine-ladyism the grossest things on earth.
Sins
The moral action of society is by filtration.
and virtues alike descend, they do not rise upward-
from the people to the aristocracy; consequently, Fine-
ladyism has descended from the parlour to the kitchen,
and our maids are now nearly as much fine ladies as
their mistresses. The cook must have a kitchen-maid ·
to do her dirty work; and the kitchen-maid demands
a scullery-maid to do hers; the parlour-maid will not-
spoil her hands by the use of anything rougher than a
feather-brush; the housemaid divides the sphere into
upper and lower; and the lower thinks herself entitled
to a charwoman at every pinch that comes.
It is one
33
D
FINE LADIES.
incessant shuffling off from their own hands the
rougher portions of the work covenanted to be done;
and the first thought of all servants now-a-days is, who
can they get to wait upon them? and how much of
their rightful burden can they lay on vicarious backs?
In dress it is the same thing; the fine lady above-stairs
aims to look like her betters, and the fine lady below-
stairs aims to look like her mistress. No servant that
lives is content to look like a servant out of her work,
and the greatest insult you could offer her would be to
take her for what she is. She spends all her wages on
her silly person, and thinks silk and velvet, to make a
show which is not real, a vastly superior investment.
to the savings bank and three per cent.
The very
scullery-wench and kitchen-maid must have their cri-
nolines and their flounced petticoats, and then bemoan
themselves as ill-used by fate because cook can wear
deeper embroidery and a handsomer black silk. I sup-
pose there is no use in wishing for the return of the past,
but a little revivification of the defunct old sumptuary
laws would be a blessing to many weak souls, if also an
act of tyranny as we read tyranny.
Not only servants, but all the lower class of women
are touched with this disease of Fine-ladyism. If any
one doubts this, let him go among the better class of
34
FINE LADIES.
small tradespeople in the towns, or among the medium
class of tenant-farmers in the country, and he will then
see for himself how wide and broad this feminine curse
has become. I do not say that every individual
woman all through the country is touched-that you
cannot find a butcher's wife who is not a fine lady with
nerves and a horror of fresh meat, nor a farmer's dame
who does not despise pigs as unclean animals and the
nursing of calves as an occupation unworthy one of
her degree; but I do say that by far the larger propor-
tion are tainted with Fine-ladyism in one or other of
its many manifestations; and that, shrinking from work
and business, a hatred of simplicity, and the mistaking
idleness for refinement, are becoming characteristic of
Englishwomen of every station. The dignity of labour
is a doctrine which may apply well enough to man,
they think, but it is one in which they have no part,
and for which they have no natural obligation. "It is
not woman's work," is a phrase one hears perpetually
in these times from servants and the whole world of
working women; till at last one gets to wonder what
is woman's work, and if she has any assigned to her
by nature; and, if not, why was she born into the
world at all? The very drones in the beehive have
their uses; the flowers in the field play their part in
35
D 2
FINE LADIES.
the great economy of the universe; the gayest butter-
fly that looks as if it was born only to flutter in
the sunshine; the brightest bird whose final cause
seems merely song and plumage; the crystals gem-
ming the old grey rocks; the metal gleaming through
the river sands; all have their uses, though seemingly
only beautiful superfluities of life; but woman-what
is her place? What are her duties? What is her
work?
According to the fine lady it is simply to be waited
on and caressed; to have every wish gratified by the
toil and thought of others; to be exempt from all the
cares, free of all the troubles, exonerated from all the
duties of life; it is to be made into a drawing-roone
doll, where she is placed on a pedestal and kneeled
to or taken care of, but whence she is never to
come down and lessen the sorrows or share the labours
of others. All things else in nature have their uses,
but the fine lady has none: and all things else are
born to share and to give, but the fine lady is born only-
to receive.
The thing in the fine lady which strikes me more
forcibly than all the rest-her selfishness excepted,
which indeed is the very root and groundwork of her
being is her intense vulgarity. The frankest-spoken
36
FINE LADIES.
woman of the people, who does her life's work honestly
without dress or finery or self-exaltation or self-bewail
ment, and is herself through it all-whatever that seli
may be is a better gentlewoman than the fine lady
who owns herself to be meaner than the poorest little
circumstance, and whose gentlehood is not strong
enough to carry her over such a stumbling-stone as a
brown-paper parcel, or a daub of paste upon her hands.
Were she in any degree the lady she pretends to be,
she would know that work never degrades, and that
the quality which cannot soil its hands is about as
much gentlehood as the wings of Icarus were eagle's
pinions. Again, how unutterably vulgar she is in the
matter of dress and its artificial proprieties! Now I
am one who hold to the moral duty of women to make
themselves beautiful in all lawful ways; who think that
slatternliness and carelessness in the matter of dress
and personal habits are positive sins; and that a
woman is good for nothing if she is not pleasing in her
person. But there are times and seasons for all things,
and occasions wherein every rule must be relaxed, and
the strictest obligation shelved in favour of something.
for the moment more important. And so with dress
and personal attention. Take sickness for an example.
What should we say of a woman who, having to tend a
37
FINE LADIES.
sick, perhaps a dying person, gave her first thought to
the nice starching of her collars and cuffs, the becoming
arrangement of her hair, and the well-fitting of her
dress? But this is what Fine-ladyism does, if by
chance it plays at womanly usefulness. A fine-lady
nurse! Good heavens! The tender thought of un-
selfish watchfulness to come from her miserable, self-
absorbed brain? the kindly touch, soothing and minis-
tering just at the right moment and in the right way,
to be looked for from those white, dangling hands,
which could no more shake a pillow, mix a saline
draught, or prop up a weary head than they could lift
an anchor or splice a rope? See in a sick-room a fine
lady playing at womanhood-you might as well set a
child to rule the State, or put a monkey to master
Euclid! She would be thinking of herself all the time
she was not shuddering at her work; and between
self and shrinking the poor patient would have but a
bad time of it!
The fine lady is nothing if she is not well-dressed.
Take her at the sea-side, where others go about in
colours and materials that sea-water does not spoil,
and there she is, a marine Regent Street lounger, trail-
ing her silks and laces among the sea-weed as she
trailed them last week over the city dust. Take her
38
FINE LADIES.
in the country, where the cows and the crows are the
only creatures to look at her-but her boots are irre-
proachable, her chignon is of the orthodox dimensions,
her fashions come from London, and she is as unex-
"drum"
ceptionally got up as if she was engaged to a
or a fête.
She would be miserable else. For she is
never superior to her boots, never above her gown, or
better than her gloves. An immortal creature, with a
soul to be saved, she degrades herself to the worth of
a milliner's dummy as the sign of her superiority.
And this she calls being "ladylike" and "refined !"
Heaven help the pretty fool, and give her sense to under-
stand the wholesome beauty that lies in strength-the
grace of a capable, practical womanhood!—give her
sense too, to see her own abounding vulgarity, and
the poverty of a ladyhood which cannot rise above
material conditions, but which must be draped and
labelled to be accepted or believed in!

39

EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
IN the opposite side of the scale to that where
the Fine Ladies stand simpering in their use-
lessness, are the sturdy, stout, Emancipated Women-
the women with strong wills, and of independent minds
-the women who think for themselves, and act as it
best pleases them, let who will say them nay—the
women who, having flung off some of the softer follies
of our sex, have gone into others of a harder nature,
and who, because they object to slavery, think they
must also forget their womanliness.
This sect has done the Woman cause much harm.
For we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the Rights
of Woman is a cause, and one not wholly uncalled for
nor unrighteous; and that, though individual men
may love us, and fathers, brothers, and husbands
sometimes think it their duty to protect and honour
40
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
us, yet in the main the womanly section of humanity
is not well treated by the manly section-at least in
England and other rough-handed countries-and that
both society and the laws unite to oppress and wrong
us. This uncomfortable state of things the emanci-
pated women have taken to heart warmly; and some
among them have given up their lives to a kind of re-
venge, in making men understand what poor creatures
they think them all to be-and what much finer
fellows they themselves are in their bastard manliness
than anything that reality can show-and how well
they can get on in life without the aid of the masculine
arms, which many of them say are "good only to help
you through a crowd." Whether they have done good.
service by their crusade is another matter. I think
they may always count upon a large dead-weight of
spiritless sisters who can never be stirred up to this
hatred of men, but who naturally turn to them, and
love them, and cling about them, like the parasites.
they are.
There are two kinds of emancipated women: the
one who has delivered her soul from the clinging
affections, the other who has freed hers from the bind-
ing moralities, usually held essential to true womanli-
ness. The one will be no man's wife because wifehood
4I
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
includes debasing submission, and motherhood is de-
grading in its animal conditions; the other will not
marry because marriage is restriction, and her nature
is of the kind which prefers free love to that which is
bound. It is only in the middle-class though, that we
find this kind preferring celibacy as better fitted for
her peculiar practices; in the higher ranks, marriage is
handier to her purpose, and the free lover of the upper
ten thousand is the wife not the spinster. But we will
come to this kind of emancipated woman by-and-by.
At present we have to do with the sterner sort—that
illogical creature who professes to hate men, and who
nevertheless imitates them as closely as is possible to
the conditions of things-enemy and plagiarist in one.
This branch of the sect suddenly blossomed out
about fifteen years or so ago. It would be invidious
to mention the names of the leaders; but many of us.
can remember how all at once appeared a small
number of epicene-looking women, with cropped hair
mostly parted at the side; turned-down linen collars.
and small black ties; cloth jackets cut like a man's,
with falling lappels to show the linen shirt-front, and
what are now the fashionable coat-sleeves to show the
linen shirt-cuffs; with unmistakeable vests to make
the likeness more complete; and with a certain little
42
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
swaggering air that was by no means badly caught.
When standing in a corner, so that the betraying pet-
ticoats were hidden, these women could scarcely be
distinguished from beardless youths of twenty or there-
abouts, and at first sight many odd mistakes were
made by the uninitiated. In fact, it was a modernized
version of the mermaid-inversion rather-and if the
mistakes made were not so disastrous, the false like-
ness was quite as bewildering.
They were all unmarried women, with decided views
on most social subjects, and on almost all moral ones;
and some of them had "missions," which they were
apt to make a little wearisome by perpetual insistance,
after the manner of missionaries in general; and they
all despised the fineries of their sex-in which they
were right; and abjured the natural beauties and
allurements—in which they were wrong. They all
wished they had been born men, and yet they thought
men great brutes, and not fit to tie the shoe-strings of
nobler woman; they all held babies to be unmitigated
bores, and not half so amusing as kittens or puppies ;
and thought a lecture-room, where bold professors dis-
cussed the origin of species, far beyond any nursery
ever built. And they one and all laughed at the old-
fashioned notion that woman's highest mission is best
43
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
fulfilled by the way of marriage and maternity—that
indeed, the true divinity of womanhood is contained
in her maternity. And none of them ever blushed.
There was a great deal of cleverness and sincerity
about these women. They were lamentably mistaken in
their views of life and the best kind of womanly power;
but they were respectable because, if mistaken, at all
events they were true to their ideals, and bravely bore
the ridicule they created-and deserved. They walked
conscientiously by their lights, such as they possessed;
and if they had stuck the wick all awry, so that
they saw everything confusedly and with shadows un-
naturally thrown, it was not a wilful distortion of lines,
and they held by what they believed to be the right
way. Since then circumstances have broken up that
little knot of what I once heard called "earnest up-
ward-striving souls." Some have seen the error of their
ways before too late, and have married while there was
yet time to know the maternal blessings they had
blasphemed in their days of darkness; others have let
their hair grow, and have gone back to flounces and
artificial flowers, and other outward emblems of
womanhood—indeed, according to the saying that the
greater the sinner the greater the saint, the outward
emblems of these renegade emancipationists are for
44
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
the most part of an excessive kind, and beat those of
the ordinarily smart woman all to nothing; some went
into business, in which they had to make the humi-
liating confession that they could not get on without
the aid of masculine strength to supplement their
weakness, finding themselves at fault in figures, and
out of their reckoning in the deeper waters of com-
merce; but some remain true to the primitive faith as
at first preached, and though not so largely labelled by
dress and demeanour as of old, still go about in de-
signedly unlovely apparel, and are just as bitter in
their abhorrence of the ordained duties of their sex-
just as passionate in their denunciations of men, and
as angry at the division which society and nature both
have made of the good things of life.
The main object of these women is- laudably
enough to find practical work and the means of self-
support for those of their own sex who have no male
creatures at hand to keep them. If they were to stop
here if they were to advocate only such work as
would fit in harmoniously with woman's physical con-
dition—with the quality of her brain, and the possibi-
lities of her power-they would be doing incalculable
good; but like all enthusiasts they overshoot their
mark, and by way of enlarging a sphere change its
45
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
entire form and take it out of the field altogether.
The advanced guard of this sect is to be found in
America, where captaincies, naval and military, judges'
wigs, and barristers' silk gowns are not thought unbe-
fitting or out of the natural order of things feminine ;
and where, if all had fair play and women might lay
their hands on such spokes of fortune's wheel as
seemed good to them, it is assumed the greatest prizes
would be gained by them; and where the future Saviour
of Society is to be undoubtedly a daughter, not a son.
For, to the man-hating yet man-imitating sect, the
feminine is the highest, the divine element in humanity.
Manhood represents pride, gluttony, selfishness, hate,
wrath, and the sins of the world, the flesh, and the
devil combined-the concrete man being a demon of
doubtful mien, possessing all the fiercer vices conjoined
with all the sensual ones. But woman is an angel,
with a cascade of golden hair meandering down her
dimpled back, her eyes turned up to heaven, treading
spiritual lusts and fleshly ones under her feet, and
meekly carrying the heavy cross imposed on her by
her male tyrant. Too meekly, say the emancipated ;
with a burning desire to free their sisters from the toils
they love and the chains they hug. She is Una with
her lion rampant in her path, not submissive by her
46
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
side, nor yet with his claws cut and his fangs drawn ;
-Hope, leaning on an anchor that breaks as she re-
lies;-Patience, bearing her yoke, which the craft of
the masculine oppressor makes doubly hard upon her
neck; she is the proprietor of all the virtues, includ-
ing even the grace of strength-for has she not endu-
rance and the god-like power of fortitude?—is she not
strong to suffer and to love? Not that the emanci-
pated care much about love; but they cannot deny its
force; and if it is a weakness, contrasted with the
rugged power of those who can stand unloved and
alone, it is a weakness that does the same work as
strength, and even they must admit it into their cate-
gory of human forces.
To this sect then, woman is the apex of the pyra-
mid; the flower of the human aloe; the best thing we
know; and emphatically the work of Nature's master-
hand, while men are only the botch of her 'prentice
power. And the way in which she, the emancipated,
proves her superiority and her contentment with the
same, is by aping the meaner man, and by making
herself as much like him and as little like a typical
woman as she possibly can. Another thing she does
is to knock at the door of all his offices, seeking to
push him from his special place, instead of perfecting
47
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
her own assigned work, and making it bear new fruits
and double blossoms. Perhaps this is on the same
principle as that which made old Rowland Hill take
dance-music and the airs to which profane songs
were set, for the favourite hymn-tunes and voluntaries
of his chapel. He did not see why the devil should
have all the best music, he said; and, in like manner,
the emancipated women do not see why men should
have all the best places and the pleasures of indepen-
dence. The analogy is close if you stand on their
platform.
And yet the very women who clamour most for the
work which men do now, are precisely those who leave
undone that which nature and society assign specially
to themselves. It is not because woman has exhausted
her natural ground, and has so thoroughly tilled every
portion of her own patch, that she is crowded out of
her peculiar domain; and therefore, in a way forced
to invade that of men; but that she dislikes her own
sphere, and covets her brother's-omne ignotum pro
magnifico standing at the gate of many a longing, and
leading the way to many a discontent. But there are
certain stubborn natural facts which tell against this
invasion of place and assumption of likeness; which
last is a different thing from equality. Men are the
48
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
active energies of human society, women the passive;
men originate, women perfect. By that instinct of
masculine nature by which the world is kept alive and
humanity is redeemed from barbarism, men must work
and strive; the fight belongs to them by right of love
and longing; and their very self-respect demands that
they try their strength one with another, and
shoulder their way through opposition and difficulty;
and women, because of their weakness, must be worked
for and protected. The thing is too self-evident to
need reasoning about. Besides, what kind of world.
would it be if they persisted in coming to the front,
and taking on themselves the place and burdens of
men? What kind of work would be done if Hercules
took to spinning wool in safe places, while Omphale
turned out to do battle with monsters in his stead?
What kind of men should we have as the result of the
exchange ?—not to speak of the women, as much
unsexed for their own part. Creatures we could love?
creatures we would condescend to marry? for it must
be remembered that the maiden's pride is in herself,
though the wife's is in her husband; and that to give
herself, is the highest proof of honour a woman shows
to any man. Men we could honour as fathers, hus-
bands, and brothers, or men we should despise as
49
E
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
utterly wanting in all that constitutes true manliness ?
as wanting in courage, and the high spirit of inde-
pendence which would make them forbid us to work
that their hands might be lightened? There is very
little doubt which way the general verdict of woman-
kind would go; and the instinct is right which gives.
men the heavy end of the stick to carry, and assigns
to us the less onerous task of bearing the branches;
which sets them to clear the path and build the house,
and us to plant the flowers, and prepare the home for
rest and pleasure. And the great mistake which the
emancipated women make, is that they put instinct.
out of the question altogether, and because they them-
selves are without it, think that all the world besides.
must be ordered on the same truncated plan.
Take the marriage question as an instance. The
emancipated despise marriage as servile submission
unbecoming the free-born soul; but they forget that
the ideal on which marriage is founded is love, and
that no true-hearted woman that ever lived, who loved
her husband, desired anything but submission. It is
the very life of a woman's love-her pride, her glory,
her evidence of self-respect. If she loves, she desires
her husband to be greater than herself, and she be-
lieves him to be so. If the choice was offered to her,
50
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
she would rather rely on him than be independent of
his care; and to owe her all to him is both natural
and sweet. The honour paid to him reflects itself on
her; and the honour paid to her, in rivalry to him or to
his exclusion, is a light that burns rather than shines,
and is soon quenched in darkness and disfavour.
But this is only the ideal; and we all know how
rarely the ideal is attained in this sad world. The
hardship is, where a woman who does not love, or who
belongs to an unworthy man, is obliged to submit to
his caprices and injustice because of form's sake;
and the idea that marriage should include, per
se and arbitrarily, the sacrifice of all feminine indivi-
duality and womanly rights. For my own part, I think
the ordering of things according to the aesthetic doc-
trines of a sublimated ideal such as is seldom, if ever,
attained by a frail humanity subject to criss-cross in-
fluences, a cruelly false and fatal principle of life.
And I hold so far with the emancipated, that, while
granting the perfection of marriage to be love, and the
perfection of womanly love to include the tenderest
submission, the most passionate self-surrender, the
intensest amount of faith, and the most reverential
homage, yet, as the reality is just as often a jarring
discord as it is this perfect unison, with sometimes the
5 I
E 2
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
harsher clash of enmity and tyranny in place of the
loving accord-the woman, as the weaker, ought to be
protected from the possible ill-treatment of her lord,
and be in some sense free, though bound. The danger
of "lowering the ideal" does not seem to me so great
as would be the good of boldly acknowledging the
truth, and candidly abolishing lies and pretences.
And until we can get all our husbands to be ideal
men, and all our wives to be ideal women, and can
provide that all marriages shall be made on true prin-
ciples and none on the false ones of ambition, passion,
convenience-what not-it would be far better to allow
for flaws and cracks, and to fashion the cement where-
with to stop them, than to go on legislating for per-
fection only, and making no provision for frailty.
If the emancipated women disdain marriage, much
more do they contemn maternity. And yet what other
natural end and meaning of a woman's life is there?
Of course there is anxiety attending it, and pain and
terror and sometimes death; and the early years of a
child's life are always heavily laden to the mother with
trouble, both physical and mental. But the reward!
What woman that is a woman, mother or not, has not
felt her heart throb at the touch of a child's little hands
upon her face? has not felt her own soul at rest, and
52
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
her whole nature satisfied, when she holds a loved child
in her arms? What mother, that is a true woman, when
she enters her nursery, and the little ones come crowd-
ing to her with outstretched arms, happy if they can
but cling to her dress-happiest of all angels out of
heaven if they can clamber to her knee, and up to that
pinnacle of bliss, her lips-does not feel that she is
entering her heaven? and that so long as these be-
loved ones are safe and well, fortune has no whips that
can cut below the surface, and sorrow is deprived of
half its sting? Call it if you will an animal instinct,
you poor emancipated women ignorant of life's dearest
joys-sneer at the likeness of a nursing mother to any
other mammalian female with her young by her side-
extol the value of intellectual endeavour, and uphold
thought at the cost of emotion-be in yourselves quite
worthy examples of intellectual culture, so that how
much soever men may disagree with you, no one can
despise you-but nature speaks with a clearer and far
stronger voice than do you with all your theories
and the woman of perfect physical organization and
healthy mind will still worship with loving faith the
man to whom she has given her love and herself, and
will still yearn for his child, and hers, to lie on her
heart and call her mother. For to be the mother of
53
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
his child is the one most ardent desire of every woman
who loves.
Say then, that animal instinct is the basis of this
divine passion, this unconquerable desire, I, for one,
accept the animality as a motive cause, and am not
ashamed to own to it. We do not yet know the whole
of the God-likeness lying in nature, and the very fact
that the animal instinct is both general and necessary
is a sufficient answer to those who sneer at it as vile.
If human nature is made up of sense, mind, and spirit,
I do not see why we should be ashamed of that one
upon which the others rest; and if the nursing mother
is like any other mammalian female with her young by
her side, surely animal maternity is as much the fore-
shadowing of the human, as the human is the echo of
the animal. Can we not level up as well as down?
Can we not see beauty and divinity in the animal in-
stincts, as well as in the mere thoughts of men?
In their wild tilt against instinctive affections, the
emancipated women are only repeating Dame Par-
tington's mistake-trying to sweep out the Atlantic
with a broom. They will succeed no better than did
that typical old obstructive. Try as long as they may,
they will not be able to affix the stigma of the "lower
creature" on the woman who prefers bearing children
54
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
to writing poetry or lecturing on self-culture, and who
thinks that being a loving wife to a manly husband is
a better thing than the intellectual progress possible
in the lonely grandeur of celibacy.
Neither will they succeed in their crusade in the
ordained division of office, with the practical result of
getting possession of certain of the places occupied by
men. They will get some perhaps, because some of
the lighter work now appropriated by men ought to be
done by women instead, and ought generally wins the
day in the end; but they will not get all for which
their most ardent partisans (in America chiefly) think
them quite capable. For instance men would not
submit to live under the laws made by women; nor
yet would they prefer them as the judges of their
causes, or as the pleaders of the same. They will not
choose lady-professors for their sons; nor lady-theolo-
gians for the guidance of their own souls; female
warriors, such as we lately read of in South America,
and such as the King of Dahomey employs, would
never suit the temper of the men who fought at Bala-
clava, and those who raised for their supreme cry in
India, "Remember Cawnpore !" Lady-doctors are
modern resuscitations of an old condition, of admirable
use and purpose, if wisely directed; but they must be
55
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
content to confine themselves to the care of women
and children only-lady-doctors for men being needless
and unseemly. But all these questions settle them-
selves by the great law of the Best; and even in
medical practice, if the Best there was unquestionably
a woman, there would be no reason why men should
not profit by her brains, as now women profit by the
brains of men. Still, we are speaking only of averages;
and taking this ground, what has been said holds
good. Supremacy, of course, unsexes per se; and in
both art and science it is not so much who has done
certain work, but the work itself and how it is done,
that challenges our admiration or respect. If then,
it can be proved that women will make as good ad-
vocates or better than men; as good judges or better
than men; and so on of other professions at present
followed exclusively by men; they will be as highly
salaried as men, and as much honoured. But the
difficulty lies just in that very proof; for until it is
established no one will try them, and it cannot be
established until they are tried.
The other class of emancipated women-those who
have delivered themselves from the thraldom of mo-
rality as generally practised by the world at large,
is one to be very carefully handled.
It is not a
56
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
pleasant thing to write of, but it exists; and this also
more rampantly in America than here. These are
simply women whose instinctive life, instead of being
withered and cut off, is excessive and abnormal. They
abjure matrimony because they love men-not the one
man—and are not willing to be confined to only one.
They are unbought hetaira, who give instead of selling,
and they stand on the same plane relatively to men
and morals. Not on the same plane relatively to
society, because many of them are crypto-hetaire, and
keep the fact of their discursiveness a profound secret,
save to those others concerned. But some come
boldly forward, and in the face of day advocate Free
Love as the saving health of nations, the best ideal of
nature, and denounce the monogamism of our western
life as debasing, unnatural, and immoral. Like rakish
men they wander from one lover to another, but they
never know the meaning of love; and in their craze
after freedom give themselves up to the worst slavery
of all-the slavery of their own desires. Let the pas-
sionless philosopher argue that there are polygamous
instincts and polyandrous instincts in mankind, all the
same as in plants and animals, but both he and the
emancipated women must recognise that other instinct
-the abhorrence which good women and noble men
57
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
have against polyandria, and which has made society,
in all ages and everywhere, brand it as a shameful sin.
So let her bear the shame in her own soul, if of the
cryptic kind and a hetaira by secret affiliation, not by
open confession; but if she boldly proclaims her prin-
ciples by public deeds as well as by public avowal,
then must she expect that the best of her own sex and
of her lover's, will despise her as something lower than
her ordination, and more ignoble than what nature
destined her to be-as something by whose example
frail souls are led astray and given over to unutterable
perdition.
For strong-minded folks, who assume to rule the
rougher elements, emancipated women are but weak
sisters in their inability to tolerate the weaknesses of
others. Really powerful men, powerful in mind and
body both, who would march up to a cannon's mouth
without a muscle quivering, may be seen tenderly
mindful of some pigmy vixen of a woman who flouts
them as if they were her slaves, but whose petulance
these giants accept with undisturbed serenity. Now,
emancipated women are not strong enough for this
kind of thing. They shriek hysterically that men are
selfish and vile, or small and weak in spite of all their
big bluster; and yet they themselves are no better.
58
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
For if strength is good for anything at all, it is as good
for the bearing of one burden as of another; and pa-
tience with our brothers' infirmities is only a form of
power, and the one naturally looked for from women.
And after all, are men as bad as the emancipated of
the inimical class make out? Grant that they are
selfish, how would the world go on without that great
pushing, driving, masterful instinct of theirs? and if
it does lead them at times to oppress the weaker—
women included-is not this shouldering out of de-
bility by strength one of the natural results of the
struggle for existence, and the instinctive selection by
which the world and nations are governed? If they
were not selfish, humanity would not be what it is,
and civilization would not have advanced as yet be-
yond a contented herding with wild beasts. And
surely, though some men are gross and sensual on the
one hand, beyond all possibility of respect, and others
are just as mean and effeminate, yet on the whole the
MAN is the most god-like thing we know! If the
angels are feminine, the archangels are masculine; for
the matter of that, so are the demons; but the arch-
angel conquered the prince of the fallen, and the alle-
gory holds good with mankind in the mass. And
then, beautiful as are all the softer virtues of women,
59
EMANCIPATED WOMEN.
the nobleness of a man-when noble-is so ineffably
grand; his patience, his justice, his largeness, his
courage are all so God-like when they exist at all!
Ah, my dear sisters, you of the emancipated who
imitate while you profess to hate, and envy what
you say you despise, imitate your great enemy in his
true strength, and then perhaps you will see better
where your own weaknesses lie, and be able to under-
take your natural duties with higher courage, a nobler
patience, and a wider understanding! "Woman is
not undeveloped man," but a being perfect in herself;
most perfect when most womanly; and the best form
of womanliness includes love, both wifely and maternal.
The only true life is got by experience, and women
who are neither wives nor mothers know only half
the truth, and assuredly only half the joy of existence.

бо

OUR SMALL SINS.
ROM the days of Solomon downwards, and in
all countries where proverbs crystallize the
various affluents of experience, we women have been
especially credited with all the smaller vices incidental
to humanity at large. We escape the abyss of the
darker crimes, which are reserved for men—save in-
deed, as the teterrimæ causæ of all evil,-only to fall
upon the mud-heaps of the meaner sins; and perhaps
the accusation is not entirely unreasonable.
Let us
begin with one of the most notorious of our small sins
-our love of gossip, accompanied by that inveterate
habit of chattering about ourselves and our affairs,
which seems to be a feminine characteristic every-
where and at all times—and surely we must confess
that this is one of our instinctive faults, not in any
degree equally shared by men. Even when we find it
61
OUR SMALL SINS.
in men, do we not brand it as our own translated, by
calling it "womanish ?"—and are not all the worn-out
old fellows who congregate round the club-windows to
discuss the passing scandals of the hour "old women"
by the discourtesy of common parlance? Though, of
course, there are some miserable little fellows who far
outstrip the worst of ourselves, and do more in the
way of fuss and chatter than the fussiest and most fluid
woman to be found in the kingdom, yet no really
manly man likes gossip or gives in to the habit of
chatter. The petty details of the home, the small
events and minute annoyances which are so gigantic
to women, are so many nothings to him; and it is dis-
tasteful to him to hear of them as things demanding
much attention or worthy of any very profound emo-
tion. He bears them in the same way as that in
which the old Norse giant bore the blows of Thor's
hammer," I thought the leaves were falling on my
face last night, and that the birds were throwing moss
over me ;" and shakes himself clear of them as Gulliver
shook himself clear of the Lilliputian cordage. To
hear them magnified into heavy grievances, strong
enough to weigh down the happiness of life, is a mis-
direction of force, a waste of power, that he cannot
away with; and is as unpleasant to him as it would
62
OUR SMALL SINS.
be to a large-minded woman were she forced to live in
the squabbles of children, and bound to gravely adju-
dicate between the rival claims of Rose the black-eyed
doll, or Laura the fair-wigged one.
But women take an almost artistic pleasure ín
gossip; which indeed, with personal chatter, is the sole
form of conversation generally found possible with the
ordinary British female. Like the elephant's trunk
which can pick up a pin or crush a man's bones to
pulp, nothing is too small for the British female to
discuss, and nothing too large for her to decide; be-
cause she makes every subject which affects herself of
supreme importance, how trivial soever it may be
intrinsically, while she narrows down the broadest
questions to the pitiful level of her own personal con-
venience. From "Mary maid's" new Sunday bonnet-
trimming to the exact limitation of cook's lawful
wages-involving the whole question of capital and
labour-she is at all times ready for the most fractional
details and the most authoritative decision. Not that
she sees in the limitation of wages any connexion with
that greater subject of capital and labour, but only as
it bears on her own private means, and the conve-
nience or inconvenience to which she may be put
according to her balance at the banker's. If you were
63
OUR SMALL SINS.
to tell her that she was pronouncing on a branch of
political economy which had puzzled, and was still
puzzling, the wisest heads to set straight, she would
express her opinion that nothing was more easy to
arrange; and that if men were as clever as they pre-
tended to be, they ought long ago to have settled such
an easy and self-evident question. She would also
be sure to settle it against poor Mary and cook;
and with her own allowance double that of her
mother's, contend that servants are a great deal too
well off as it is, and what do they want with so much
money? For one of the small sins of women is stingi-
ness, and a disinclination to pay well for work of any
kind; but I am coming to this in its own time.
The kitchen is always one of the most fertile hunt-
ing-grounds for the chatter and gossip of women; and
so far from servants being "the greatest plagues in
life," half the women in England would be "blue-
moulded" for want of them as the pièces de résistance
in the centre of their frothy talk. The shortcomings
of their domestics are their darling grievance; and
what would the world be without feminine grievances !
A legend says there was once silence in heaven for an
hour; there would be silence then in English drawing-
rooms for many hours! Their maids are "shop" with
64
OUR SMALL SINS.
women, and they talk "shop" as men never do. No
officer chatters about his men, no merchant of his
clerks, as women chatter about their servants; and no
ordinary master-always excepting the miserable little
fellows before-mentioned, who are just so many fussy,
bearded women-would dream of giving the same
attention to the sayings and doings of his domestics as
even strong-minded women give to theirs. Fancy a
man peeping and prying behind the blinds to see
whether John ogled the pretty milkwoman, or squeezed
the hand of the comely laundress!
Yet how many
women are there not who can tell you how Jane stands
and talks to that bold butcher-boy; and how Anne
blushed when she saw the baker's man at the area-gate
yesterday; and how that artful little hussy, Sarah,
always puts on her most becoming cap when gentlemen
are dining at the house; and, "Did you see the way
in which she looked at Mr. Blank when she handed
him the bread? You did not? Ah! you are not as
well acquainted with Miss Sarah's ways as I am! You
should live with her, and then, perhaps, you would
understand her artfulness!"
In fact, there is a certain jealousy, a certain mute
rivalry between mistress and maid, which is sometimes
the reason why the former takes such an excessive
65
F
OUR SMALL SINS.
interest—not of the most friendly kind-in the looks
and the ways of the latter. Both are women, and not
unfrequently the maid is the prettier woman of the
two, and though the mistress could neither individua-
lize, nor would even to herself confess her jealousy,
there it is all the same, as the motive force setting
many things in action. Of course women will deny
this passionately; but it is true, nevertheless. Are
there not many house-mistresses who refuse to engage
pretty servants, because of the attention they would
excite and the admiration they would attract? They
may give a fine-sounding name to this refusal: if they
spoke the truth candidly, it would be jealousy.
A small sin very common among women is their in-
tense craving for excitement, in the two forms of un-
wholesome reading and sensational gossip. Listen to
a knot of women scandalizing their neighbours, and
hear how eagerly they catch up any detail which rounds
off the chronicle and makes it more harmonious as a
set story. Not that they wish any harm to Miss A. or
Mr. B., but they like the excitement of the passing
drama--they shiver with pleasant horror at the dark
sin just indicated-they hope it may not be so, and
yet the story would be so much more complete, so in-
finitely more thrilling! What an experience too, for
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OUR SMALL SINS.
themselves to find out that the fascinating foreigner
admitted to their homes and hearths, just like one of
themselves, was the leader of a gang of swindlers,
forgers-perhaps murderers-and himself a villain of
the deepest dye, though a gentleman of the nicest
manners. To think that those white, virtuous hands.
of theirs had clasped in friendship the hand of a pro-
fessed cut-throat-of an escaped convict, with whom
the aureole of high life contends with the shadow of
the Brest bullet! Horrible yet how exciting!
making them feel quite improper themselves, on the
principle of the pot and the rose-inverted. Any-
thing so dramatic as this though, rarely happens; and
when it does it serves for a lifetime. But the impru-
dences of Miss A., and the gambling debts of Mr. B.,
and how the C.'s half-starve their servants, and what
quarrels convulse the domestic atmosphere of the D.'s
—all these are daily food for the dramatic instinct to
live on and are made the most of.
Side by side with this sin of sensationalism in daily
life is that of sensationalism in literature, and the ex-
treme aversion which most women feel for "dull read-
ing," as they call anything grave or solid. What do
they first claim at Mudie's and the sea-side libraries—
history or fiction? Kinglake or Miss Braddon ?
67
F 2
OUR SMALL SINS.
Carlyle's noblest work or Guy Livingstone's latest ro-
mance? What do they read in newspapers ?-the lead-
ing articles?—the letters from great names on grave
subjects ?—the parliamentary debates? or the murders,
the police-reports, the little bits of news and gossip,
that awful column of facetiæ, table-talk, odds and
ends by what name soever the editor chooses
to designate his sweepings from Joe Miller and the
back numbers of Punch? These are the woman's bits
in a newspaper, with occasional interludes of foreign
correspondence if after the manner of the famous
Daily Telegraph, which surely must be written for
ladies only! This dread of dulness is one of the most
foolish things about women, and one of the causes,
inter alia, why their conversation is so often not worthy
listening to. They gossip because they cannot con-
verse. They do not cultivate that art of pleasant,
easy, sprightly conversation, which comes in as part of
the education of a Frenchwoman, and which is as
necessary for her social success as the art of dress or
the science of appearances. Those few women among
us who can talk easily and brightly on the current
topics of the day, are always sought in society, and
never in want of partners for a conversation. They
may be old and ugly; but men with brains will leave
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OUR SMALL SINS.
the prettiest girl in the room, if a fool, for them, and
neither wrinkles nor harsh lines will repel them, if the
wit is keen and the sense is clear. But women in
general think that their only social value lies in their
outside prettiness, and the amount of personal admi-
ration they can excite; and so they neglect the beauty
which lasts for that which fades, and when they are no
longer charming as possible lovers have nothing to
fall back upon as pleasant companions. One quite
understands the important force of the instinct which
makes a young woman prize her person more than her
mind, and which makes young men gravitate towards
beauty rather than towards character. Human nature,
like all other parts of creation, has its unreasoning
impulses that work to good ends: and this is one of
them. But as there is something more than mere
instinct in humanity, so ought there to be a further
outlook and a higher aim than the mere perishable
prettiness of the hour.
It is a favourite excuse for the faults of women,
to say that their intellect is narrow because their
life-sphere is circumscribed; and that if they might
do more, they would have more wherewith to do.
Yet it is in their own hands to broaden their natural
lines without travelling beyond their appointed
69
OUR SMALL SINS.
66
boundaries; they could, if they chose, exercise intellect
and education in things which are now suffered to drift
like so much sea-wrack without roots, and so make
their lives more generous and of nobler intention.
Home and maternity are woman's natural offices and
vocation. This, I think, not the boldest of the
'strong-minded" will deny. And as things go,
nothing could be more uninteresting or more narrow.
But whose fault is that? Whose fault is it that the
"cold mutton" of the home has passed into a proverb,
and that men have a not quite unreasonable gibe for
every domestic circumstance? What exquisite beauty
and improvement, through the aid of science, might
not an intelligent woman incorporate into the manage-
ment of her house and children! Is there nothing to
be learned about the chemistry of food?—and must
English cookery always be a simple application of heat
to raw flesh, with sometimes a rude dash of salt or
sauce as the highest extent to which middle-class in-
tellect and ingenuity can attain? Must we always
stay where we are, just a step in advance of the savage
who tumbles his freshly killed game among the ashes
of his wood fire, and drags it out while still half raw
that he may taste the blood left in it? Is there nothing
in this direction to interest the brains and worthily em-
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OUR SMALL SINS.
ploy the time of women? We know that the quality
and preparation of food are half the battle with the
young, and more than half the battle with all brain-
workers; and that we have the same capacity as that
which bees and ants possess, inasmuch as we can feed
our pupa into pretty much what we choose them to
be-stunted, emaciated, scrofulous, half vitalized, or
comely, well-developed, healthy, and finely-formed.
Granting that the present mode of housekeeping is a
wretched thing altogether, and that to give much time to
it as at present conducted would be as wretched a waste
of power, still the fault lies with women in that they
do not bring their intelligence into the service of their
duties, and so raise the whole platform, and make
object, life, and intellect all harmoniously great.
Women may say-" What! learn the chemistry of food
simply that my husband may have a good dinner when
he comes home? Degrade myself to the condition of
a servant, and give time and thought for such a
result? No! let him eat cold mutton, as I do; if
he cannot eat it, he ought to be ashamed of himself,
and to go without."
+
Spoken or concealed, this would be the argument
that would naturally occur to most women; for indeed
we are an unreasoning set of creatures, and as in-
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OUR SMALL SINS.
capable of a far-seeing judgment, where our own
pleasure is concerned, as a blind man, attracted by the
scent of the roses growing on it, is incapable of seeing
the wall he is just going to run his head against. We
never reflect on the ultimates of things. A medical
man has to study botany, chemistry, comparative
anatomy, as well as the more immediate subjects of
his profession, for the result, among others, of clipping
out a little girl's milk-teeth or poulticing a maid-ser-
vant's whitlow. But the greater results of the valuable
lives he can save, and the human suffering he can
alleviate-do they count for nothing? Does he flinch
from his studies, and grudge his care and attention
because the milk-teeth and the whitlow come in as part
of the final cause? and does he ignore that great, grand
end which lies beyond the petty details of his prac-
tice? To save life and alleviate human suffering,
were quite sufficient moral motives for those long
years of study and labour; and might not motives as
great influence women? If the physician is healing,
is not the cook health? We cannot free ourselves
conditions, and the food.
from the tether of material
tether is one of the stoutest. And if women would
take up the subject and really study it in all its
branches, as one of the positive sciences, they would.
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OUR SMALL SINS.
not only help forward the improvement of the race—
which perhaps would be no very great incentive to
some of the lighter sort-but they would also gain
knowledge and find interest. A perfect knowledge of
the chemistry of food and the science of cooking seems
to me to open up an almost illimitable field for the
energies and education of women; and if the prepara-
tion seems great for the result, and the best mode of
broiling a mutton-chop too mean an object for varied
and extensive study, we must remember that the best
mode of broiling a mutton-chop is part of the means.
by which the best kind of race is made, and that food
is potential humanity. And I do not think that any
woman could find that too mean an object for the
exercise of her faculties.
Again, with children-where is the woman who
sincerely studies the best mode of education? who
brings to the task of forming the characters of the
young, any sound philosophy, any accurate observa-
tion? The mother who thinks of her responsibilities.
as they are in spiritual truth, ought to understand all
about the constitution of children—their tempers,
moral and intellectual capacities, symptoms of disease,
and their moral and physical dangers and temptations
-which opens a rather wider field than most women
73
OUR SMALL SINS.
have wit enough to plough. She ought to know how
best to feed them, how best to clothe them, how to
conduct and manage them so that the good in them
may be brought out and the bad repressed; but as a
rule she knows nothing of it all, and for the most
part leaves her children to the care of servants, to be
ill-treated or spoiled according to the humour of the
women and the state of their digestive organs. Many
a broken constitution and shattered nervous system
date from the early days of mamma's neglect and
nurse's talk; but this is not one of the small sins of
women. It is one of their largest, and deepest, and
most shameful!-a sin indeed that I cannot under-
stand. For if motherhood does not include the com-
panionship of the children, if it does not mean the
training, by love, of their young minds, and the ren-
dering their lives happy by judicious care, what
can it mean? and where is its pleasure, its value, its
significance? To be a mere human rabbit is not to
be a mother.
All these things women have it in their power to do
if they honestly wish to enrich their lives. But they
do not honestly wish this. They are like children
themselves, impatient of their own assigned work while
grasping at that which their elders are doing. They
74
OUR SMALL SINS.
neglect their own part of life, or hand it over to bad
delegates, while they are swarming about the men's
offices, and attempting to enter into competition with
them without one qualification for the struggle. And
what but a sin can we call the fruitless endeavour
which includes discontent with ordained duties? It is
not only misdirection of power; rather is it that frank
selfishness of the Frenchman "Ôte-toi, que je m'y mets,”
which does not mean the race to the swift, or the
battle to the strong, but simple spoliation of another's
gains and reaping where we have not sown.
For my
own part I think there should be free trade in work,
and that the best hand should be chosen irrespective
of sex; in that case women would prepare them-
selves for high-class work better than they are prepared
now, and come into the arena armed to win, not only
supplicating to be favoured. Our present excuse is,
our want of teaching; but that very phrase is a con-
fession of inferiority which I cannot accept. Who
taught men? Did they not build up the various
processes of thought for themselves? and yet here are
women, who can read and study at their own will,
whimpering about their wrongs in not being taught !
Let them teach themselves. If we had any real stuff
in us, and were not merely so much wax in the hands
75
OUR SMALL SINS.
of others, we would do this for ourselves, and ask no
help in that which we are able to do alone, nor leave
to follow on a course whence we are not barred. The
fuss we make about certain of our wrongs, which we
ourselves can remedy, is one of the most humiliating
things about us. If we are in mental chains-which
we are—why do we not break them? Is it likely that
our jailers will do this for us? If we really resolved
on setting ourselves free from the trammels of igno-
rance, to deliver up ourselves into the glorious liberty
of knowledge and reason, we have the power to do so,
and only our own supineness keeps us bound.
A small sin, with sometimes large results, is the
fatal habit so common among us women, of letting out
our own personal secrets and family histories. We do
not betray the secrets entrusted to us where we think
we may do harm, save indeed for some fierce revenge,
when we would slay the life had we the courage.
Failing which, we only slaughter repute. But we tell
our own secrets, we chatter about our family and our
friends, and in the most artless way possible put our-
selves into the power of one after another of our
intimates, and trust implicitly to the reserve in others.
of which we have confessed ourselves destitute.
There are very few women who are really reticent.
76
OUR SMALL SINS.
Even silent women can be brought at last to the
confidential point; while with impulsive women, the
well-planted artillery of a dinner-hour will be sufficient
to blow every atom of their defence-work to pieces:
and a man who cares to know the arcana of his com-
panion may, if she is of this kind, get from her the
whole of her life-history between the soup and the
grapes. I have known this done. We give ourselves
up to the impulse of the moment; and how much
soever we may afterwards regret our foolish unreserve,
at the time we are powerless to prevent it.
This inability to calculate consequences is one of
the basic differences of sex-at least so it seems to me;
and it goes through the whole of the feminine nature.
No true woman-woman, and nothing more—would
make a good strategist; but many, if they had the
physical strength, would be first-rate at brilliant dashes,
guerilla surprises, and isolated ambushes. The same
defect comes out in the want of close reasoning power,
characteristic of us as a race. I do not think that want
is due simply to the difference of education between us
and men; and that if we were taught the formula of logic
we should therefore learn to reason, and leave off
jumping to conclusions according to the way we have
now. And furthermore, I think it would be a bad
77
OUR SMALL SINS.
day for men if we did learn to reason.
The great
hold they have on us now is by the supremacy of our
instincts and what we are pleased to call our "intuitive
perceptions" over our reasoning faculties; and if ever
we cast aside the superstitious and impulsive parts of
us, we shall then give the "woman, spaniel, and
walnut-tree" theory its final death-blow; and men
will have to meet us on different terms from those of
the present order of things.
One of our small sins is our small jealousy of each
other. It is wrong to say that women cannot be
friends together; we can-true, firm, enduring friends;
but I doubt if any woman's friendship ever existed
free from jealousy. If we are not jealous about men we
are about other women, and guard our rights against
division with the vigilance of a house-dog guarding his
domain. No man can understand the unresting petti-
ness of jealousy that exists between woman-friends :
no man knows it for his own part, and no man would
submit to it from his friend. But we accept it patiently,
knowing where the shoe pinches from the shape of our
own feet.
As wives and lovers we are perhaps the
most exclusive and the most jealous women in the
world. There is scarcely a wife in England who would
allow her husband to admire any other woman, to
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OUR SMALL SINS.
make of any other a friend, or to show frank pleasure
in her society. There would be pouting or tears or
tantrums according to individual disposition, and the
whole harmony of the household would be swept by
the board; the practical upshot of which is that men
make friends outside their homes, unknown to their
respective Junos; and that very often the simple fact
of secresy changes the complexion of the whole affair,
and makes what would have been only a friendship if
it could have been frankly acknowledged, an intrigue
instead.
Girls too are awfully jealous of each other: I should
call this the girl's distinctive fault. See them when
they are introduced, or when they first meet at a ball
or croquet-party; see how coldly critical they look at
each other—how insolently their eyes rove over every
portion of their rival's dress; read in their faces the
unspoken scorn as the result of their scrutiny: "You
think you have done it very well, but you have made
a fright of yourself, and I am much better than you !"
Watch their disdain of the more admired among them;
and how excessively naughty for attracting so much.
attention they think that Ada or Amy about whom the
young men cluster. How bold she is!-how over-
dressed she is!-how affected she is !—and, oh! how
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OUR SMALL SINS:
ugly she is! Sometimes, if they are deep, they will
overpraise her enthusiastically; but the ruse is gene-
Fally too transparent to deceive any one, and simply
counts for what it is-a clever feint that doesn't answer.
It is quite a study to watch the way in which girls
shake hands together, or take hands in dances. The
limp, cool, impertinent way in which they just touch.
palms, then let their arms fall as if paralysed, tells a
volume to those able to read the lettering. In dancing
they very frequently do not take hands at all, but just
brush the tips of the fingers, or make a show of doing
so, and so pass on in the "chain," to press perhaps
more than cordially the next male hand that grasps
theirs. It may be all very right, and quite according
to the dispensations of Providence, but it is funny to
watch nevertheless.
Only women of a certain age are really friends
together. School-girls are lovers-gushing, sentimental,
expansive lovers unconsciously rehearsing for the
real drama to come by-and-by; and young ladies, when
"out," are rivals, undergoing deadly pangs because of
bigger chignons and shorter petticoats, and yet more
audacious tournures and a larger following of admirers;
but after these turbid waters have run themselves clear,
then they can become friends; and often some of the
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OUR SMALL SINS.
sweetest experiences of a woman's life are those she
has had from the love, the confidence, the faithful
sisterhood of some dear "second self," whom no
fear disturbs, and from whom no petty jealousy can.
sever her.
Another small sin of ours is our desire of attracting
attention. There are many women who would rather
be infamous than obscure, and who prefer the tra-
ditional thrashing of the Russian to immunity and
neglect. They will do anything to attract notice, and
think the "wallflower" position worse than the pillory.
There is nothing of a noble ambition in this; quite the
contrary; it is the mere restlessness of small egotism
-the mere fever of vanity-the same feeling which,
in another form, makes certain of us refuse to grow
old, and have recourse to any expedient, no matter
what, rather than confess to grey hairs and wrinkles.
Neglect is worse than death to most of us; and
notoriety is our version of Fame, as admiration is the
sum of our ambition. Even Madame de Staël would
have exchanged her brains for Madame de Récamier's
beauty; and poll the world of woman honestly, not
one in a thousand would dissent from her choice.
Another of our small sins is, I am sorry to say—one
that I alluded to before-stinginess. It seems to me
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OUR SMALL SINS.
that the race of large-hearted, open-handed women is
almost dying out-I cannot say has died out, for,
thank God! I know one or two beautiful examples
still left to us, where generosity is not extravagance,
nor economy meanness. But granting exceptions as
we all know them, the small, stingy ways of women in
general are very painful, very rasping. They seem to
have increased in exact ratio with the personal extra-
vagance of the time; as indeed is very easy to under-
stand. For money is a fixed quantity horribly in-
elastic; consequently, the more we spend on one
thing the less we have for another; the more liberal.
we are to ourselves the closer we must be to our
neighbours; and lavishness on the right hand must
needs include tight purse-strings on the left. I by no
means find fault with the household economies of
women-taking these to be the power of "making-up"
with such and such odds and ends, and the little self-
denials of going without" such and such pleasant.
superfluities-but with the habit of beating down, the
higgling about pence with the poorest sellers, the
grudging payment of the wages due for labour, and
the almost universal desire among us to deprive the
retail tradesman of his rightful profits. There is
scarcely a woman who does not think that she ought
((
82
OUR SMALL SINS.
to buy her goods at trade price, and who does not
regard the percentage of the middle-man as so much
swindled out of her own pocket. She calculates to a
fraction the worth of the lace and ribbon on her bonnet,
but she does not take into account the expenses of her
milliner's establishment, and her need of earning now
in the bright days of her power enough whereby to
live when the dark hours come, and she is no longer
able to bake her bread by her daily labour. This
grudging however, is only in the case of the "little
milliner," confining to the article of dress what might
be applied to every tradesman dealt with. Given a
name like that of Madame Elise, and the cost is not
calculated. Here that mysterious thing called style,
or name, floats the percentage, and takes it out of the
category of peculation. That makes it distinction;
which is another matter altogether, and a thing that
must be paid for. Wherefore we all pay, willingly, for
the name and favour of our respective Mesdames
Elises, but growl and dissect unflinchingly when the
"little milliner" sends in her humble account. We
went wild a short time ago about the co-operative
stores, but I never heard that we did much good with
them, or that we got our goods for less than their
market value. We will go miles in search of bargains,,
83
G 2
OUR SMALL SINS.
and spend the difference twice over in cab-hire, under
the impression of saving hugely; and one of the most.
persistent applications of our "tables" is the exact
number of pence due to cabby, with the stern resolu-
tion to die at the stake rather than give that extra six-
pence outside the legal fare.
us
Many other little sins are there in full force among
; sins which weaken our influence and destroy our
power-sins which hurt our own selves more than they
hurt our neighbours, and which eat into our nobleness
more than many others of larger dramatic scope and
more deadly social effect.
And among them is one
very patent to certain bold speakers-our impatience
at rebuke, and the kind of Dalai Lama sanctity which
we assume for ourselves. We must be worshipped as
the supreme of creation. Burns' pretty little bit of
"prentice hand" and the
gallant nonsense about the
masterpiece must be taken as gospel truth; we must
be flattered and coaxed and adored; taken care of
and given our own way at the same time; allowed to
compete with men on their own standing, yet treated
with the chivalrous respect due to the protected and
fought for.
We must have no hard work laid upon us,
because we are feeble and delicate, but we must have
the same salaries as those apportioned to the hardest
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OUR SMALL SINS.
workers among men : else we cry out at the injustices
of men, and talk rubbish about the prejudice attached
to women's work; we may neglect our own duties and
blaspheme them, and yet be suffered to snatch the
offices of men; we must not have a hard word said of
us, but we may everywhere argue on the brutality of
men, on their selfishness, their hardness, their dis-
honour, and their cruelty. And all this we call the
rights of women, and flounce and flout when cast in
our one-sided suit. These are bitter truths to say of
ourselves. But it is the truth which makes the bitter-
ness.

85

MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
GREED on all hands that servants are the
greatest plagues in life-that they are idle,
thriftless, untrustworthy, and without more conscience
than so many black-beetles or red-ants; that they
break and ruin more than they are worth, and in all
ways within their range damage one's estate and vex
one's soul; agreed that every conceivable screw is
shaky in the whole fabric of domestic service, and
that we are all at loose ends everywhere-and yet
there is something to be said on the other side. For
all these years the man has painted the lion, and mis-
tresses have groaned over the misdemeanours of their
maids. Suppose we let the lion paint the man in-
stead; suppose we shift our point of view, and look at
domestic service through the kitchen grating and not
from the drawing-room window, judging of the life as
it affects the maid not the mistress.
86
MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
Let us remember that the maid has no representa-
tive in the councils of the drawing-room. Like the
working man in Parliament, she has no accredited
delegate, and only at the best a weak kind of fancy
advocate. She has no medium for the declaration of
her wrongs; no voice, no vote, no power of class
combination save in the isolated kitchen to which she
and maybe another belong. Pressed by hard want to
take service in a family which can never be hers, to
give her life and her life's worth for joys she cannot
share, for sorrows that do not touch her sympathies,
for pleasures she must only look at from a distance,
she is assumed to be just so much human energy
bought and paid for; and her rights, outside the pri-
mary rights of food and drink, clothing and sleeping,
are considered about as obligatory as the rights of the
pots she scrubs or the plate she polishes. Rights? a
servant with rights other than those which the grace of
the mistress allows? rights by nature? rights by con-
<lition? what rubbish! No; domestic service is just
so much moveable slavery—a choice of masters but
a perpetuity of serfdom-a chance of change in the
pattern of the padlock and the fetters; but always
fetters, always the padlock.
Domestic service is a profession like others—a pro-
87
MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
fession for the most part badly learnt and rashly un-
dertaken; but still a speciality of knowledge to be
exchanged for the means of subsistence. No one
goes to service for enthusiastic love of waiting at table,
or of boiling potatoes; nor from philanthropic desire
to help others in their duties; and very few women
would remain in service if they could earn their bread
by leaving it. We see this exemplified in America,
where women have a wider field for their labour than
they have here, and where consequently no free-born
American woman will be a domestic servant, save
under the most tremendous pressure of incapacity to
be anything else. The reason for this reluctance lies,
not so much in the character of the work itself, as in
the low estimation in which the workers are held, in
the unfriendly manner in which they are treated, and
in the inadequacy of the remuneration for any future
provision. The higher prizes of the upper places in
grand houses are rich enough, and the upper servants
of grand people are well treated; but saving these,
and a very few exceptional cases in the middle-classes,
domestic service is by no means a well-paid profession,
and almost invariably a shabbily treated one.
If, on the other hand, the most ignorant farm-girl
thinks herself fit to take a situation, without previous
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MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
training, in any capacity that strikes her dul! fancy, on
the other, anything is considered good enough for the
servants, whether they are capable or incapable, well-
educated or ignorant. They sleep under the slates
and they live below the ground: sometimes they sleep
below the ground, and luxuriate in turn-up bedsteads
among the crickets and the cinders. Often they are
fed sparingly, and seldom generously; and their food
is, as a rule, of a different quality from that of the
family in the parlour-not only in special luxuries,
which would be fair enough, but in the primary matters
of daily consumption. In many poorly-found middle-
class houses, where the wonder is what can be further
pared down, every article of the servants' food is of a
lower quality and more stinted quantity than that of
the family-poor as this is; and the only community
between the half-covered tables is when the kitchen
receives the remains of the dining-room. Bread, but-
ter, tea, sugar, rice, cheese, and many other things,
show the distinction of "master's family" and "ser-
vants;" and there is scarcely a home in England
where the kitchen shares equally with the dining-room.
In most houses too, the servants are still allowanced
according to the old scale, in things which were once
both costly and unnecessary, but which are now cheap
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MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
".
enough to make a wider margin possible with the most.
frugal housekeepers; and which are also food necessa-
ries. But servants have yet very often to "find them-
selves" in coffee, tea, and sugar, as in the days when
these were exotic luxuries by no means necessary in
the midst of the home-brewed beer, the milk, butter-
milk, honey, and preserves supplied to the household
with the large liberality of old-time housekeeping.
But this is one of the many instances of irrational
conservatism to be met with in society, where the form
is preserved long after the conditions for which it was
created have ceased. It is a notorious fact among
servants that their own friends live better in their
dingy little parlours behind the shop, or in their big
bare kitchens, than do they themselves in the houses
of middle-class gentlefolks; and "going to tea at my
aunt's" on Sunday means a small feast far superior to
any treat given by the mistress at home.
In the two great circumstances then of house-life,
namely, food and lodging, the profession of domestic
service does not receive specially great rewards, and
by no means offers inducements for a higher class of
professors than are at present engaged. And what
society is crying out for with lusty lungs at this moment
is, a better race of servants altogether, of more tech-
yo
MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
Society is
long as it
nical capacity and of a higher moral tone.
not likely to get what it is crying for so
treats its servants as a peculiar people not exactly of
the same organization as others, touched by different
feelings, actuated by different motives, as "maids"
rather than women; and destined by nature for a life of
hardship, sometimes positive and always comparative,
sometimes tyrannous and always oppressive.
It seems strange in this day of woman's clamour
for her rights-her redress against the tyranny of men
and the injustice of the law-that the claims of the
maids against the unfair conduct of mistresses do not
come in for their share of attention. If the ground-
work of the one is true, so is the other, and if women
have their griefs as wives, so have they as maids; if
mistresses find housekeeping not always a bed of roses,
servants know what it is to lie on pillows stuffed with
thorns. I know that I am preaching now the most
unpopular doctrine I could possibly advocate; and
that all but a very small section of women would say that
servants are only too well treated-certainly they
would deny that any cause of complaint exists.
the men do exactly the same thing on their side, and
laugh down our complaints of wrongs which do not
touch them, and the righting of which would be so
But
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MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
much of bit and bridle on themselves. Ought we to
wonder at this? Is it not human nature to wince at
our own pinching shoes, but to ignore our neighbours'
corns? do we not all abjure the bit but delight in the
reins?
If the material treatment of servants is not very en-
couraging, the moral treatment usually awarded them
is of a yet more depressing character-taking the class
as one we all want to see raised to a higher tone and
greater capacity. The better the education and the
more noble the nature of the mistress, assuredly the
more generous and considerate she will be to her
servants. Noblesse oblige; self-respect demands that
you respect others; and, as a broad rule-a margin
allowed for individual tempers defiant of class regula-
tions-a duchess will ask a service of her maid with
grace and courtesy, and thank her for it when it is
performed, while a miserable little snob, aping the
gentility she neither feels nor knows, will command hers
with rude impertinence, and hold even the coldest
acknowledgment beneath her dignity to make. The
lower section of the middle-classes for the most part
treat their servants with humiliating rudeness-hu-
miliating to themselves, be it remembered, rather than
to the maids and in some houses, where the master
:
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MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
and mistress have not a single qualification of gentle-
hood, "If you please," "Thank you," "Will you do
so and so for me?" are phrases as little likely to form
part of the mistress's formula to her maid as a Chinese
kowtow or an Assamese reverence.
This does not apply to thorough gentlewomen by
blood and breeding, nor to really good and womanly
women of any station; but it is true of a very large
class of women who pass for ladies according to con
ventional forms of speech, and who would not do
anything outrageously cruel or wicked. They think
moral brutality to their servants neither one nor the
other-simply what is allowed by the difference be-
tween their social conditions, and what is required as
an engine of good home-government. If a younger
and less experienced woman, of sympathetic nature,
and with an idea that justice and humanity in the ab-
stract are finer things than the conventional injustice
and inhumanity received as the rule of right for the
kitchen world—if such a one, I say, begins her house-
keeping on a different plan, and treats her maids as
human beings and not as machines, she has the voice
of her whole circle against her, and is warned, almost
threateningly and certainly unanimously, how her in-
novation will end. "I tried it in the beginning," one
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MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
66
will say, "but I was obliged to leave it off. I found
that if I treated my servants kindly, they only took
advantage of me, and so you will find too." They
are all ungrateful wretches," is the dictum of another.
"However kindly you treat them they will leave you at
any moment for their own advantage." As if that was
such a sin in a state of society where every one has to
fight for himself, and where no favour is shown to the
weak !—as if a mistress would not get rid of her servant.
if she could better herself by the exchange-and as if
too, a servant who treats her mistress with extra
consideration, and does for her more than the stipulated.
amount of service, is ever considered more than one
who just scrapes the edges of her duty, and does no
more than she covenanted for. But mistresses, of all
people, have learnt by heart that old copy-book rule,
“circumstances alter cases;" and they apply it with a
will.
There are two things held to be incompatible with
domestic service in England-personal liberty after
work-hours, and pleasure, save under jealously guarded
conditions. A servant's life is monotonous and re-
stricted. It is considered quite enough recreation for
her if, after a hard day's work, she can "clean herself"
by the evening, and sit down quietly to needle-work in
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MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
the kitchen. Perhaps there are two maids, perhaps.
only one maid, to enjoy this inspiriting occupation:
anyhow it is the maximum allowed, and eminently the
right thing for servants. Even reading, save on Sun-
days, is regarded with disfavour by a great many mis-
tresses sceptical as to the value of the traditional
schoolmaster below the dining-room floor; writing, if
seen, is sure to be discouraged—hence in most houses
the servants' letters are always more or less "
on the
sly," and the daily post is a daily stratagem; laughter,
if heard, is rebuked; romping, though the maids are
perhaps mere girls yet to whom a romp is intense en-
joyment, is an offence even beyond that of laughter;
visitors are forbidden; followers are the sons of Belial
and to be steadily refused admission; and to “go
out" is of a certainty to go straightway to destruction.
Only the parlour itself knows how much it dislikes
and resents the "going out" of the kitchen. All these
enjoyments then are anathema maranatha; but the
stitching, which the mistress refuses for her own part,
which she puts out at great cost to her husband rather
than do, or which she turns into an amusement by
means of a toy-machine, she imposes on her maids as
the only recreation they need after they have laid aside.
the rolling-pin and the scrubbing-brush. It has been
95
MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
found impossible to maintain such a system of life
among men. In the army and navy, where discipline
and arduous labour are the very pith and marrow of
the service, the men must have both pleasure and per-
sonal liberty when their immediate tasks are done;
and commanders find that they get more work out of
them, and that the work is more cheerfully and there-
fore more satisfactorily done, the more they recognise
their right to themselves when the demands of the ser-
vice have been fulfilled. But women are not broad
enough for such recognition. They know nothing of
physiological truths or of mental necessities; and, as
I said before, they are too tyrannical to allow that ser-
vants have rights where they are mistresses.
Certainly, servants claim their alternate "Sundays
out" as part of the house-law now; and moreover
bargain for periodic holidays, the enjoyment of which,
however, is tremendously neutralized by the hour
usually fixed for the return home. To be in by half-
past nine or ten effectually puts a stop to all such
amusements as the theatre, &c. And yet, granting a
theatre at all, and that respectable and well-conditioned
folks patronize it, what special harm is there in a ser-
vant's spending her holiday evening with her friends
at the Haymarket or the Lyceum? She sees only
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MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
what her mistress and the young ladies have seen; and
is Columbine in her spangled skirts more immoral
from the gallery than she is from the stalls? She or
her fellow-servant sits up often enough for master and
mistress when they go out; would it be too much to
ask that every now and then she might be sat up for
half an hour or so beyond the usual time of going to
bed and shutting up the house, and so be allowed to
join in the pleasures which cost, say an hour less of
sleep, but which cost nothing more subversive of good
morals? "Le plaisir fait le cœur si bon !" says Gavarni,
in one of his sketches of Parisian life. But we in
England, and more especially we women in England,
have not learnt this truth, and domestic service will be
the last place where it will be admitted. How much
it is needed and desired the "Sunday out" bears wit-
ness, when a servant will brave any weather, ruin her
best clothes, and run the risk of an illness, rather than
forego her one evening of liberty and society. Nothing
short of absolute physical disablement will keep a
servant indoors on her Sunday out. But the mistress:
learns no lesson by this. She only grumbles at girls
for being so giddy and gad-about now-a-days, and
wonders why they cannot stay quietly at home and
read the good books which she provides for the kitchen
97
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MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
Sunday evening occupation-so much better for them
than all this going out at night-going no one knows
where, and doing no one knows what! In short, every
manifestation of the social instinct is a fault with ser-
vants; and visitors, outings, and followers are equally
condemned. Yet the mistress upstairs spends half her
life in other people's houses, counting visiting as one
of her primary social duties; and the young ladies flirt
with all comers, and think life without a tame rabbit
or two on hand the dreariest thing imaginable.
Let us
This follower question is a very hard one.
look at it for the servant and not as it seems to
the mistress, who, perhaps not unnaturally, dislikes a
strange man on the premises, and holds herself rc-
sponsible for the good conduct and moral maintenance
of the kitchen. The wages of a middle-class servant
are not sufficiently good to allow of an effective reserve
fund. She must dress well, and all the better since
the national tendency has gone to such a costly rest-
lessness of fashion. There are the expenses of her
holidays to be met; and what can be saved after these
from the fourteen or sixteen pounds a year which re-
present good average middle-class wages? At most a
pound or two, which goes at the first change of situa-
tion, or for the illness of the old folk at home, or for
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MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
the home journey which comes once in every two
years or so, or in presents to her friends. What then
is to become of her if she does not marry? What has
the future in store for her? She remembers that old
phrase, "service is no inheritance ;" and remembering
it for her own sad guidance, can we wonder if she
wishes to secure a home and a protector while she
may? Is there anything so very unnatural in a woman
wishing to be kept, to be worked for, rather than go
on working and battling for herself?-in her wishing
to be free and her own mistress, rather than in service
to another? Again: servants are mostly young women
in the very prime of life, with all their instincts and
passions full upon them. They are women like their
mistresses, and desire a home of their own, a good
husband to support them, to love them and whom
they can love, and little children to call them mother,
just as Miss Julia and Miss Fanny desire the same
things in their own sphere. But this likeness—this
identity of nature-is ignored altogether; and ladies
quote it as a personal grievance when a good servant
has left them to be married, or that any servant should
wish to be married at all.
baker's man!" Well! and
"That flirting girl and the
Miss Julia and the young
dragoon upstairs? Miss Fanny and the favourite
99
H 2
MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
curate spooning at croquet on the lawn? Is it not all
human nature of the same pattern, a little varied in
fineness of texture and whiteness of thread, but all
wrought according to the one central design? Mis-
tresses think not-and that service, which is held by
the slender root of an hour's ill-temper or a month's
warning, is supposed to be sufficiently strong-or
rather it is thought that it ought to be sufficiently
strong to destroy all natural aspirations of woman-
hood, and to create a class of voluntary celibates for
the convenience of wives and mothers.
What is weakness in a mistress is wickedness in a
servant-the captain's choleric word and the soldier's
flat blasphemy, in feminine form. The love of dress,
the example of which is set in the drawing-room-
sloth, or even occasional over-sleeping, not uncommon
in lethargic temperaments, when the mistress rises at
ten and breakfasts at noon-the feminine failings of
temper which are accepted as belonging to the nervous
organization of the sex in the drawing-room, but which
are hotly resented when seen in the kitchen, as if
human nature changes according to the floor on which
it dwells-none of these infirmities of humanity are at
any time made kindly allowance for in the kitchen,
where life is always expected to be at its best. In fact,
100
MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
servants are expected to be something very near per-
fection, and to be never caught tripping. With a
narrower class of education, grosser habits of life, and
a lower range of thought, we look for the nobleness of
saints and heroines, and are impatient of the fracture
of a single link in the chain of virtue. Read the list
of questions put by one lady to another when sending
for the character of the daughter of a day-labourer-a
hind a jobbing carpenter-or a Spitalfields weaver.
Good temper, cleanliness, early rising, sobriety, chas-
tity, industry, truthfulness, thorough knowledge of her
work yet not objecting to be interfered with; willing-
ness to do more than she is paid for, under the com-
prehensive head of an obliging disposition; meekness,
so that she will never give back an impatient answer
to an angry mistress, nor even attempt to defend her-
self against an unjust charge; these are the modest
requirements for a fallible human being at sixteen
pounds the year. And a mistress, with perhaps half
these qualities missing in her own nature, thinks her-
self "tried" if her maid fails in one. But above all,
there must be meekness of temper, and patience under
any amount of contumely or wrongful accusation.
How much, and how unjustly, soever the mistress may
scold, there must be no reply, still less a retort. "I
ΙΟΙ
MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
never allow an answer," ladies often say, with an air of
profound right and reason; and mistresses themselves
might take a lesson from the quiet dignity of patience
demanded from the kitchen wench among the cinders,
who can neither read nor write, and who has been
brought up in the fields or the back-slums.
But
And how some women do scold! Only women
could rate women as certain mistresses rate their
servants. Men would neither bear nor attempt any-
thing of the same amount. The most intemperate
martinet would give a volley of abuse, seasoned with a
full-flavoured oath or two, and then have done.
some women are at it all day long, with a persistency
of ill-temper and an activity of perception simply
amazing. Not a mistake is left unnoticed; not the
most venial little slip of duty is passed by in generous
silence; an accident is a moral crime-heaven and
earth! the human hearts that have been anguished for
the breakage of glass and china, because hands will
get benumbed with cold, or slippery with soap and
water! The servant alone of all the household must
be absolutely without fault or flaw; and when she fails
by reason of the weakness of the flesh, must bear with
rebuke for ignorance, for frailty, for misfortune, more-
severe than those bestowed by gentle hearts on sin.
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MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
I do not by any means advocate that loose indif-
ferentism of management which lets things go right or
wrong as they choose of themselves; which has no
eyes for dirt, no instinct of order, no love of method,
no power of arrangement; but I do say that most
women make too much fuss over little things, and that
almost all are too heavy-handed with their maids.
You hear them boast of themselves, and give advice
to their juniors, "never to overlook a fault—it keeps
them up to the mark;" but I have scarcely ever heard
one who advocated a corresponding "never to over-
look a merit ;" and I have never known one who has
praised for good as warmly as she has blamed for evil.
They seem to take the good as of course—as some-
thing paid for at the month's end; but the evil, being
only human and not commercial, is eliminated from
their calculations, and resented when it appears. If
only those mistresses who were without sin them-
selves would cast stones, our unhappy servants would
suffer less than at present from the moral lapidation
they are called on to undergo so patiently.
But
perhaps this is asking too much of the mistresses; for
is not their flesh also frail ?
There is one difficulty in the management of small
households not met with in large communities, and
103
MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
that is the difference between organized will and in-
dividual command; which too often makes just the
difference between discipline and tyranny. Large
communities are under laws which affect all alike, and
which afford but small scope for individual digression,
for or against; but in the narrow rule of an irre-
sponsible home any amount of tyranny not illegal
can be indulged in without restraint. And public
opinion does not go with the oppressed, save when
oppression becomes such an amount of cruelty as
brings the offender within the cognizance of the law.
On the contrary, those who have hitherto spoken out
on this subject, go in for a closer strain of service, for
a nearer recurrence to bygone sumptuary laws (in the
matters of artificial flowers, kid gloves, crinolines, silk
gowns, and the like, the common-sense basis of which
is spoilt by the class pride that builds up the negative
series), for class distinctions more clearly defined, and
for even less allowance of personal liberty after the
house-work is done. A certain lady wrote some letters
to the newspapers on this subject in the early part of
last year, and her letters made a little noise at the
time. They were all couched in the same strain, that
of servants being a peculiar people, and to be dealt
with by laws as peculiar as themselves. But at the
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MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
same time, those mistresses who would bring into our
households the spirit, if not the substance, of serfdom,
ask for higher service, and a nobler race of workers.
As society has to go through the phase of individual
rights into which it has lately entered, as we must see
to the end of the personal liberty which we have in-
augurated and are all trying to push forward, surely it
would be only ordinary wisdom if mistresses would
recognise the new spirit, and try to secure better ser-
vants by better treatment. For there is nothing
in domestic service that should be degrading to
women of intelligence and independent spirit, any
more than the work or subordination of the army or
navy is degrading to high-spirited men. It is only the
estimation in which the workers are held that degrades
work; only the treatment they receive that lowers the
moral character of any section of society; and ladies
have it in their power to elevate servants and domestic
service together by respecting both. Influence goes.
from the higher to the lower; it does not ascend ; and
modern complaints of bad servants have their rise in
the folly, the injustice, the tyranny, and the haughti-
ness of bad mistresses. When these last are re-
formed, we shall have no more of the first; but not
till then.
105
MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
There is one subject which I wish to touch on, and
which I know must be touched on very carefully-
very delicately; and this is the treatment of servants.
when they get into "trouble." Without wishing to
lower the standard of female morality in the least
degree, I frankly confess I think a servant can be guilty
of a worse crime than the "trouble" to which I am.
alluding; and given honesty and industry-given, in.
fact, certain qualities which render the girl valuable as
a servant and loveable as a woman-I, for one, would
overlook this fault, and help her through her difficulty
to the best of my ability. And I would not discard
her. I would not, for this one fault, send her out
perhaps to death-perhaps to something worse-to the
streets and life-long ruin. Ah! how many a good,
true-hearted girl might have been saved if her mistress.
had been her friend-if the mother's place had given
the mother's heart, and the cloak of womanly charity
had been thrown round the poor erring daughter. I
know that many pious women will hold up their hands.
in horror at this doctrine, and that I shall be thought
no better than the sinners myself; but I think it is no
bad thing to do as Christ did eighteen hundred years.
ago, and make our pitiful forgiveness depend, as did
His mercy, on the simple need of human frailty for
гоб
MISTRESSES AND MAIDS.
compassion.
Of course I know that it would never
do for mistresses to treat this offence lightly, or to let
their servants feel that they might sin with impunity;
but, having sinned, the mistress has then before her
either to give the poor girl a chance of salvation by
her protection, or to abandon her to more than pro-
bable perdition. And I do say most carnestly that
the plain Christian duty seems to me to be that of
protection; and that the virtue which sends our poor
Hagars into the wilderness to perish is a cruel fetish.
and no god-a Christian crime and no virtue. It is.
in vain that we subscribe to Penitentiaries, and Homes,
and Refuges for "soiled doves," when we ourselves,
by our hardness, help to swell the ranks from our own
households. The first fatal step can be recovered in
almost all paths and with almost all walkers; but once
over the edge of the abyss, and who shall say there
can be salvation then? And what an awful thing it is
to think that by our own inhuman virtue we have
thrust a sister's soul down into perdition, and destroyed
what might have been a worthy and a redeemed life!
Mercy is not laxity; charity is not indifference to
good; and women are not called upon to persecute
or to abandon those to whom God Himself has offered
forgiveness.
107

TACT AND TEMPER.
HERE is no country and no age in which we
women have not been accused of craft, false-
hood, and treachery, extra to the craft, falsehood, and
treachery of ordinary humanity. Delilahs who paralyse
men's strength, then give them up shorn and bound
into the hands of the Philistines; Viviennes who coax
from them the secrets which are their power, then turn
their knowledge against them for destruction; Lucre-
zia Borgias, betraying with a smile, poisoning with a
kiss; Brinvilliers', making deadly experiments on the
wretches feigned to be nursed with such seraphic self-
devotion-who does not know the roll-call of deceitful
woman? Even Judith, self-consecrated to patriotic
vengeance, could find no better means than seducing
to her love the man she designed to slay; while Jael,
granting the security of her tent to the fugitive, then
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TACT AND TEMPER.
murdering him at the most sacred moment of his help-
lessness, has passed into a proverb when one wishes
to express the utmost treachery possible to human
nature. And the charge is true to a certain extent.
We may as well confess it frankly-we women are not,
as a race, truthful or straightforward.
Melancholy as this fact is, it is not to be wondered
at, all things considered; for it is the old story, told
wherever we find tyranny on the one side and slavery
on the other; wherever there is harshness to engender
fear and fear to bring forth untruth in its turn. And
women, being slaves in a way, have learnt the slave's
vice of deception; and because of the oppression
under which they have lived, have turned for safety to
deceit and for vengeance to treachery. It is a
"round of wrong" in which every one suffers alike.
But there is another fact, as melancholy and even
more surprising than our own generic untruth, and this
is, that some men do not object to a certain amount
and manner of deception in us. Like courage, or like
justice, truth with them comes into the category of the
masculine virtues not to be looked for from women,
and not including moral humiliation when wanting. I
say some, not all; for to some, untruth in women is
as disgraceful as it would be in men; but there is a
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TACT AND TEMPER.
large section an essentially manly, high-handed,
upper-class section-who regard themselves as apart
from and infinitely superior to women, to whom les
fourberies des femmes seem quite the right thing to ex-
pect, and natural enough. Laughable as well as
natural perhaps ; perhaps contemptible; perhaps only
amusing; but no more reprehensible, because so
entirely of the ordained order of things, than tricks in
a monkey or passion in a child.
Indeed, men of this stamp, when holding certain
conventional notions of the drawing-room divinity of
women, contend that they ought not to tell the truth
at all times; that it is an indelicacy when they are too
candid; and that nature gave them their faculty of con-
· cealment as a useful quality, imperatively necessary for
the preservation of their womanliness. If we place our-
selves on their platform we can see how they have arrived
at their sophistry. All the virtues of women being of the
feeble and refined kind-their grace being just in pro-
portion to their sensitiveness, and their moral value in
inverse ratio to their strength-it follows naturally that
concealment must come in as part of the moral law
under which they specially live; and we all know that
the line between concealment and deception is almost
imperceptible, and that the one passes into the other
IIO
TACT AND TEMPER.
in a way which even the most conscientious cannot
prevent.
But this want of truth is just one of the gravest
faults that women have, and one of the things by
which they are kept in their lower position. Still,
while candour is considered unfeminine by certain
men, it is rather hard for us to be truthful; for in
spite of all the quarrelling and discontent between the
sexes, and in spite of all the mistakes that women
make, and the wrong roads they will rush down, they
do desire the love of men, and with their love their
respect. I know that the stronger we are, the more
comparative weight we give to their respect as balanced
against their love only; but to the weakest of us it is
their love and their respect.
The fact is, there is very little truth-telling between
men and women on either side. Men conceal from
: women the realities of their lives as passed out of the
house, on the plea that they are but coarse animals at
the best, and that they do things which the purer
creatures had better not know anything about; and
women conceal the truth of theirs from men for fear
lest they should be interfered with, denied, or for-
bidden. Hence comes the theory that women must
be kept in the dark because they are not strong
.*
III
TACT AND TEMPER.
enough to bear the light; and that men must be
"managed," so that they shall not detect the poor
little farthing rushlights which women stick up over
their dressing-tables, and by the uncertain shimmer of
which they walk. When women want to have their
own way, the popular doctrine among them is that
they must manoeuvre for it. They must neither take
it boldly nor openly ask leave. Their husbands or
fathers must be led to acquiescence by all manner of
circuitous routes, and treated as the sick are treated
by the sane, as children are treated by adults—that is,
humoured, hoodwinked, managed, and induced to do
right by diplomacy, not by reason nor by justice.
Now, to my mind, this method of managing men by
diplomatic wiles is about the most fatal that women
can adopt. And yet we are almost invariably told
that indirect influence is the best; that we are strongest
when we make ourselves weakest; that the less we
take the more will be given to us-and the less we
assert the more we shall gain. And this seems to me
to be a cowardly, crafty, sinuous method of proce
dure, and creeping up to a point while pretending
to abandon a piece of moral baseness as injurious to
ourselves, who are the actors of the falsehood, as it is
substantially insulting to the men who are deceived.
II 2
TACT AND TEMPER.
Take it how we will we can make no good of it; and
the wonder is that even fine-natured women should
advocate such a doubtful doctrine as warmly as they
do. Yet it is advocated by all sorts and conditions of
women, save the strong and independent; by those
who set themselves out as womanly women par excel-
lence-that is, who openly maintain that submission is
the feminine badge to be worn from the cradle to the
grave, but who, being human, cannot forego all exer-
cise of individuality, and so exercise it in an under-
hand manner; and by those who, thinking themselves.
morally superior if physically inferior to men, hold
themselves as consecrated to rule by a crooked sceptre,
seeing that the sense of society is against a straight
one.
"What is the use of showing that I have set my
heart on such and such a thing? If I pretend the
contrary, I shall probably get what I want-men are
so contradictious; or if I pretend indifference, I shall
awaken no suspicion, and so can lead my master
gently."
This is the kind of secret reasoning common among
a certain class of women-those who despise men,
and make their account out of their contempt.
"Wait; don't say any more just now, but speak of
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TACT AND TEMPER.
it again in a day or two; do not let it drop, and you
will get your own way in time; but you must go to
work very gently, and never press your point, nor
state it warmly. It is all to be done by management.
You must manage your husband if you want to live
well with him."
;
This is what wary mothers urge on timid daughters
when married to hard-mouthed men not to be driven
easily, and whom they are too cowardly to treat with
honesty and independence. Reculer pour mieux sauter.
Grimalkin's pretence of sleep before the mouse's hole
"sly Reynard" in his tricks; traps and springes set
for unwary game; I confess the stock types and
phrases so often used to designate this line of action.
in women, do not seem to me of the most honourable
or inviting kind. On the contrary, this indirect mode
of management ought to be abhorred of every honest
woman, even though its place was taken by open con-
tention. For, bad as strife is, it is not so bad as
deception.
But, though all slavery and crookedness of manage-
ment ought to be abhorred and set aside, yet com-
plaisance and tact are the two most valuable working
qualities in a home, and to be just as warmly culti
wated. There is a world of difference between tact
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TACT AND TEMPER.
and this sinuous management; a world as large as that
between temper and individuality selfishness and
freedom. A woman ought to exercise tact, not because
she is too great a coward to say what she means or
show what she wants, nor yet because she thinks men
too selfish or too brutish to be able to hear reason, but
because it is more noble to observe the signs and
signals of another's mind than to attend only to one's
own desires; because tenderness with courage and
softness with truth make the best combination to be
found in humanity; because voluntary self-denial is
better than self-assertion, and any one who can give
up his or her own will for love and in the grandeur of
strength (not for cowardice and in the pitiful bondage
of slavery), has learnt one of the greatest lessons that
humanity can learn. But the tact that a woman ought
to have is the tact proper to humanity at large, not
special to sex; the expression of sympathetic observa-
tion and of unselfish surrender, not the result of weak-
ness, of cowardice, or of crafty calculation. What I
want to combat with all my strength, is the doctrine
that women, quâ women, ought to forbear all outward
exercise of individuality, and renounce the common
birthright of freedom as something not meant for them
to share. The consequence of which is that, because
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TACT AND TEMPER.
the reality of Griseldadom would be impossible in its
fullest extent—at least in the West, where women, in
spite of Attila," are allowed to have souls-they
make up for the false pretence of unqualified submis-
sion by "management," and so attain their ends after
the fashion of snakes rather than of upright, honest
Christians. A false pretence is the "false balance"
translated into active life; and the one is as much
"an abomination" as the other.
Now, because we are not to "manage" like snakes
or cats or foxes, this does not mean that we are to
flounce and flout and rage furiously like heathens, in
all the turmoil of temper and disregard of our "pro-
prietors" and their wishes. Yet unfortunately, when
we do not manage by craft we do not often attempt
the alternative of tact, but take to temper and bullying
as our form of honesty. Few women have both tact
and truth; and indeed, this special bit of moral
mosaic is just the most difficult piece of carpentry in
the whole of the human workshop. If we have the
sensitive temperament which induces tact, we let our-
selves slide and quiver into falsehood by fear and
dislike to wound; if we are courageous, and can stand
'four-square" on our own feet, we blare out into de-
This is because we are weak and spread out
66
fiance.
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TACT AND TEMPER.
into extremes on slight provocation.
How else could
For it is mere
men have subjected us so long?
moonshine to say that we have been kept under by
superior physical force. We have been kept under by
superior mental force; and if we had been as strong
as lionesses we should have been subjected all the
same. And this it is which makes us crafty; craft
being the cleverness of weakness, and the weapon of
self-defence assumed by cowardice and feebleness.
And yet, whatever that one high-handed section
spoken of before may say-the men who so loftily
despise women even while they love them, and who
hold them as nothing better than pretty playthings,
and of so little moral account that it really does not
signify whether they are truthful or untruthful-what-
ever they may say, the better kind of men do prize
and admire straightforwardness in women when they
meet with it. Many a woman has saved herself from
the worst consequences of a fault by her courage (not
cynicism) in avowing it. That painful, wicked, and
yet loveable story of Manon Lescaut, owes all its
charm to the candour of the little puss whose thousand
sins were condoned by this one virtue; and who,
though she never kept herself straight, never conde-
scended to humbug. And men, in speaking of the
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TACT AND TEMPER.
Manon Lescauts they know, will often speak of their
frankness-so unusual in their experience of women—
as something that makes them almost respectable.
They are so accustomed to feints and denials in vir-
tuous drawing-room women, that the straightforward
candour of the women who are not of the virtuous or
drawing-room class strikes them as at once wonderful
and admirable—as a quality which atones for many
.defects. The noble side of this frankness is the
courage which is true to itself, and fears nothing so
much as baseness; the ignoble, is the cynical defiance
of opinion which shrinks from no confession of fault
because it has no perception of virtue.
There are
seamy sides to the velvet of every virtue, but we are
not bound to turn the raw edges outward.
Of course, there are tyrannical monsters who object
to every expression of individuality in women-men
who hold themselves consecrated sole lords of their
respective spheres, and who believe in the divine divi-
sion of the human family into men as masters and
women as slaves, just as the Southern clergymen
believed in the divine ordination of slavery as applied
to the "children of Canaan." But fortunately for the
progress of humanity, the number of its fetish wor-
shippers is becoming smaller every day, and questions
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TACT AND TEMPER.
are discussed now on their own merits and not by the
false light of superstition; and the momentous question
agitating all minds at the present time-whether
women ought to be freer than they have been, or as
much fettered as they are-stands on the one ground
only of the general good of society, and whether the
world at large would fare better or worse for the
loosening of their bonds. It is not a question for
shriekings or hysterics; it is to be decided by women
themselves, and by their own acted evidence of fitness
for freedom. In all our pleadings and representations,
we ought never to forget this one central point on
which the whole matter hinges.
Turning back to the tyrants who will not allow any
expression of individuality in their women-is it only
men who are thus one-sided and unjust? and only
men with women? In all our society how many are
there upon whom we can count for the power of re-
cognising the good qualities of those who oppose
them, or of granting freedom to those under their
control? Do women themselves? Do they allow a
servant to answer them, or a child to demand a reason?
They have over servants and children the same sense
of superiority which, right or wrong, men have over
them, and they deal with their inferiors as men deal
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TACT AND TEMPER.
with them. Yet they are foolish enough to think that,
because they are women, human nature (in men) is to
be changed for their profit, and that what they them-
selves could not do to their belongings, men are to be
great enough to do to them. Taken in one way, this
idea holds a flattering if fallacious compliment to men ;.
but I am afraid more fallacious than even flattering ;-
at least under the present dispensation, and until the
time arrives when the evil principle shall be finally
abolished, and men and women be both perfect
alike.
Though men may not like opposition in their wives,
and though a decided “I will,” and a firm "I wont,"
may bring about a domestic tempest not easily allayed,
yet in emergencies they will trust the woman who has
dared them with the truth fully spoken. The husbands
of slippery wives are never easy because they never
feel safe. They know that they are deceived, but
they cannot tell how, when, or where; they cannot
put their fingers on the exact spot, and yet they are
conscious of what they are unable to prove. Things
go in the air, and consciousness can be touched though
the senses reveal nothing. Men feel that they are
managed even though they do not see the mode. The
thread may be of the softest silk, and the hook of the
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TACT AND TEMPER.
finest steel; but, for all that, Leviathan shakes his
huge head and wonders what it is that tickles his big
lips, and why he feels impelled to go to the right when
he thought he wanted to go to the left, and by what
queer magic it has come about that he finds himself in
Paris when he has all along determined on Margate.
He peers about and sniffs vigorously, but the little
hook in his nostrils, and the soft silken thread that
runs through the catch, remain undiscovered; and
when his wife lays her hand caressingly on his neck—
when, like Titania with her gentle joy she strokes his
hairy cheeks, and feeds him with dewberries and
apricots-he little knows that the caress masks the
strain, and that all the while she is amusing him with
her love, the thread is round her dainty fingers, and
the hook cautiously twitched in the direction in which
his heavy steps are to follow. And yet he is uneasy in
his dumb, blind, instinctive way; uneasy, soothed,
and flattered all at once. Poor Leviathan ! If his
wife has good luck, she will lead him to the end, and
he will go down to the grave trumpeting forth to the
world his own infallibility and his absolute mastership,
but in his secret heart conscious that he is but a blind
beast consummately managed. No one knows how to
depict this kind of thing so well as Gavarni. Les
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TACT AND TEMPER.
fourberies des femmes is a text-book on the subtlety of
women without its equal in the world.
But a truthful woman, if even a termagant, creates
none of this dumb uneasiness; and though her hus-
band may absolutely dislike her, and writhe in his
bondage of wedlock like a galley-slave writhing under
his chain and bullet, though he wishes a dozen times
in the week that he could tear up his marriage lines
on the floor of the Divorce Court, yet he respects his
shrewish lady, and on occasions can be brought to
acknowledge it. He knows the worst of her; which
is more than Leviathan can say of his Vivienne. He
knows that she has no lover round the corner-no
love-letters at the pastrycook's-no debts in the back-
ground-no manoeuvring anywhere. Cantankerous,
ill-tempered, dogmatic as she may be, she is true:
and that assurance weighs down all the rest when the
balance is loaded with the graver matters of life. For
the lighter things of daily existence, a woman of bad.
temper is simply unbearable; and I am sorry enough
to confess it, that we Englishwomen are very bad-
tempered. Mrs. Naggleton is no fiction. Chapter
and verse could be "capped" by home sayings and
doings in many and many an English household; for
no one can shut his eyes to the fact that if women are
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harshly handled by men, men are severely exercised
by women; and that the spirit of interference, of
which I have spoken before, breaks out in the weaker
sex quite as potently as in the stronger. All women
who think much of themselves are especially apt for
outbursts of temper; and if you stand in a fête or a
soirée near a quick-eyed, fiery, well-got-up little lady,
with a meek kind of man in attendance, you will
almost invariably hear her begin to rate him for going
away too soon, or for not going away soon enough, for
lingering at supper, or for not bringing her shawl, or
for some misdemeanour of the like nature, which the
much-enduring husband has to bear as he best can,
with a feint that he rather likes it than not if he sees
that they are overheard.
This kind of thing is very embarrassing to men.
We "have at them" with a rapier, and they must de-
fend themselves with a foil. They cannot beat us;
they must not bear us down in public with a loud
voice against nagging words; and so they have to
endure what they cannot avoid, and be rated for the
amusement of the smiling bystanders. I have often
heard this questionable sort of byplay go on in public;
and I confess I have generally wondered at the
patience of the man under affliction. Perhaps he in-
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demnified himself when he and his cherished spouse
were safe at home and alone. One never knows the
actualities that lie behind appearances. The martyr
in public may, for all we can tell, be the tyrant at
home, and our meek-looking man may develope claws
by the domestic hearth which he is careful to hide
within velvet sheaths only when abroad.
sabe?
Quien
In nothing do women show more temper than about
their religious faith. The latitudinarian husband of a
pious wife of any denomination has no light time of
it. Church is the place of combat, rather than of
Christian unity; and the Bible is the battle-ground of
anger, bitterness, and uncharity, rather than the book
of love out of which all can read in harmony, though
one does find most comfort in one chapter, and
another his best spiritual sustenance in another. The
latitudinarian husband has taken to his heart the
broad principle of universal charity, and the belief
that all men, sects, and reverses are pretty nearly equal
in the sight of God; the pious wife is of the stiffest
version of the Elect, or she has gone into the narrow
fold of a divisional denomination within the Church
itself. To her the Universal Father is the partial
parent who raises some of His children to His right
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hand, and banishes others far down below the salt,
and out in the cold; and she is exultantly glad that
she is of the former, while as sorrowfully angry that
her husband is of the latter. It is all in good faith
doubtless, and with the best intentions in the world,
that she makes his life a burden to him, by way of
converting him from evil into good. Religion, as she
practises it, is the weapon of chastisement for his
daily sins, and she uses it unsparingly. Souls must be
dragooned when obdurate and dark; and she is thank-
ful for the spiritual power which enables her to dragoon
the soul of her graceless husband. She does not
spare him, be very sure. If she is of the High
Church party, she covers her walls with illuminated
texts in Old English very hard to read, and crowds
his table with High Church pamphlets, queerly illus-
trated. She is hard at work for her priest when he is
calling for shirt-buttons and decent clothing; and she
sits with a condemnatory air, as one consorting per-
force with sinners, mortifying herself on fish in fasting
times, while he drinks jollily of beer and feeds gene-
rously on beef. If she is of the Low Church party,
she is always at prayer-meetings, or Bible classes, or
Dorcas gatherings, when she is wanted among her
neglected lares at home; and as she reads the family
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TACT AND TEMPER.
prayers night and morning-she would not allow her
unbelieving husband to perform this sacred office if
she had to go to Sir James Wilde in consequence !—
she throws in a spiteful emphasis here and there to let
her unconverted spouse be well assured for whom she
is specially entreating the Divine Grace, that he may
be saved in time from the evil of his ways and brought.
into the light with herself. The children know quite
well what she means; so do the servants; so does the
marital "brand" himself; but she would think herself
persecuted for righteousness' sake, and hindered from
the precious privilege of bearing testimony, if her
husband objected to her peculiar method of making
family prayer profitable to the household, and desired.
her for the future to let him lose his own soul in the
way he chose for himself.
About the children too, women often show an im-
mense amount of temper which a little judicious con-
sideration would prevent. When the father comes
home and finds Georgie in disgrace, and Janey in
tears, of course the ideal Rhadamanthine thing to do
is to lay the coping stone to the boy's wall of isolation,
and to add a fresh supply to Janey's bitter fountain.
But not being Rhadamanthine, only weak and human
and paternal, the sinful man ignores the lines of dis-
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TACT AND TEMPER.
cipline marked out, and takes Georgie and Janey to
his arms with quite impartial caresses and a cheery
well-favoured comfort. And this is just what the wife
and mother cannot and will not bear. She does not
remember how seldom the father sees his little ones;
and she does not reflect that it must be very painful
for him to find his short hour of nursery enjoyment
spoiled and curtailed for the sake of some childish
fault, at the worst so venial, so unimportant, so trivial!
All she knows or thinks of is her own world, her own
little difficulties, and the troubles that beset and
hamper her home-life. She cannot throw herself into
her husband's place, and see how minute to him, en-
gaged in the real warfare of life, must seem all these
pinpricks which hurt her as much as if they were sabre-
cuts. So she snatches away the offending child, says,
"No, papa, Georgie has been a bad boy, and must
not have his toy to-night. Do you know what he did,
papa
? he would have his ball in the nursery, and so
he flung it at last through the window and broke it—
such a naughty boy!"—or, grimly, "Janey has been a
naughty girl to-day, papa-please do not kiss her; she
got into a passion with Georgie and actually beat him ;
she must not be loved to-night." And when Georgie
howls and Janey sobs, she does not see that poor
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TACT AND TEMPER.
papa, who has been looking forward to this pleasant
little moment of children and home, and the half-
hour's evening romp, and the long good-night kisses,
is more punished than they; and that if he wishes she
would do the discipline and punishment out of sight,
he is not wishing anything so monstrous.
If he is a
jovial, easy-going kind of papa, he breaks bounds and
ignores misdeeds; and then he too comes in for a
share of the spiritual discipline never wanting, and
learns by experience a thousand times repeated, the
full weight of womanly displeasure. He is put into
the black books together with the little ones, and may
think himself lucky if he escapes without a storm of
anger or of hysterics, according as his wife is prone to
fire or water.
Now the tact of which I spoke before would have
obviated all this, as indeed it would obviate far more
than this in the way of home unpleasantness. Men
who are men and not muffs, do not want to be wor-
ried with the small house-details and house-miseries.
They have their own special annoyances in business,
and they want their home to be their place of rest and
love and soothing. They do not bring up to Bays-
water or St. John's Wood echoes of the discords
which have resounded through the city office, neither
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TACT AND TEMPER.
do they want the echoes of those which have troubled
the atmosphere in the suburbs. They think, not un-
reasonably, that part of the final cause of a wife is her
ability to undertake the management of the house;
and that, as life is but an imperfect thing at the best,
and serpents abound in all flower-pots, she must un-
dertake with that management much that is difficult
and more that is painful. This is her share in the
great division of family work, and the burden for
which her shoulders are made. But women are so
weak they cannot keep their crosses to themselves,
but must trouble their husbands with miseries they
ought to bear unassisted. And when told that those
things are in their province, and do not touch the
man's at all, and that they ought to hide them out of
sight and do the best they can with them, then they
pout and sulk, and do not ask for advice or counsel
in matters wherein the joint interest is concerned, and
where the man's voice should be heard. This does
not apply to good-tempered women, nor to women of
real tact; but how few these are! and how vastly
happier than now the married home would be if women
were thus good-tempered and with this available tact!
However, as there is always a worse thing to be found,
the craft and subtlety of women, with which we began,
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TACT AND TEMPER.
are worse things than temper and want of tact; and if
we cannot have perfect women yet awhile, let us takę
the honest termagant who shows all her seams, and
parades the very worst of herself, rather than silken,
sinuous, dishonest Vivienne, as slippery as a snake and
as crafty as a fox, whom no bonds of truth can bind,
and no ties of duty restrain.

130

!
MARTHAS AND MARYS.
T has always seemed to me that Martha has
been somewhat put upon by posterity, and
that the poor soul has been unjustly judged, all things
considered. Being one of those who are personally
useful only, not aesthetically beautiful in any way, and
perhaps a little aggressive-certainly unpleasant-in
the exercise of her virtues, there is nothing in her to
excite our admiration or to fire our fancy; and much
to make us instinctively regard her as something
meaner in soul than the mere surface-lines of the story
express. Doubtless though, she was sorely tried in
her home-life. The heavy end of the stick fell on her
without much aid from the hands or hearts about her;
for though doing all the work she got none of the
praise, while her sister, who took things easy and let
the house-wheel go round as it liked, was commended
131
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
then, and her name has been held in honour ever
since.
Of course the story can be taken in more ways than
one. It can be taken to emblemize the two great
divisions of humanity-the material and the spiritual
-the earth-grubbers and the heaven-seekers-those
who lie contentedly among the ashes and spend their
time in scrubbing pots and pans, thinking the require-
ments of their immortal souls quite sufficiently attended
to if they can brighten up old iron, and show a clean
array of cracked delf, and those with "dove's feathers,”
who live in noble thought, in earnest endeavour, in
self-culture, and the sacrifice of the fleeting pleasures
of sense for the eternal progress of the spirit. Or it
can be taken to mean common sense and moony
enthusiasm, practical work and ideal reverie. In fact,
it is doing and aspiring; and according to the run of
our own natures will we put the one first and the other
last-according to our own ideas of the duties of life
and the fittest sphere for woman, assign love to Mary
for her worship or admiration to Martha for her
work.
All the practical and energetic, those whose cha-
racter, as Swedenborg says, is "founded on ultimates,”
will have sympathy with Martha for the industry, the
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
practicality of her life. Though indeed one cannot
help seeing that if she was earnest in her own way she
had but little regard for the feelings of others; and
that, a time for all things being one of the fundamental
rules of Order, unquestionably when the Master sat
there to teach was not the fitting moment for troubling
about much serving, and for diligent scrubbing of pots
and pans. How important soever are home duties,
there are occasions when they ought to give way to
higher things, and be left undone altogether rather
than these others be neglected. But the Marthas of
life are wofully apt to make the material well-being of
the house the one thing needful at all times, and to
put a value on clean linen and a well-swept hearth
quite beyond that which they assign to charity, to
thought, to spiritual endeavour. And also they are
imiserably prone to be only servants where they are
servers at all; only machines where they are in any
sense handiworkers.
Now there is not the slightest necessity for the best.
housekeeper in the world to make herself a mere
drudge, a slave to old iron and cracked delf and the
lowest materiality of the house. Serving does not ex-
clude aspiration; work does not deny education. On
the contrary, as in the famous formula, "Show me thy
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
faith by thy works," so to the whole human family in
all its labours may be said, "Show the reality of your
aspiration by the nobler perfecting of your work ;" and
to women especially, "Set forth the fruits of your self-
culture by your sweeter grace of deed, your greater
power of serving." Our Marthas need not lie con-
tentedly among the ashes, nor use the precious time
when the Master comes to teach, in troubling about
much serving. But neither need our Marys let the
whole circle of practical duties go by the board, that
they may give themselves up to the luxury of hearing
only, and to the indolent enjoyment of thought.
Human nature ought to be rich enough to include
diversities; and the soul should be large enough for
contrasts to blend into harmony. The greatest mistake
we have ever made is in formularizing the wretched
classification we call " character,” and assuming that
men and women must be all of one thing or all of
another: that is, that they must be poor and stinted
and narrow and circumscribed in exact ratio with their
integrity.
This idea is unfortunately too much founded on
truth; and the larger half of the truth belongs to women
who are rarely able to be two things at once; as,
strong-minded and tender-tempered, earnest in aspiring
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
and capable in doing ; loving liberty yet able to submit
when submission is the higher virtue; intellectual and
yet homely; ideal and yet practical. For the most.
part they run out into extremes on a single line, and
lose in catholicity and richness what they gain in in-
tensity and force. Certainly a few every now and then
come to the surface who are both strong and tender,
capable and intellectual; but as yet they are only a
few, and we have to wait the better time before we
realize the better race. Meanwhile we cannot be too
thankful for the beautiful specimens of catholic woman-
hood which at times turn up; many-sided women with
a diversity of gifts and great in more directions than
one, who, though they are strong do not give up the
tenderest, softest, womanly graces; women who do
good artistic work, say, yet do not disdain to rock the
baby's cradle when the nursery sleeping hour comes;
women who best prove their capacity for manipulating
large things by the thoroughness with which they per-
form small ones; women who do first their own duties
before they clutch at the offices of men, and who reve-
rence the laws of nature under which they are created,
instead of frantically disowning and despising them.
Such women are rare it must be owned; too rare; but
the fact that they exist at all, and are not impossible
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
chimeras, gives us cause for vital faith and a suf-
ficiently large hope in the future.
Women have assigned to them by nature, more dis-
tinctly than they always care to own, the supreme
spiritual function of elevating and purifying the world.
A man must have gone very far indeed on the down-
ward way, who would knowingly lower the moral tone
of his wife or daughter. Men do it undoubtedly and
continually, but not out of malicious design. They do
it because blinded by passion, because having no true
perception of right and wrong, because perhaps igno-
rant of the effect their words or their example will
have. But unless they are thoroughly bad they respect
the comparative purity of their women, and love them
in proportion to their belief in that purity. They must
be demoralized beyond all measure if they would wil-
lingly bring a mother or a wife into their own vicious
atmosphere; and the pollution of a daughter's mind
counts with even ruffians-taking the ruffian's measure
of what constitutes pollution-as a sin not far removed
from that of murder. To keep men true and pure, and
to maintain a lofty moral standard in society, is then
the part which has been allotted to women in the great
drama of human life-the share, and not an insignifi-
cant one, given to them in the divine plan of progress.
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
And yet we women do not fulfil this high function
of ours as it was meant we should fulfil it
it—not with
the thoroughness, the spiritual vitality, with which all
human action ought to be interpenetrated. We only
discountenance in others what we do not like for our-
selves, but we do not sacrifice in ourselves the evil we
like, or that gives us pleasure. We do not as a rule
encourage what is usually called vice; and men take
care to hide from us the abominations of sense into
which they are led, because they know the disgust and
revulsion we should feel. But the real reason of this
greater strictness with us is simply because our passions
are weaker than theirs, and we are less dominated by
our senses; so that the temptations which are so over-
whelming to them are no temptations to us, and we
can very easily, therefore, frown down what does not
allure us.
But in things wherein we are tempted—as
men are by passion and sense-we are as powerless to
resist as they, and we have no more regard than they
to abstract beauty or moral purity. We commit all.
manner of small and mean offences, and violate the
higher law for the sake of the miserable moment, just
as men do in their grosser sins. We are seldom greater
than our world, whatever that world may be; and it is
as rare to find a woman capable of an unconventional
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
virtue-and, remember, there are virtues which are
utterly unconventional, and which Society and Mrs.
Grundy would rank as offences-as it is to find one
bold enough to think for herself against the received
canons of the Churches.
Pleasures and luxury are the down-pullers of the
feminine soul; and if men are ambitious so are we,
but generally in a smaller and more personal way than
they. We do not want money for power, as men do;
nor for the great city boast of how many thousands.
we are worth. We want it for personals and for show
-for the finer house in the better neighbourhood, the
richer dresses, the grander dinners, the carriage and
pair where the rule of our special sphere is only a hired.
turn-out for Sunday show, or a bandbox brougham
with a three-legged screw between the shafts. And
very seldom are we capable of sacrificing all this for
the sake of an ideal which has no influential sup-
porters, and no present praise or sympathy.
Poverty is a bitter weed to most women, and there
are few indeed who can accept it with dignity. Some
take it with patience truly; but the most, even when
patient, supplement a fretful kind of self-assertion,
however meek, and are fond of speaking of the time
when they were beyond their present low estate; and,
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
ah! you should have seen them then-you should
have seen their jewels, their house in the grand square,
their visiting-list, their servants. Poor creatures that
we are! If only we could attain to that interior dignity
which bears the soul over the accidents of circum-
stances, and leaves us always ourselves, whatever our
estate ! But women have little or none of this interior
dignity; and, as I said before, poverty is a bitter weed
to most of us. Is not Madame Palissy the type of all
our tribe? There is no denying that her lot was a
hard one and her burden heavy while it lasted; and
we can all realize the anguish of a woman whose hus-
band is pursuing the Absolute, while her children go
short for bread and scanty for clothing. The discovery
of the right glaze for pottery, of the best manner of
reproducing newts and lizards in clay, of the exact
heat at which a furnace should be raised for the accu-
rate baking of plates and dishes, do not seem to us
matters of so much importance as the children's
schooling, their sufficient clothing, and food whereby
they may be nourished. And yet, what would the
world be without the men who sacrifice themselves
and their families for this search after the Absolute ?·
Where would humanity be at this day if the best thing,
the ideal truth, were set aside for bread and cotton ?
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
if even the discovery of the right glaze for pottery was
not ranked above fine meats and sumptuous clothing?
It would be slaying the future for the present, and the
result would be an eternal death with no life beyond:
whereas making the present the sacrifice of the future,
the seed-bed, the tap-root, is to insure perpetual life
and unending advancement.
Women cannot accept poverty for the ideal, still
less can they endure that slow martyrdom which the
world knows so well how to inflict, for the sake of
future and general good, for the spread of an idea, the
promulgation of a despised truth, the support of an
unpopular theory. They can choose martyrdom rather
than recantation of a religious faith; but that is another
matter altogether, and does not come into this part of
my subject. We women can give of our superfluity to
a cause, and we can follow in a crowd of so-called
sacrificers; by which it comes about that we make no
sacrifice at all, and are merely of the right herd instead
of the left; but we cannot stand apart clinging to our own
solitary banner, amid the jeers of the drifting multitude.
Tomount the moral pillory and let ourselves be pelted at,
because we have adhered to our own truth-which is
to the world a lie—is a grace beyond all but the ab-
normally strong and steadfast among us to accomplish
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
of our own free will. Yet this recognition of all great
truths has been won by the advanced guard voluntarily
mounting the moral pillory; and the stones and mud
flung at those "sinless Cains,” have been the garden-
plots whence have bloomed roses as sweet as Do-
rothea's, and as heavenly in their power.
We in England have not much opportunity for this
kind of choice at the present moment. The number
of the thinkers and philosophers who advocate what
the world calls unpardonable heresies, and who have
given up social status and material gain therefor, may
be counted on one's fingers; and only one woman
of note has joined the ranks. It is a fortunate
thing nationally, I know, that we have so little cause
for self-devotion. We have gained so much that we
have reached one of the stations with "Rest and be
thankful" engraved on the seat; and so far we have
cause for rejoicing. But we are not at the top of the
hill yet; and there are still sundry unpopular theories,
and tremendous heresies, and unpalatable truths,
which will ruin those who first advocate them publicly.
It must come; and in the great struggle before us,
God send us women with hearts and brains strong
enough to help our men by our sympathy, and even to
do a day's good work on our own account! We must
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
not forget how all that we have already gained has
been won ;-how the martyrs of progress and liberty
had wives and children like ourselves, whose personal
well-being was sacrificed for the general gain of the
community and the advance of the future; and who
in their day were either helped or hindered by the
sympathy or the dissatisfaction at home. And when the
time comes for the open discussion of many difficult
social questions now secretly agitating men's minds,
we women must be prepared to give up all we hold so
dear-wealth, status, social consideration and the
esteem of our fellows-while the rags still left fluttering
round the various scarecrows of tyranny are torn into
fragments, so small that they can never be made into
the winding-sheet of freedom again. We have not
conquered the whole evil of the world yet; and we
must remember that reformation is heresy in the be-
ginning, and resistance to tyranny is rebellion-till
successful.
What we have to learn is, that the money value of
a question is not its best test anyhow; that our men
are not necessarily wild or visionary when they con-
secrate their energies to matters which do not yield a
rich percentage, cash down; that the good of humanity
at large ought to count beyond the personal advançe-
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
ment of our own private families. We have much to
answer for in the great national thirst for gain that is
consuming us like a fever; we urge the men on to get
money in ever-increasing amount, by our own ever-
increasing expenditure. From the highest to the
lowest, from the peeress to the kitchen-wench, we are
all frantic for pleasure, for luxury, for dress.
If a
woman has ten thousand a year, she must rival her
who has twenty; if she has five hundred she must do
the same as she who has a thousand. Mary the maid
with her modest ten pounds a year, dresses like Mrs.
Abigail with her thirty. Though how it is done
remains a mystery to all but Mary the maid herself.
And all this is of an infinite evil influence with men.
For we have influence, if no direct power. There
never yet was a great man whose greatness was not in
some degree owing to a woman; as there was never
a man who went to perdition, whose ruin was not
helped by a woman. If then we are Marthas, only
solicitous about our worldly pelf, we make them sordid
and money-loving that they may gratify us; but if we
are Marys, careful rather for wisdom than for gain, we
give them a noble standard against which to measure
themselves; and the world goes all the cleaner for the
example.
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
And yet there are limits, even to Mary's sympathetic
worship. Poor Blake, for one example, would have
been all the better for a tender-hearted, stout-brained
woman who had not had visions with himself-for a
Martha who would have woven decent garments within
doors, while he walked the garden in Eden simplicity.
And much as aspiration does for the soul, a wife with
her head in the clouds is of no good. The bills un-
checked, the house left to keep itself, the children
neglected, that the Mary-mother may compose themes
at her piano, or poems at her desk, that she may cover
squares of canvas with mimic flowers, and trees, or
even, Jellaby-like, undertake great schemes of far-off
philanthropy, is a wife of no value, save the value of
showing which way not to go. She is Mary choosing
the wrong hour for worship; for even the soul has its
hours like the body. Martha grubbing in the back-
kitchen is doing her life-work more fittingly than any
such enthusiast, neglecting the prosaic duties lying
nearest to her for those more brilliantly imagined ones
of mere thought and emotion. In this, as in all things,
there must be order and harmony of seasons; and
above all, that grand compensating power of common
sense, that best of all knowledge-when to do and
when to refrain, and how far to go. Also the know
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
ledge of her dedication. A great woman consecrated
by God and nature to a noble work is not to waste
her time in checking the household bills, or in mend-
ing her husband's stockings. To the exceptional
creations must be exceptional laws; and an Elizabeth
Tudor set to teach a day-school, or a Lucy Hutchin-
son at the head of a millinery establishment, would
have been just so much human power wasted, just so
much moral force misapplied.
Women are saving or producing. If they are or-
dinary women, their work is good merely for saving;
if they have the flicker of the divine fire they can
produce; but even if they are of the latter, they ought
to be also of the former kind. A man without prac-
tical faculty is a poor daft body that one looks at with
mingled wonder and impatience; but a feckless
woman is a being wanting one of her final causes of
existence altogether. No ordinary woman is worth
much who cannot use her hands and her eyes; and
a large proportion of people have only a very im-
perfect use of both these organs. With a great deal
of folly and rubbish intermingled, the Kindergarten
system of education is so far valuable in that it teaches
quickness and accuracy of vision, and dexterity of
handling. We are too apt to think that things usual
145
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
come by the grace of nature, when they come only as
the result of training. Eyes and hands, and indeed.
all our senses and faculties which seem to be instinc-
tive, have to be educated into efficiency. We have
them in the beginning only potentially; in a very
small extent indeed absolutely; and they never come
to their full use unless carefully trained. Not one
person in a thousand sees, in the fullest sense of the
word. Look at a servant "laying a table," scan a
woman's embroidery, measure the pictures on the wall,
or put your finger on slabs or ledges of even a well-
kept house, and then see how many servants are there
who place the things on the table square, how much
embroidery is there that is even, where the pictures
hang absolutely square, and how many times have
both mistress and maid glanced at that same slab or
ledge on turning into the room, and not seen the dust
lying on it?
Now all Marthas should be clear-sighted and deft-
fingered. A handy woman is a priceless blessing in a
house, and one who has both eyes and hands keeps
her home up to a standard of order that is worth
more than loose-running artistic beauty. A Martha
who is not handy and not intrinsically orderly-a mere
grubbing bit of untidy clumsiness-is an awful mis
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
take, and offends in all directions-in poverty of soul
and in grossness of sense—in want of ideal homeli-
ness and of practical beauty, at one and the same
time. Thoroughly useful women with well-educated
organs are priestesses in their own way and according to
their own degree; and earnest-minded aspiring women
--Marys, sitting with folded hands but with open souls,
are priestesses too, of a higher order if of a less evi-
dent service. But to be neither—to be a mass of un-
productive clay, too poor for wheat, too heavy for
flowers, is to be a failure. And failures are faults.
With the immense amount of work of various sorts
waiting in the world for hands to do, there are useful
tasks for every one who chooses to seek the fitting
kind. If clumsy hands will fumble wildly at making
watch-springs, or delicate fingers grasp the pavior's
rammer, there must of course be bad work-cables
for hair-springs, and pebbles tapped faintly instead of
square blocks rammed solidly home. If Martha
neglects her brooms and brushes and takes up with
the aesthetics, and if Mary insists on cooking the
family dinner, there will be confusion in the house-
hold, and all the work ill-done.
And yet how often we see this!-how often we see
good honest housewives among women disdain the
[47
L 2
MARTHAS AND MARYS.
simple homeliness into which they were born, to aim
at all sorts of fine fashionable graces or more subtle
intellectual airs! Again, sometimes but more rarely,
we see slender, unhandy Marys playing at doing
homely work; pretending to nurse a baby which they
do not know how to hold; making-believe to be
ministering angels at a sick-bedside, and not knowing
calomel from rhubarb; but just getting everything
into a tangle and a coil, till Martha swoops down
upon them, and brushes them and the summer flies
away together. But where there is harmony between
the labour and the labourers, then and then only is
completeness. While Martha rules the kitchen, the
household is well managed; when Mary reigns in
the parlour, the family life is one of grace and sweet-
ness.
But I must go back upon what I have said before.
The perfect woman is the one who is both Martha and
Mary. And of these we find a few, the gems which
star society, the flowers which perfume the whole
garden. I know some, young and beautiful, and with
that true woman's desire to please-good wives, good
mothers, careful housekeepers, and yet the most
charming of all ball-room guests, the most delight-
ful of all evening companions. And this is what
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
women should be. We have divided and apportioned
too much in one direction, if too little in another
for, after all, perfection in making pins' heads may be
something worth seeking after rather than that pins'
heads should be made badly; but it would be better
for the worker if he could make the whole pin per-
fectly, and so enrich his mind with a knowledge of
points as well as heads.
It would be better if pretty
In
Mary, sitting meekly, should also be able to do
briskly; and if Martha-homely, red-handed, useful
Martha-should be able to turn her back on the cinder-
sifter and look out on the stars with a consciousness
of a life beyond the kitchen-floor. In the palmy
days of old Greece, her great men were masters of
many forces. The bravest general was the astutest
statesman, the finest poet, the noblest orator.
Italy too, when art meant more than it means now,
the foremost artist was the foremost man of the state.
And this is what I want to see in women-this rich-
ness of nature, this diversity of power; so that
supremacy in one direction shall necessarily include
mistresshood in another. I have never been able to
understand why intellect should not be applied to
small things as well as to large ones; nor why a
thoroughly clever and capable woman should not make
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MARTHAS AND MARYS.
a better house-mistress than her ignorant and stupid
sister. Perhaps it will be proved that the best
educated intelligence does give the best practical
results, when the present utterly nonsensical craze
against active housekeeping has passed away, and
when a woman's honour lies just in proportion to the
thoroughness and zeal with which she performs her
woman's natural duties, both of doing and aspiring, of
serving and of purifying.

1
150

THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
F all our follies none perhaps are so great as
those which we commit in the name of Fashion.
Fashion is the sorceress to whose spell we all succumb,
the tyrant whose will not one of us dares dispute, the
ignis fatuus whose wavering flame we follow, indif-
ferent to the nature of the ground through which we
are led. Bog or brake-what does it matter? so long
as we go precisely as we are told, and obey that
mysterious and capricious leader of ours, we are all
right; and if we do fall into odd places meanwhile,
that is not our own fault but rather the misfortune of
the times. Fashion while young is never in fault---
when old you may laugh at her as much as you please;
but while new and vigorous all that she does is perfect,
and if you, as an individual, stand out against her and
find her ways unpleasant, the blame lies with you and
not with the lawgiver.
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THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
Perhaps I am wrong in saying that not one of us
dares dispute this tyrant, this great Dalai Lama of the
work-room and the manufactory; for every now and
then we do meet with recusants who refuse to take on
themselves the yoke of fashion, and who walk in
unfettered freedom, bound by no silken ties and lured
by no false lights of pretended beauty. But unfor
tunately they are generally women who fling off the
bonds of real beauty as well as the false ones of
fashion, and who appear as frightful in their own
originality as they would have been under the most
servile imitation; women who, because they will not
be slaves to conformity make themselves slaves to
ugliness, and find no mean between the two opposite
poles of extravagance in obedience or eccentricity in
dissent. These were the women who, when all the
female world went about like huge bells encased in a
swelling scaffolding of steel and whalebone, walked
sefiantly among their structured sisters with not so
much as a pennyworth of starch in their skimpy skirts,
nor an inch-wide frill to faintly represent the foam of
flounce then in vogue; and these are the women who,
now that fashion has veered all the way round and
draped herself in clinging skirts and lanky lines, still
keep to the crinoline of ten years ago and sweep their
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THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
harsh way among us-nuisances for whose disagree-
able unloveliness there is not even the questionable
excuse of conformity.
They are women who begin a fashion just as it is
dying out, so that they are always in opposition, but
no more sensible than their neighbours; or they are
women without the power to unite sense and beauty,
and even when they are intrinsically rational—as in
the days when they withstood the craze of cages and
kept their petticoats undistended-are so uncompro-
misingly ugly in their attire, so ungraceful, so careless
of what we mean by "appearances," that so far from
helping their sisters to better things by offering them
a beautiful model or a wise one, they throw them yet
farther into the extreme of the prevailing folly
from very dread of becoming like to anything so
ridiculous.
If this section of the strong-minded who are not
afraid of being recusants, would devise some costume
that should unite artistic grace and work-a-day con-
venience, something as useful and not so hideous as
the Bloomer costume say, and not so defiant of pre-
sent fashions, they might do a good work in their
generation, and effect the most valuable of all second-
But they only strengthen the hands of
class reforms.
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THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
the enemy while they are merely oppositionists who
cannot offer anything absolutely better than the fashions.
they decry.
This question of woman's dress has always been a
thorny and troublesome one. Save the Greek and
early Roman costume nothing has been devised which
thoroughly satisfies a cultivated taste. But the world,
which by-the-bye never knows its good things when it
has got them, acted on by that mysterious law of
change which takes up with evil and the worse rather
than remain stagnant in the beautiful and the best,
slid by degrees out of the perfection of the classic
times; and even before the Roman Empire came to
an end we find ugliness and monstrosity where the
very culmination of beauty had formerly been. When
once set loose from the boundary of national costume,
fashion flowed over into every absurdity that a vitiated
taste and restless desire for novelty could conceive.
Neither beauty nor convenience had the slightest in-
fluence in the councils of the "mantua makers" and
the tire-women of the Middle Ages. Huge peaked
horns, sometimes single like a unicorn's and some-
times double like a cow's, with a long web of linen
flowing from them, set a woman's face about midway
in her body; sleeves so long that they had to be
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THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
knotted up to keep them from the dirt, vied in folly,
wastefulness, and nastiness, with trains that swept up
all the filth from the rush-strewn floors and the un-
beaten roads; stiff stomachers, with an inner casing
of iron and an outer one of quilted silk and heavy
gold embroidery, destroyed everything like suppleness
of movement, grace, or flow of outline. But these
monstrosities were thought the ultimate perfection cf
beauty in their day, and then, as now, extravagance
in a prevailing mode was counted as a grace, and the
woman who went farthest beyond her fellows in the
absurdity of her dress was the queen of her circle for
the time being, and the glass wherein her sisters saw
their ideal.
It was in vain that the Church tried to stem the silly
current. Eloquent preachers discoursed valiantly
about the imps and devilkins which they said they
saw with their bodily eyes, sitting aloft on the horns,
and hiding in the trains of the fashionable ladies who
attended mass so bravely attired, and which prevented
the Word of Life from finding entrance to their hearts.
More than once they singled out some queen of the
mode for direct and public censure; but they did not
do much good on the whole. A few of the softer-
natured believed, trembled, and obeyed; and on
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the follies OF FASHION.
going home cut off some half-dozen yards of superfluous
material; but the greater part, though they might be-
lieve and doubtless trembled, nevertheless did not
obey, but wore their horns as high and spread out
their trains as far as ever, and only heeded what the
preacher said when fashion had endorsed his strictures
and changed her venue and his.
One consolation, however, which we women may
take to heart, is that men were just as ridiculous as
ourselves, quite as extravagant, and very often much
more unseemly. Certainly they have reformed before.
we have, and we have now all the folly to ourselves;
but in those early days when they were fain to chain
up the points of their shoes to their garters, it was but
a race, neck-and-neck, and more than once the men
beat us by a head.
The worst of it all was that every now and then
some beautiful and graceful and simple fashion was
struck out that one would have liked to see perpetuated,
but that died away in a very few years, to be replaced
by something as monstrous as this had been befitting.
There was the justaucorps, which we see in the pic-
tures of (I think) Eleanor of Provence: that sleeveless,
well-adjusted but not strained kind of surcoat which
we have been lately somewhat imitating. This is an
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THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
article of dress that affords all manner of pretty oppor-
tunities; but it went out; and we had in its stead,
after a long succession of experiments in ugliness-
each more advanced than the last-the steel corset of
Catherine de Medicis and our own Elizabeth, the
padded hips and rigid waist accompanying, and the
whole art of the Mesdames Elises of the period thrown
into making a woman look as much like a wooden
wasp as it was possible for bone and buckram to
achieve. We have not got past that folly even yet.
Only the other day a book was published which gravely
-by no means jokingly or satirically-first of all
asserted that the creation of a small waist by means of
tight lacing, or its semblance by the artful aid of hoops
and frills, &c., has been the end and aim of all fashion;
and then went on to advocate this creation as the
righteous end and aim of fashion, and as the one.
thing which women, and specially unmarried women,
should set their energies to attain, no matter through
what suffering; and which the author assures us to be
in nowise hurtful to the health, while it is undeniably
beautiful (?) to the eye.
That the ribs are a protecting case within which
are packed away certain tender and important organs
—that it is vitally necessary those organs should have
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THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
full space for the exercise of their functions, that they
should not be pressed on, nor hampered, nor in any
way impeded-seem physiological facts utterly un-
known to the person who wrote that remarkable book;
while as for such a prosaic law as proportion, what
has that to do with the integral beauty of a waist
thirteen inches round?-to which worse than foolish
dimensions some young ladies, by dint of present per-
sonal torture and future certain disease, have at last
contracted their bony case of ribs. A large, flat,
spreading waist is as ugly as anything else which is
large and flat and spreading, when it ought to be small,
compact, and trim; but a wasp-like waist, with huge
shoulders above and full hips below, is even more
ugly. The one at least represents freedom, and such
ease and health as come from freedom; the other is
eloquent of pain, of contraction, and of disease.
But the writer was true in his premises if false in his
conclusions—the meaning of farthingales and crino-
lines and hoops and modernized paniers, and all the
other queer structures in steel, buckram, or lighter
puff in which we women have at various times invested
our persons, is to create, by the shadows and contrast.
afforded by excessive expansion, the semblance when
we have not the reality of a small waist.
One can
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THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
and
understand physiologically and sentimentally the beauty
of a round, small waist in a young unmarried girl, when
not carried to extremes and when kept in just pro-
portion to the rest of the figure; but what one cannot
understand is, why women of riper years and matronly
condition, should take so much trouble to make them-
selves unsatisfactory travesties of maidenhood;
why they cannot utilize the special beauties of their
own condition, and be content with the richer and
fuller graces belonging to them. Girls do not set the
fashions. They may and do exaggerate them, because
there is very little else to distinguish one girl from
another in the crowd, and because they are silly; but
it is the woman who is just beginning to be on the
wane, la femme presque passée, who wants to look still
youthful and girlish, from whom proceed nine-tenths
of the devices to conceal the figure and delude the
eye. The large manufacturers and wholesale millinery
establishments of course decide beforehand what are
to be the patterns of the season; but in the smaller
details it is the married woman—who, moreover, bears
the purse and possesses the social influence—who sets
her wits to approximate herself to the young girl; and
this is best done by such fashions as most conceal
distinctions and level inequalities of graces; as in this
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THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
very matter of the small waist, which is to be created
in appearance when it does not exist in reality. It is
for the advantage of a nicely-made girl to appear in
simple costume. Her trim proportions, and the pretty
run of her figure, want only leave to appear as nature
has given them to her; but when she and the rotund
matron dress in the same masquerading expanse of
crinoline and furbelow, the girl loses all distinctive
charm and the matron alone gains by the simili-
tude.
At present we have made ourselves only ridiculous,
we are not inconvenient to our neighbours by the
particular furbelow of the day. If we think the
"Grecian bend" a graceful kind of thing, and that
yards of material puffed out at the back make us more
lovely in the eyes of men, by all means let us go on
with the "bend" and the puff till we get tired of them.
It does not much signify to what we shall change; it
is so sure to be something both intrinsically ugly and
absurd. All we can hope for is, that our tyrant may
not be pleased to put on us an attire which shall be
inconvenient to others as well as to ourselves, and
that by degrees a little common sense may be allowed
to filter into her councils, so that she may be induced
to consider what is beauty in the abstract, rather than
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THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
what milliners and dressmakers call "fit for any lady
to wear."
Our greatest folly at the present moment however,
is not the puff we call, I believe, paniers, but the long
trains which we delight in dragging after us for a yarl
or so, and which make taking down to dinner, or
walking across a room a trial of nerves, temper, anl
agility to all concerned. "It looks so graceful!" we
So we
say complacently, when remonstrated with.
sacrifice convenience, cleanliness, and the good temper
of the men to maintain a childish, and worse than
childish fashion, because "it looks so graceful" to
trail behind us silken trains not half so beautiful as a
peacock's tail, nor so dignified. It seems to me we
might do something better than fall below a two-legged
fowl in our imitative art of personal decoration.
Next of importance to the creation of a small waist,
fashion has always held the disposition of the hair and
the dressing of the head. And here again we come to
those queer exaggerations in which we women so un-
accountably take pleasure. Only a few generations
ago, and our heads were literally built up like so much
mason-work. Buckram, pomatum, powder, flowers,
laces, and jewels, all were employed in the disfiguring
of our hair-one of the most beautiful things which
161
M
THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
nature has given to woman; and the result was an
amount of hideousness that seems to us now absolutely
incomprehensible, and a state of dirt and horrible.
nastiness even more incomprehensible. Ladies then
went from London to York, a three days' journey, with
their hair dressed by a town hairdresser, all ready for
the county ball. They slept by the way propped up
by pillows; with their heads supported on the backs of
chairs that the hideous structure should not be disar-
ranged. This was their pride, and the sacrifice they
made to fashion and appearance; for which they had
their reward in the wonder of the beaux and the envy
of the belles of the provinces, who could not suf
ficiently admire what the one never saw surpassed and
the other could not hope to compass. Once a month
their heads were opened, cleansed, and renewed; for
which we have the authority of the Spectator; and it
does not require a very vivid imagination to enable us
to picture what they were like when they were opened.
I am old enough to remember the huge bows, trained
over wired foundations, that my elder sisters wore on
the tops of their heads some forty years ago; and
great was the labour and detestable was the result
thereof. Then we had those cascades of corkscrew
ringlets which cost so much pains to make, and which
162
THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
the damp brought out into ignominious lengths called
by the irreverent, tallow-candles. After these we had
a very pretty and simple fashion of braid that did not
last long; and then we came to the reign of the
chignon-and now to its offshoot, the big bird's-nest
on the very crown of the head, with the fringe of short
hair about the face, curled or straight. But whatever
type we adopt whether that of the secretary bird, or
of any other animal which has all its feathers or fur
falling backwards, or that of the crested cockatoo, the
bison, or the other beasts which have bristling frontlets
we carry our imitation to extremes, and caricature
the lower creature whose leading lines we reproduce.
We cannot be content unless we caricature. No
sooner do we get hold of a tolerably pretty fashion
than we set to work to torture it (and ourselves) into
the extreme of ugliness and folly-as now with our
hair; for though not so dirty, our heads are almost as
absurdly dressed as they were in Queen Anne's time;
and certainly the things we wear on them are more
absurd. What can we say of the taste which coils a
length of fur round and round as a cap, and then
finishes off with a stuffed head-fox or what not-
with glass eyes made as like to nature as is possible?
Our girls dye their hair to the right shade of tawny
163
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THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
brown, then perch on the top a thing they call a hat,
which is this beast's head and (presumably) its body,
with the sharp muzzle and staring eyes right in front,
as if about to leap off on to the first passer-by. And
this is the taste of the nineteenth century in the matter
of one form of head-gear.
Only within the last seven years how have fashions
changed! Seven years ago we had the spoon-bonnet
which disconcerted all our previous instinctive mea-
surements, and led to endless discomfort in the way of
knocking our spoons against the roofs of carriages and
the like; now we have vanishing trifles of lace just
bound round the fore-part of the head, without real
fastenings properly so called, and leaving the whole
face, nape, ears, and throat unprotected. It has taken
just seven years to pass from spoons to the modern
cap-bonnet-from enormous crinolines, yards wide, to
the present lank skirts, and Japanese or ghost-like
wreaths of trains eddying round the feet. Or we have
long French-formed trains much bedecked, which
spread out as we walk like a peacock's tail, as I said,
and are more inconvenient. The prettiest fashion,
and the wisest, that we have inaugurated for a long
while is the short walking costume; which it is to be
hoped will become the fashion for rooms as well as for
164
THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
streets. But there is little chance of that-it is too
rational, too pretty, and too simple.
Another hurtful and ridiculous fashion is in the
high-heeled boots, which have again worked round.
from our great-grandmothers. A slight heel is an ad-
wantage in walking, but these high heels, with the
excessively small surface and the sharply bevelled
sides, make walking a service of pain and difficulty.
Besides they destroy the shape of the leg, which is
something to be considered. They throw the weight
forward and the strain on the shin; and consequently,
they diminish the back muscle, the calf of the leg, and
bring out the bone and muscle of the forepart into an
ugly bow. The shape of our shoes and boots is in
itself an outrage against common sense; but we
women are not alone in this absurdity, nor are we to
blame; so that, as these papers deal with our own
follies specially, we may be let off any personal and
peculiar reproof therefore.
But what can we say of the fashion which dyes the
hair, paints the cheeks, blackens the eyelids with anti-
mony to make the orbit look larger and the lashes
longer, or that expands the pupils with belladonna, no
matter at what cost of complexion or future eyesight ?
What too can we say of the fashion which uncovers
:
165
THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
the arms and neck in the evening after having clothed.
them through the day in flannel, or velvet, or in warm
wadded stuffs? Women threatened with bronchitis or
rheumatism sit all day long in a warm room muffled
up to the throat in thick material; at night they un-
cover below their shoulders, and go out in the cold
winter air with just an opera cloak thrown over their
shivering skins. But this is fashion; and none of us
dare disobey it; none of us dare go out in the evening.
with dresses made after the pattern of our morning
ones, or wear in the morning low boddices and short
sleeves to at least equalize the risk, and inure us to
the evening attire without damage. There is no in-
trinsic reason why we should not all be sitting in low
boddices and short sleeves at this very moment, though
we will make it ten o'clock; but if we were, we should
be thought mad or bad or both, and not even our
staunchest friends would stand by us. But wholly one
thing or the other would be a wiser system than the
present, and would be productive of fewer catarrhs,
bronchial affections, and consumptions. Ah! it is a
sad thought which springs up from that last word! If
we could only see, as those removed from our own
sphere would see, the criminal folly of sacrificing
beautiful and valuable lives to the fashion, which im-
166
THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
poses naked necks as a rule for evening costume !
Many a sweet young creature who would have lived
into happy old age as a beloved wife and honoured
mother, has gone to an untimely grave because of that
ball or that party at which she caught cold from ex-
posure. But fashion so willed it; and neither mother
nor daughter had strength to resist her impalpable but
absolute decrees. We all obey her; young and old
alike those who should keep their beauties sacred,
and those who have none to show-the delicate who
have to be kept alive by art and care-the lean who
are too ugly for any one to find pleasure in the con-
templation of their angles-the wrinkled, and the
gross-we all parade ourselves in evening society
without more disguise than that which a bit of gauze or
lace can give; and only very few of us use that; for even
when well on into the fifties, we do not believe that
anything is to be gained by concealment. As to the
extent to which we cut down our boddices, that is a
matter too patent and too painful to be discussed.
It is a race among us who shall wear the dress the
lowest, and show the largest expanse of shoulder.
And yet we mean no harm: we mean only to be
fashionable.
That is the worst of it. The nicest women among
167
the follies OF FASHION.
us-pure, high-minded women, who would die rather
than be guilty of impropriety if it appeared like an
impropriety to them, and whose very innocence makes
them unsuspicious of evil-get accustomed, as every
one must, more or less, to an objectionable fashion,
and follow it in real simplicity of nature as a thing
without meaning or effect. Also, the nicest wo-
men among us are just those who always follow—
who have not sufficient boldness of mind or manner
to make a public protest against anything endorsed by
the majority-women who are not touched by the evil
of a baleful custom, and by whose own purity is
climinated the poison of a mischievous fashion. They
follow, and their moral support bolsters up the bad
habit, and gives countenance to the bad followers
thereof. But what can we say when originality is still
censured as unwomanly, and a public protest, be it
even against evil, is set down as "strong-minded" and
unfeminine?
I have taken up so much space in denouncing the
folly of fashions in dress only, that I have left no room
for more than a few words on the foolish customs we
preserve the dropping of cards here, the making
feints of visits there, the substitution of forms and
ceremonies everywhere for real hearty friendly inter-
168
THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
course. So far at least we are honest, that we do not
pretend to make our intercourse friendly. It is a sham
throughout, and we are not ashamed to confess to the
make-believes we cherish. We all know all about
the morning calls we pay so religiously; we all
know how delighted we are when the answer is, "Not
at home." We may express our sorrow to each other
when we next meet, and a few of the simple-minded
among us may believe in the regret so glibly pro-
nounced; but we are like the old Roman augurs in
this, and if we do not laugh in each other's faces it is
not from want of knowing what pretty little hypocrisy
we are playing, but simply from the conventional good
breeding which makes laughing in a person's face
vulgar and ill-bred. Our dinners, our evening parties,
our moralities, our whole manner of being, come into
the category of fashions more or less foolish according
to the individual, but always fashion-always things
regulated by an arbitrary law that is not intrinsic or
fundamental. It is worth considering though, how
much we should lose as well as gain by the open re-
nunciation of authority (which fashion in its silly way
represents, as the golden side of its tarnished medal ;)
and how we should fare, all things considered, if we
women became independent and above the general
169
THE FOLLIES OF FASHION.
law. If we were all wise we should do well; but are
we not too silly yet to be left free to follow each her
own desires? The very foolishness of our fashions, I
am afraid, proves this; and the almost as striking
foolishness of our dissent shows how little we can
combine revolt with prudence, and how our opposition
to black is not necessarily white. But a better day
will come in the future; meanwhile, those of us who
think the tyranny of fashion a thing to denounce, must
do so with the wisdom of serpents and the meekness
of doves, and make our rebellion respectable by its
rationality, its beauty, and its usefulness.

170

FEMININE EXTREMES.
36
HE golden mean is the hardest point for any
one to touch-men and women alike; but
there is something in the feminine constitution that
renders it doubly difficult for us—impossible indeed
for all practical purposes, and as a general rule of our-
life. We are always in extremes on the one side or
the other; always ramping over the borders of mode-
ration and common sense; always the "fastest" of
sinners or the strictest of saints, apparently unable to
see anything in its true proportions, or to walk in the
middle way without toppling over the barriers to the
right or to the left. "Lovely woman" is nothing if she
is not in extremes; and unless she carries her convic-
tions, like her passions, to exaggeration seems almost
incapable of having either. "Confession or Cremorne,
my lady?" was one of Punch's best cartoons, with the-
171
FEMININE EXTREMES.
smart footman touching his hat to his discontented
mistress as she leaned back in her carriage pondering
into which of the two extremes she would go. And
the satire, if sharp, was not unfounded. "Confession
or Cremorne ?"—yes, that about hits the mark with
ninety per cent. of the "softer sex"; soft in nothing so
much as the fibreless way in which they suffer them-
selves to slip over into excesses, and in the looseness of
their middle terms. They have so few gradations in
their methods of procedure; it is all black or red with
them—the nun's coif or the dévergondée's paint—and
they despise anything between as half-hearted and
temporizing.
Has not this tendency of ours found expression in
the proverb "The greater the sinner the greater the
saint ?” and in that other saying, as common if not so
proverbial, "When a woman is bad she is worse than
a bad man?" For the first, who that has lived long
enough does not know instances of women who have
run through the whole octave of extremes, passing
from frantic vice to frenzied virtue, and denying cakes
and ale to the whole world so soon as they themselves
have left off sweets and wine? For women cannot
believe in virtues which do not wear the same livery
as their own; and cakes and ale, when they themselves
172
FEMININE EXTREMES.
fare on bread and water, are sins of sense not to be
lightly regarded. This too is one of the evidences of
excess specially common amongst us. Who does not
know some modernized version of an awakened La
Vallière passing straight from the world to the convent,
perhaps from the Alhambra to Exeter Hall, and thinking
to expiate her excesses in the past by excesses of another
kind in the present? It is only a question of kind,
determined as much by chance as by design; the de-
gree always remains the same; and as saint or sinner
there is sure to be excess and exaggeration when
women translate their thoughts into action.
The police-courts afford examples enough of the
second saying, and show how women throw every-
thing overboard when once they permit themselves
free sailing, and how utterly warped they become when
they are not kept straight by the girders of social
shame.
The rarest characteristic to be found among them is
the power of philosophic liberty; by which I mean the
power of self-restraint in the exercise of free-will, and
the maintenance of outside propriety, if there is
anything like disregard for the virtue of which that
propriety is the typical expression. Not that
philosophic liberty, which not infrequently includes
173
FEMININE EXTREMES.
cynical libertinism, is a specially desirable characteristic
for women to cultivate. I only state the fact, not
lament it. Men, on the contrary, can set limits to
themselves, and keep to them when set; they can say
so far and no farther to their excesses; they can break
off bad habits even after they have been fully formed
and cherished; and all but poor, weak, washy fellows,
in their nature feminine and exaggerative, can pull up
when they think they have gone far enough. The very
essence of masculine strength is this quality of self-
restraint; this moral power which has nothing to do
with religious faith or conventional fear; this ability
to be a law to himself, and yet not an anarchist towards
the observances of his neighbours, which every really
manly man possesses. But women get so "mixed up"
by emotion, desperation, passion, and defiance, that no
after-restraint is possible when once the curb is slack-
ened; so that, unless they are held in subjection by
the fear of God, the world, or the devil, they go head-
long to destruction, and neither reason nor philosophy
touches them. Who ever heard of a woman who had
once taken to habits of intemperance, say, breaking
them again save under absolute personal coercion ?
But men can, and some without the intervention of
the pledge; and though it is difficult and rare, yet it
174
FEMININE EXTREMES.
belongs to the masculine nature to restrain, even after
indulgence, when the will sets that way.
Again, when women believe a thing, they must let
the world know the very outside limits of their faith.
Even when they are in such exceptional positions of
life as make extremes of any kind social scandals,
they cannot keep silence or within bounds for the
sake of expediency only. Love or hate, licence or
superstition, it is all one-they rush out to the wildest
extremes, and let the world talk as it will; through
the whole warp and woof of their mental lives runs
this one governing thread of excess, without which it
almost seems as if some women had no mental life at
all. What damage soever it may do them to have it
known that they have gone into extremes, and how
silly soever the extremes into which they have gone,
the publication of their folly is none the less impera-
tive, and they think themselves martyrs if their friends
do their best to hinder the exposure, and complain of
the world's ill-treatment if they are laughed at for their
extravagance. But women are not the only people
who like to outrage the opinions of the world and yet
retain its countenance; or who think that while they
hold with the hare of extremes the hounds of con-
ventional disapprobation should not so much as sniff
175
FEMININE EXTREMES.
at their heels. I fear this is a somewhat universal
superstition among us all; about as universal as self-
will, self-love, and inability to see ourselves as others.
see us.
It is this facility for running into extremes on every
question and on all occasions which makes women
such thorough-going partisans as they are; the most
passionate advocates and the most prejudiced judges
to be found. In the gyneocracy of the future-that
new moral world which is to be under woman's un-
divided sway, when all the manly offices of the pre-
sent are to be redistributed, and women are to rule and
govern all things-the grave judicial bench presided
over by a woman, all impulse and no balance, all
excess and no golden mean, will be something for
men and gods to see-and I fear for angels to weep
at! Putting aside the patent nonsense about the
handsome men getting all the votes and verdicts, and
the pretty girls being invariably cast in their suits, the
fact of partisanship, as a feminine characteristic, re-
mains the same; and the injustice of feminine judg-
ment admits of no possible contradiction. Take a
woman who is called on to decide between her own
flesh and blood-her son or daughter, say-and the
wife or husband belonging, and see whether she can
176
FEMININE EXTREMES.
own.
hold an even balance, if troubles have come from the
faults or follies of her own kith. Her heart pleads.
one way and justice declares for the other; and which
does she obey? The woman who would be capable
of seeing that the one she loved best had offended
most would be capable of much more than this. But
in most cases excess of love would carry it over just
judgment; and while a loving father could decide
righteously, uniting justice and love together, a loving
mother could only decide with partiality, and for her
Even the sentiment of sex, which makes her
so doubly formidable as a man's mother-in-law, would
be of no weight if the delinquent was her son and his
victim only her daughter-in-law; and many a young
household has owed the total wreck of its happiness.
to that feminine excess of love in the mother which
could not do justice against its own. Many a mother
might have set things straight in the beginning, if she
would but have had the courage to force herself to see
how they stood askew ; but measuring and apportioning
with a nice perception of merit, and holding an even
balance, and showing no favouritism, are beyond the
power of most women to compass. Wherefore young
griefs have multiplied, and young homes have gone
roofless and rafterless all the time the joint occupancy
177
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FEMININE EXTREMES.
lasted, because the mother had zeal and no judgment,
love and no justice.
Women have always been among the first and
most ardent of the disciples who have clustered
round a new school; save indeed, those founded on
abstract reason, which they cannot away with anyhow.
The visionary and emotional doctrines which seem
even to their promulgators, and unquestionably to
their devotees, to be like the dawning of the millen-
nium, count their female disciples by tens where their
males are reckoned by units. Even faiths which are
not specially flattering to themselves-as Mormonism,
to give no second example-find their most passionate
upholders in the very sex they undervalue; and there
is not a minor novelty in any direction, not a quack
doctrine in religion or physics, which is not believed in
by them, both long before and after it has been de-
rided and discarded by men. They take up with any
creed, provided it is new and extreme; and the most
devoted worshippers at any shrine, no matter what the
idol, are always women. Only when preachers preach
logic, and the doctrines taught are those of reason and
demonstration, do women fall away; indeed, the
quality of a pulpit may be pretty accurately measured
by the preponderance of hats or bonnets in the con
178
FEMININE EXTREMES.
gregation :—the men going where their minds are
enlarged, the women where their hearts are touched,
and but few preachers being able to unite both con-
ditions of improvement. Saving then the sects
founded on reason women are the intensest sectarians
to be found; and such faiths as are pushed most to
extremes are those they most affect, and feel most at
home with.
It is this quality of excess which makes women such
tyrants when they have power. Theirs is a restless,
all-pervading tyranny, totally unlike the heavier, more
brutal tyranny of a man. They are so ingenious in
their tormenting-they are able to descend to little-
nesses which no man could practise, and to stoop to
mean petty acts of oppression out of the power of
the coarser and more robust sex to imagine. The
revelations of conventual life which we have had of
late, bear out this accusation with painful force. Here
were no red-hot pincers and burning ploughshares, no
walling up with a cup of water and a mouldy crust,.
no thumbscrews or bootikins, or any other acts or im-
plements of bodily torture, but an incessant round of
mean cruelties, of petty tyrannies, and small oppres-
sions, which filled one with wonder as one read at the
ingenuity and power of detail in the holy sisters,
179
N 2
FEMININE EXTREMES.
within the convent walls. The revelations made then
will never be forgotten. They proved the whole ques-
tion as to the capacity of peace and fair-dealing among
a community of women unchecked by masculine in-
fluence; and they proved it against ourselves. I do not
say that women only are tyrannical, and that all men,
on the contrary, are fair-dealing and liberal; but I do
say that in this, as in other things, women go to ex-
cesses by class temperament, not, as in the case of
men, by individual temperament. Where a man canes
a boy of ten, a woman whips a marriageable girl.
Have we not had the whole mystery of the Birch in
the Boudoir publicly discussed? Only women who
have had the misfortune to live under the supreme
control of women, know to what extremes the exercise
of power is carried, even by the well-conditioned
among them. Of course some men of the feminine
kind are like women in this; but the very fact that
they are men of the feminine kind proves the rule for
our own sex—and against us.
It has been often said that women love better than
men; but I think this more than doubtful. They love
more in extremes-they are more absorbed by their
passion while it lasts; but weight for weight a man's
love is the strongest, though not the most over-
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FEMININE EXTREMES.
whelming.
Does this sound like a paradox? It is a
simple fact in psychology. Excess does not neces-
sarily prove the strength of any passion-for nothing
is so tyrannical as the weak passion of a weak mind.
Men will not give up everything for love as women
will; and yet their love is larger in amount, if not in
proportion. Women will give up reason and common
sense for their love. They are more ready to make
bad marriages than men are to abandon their career;
the two things being the same in result.
And yet
women are as ambitious as men, if in a different way
from that of men; and as fond of all the results of
success. And yet again, the woman who will run off with
a groom, or who elopes from her husband with another
man-and surely in either case she gives proof enough
of the reality and the extent of her love—will not
give up a fashion she likes or a folly he dislikes,
though she will abandon old friends, her home, her
status, and, dearest thing of all, her repute, for the
sake of the master-passion of the hour. In this too,
we see that strange propensity to excess characteristic
of the sex; and at the same time that adherence to
small things, that care for trifles, which runs side by
side with the looser extremes.
Another instance of feminine exaggeration is to be
181
FEMININE EXTREMES.
found in the absurdities of fashion, and the devotion
to one or other of the extremes of asceticism or fast-
ness. At the present time "Confession or Cremorne"
does really almost literally rule the English world.
The race of quiet-living yet bright-tempered, thoughtful-
minded yet active-handed home-keepers, of which our
middle-class women were once the ideal, seems to be
extinct, at least in towns; and our women are now
either dashing about the world as "fashionables,"
heaven bless them! or else as "sisters," lay or pro-
fessed, attending to all men's wants but those of sons
and husbands. Anything for an experience; but
whatever it is, it must come from the outside—it must
be given by outward circumstances, not created by in-
tensity. Of the two, certainly the religious excess is
the better.
If our women must supplement the home
life by experience from without, let them take to that
which does some good to others and no harm to them-
selves, instead of to that which defiles and destroys.
both themselves and all else whom it affects. The
most shocking thing of our domestic life at this moment,
is the "fastness" which has crept into the very centre
of the home, and which has transformed the wives and
daughters of England into bad imitations of the Pari-
sian demi-monde. What is to be the end of it all,
182
FEMININE EXTREMES.
heaven only knows; and no man can read its real
meaning. It is a madness which has seized on the
nation like an epidemic; and I suppose it has to be
lived through, and its meaning got at on the other
side, before we shall come into better things. History
shows us how all these odd phases of humanity have
to be lived through; and we learn by experience that
things which seem to be so evil, and which are evil in
themselves, do sometimes lead to better results, and
that fruits are not always as bitter as their roots.
Who knows a thoroughly accurate woman?—pre-
cise, not formal; exact, not meagre. I mean this for
thoughts and speech; for women are precise and exact
enough in certain degrees of action, as account-keep-
ing, order, method, and the like. But precision in in-
tellect is what justice is in morals; and the first is as
little seen among us women as the last. That is the
reason why we are such bad grammarians; why a
female logician is next thing to impossible; why ma-
thematics are such dry work to most of us; and why
metaphysics of the close kind (rambling speculations,
half reverie, half superstitious fancy, are not metaphy-
sics) are apparently as impossible as logic. It is all
because of the want of precision and the passion for
excess which characterize us; all because we have
183
FEMININE EXTREMES.
gone on cultivating our imaginations and our emotions,
while letting our reason and our intelligence lie fallow,
till now we have very nearly choked up the ground
altogether, and have left but little that we can cultivate.
This is the cause too why we are so little to be relied
on in the matter of testimony. Does any one know a
woman who can relate an occurrence exactly as she
saw it, without throwing in the extra colour of her own
conclusions or impressions? When counsel press close
in cross-examination, and judges separate the wheat
from the chaff in the sifting of the evidence that has
been given, how much foundation of fact is there in
general in a woman's statements, as compared with her
own added superstructure of conclusions? About as
much as Falstaff's half-pennyworth of bread to his in-
tolerable quantity of sack! Hence women are so fre-
quently falsifiers and slanderers; not from malicious
design, but because they cannot keep themselves to
the narrow limits of reality, but must spread out into
exaggeration and excess.
A woman will tell you, with the quietest manner in
the world, that Mr. Blank is a cheat, and Mrs. Blank
no better than she should be; and when you press her
for her reasons, she will say, "I believe he is a cheat,"
"I believe she is a flirt, and I am sure she is in love
184
FEMININE EXTREMES.
with So-and-so.” There is not the slightest foundation
in fact for what she says; but she is none the less
convinced, and none the less ready to express her
convictions-which are in reality the wildest exagge-
rations of what was perhaps in the beginning a mistake,
or a quite innocent inadvertence. She is not ill-natured
when she says that she is sure her neighbours have
qualified themselves for the Old Bailey and the Divorce
Court; she is only in excess of her "instructions," and
speaking what she has not cared to examine accurately
whether it is the truth or not.
This is the reason too, why we write such outrageous
novels, and why we are so fond of adjectives in the
superlative degree. It is generally easy enough to re-
cognise a woman's hand in unsigned literature, by
the upheaped style stuck about with epithets, and
by the improbability of the circumstances, or the im-
possibility of the characters. What man would dare
to write like "Ouidà ?" and who but women have
founded, and continued, and to this hour uphold the
sensationalist school? But I must not be exaggerative
on my own side. We have had some women writers
who have been just as notable for their quality of truth
as others are for that of want of truth in their work
and with Mrs. Inchbald's "Simple Story," and Miss
185
FEMININE EXTREMES.
Austen's novels, and Miss Ferrier's-to go no further
in the list-we cannot say that women are not able to
write, when they will, with the most perfect naturalness
and moderation. Still, the rule remains unfortunately
the same; and the rule of exaggeration among us can
neither be denied nor removed. Training of a closer
kind than we have ever had as yet would do something
for us; but the best kind of training would be that
which we alone can give ourselves. And to do this,
we must first of all recognise the fault we desire to
remedy. Fools' paradises are pretty gardens to look
at, but ill tenements to live in; and of all fools' para-
dises inhabited by the unwise, that of ignorance of
one's own faults is about the most foolish and the worst
found.
It is surprising that women do not see, or, that
seeing, they do not heed, the harm they do them-
selves by their habit of running off into extremes
and excesses. It makes their whole moral world seem
loose and shaky when the ground-lines are so wide and
uncertain; and the masculine contempt felt and ex-
pressed for "only a woman's talk," is due, not so much.
to its shallowness, as to its exaggeration. That fatal
habit of making molehills into mountains, of hanging
heavy weights on small wires, of translating grey into
186
FEMININE EXTREMES.
black, and calling a smouldering ember a burning
flame, by which the feminine mind is interpenetrated,
is a habit indulged at the expense of much that is
more valuable. We say among ourselves, when speak-
ing of our fault, that if we had broader paths to walk
in we should lose this habit of magnifying molehills
into mountains; that it is the very smallness of the
sole objects of interest allowed us which makes us
amplify their importance; and that the fault lies in the
circumstances into which we are thrust, and not with
ourselves. It may be so. We are all creatures of
circumstances, more or less directly moulded; but the
mischief in our case is, that seeing our follies and
shortcomings, we yet cannot control them, but do the
thing we condemn, and give way to the absurdities we
confess and deplore. If it were a matter of passion it
would be easy to understand; but as a simple case of
intellectual habit, it ought to be controlled without
much difficulty, and when once understood, should be
ever after suppressed.
Perhaps it may be objected to me that I am falling
into the very fault I am condemning in my own sex ;
and that as all women are not exaggerative, as all
women do not make grey into black and lift mountains
into molehills, I have taken the exceptions for the rule
187
FEMININE EXTREMES.
and the extremes as the mean. But a monograph
must needs be excessive, because it is a monograph,
and not a discursion. It deals only with one charac-
teristic, one section, one appearance; and it cannot
add the saving qualifications or soften down the hard
lines with friendly shadings. It is an exaggeration if
you will; but on principle and by necessity; like the
tragic mask of the Grecian theatre, or the corked eye-
brows of our own boards. And it has its uses.
Though there is no good in the "three black crows,"
yet there is good in a caricature, if by the means.
thereof the ugliness or the silliness of a fashion can be
made more manifest. I grant that this seems to ad-
vocate the famous Jesuitical doctrine of the end
sanctifying the means; but it only seems. To avoid
a valuable truth because it has been pushed to false-
hood, would be in itself an extreme that no wise man
would commit. It never answers to be afraid of truth
because it has been exaggerated into something quite
the reverse; and there is a profound wisdom lying in
the dogma about like curing like. If then, this paper
on feminine excess is an excess itself, I can only hope
that the homoeopathic principle involved therein may
be useful; and that in the present hour of the Woman
question that rod of Moses which threatens to swallow
188
FEMININE EXTREMES.
up all other questions-women may take to heart this
folly of theirs, and see it as it is-a stumbling-block to
the recognition of much they are desirous should be
recognised. When they can urge their own claims.
temperately, when they can discuss and not exaggerate,
relate without amplification, and leave off putting
imaginings for facts-they will be nearer to their great
objects than they are now. But so long as men can
twit them with class absurdities, so long will they fail
to win the place they desire, or the consideration that
only follows on esteem. It is for the advantage of
every one that we should be well regarded, and that we
should have some influence in the world of men and
the business of life. But we must win this for our-
selves and by ourselves; and there is only one certain
way to victory, and that is by making ourselves strong
enough to insure it.

189

MODERN MAIDENS.
AS
CCORDING to the show of blossom, good gar-
deners can predict somewhat of the harvest to
follow. Certainly not every fair and cleanly flower
sets into a noble fruit; for there are many dangers.
special to each individual bud, as well as those which
threaten the whole orchard in a mass; but still, bar-
ring accidents, the promise does to a certain extent
define the future, and the fruit of the summer may be
partially reckoned by the blossom of the spring. So
it is in human life. The child is father to the man,
if not entirely yet in a very great degree; and as the
leading lines are laid in youth, so will they remain in
maturity. Of course there are exceptions. A blight
comes on the orchard, which renders all the beauty
and promise in vain; and there are cases in human
life when the most beautiful youth, and the most care-
fully trained, turns to worse than nought from some
190
MODERN MAIDENS.
insidious cause impossible to be foreseen, and therefore
impossible to be guarded against. Good parents have
had bad children both before Eli's time and since; for
though education can do much, it cannot do every-
thing; as not even a tropical sun can ripen fruit which
has a canker in the heart of it to begin with. Still, the
presumption is in favour of a well-looking blossom,
and, correspondingly, in favour of a well-ordered
youth.
A great deal has been said of late about our girls-
not only about the women of England en masse, but
about the girls in especial-the unset blossoms at this
moment whitening the social orchard with their bloom
in preparation for the harvest of fruit to come. A
great deal has been said about them truly; and un-
happily, much has been said against them. They have
been taken as the mark at which scornful shafts have
been launched, with more or less truth in the aim
;
but they have been still more damagingly hit by those
of their advocates who have upheld their worst faults,
and defended their most fatal mistakes. I mean those
who have upheld the "girl of the period" in her
horsey, slangy, fast, and flirting aspect; not merely
palliating the evil thing, making kindly excuses, say,
and putting forth the underside of real goodness that
191
MODERN MAIDENS.
is so often found beneath this objectionable surface,
but who have defended her as she is, because not be-
lieving that she could be made better. She is so bad,
so foolish-women altogether are so bad and foolish—
that there is no use in scolding. No amount of cen-
sure can reform an evil where there is nothing to work
upon. Will the most moving exhortations bring forth
figs from thistles or grapes from thorns? Surely this
cynical acceptance of evil as the only condition at-
tainable, is worse than the bitterest condemnation
which has belief in the possibility of improvement as
its groundwork.
Now, what have we to say of our girls? what of the
thrift, the industry, the modesty, the quietness, the
love, the virginal reserve and pride in themselves
which ought to characterize the ideal maiden? When
we think of the Grecian maidens, spinning and weaving
in the gynæceum at home, or carrying offerings to the
temples on festival days, do we not think of them as
possessing all the qualities I have mentioned? And
can we imagine an Aglaia or Deione such as wẹ see
our own Fanny or our neighbour Alice in Hyde Park
or in a ball-room? Bold, mannh, talking slang as
glibly as any City gent, skirting by grave or improper
subjects with a light and airy manner, as one to whom
192
MODERN MAIDENS.
:
nothing is sacred and nothing forbidden, dressed with-
out regard to taste or beauty, and with only one
intention in her attire throughout-that of attracting
attention and shocking the more correct by the audacity
of her costume: this is our Fanny or our neighbour's
Alice and this is not the Aglaia or the Deione of the
early Greek days. Aglaia and Deione were content
to stay at home, and do their life's work patiently and
modestly. When they went abroad it was in the grand
and noble processions where they carried baskets of
flowers and votive offerings to the gods; they were
not seen for ever "beating the pavement" of the
City, and courting what avoided them; and when they
dressed themselves, at home or abroad, they dressed
for beauty and decency, not for ugliness and indecency.
There was a line of demarcation too between them
and the hetaire which no one could mistake. They
did not take Laïs or Phryne as their model, as our
modern maidens take Thérèse or Mabel Gray; and
dress and look and act so that even practised ob-
servers were puzzled as to the social rank of the
painted, frizzled, loud-voiced girl before them. Far
too much is known about these modern Laïses. Their
ways and works are too curiously scanned, their lives.
too closely questioned, and their bearing too nearly
193
O
MODERN MAIDENS.
copied. No one thinks it shame to speak of them,
no one shrinks from either knowledge or resemblance;
on the contrary, they are the observed of all observers,
and the women about whom our girls evince most
curiosity and interest is the most famous hetaira of the
day, whom they copy, at a distance, but as nearly as
they dare. Ah! when shall we get back to the time
when these poor gaudy wrecks are absolutely pro-
hibited to the speech, the knowledge, or the imitation.
of our virtuous maidens?
What can be said of the English girl of this present
generation relative to the first two qualities I spoke of
—thrift and industry? Just this-she has neither one
nor the other. Of thrift, in the good old-fashioned
sense, there is scarcely a trace remaining. There is a
great deal of meanness in women; but meanness is
not thrift. Trying to pare off the edges from others'
profits is not learning to do without for oneself; and
neither can we call that thrift which is merely a sparing
of the unseen for the sake of making a greater display
on the outside-which wears holes in the stockings,
for instance, under satin slippers, and covers up linen
rags with a velvet overcoat.
Thrift and industry are twin sisters among the
virtues, and the modern girl has as little of the one as
194
MODERN MAIDENS.
of the other. House-work of any practical kind she
despises as unladylike; and thinks herself degraded if
she touches a duster in the drawing-room, or handles
a saucepan in the kitchen. She certainly condescends.
to do what may be called the fancy work of the
establishment—that is, she arranges the flowers in the
vases, and performs that mysterious service called
"tidying" the room; she will even change the various
ornaments from place to place to see where they look
best; and for nine-tenths of the middle-class girls this
summarizes their active work in the house. And their
active housekeeping is of a piece with this. Making
tea, filling the caddy and the sugar-basin, putting out
the preserves, and arranging the dessert, about exhaust
the catalogue of practical duties in this direction.
The housemaid attends to the house linen, and the
cook does all the cooking, so that the young ladies
may have time and leisure for their own "private
work." And what is this private work? Tatting,
which saves the expense of edging; embroidery, which
saves the expense of bought work; artificial flower
work; stamped leather work; braided slippers, and
the like. Some do certainly make their own bonnets,
which accounts for the extravagant ugliness of so many
of these head-coverings; and some may even be
195
0 2
MODERN MAIDENS.
found who have
attack a dress.
an allowance, so
the courage and the perseverance to
That is, if their parents make them
that they can save the milliner's bill
for their own tangible good, else I do not think that
many girls care to save for the sake of their parents
only the superstition with most young people being
that papa at least has no end of money, though per-
haps he keeps mamma short; but then, she can always
get it if she likes; it is only to bear the scolding, and
have the cheque at the end of it. Of course there
are some who see for themselves the struggle papa has
to keep things going, and how mamma pinches this
and saves that to make both ends meet; but it is the
law of life that youth should be selfish; and to do
youth justice, it obeys that law with tolerable accuracy.
It is natural to it that it should want and crave for
itself, and that, sympathy and knowledge coming only
by experience, it should not understand the difficulties
it has not personally borne. So it may be; but as
all our education goes to the counteracting of excess
in instinct, this too-this natural and instinctive
selfishness-is not to be met with indifference simply
because it is natural.
The ideal English girl is a creature standing midway
between the .French and the American. She is not
196
MODERN MAIDENS.
such an exasperating ingénue as the first, nor so hard
and off-hand as the second. She is assumed to be a
clear-skinned, dove-like, gentle creature, who, on
occasions when her womanly pride demands it, can
prove herself a very Boadicea in defence of her.
dignity or principles. According to the French, she
has long, dropping, blonde ringlets, heaven-blue eyes
without expression, a set smile, a téte d'ange that takes
every now and then a slightly deeper flush, and that
shows no other feeling, but a téte d'ange that is very
lovely nevertheless, in its rose-leaf insipid way. We
regret to add that she is also supposed to have horse
teeth, to walk with the step of a grenadier, and to run
off with her groom, after having sat in the balcony at
the imminent risk of catching cold, talking pretty
inanities about the moon which cannot be seen
because of the fog. Time was when the French
mother objected to the English girl because of her
romantic ideas-because of her tendency to make a
wildly romantic love-match, instead of the marriage of
reason and convenience which she arranged for her
daughter, like a nicely-adjusted mercantile bargain.
It was held that la jeune Meess Britannique was at all
times prepared to elope with an undesirable parti; that
she had no regard for the laws of society, or for the
197
MODERN MAIDENS.
material exigencies of conventional existence; and
that, in point of fact, she was always ready to make a
fool of herself for love, instead of reserving her
treasures of affection for money. I do not think we
can say this now. The English girl of the present
day is as wide awake on all matters connected with
her own interests, as the shrewdest mother need
require; and though certainly, she does still every
now and then go off with her groom when she has
been much neglected and left to run wild in country
places, yet on the whole, she is more likely to commit
an unwholesome marriage for money, than an in-
discreet one for love. The great desire of the present
age is for money and pleasure, excitement and luxury;
and the modern maiden has gone with her age. She
is not content to begin life in a quiet manner, with a
moderate income, and the prospect of real work in
the housekeeping. She would rather marry Silenus
with full money-bags than Hyperion with an empty
purse; and trust to find in dress and amusement the
happiness she had not cared to seek in real love.
Besides, there is always the make-shift of flirting; and
to the modern maiden flirting is infinitely preferable
to love. So that Silenus represents, not only money-
bags, but a crowd of admirers in the future; and not
1.9.8.
MODERN MAIDENS.
a few of the ordinary girls of the day think home and
home-love slow when compared with the more brilliant
pleasure of triumphs and adventures derived out of
doors. It is extraordinary to me how indifferent the
modern generation of girls is to the idea of love in
any lofty or self-denying sense-to love in the abstract
-love in what may be called its romantic aspect.
The very slang that is used to express it shows some-
thing of the feeling; for though "the tender passion"
may be stilted and far-fetched, "spoons" is disrespect-
ful and trivial. The whole subject is one that you may
hear the modern girl continually deride; and she is
so far honest in that she openly prefers pelf to spoons.
I think it may be safely said that the lower half of
our middle-class girls bears away the palm for solid
virtues, taken generally; that is, the daughters of our
working professional rank and file-not the few lead-
ing stars among them who consort with rank and
fashion, and are even themselves of like degree. But
though our simple middle-class girls are good girls as
a rule, as a rule too, they are wofully ignorant. No-
thing can be worse than the education they receive,
nothing more superficial, more useless, more pointless.
In the higher ranks there is an atmosphere of art and
refinement that teaches from the earliest years. There
a
199
MODERN MAIDENS.
are pictures and mosaics, and bits of art here, and
snatches of learning there, that familiarize the young
mind with wide and lovely spheres of thought; but in
the middle-class, bare of all beauty, with no incentive
to learning save the love of learning for its own sake—
so rare a quality with women—and with the insane
dread of blue-stockingism that affects our men and by
consequence the education of our girls, with schools
which teach nothing save the poorest smattering, there
is no means of making our girls deep or thoughtful, or
of giving them more than the meagrest pretence of
education. Even French girls are better educated
than ours, while the American can sail round both.
The Americans laugh immensely at our muddled inac-
curacies, and delight to expose us when they get us in
conclave together. They generally come down upon
us in geography; and there they have their own way
without much rivalry on our parts. The most restless
nation, and the greatest travellers in the world, a cer-
tain section of us are the best practical geographers in
the world. The stay-at-home English who don't travel,
and specially girls who have only learned the use of
the globes at ordinary young ladies' seminaries, are
the worst geographers theoretically. Just as the
French, when taught exclusively by the priests, are
200
MODERN MAIDENS.
the worst historians, and the Americans the worst
judges of art and in all matters of taste. But even the
French, when taught by the secular, are above us in
the education of their women; which is quite a new
reading of respective values. Their diploméd gover-
nesses command better pay than our first-rate finishing
governesses; and the whole system of instruction by
the cours is better than ours. The convent schools
are valueless, so far as the depth or truth of their in-
struction goes.
They are so restricted for fear the
girls should learn more than the orthodox French
mother thinks fitting, that everything which could
possibly reveal the realities of life is glossed over and
covered down; and by consequence, every art, and
every science, and every branch of knowledge is trun-
cated and impoverished. This is only true however,
of the convent schools; the education given by secu-
lar professors is beyond all praise. Cheap, efficient,
catholic, free to all comers, and within the capacity of
all but the abjectly poor, it is the pride of Paris. We
have nothing like it in England; and far before the
need of Hausmannizing London is the need of ap-
pointing a Minister of Public Instruction, and of
approximating our system of education somewhat to
the French cours and classes.
201
MODERN MAIDENS.
Then as to the manners of our girls. I am not one
of the sect which thinks that everything good and
true and beautiful died out with my own youth; but
pretty and good as the girls are now, as they ever were
and will be, thank God, there are some things about
them that I, and all their best friends, would like to
see changed. And one is, their habit of talking slang.
It is very rare indeed to find a girl at this present day
who has not graduated in this questionable science;
and words which twenty years ago would not have
been heard off a cab-rank, are now bandied about
from girl to girl, and "chaff" has become an institu-
tion of the drawing-room as much practised and recog-
nised as it is in the streets. Of course men laugh at
all this. It is piquante to hear their own jokes and
allusions repeated, in a manner ignorantly, by these
innocent pretenders; but sometimes the ugly thought
will obtrude-Is it all as ignorant and innocent as
appears? Do those girls know the real meaning of
the equivoques they use so freely and unblushingly?
And then, though they may laugh still, it is in a dif-
ferent spirit. They would not like their own wives to
be of the same kind as the girls they flirt with, laugh
with-and at-and encourage. All this foolish fast-
ness is very well for a fleeting pastime, but it does not
202
MODERN MAIDENS.
do for the seriousness of life: and so we find it. These
girls do not marry. There is a great cry going up all
through the kingdom about the paucity of marriages.
in the middle and upper classes, and certainly one of
the causes is the fastness and the frivolity of the girls.
Men, who are not merely love-sick fools, have some
kind of regard to the future when they marry. They
want a wife who will do her part well and faithfully;
who will take care of their property, make a happy
and a well-ordered home, and be a good and pains-
taking mother and mistress. And they think, rightly
or wrongly I do not pretend to determine, that girls
who live only for balls and dress and pleasure and
extravagance, who do not care to learn anything, and
to whom home means nothing sweeter or dearer than
a fiction, they think that girls of this stamp are not
exactly calculated to make rational wives or profitable
partners; and so they leave untried that tremendous
experiment which, whether it succeeds or not, has to
be kept to when once undertaken.
Of course the sole cause does not lie with our
girls. I know that the whole sense of the nation has
turned to self-indulgence and luxury, and that prudence
is becoming daily a more important and a more popular
virtue; that is, prudence which forbids marriage unless
203
MODERN MAIDENS.
with a relatively sufficient income. But prudence is
all very well up to a certain point; beyond this point.
it becomes an evil not a virtue; and the prudence
which forbears the exercise of the best affections for
the sake of a few yards of silk, or a well-appointed
dinner, is not of the nature of a virtue. To barter
home and love and children for the luxuries that can
be done without, and that do not help the life or the
soul in any way, is not prudence, but utter and entire
selfishness.
If
Yet, if the women were simpler, the men would be
less afraid. In all the social life women have the
supreme influence, and where men are ambitious and
restless, it is as much for them as for themselves.
our girls would honestly consent to become simple,
inexpensive, quiet, as in the olden times, they would
find their account and their happiness by the change.
This does not say that they are to become dowdies,
or mere servants; they can be simple and yet beau-
tiful, inexpensive and yet graceful. Some girls cer-
tainly do go off into extremes on this side as well as
on the other, and make themselves utterly unlovely
because they will not be fast. They seem to
set all their wits into disfiguring themselves, and to
think that if they are forbidding in manner, and un-
204
MODERN MAIDENS.
attractive in person, they are all right, and sure of
salvation. They do not see that the great need is of
beauty that is not vanity, of character that is not bold-
ness, of intellect that has still feminine softness and
the tender submission of the weaker left to it, and
that when they make themselves less than woman,
they are betraying their own cause, and strengthening
the hands of the enemy. Between fast girls and
strong-minded ones the sweet fair-faced English ideal.
fares but badly. And what we want to get back
among us is this fair-faced English ideal, this loving,
tender, gentle, and modest creature, who is so beauti-
ful as a blossom, and so noble and magnificent in her
fruits. Please God we shall live through this odd
phase of society now on hand. There is a good in it,
somehow, if difficult at this moment to discover; but
there must be good in it as an eventuality, else is all
our learning vain. And when we have lived through
it we shall get back the ideal maiden as we once had
her; perhaps not in exactly the old form, but in the
old loveliness: we shall have her sweet and yet
strong, beautiful and yet modest, energetic and yet
loving; we shall have her as our pride and our boast
and our beloved-the thing we older women would
defend with our lives-that our men will kneel down.
205
MODERN MAIDENS.
to and reverence while they love-that our worst
enemies must respect-and that our best friends envy
us, in sympathetic admiration. An English maiden
will again mean one of the loveliest and noblest of
earth's daughters, and the national madness now upon
us will be forgotten; or else it will be deplored while
rejoiced in, as the mysterious root of evil which has
brought forth the flower of good. In which lies one
of the darkest problems and greatest mysteries of
human life.

206

MODERN MATRONS.
T may be objected that our poor girls, who get
4
such hard words thrown at them, are not so
much to blame for the present disastrous set of the
social current as are the matrons-that youth by its
very nature is imitative if wilful—and that if we, the
women, had set our daughters a better example, taught
them higher things, and used our influence to worthier
purpose, we should not have seen the growth and
culmination of the "girl of the period," but our girls
would have remained what they were, modest, home-
staying, and simple. And the objection is just. As
in the case of mistresses and maids, influence goes
from the superior to the inferior; it descends; it does
not mount up from the people to the peerage, but
filters through the higher strata down to the lower.
The same law is followed with respect to the com-
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parative action of youth and maturity. Girls copy
their elders, supplementing the extravagances naturally
springing from youth and inexperience, but they do
not make the prevailing style of manners or morals,
whatever that style may be; at the most they only
exaggerate the model placed before them. Let us be
fair and equitable. The young things have quite
enough to answer for at the best, and do what we will
we cannot wash them absolutely white; but it is only
right that we, the elders, should bear such part of the
burden as belongs to us, and do penance for the sins
that lie on our heads.
I start then with the theorem that much of the
present evil state of things has its root and cause in
the exceeding folly of us, the mature women-in our
worse than folly! Take the gravest of our present
faults-the astounding worldliness that exists, eating
like a canker through society, and threatening its very
life blood with disease: what hand have we in
the propagation of this? What example do we set?
What faith and works do we practise? Say-who are
the people we cultivate as acquaintances and friends—
men and women of means or of worth? people who
"can do us good," as the phrase goes; that is, give us
introductions to grander folk than ourselves, procure for
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us cards of admission to pleasant entertainments,
blow the bubble of our position a trifle larger, and
paint it up with brighter colours than we can make or
give out of our own material? or people who are worth
knowing for themselves, for their learning, their good-
ness, their bright example, their clear insight into
spiritual truth, their absolute and human value? Very
few indeed, comparatively, are the houses where the
most welcome guests are those with only such creden-
tials; still fewer those which keep the front door closed
against the wealthy and influential, who not only have
not got them at all, but who are positively and dis-
tinctly worthless. Can we wonder then that our girls
place more faith in a banking account than in mere
goodness, when they see us who are their leaders do
the same?
There is scarcely one amongst us who would not
feel that she absolutely failed in her maternal duty if she
did not discourage the poorer of two aspirants for her
daughter's hand in favour of the richer; though
the poorer might be the finer man and the nobler
nature. Perhaps the feminine instinct might secretly
incline to the finer man, even if the nobler nature did
not count; but the maternal balance would readjust
itself when the moment of decision came; and what
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would it signify if one was brave and temperate, and
the other mean-spirited and peevish, so long as the
money question stood square and solid? The least.
worthy can make the best settlements on the dear
child, and assure her luxury during his lifetime, and a
handsome competence after; the nobler can give her
only love, and a strong man's tender care, and the
possibilities-nothing but possibilities, remember!-
lying in courage and energy and brains. And though
possibilities are all very well, if you can get nothing
more certain, and good prospects are better than no
prospects at all, yet what are they compared to the
positive worth of handsome settlements? the actuality
of an assured income? Certainly the poorer man is
the better fellow of the two, yet really all men are so
very much alike after you have known them a little
while, and lived with them long enough to wear off the
gloss, that it does not much signify which the girl
marries; she is sure to have her cross to bear; and the
finer the dress in which she bears it the better for her;
she will have so much the more to divert her attention
from the contemplation of its shape and the pressure
of its angles. Grand entertainments, beautiful attire,
and assured worldly position, are facts; but love and
preference go only for fancies; and it is better to
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have only a little love and a great deal of money, than
to reverse the order and take the fancy in bulk and the
fact in little. This is the reasoning of ninety-nine out
of a hundred modern matrons in reference to the
marriage of their daughters; and then we wonder that
our girls grow up selfish, when the whole training of
home has taught them to be nothing else—when the
whole atmosphere in which they have lived has been
one of worldliness and materialism (however craftily
overlaid by a narrow professing faith), and a self-seeking
which cannot be dignified with any name so lofty as
that of ambition. "As the twig is bent the tree's
inclined;" and when we find our matrons upholding
simplicity and truth and love before worldly advantages,
we shall then see our girls follow on the same line;
but while mamma preaches prudence, and the stifling
of natural inclination for the advantages of arbitrary
position, what can the daughter do but drink in her
influence and follow as she is led.
Perhaps at no time of the world's history has there.
been less outward distinction between the young and
the old among women than there is at this moment.
All those strongly marked differences which used to
exist between the wife and the maiden, the youthful
and the mature, are now obliterated, and our women
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of forty and upwards vie with girls of twenty in every-
thing but their youth and freshness. The dress which
used once to mark epochs as well as dates, is now ab-
solutely the same for every one between eighteen and
sixty; art coming in to aid the deficiencies of nature
and to hide the ravages of time. Frizettes, dyes, and
wreaths of false hair, without the suspicion of a silver
thread among the luxuriant plaits and braids, and
crowned with milliner's roses to match the perfumer's
"bloom" on the withered cheeks, are supposed to
bestow the unmistakeable appearance and assurance
of youth; and the uncovered shoulders and bare arms
are held to help in the deception. Surely looking-
glasses must be made with some peculiar run in the
silver in these latter times, so that they do not give
back true reflections, and women are therefore unable
to see themselves either as others see them or as they
are. How else can we understand the ostrich-like
complacency with which matrons, with half a century
at their backs, exhibit themselves made up and tricked
out like young girls, sincerely believing that no one
will find out the difference, and that the friendly gas-
light will raise or reduce all to the same level? For
no one commits follies with intention; and of all the
follies committed, those of coquetry and vanity defeat-
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ing their own end are the least intentional. When
therefore, we see our robust, full-blown mothers, with
their pretty little jaunty patterns that look so well on
their slim-set daughters and so ill on their rotund
selves when we see them rouged and tightened and
padded, helped out here and disguised closely there,
the result of all their efforts being a "figure of fun" that
does not bear looking at, we know that they cannot
see themselves aright, and that their mirrors tell them
nothing and their friends less than nothing-we know
that they mean to make themselves beautiful and not
ridiculous, enticing and not repellant. We know too
that they fail in their design-fail signally-and that the
best thing which could happen to them would be to
learn exactly how things are with them, and what the
world thinks of them.
Without going into extravagances, or thinking that
because a woman is married to one man she ought to
make herself ugly to all the rest, or because she is
no longer young she ought to give up all idea of
pleasing, and be hideous and ungainly because she
cannot be blooming and sylph-like-and without going
back to any form of the sumptuary laws-it would
surely be a great good if there was more distinction of
dress for the various states and ages of women. As
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it is, every one tries to look something different from
the reality—the maid wants to look like the mistress,
the matron wants to look like a girl; and you cannot
please this last better than by telling her she looks like
the daughter of her husband, and as young as her
own daughter. As for poor Mary the maid, you have
won her heart clean away, and her head with it, if you
call her miss, and let her believe you have mistaken
her for a lady. But we have not to do now with Mary
the maid, only with the mistress. The meaning of
the strict school-room seclusion practised in high life,
is not so much to keep the girls fresh and unused, as
to conceal from society as long as possible the irre-
fragable evidence they afford. While they are only
little creatures, they may be taken about as much as
you like.
Juvenile balls, theatres, amusements of
all sorts are allowed in almost any excess; laying
the foundation of future disease and robbing their
childhood of half its charm. But no one gives any
heed to this. They are too young to be rivals or
chronological tell-tales; and as they can be dressed
prettily and made to look picturesque, and as finery
stands in the place of love, and a lavish use of
embroidery does for care and thought, they are good
as room ornaments and occasions for compliment.
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Besides, even unloving mothers know that they always
look well with little children about them, and that
many men like them best thus, and admire them most.
But when they grow into what are called "great girls,"
when the fact of a daughter of fifteen tells somewhat
against a mother's assumption to be considerably
under thirty, then they are religiously relegated to the
obscurity of the school-room; and when time can be
no longer delayed, and they are finally brought out,
they are more often than not regarded by the mother
as her rivals and her enemies as her thorns and not
her roses. This is no exaggeration. Hundreds of
fashionable households are living at this moment in
exactly the conditions I have sketched; hundreds of
fashionable mothers are chafing under the evidence
given by their daughters, and wishing, how devoutly!
that there was some method of suppression, short of
cruelty and murder, which would give them a year
or two longer of their uncontradicted pretence of
youth.
The great art-not duty-which women have to
learn is, how to make the best use, in its own time, of
the various kinds of attraction, the various sorts of
charm, practicable by them-each beautiful in its way,
but only perfect when in harmony with age and con-
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dition. For instance, the simplicity of a child is
silliness in a full-grown girl; the unsuspecting frank-
ness of a girl is loose-lippedness and undignified want
of reticence in a woman; the instinctive coquetry,
and desire to excite admiration and love in a maiden,
become folly and heartlessness and a fixed habit of in-
constancy, and, as time goes on, a ghoulish craving, in
a matron; and so on through the whole list. And
this insane desire to appear young always-only young
-which destroys the intrinsic value of half our
women, is power pitifully wasted, even when the end
is in a manner attained. We may say, and with
truth, "how well Mrs. Evergreen looks to-night!-how
young she keeps-how astonishingly well she wears-
what a perfect specimen of the mature siren !"-but
would she be older, uglier, less charming, less the
siren she is now, if her dress and manners were a
little more in accordance with her known years, and
less like those of a maiden of eighteen ?—which she
is not if she had something more than excess of
magnificence in jewellery, and excess of audacity in
fashion to mark the difference between herself and
her daughter? On the contrary, she would look far
more beautiful, if for no other reason than the absence
of rivalry; for in the comparison between herself and
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her girls, which she herself institutes, she must of
necessity come off the worst.
as theirs; it is beauty, and of a
kind, but it is not girlish beauty
:
Her beauty is not
very rich and lovely
and when she sets
herself in distinct comparison with her girls, the foot-
prints of Time are seen, and she loses the advantage
of what she has kept still untouched.
The root of this special flower of folly lies in the
want of purpose that pervades the whole life of
woman. Society and the admiration of men make up
nine-tenths of our causa vita, and the moment we
cease to be ornamental in the one, or to command the
other, we collapse, having nothing else to turn to,
nothing else to bear us on. We do not cultivate as
an art the faculty of pleasant conversation, or the
power of charming by wit, by sympathy, by readiness
of comprehension; we put all our eggs into one
basket, and that basket is the mere physical charm of
youth, and when that has shrunk into a faded memory
we have nothing to take its place. And yet an old
woman might be absolutely delightful if she would-
but delightful in a very different way from what she
was as a girl. The mistake is when she insists on
being delightful in the same way; and so between the
two stools of affected youth and real age falls to the
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ground in utter unloveliness and want of attraction.
We see exactly the same kind of thing, and from the
same cause, in men who have no occupation and no
pursuit beyond that of fascinating women, and killing.
an importunate time in drawing-rooms. So long as
their youth and green middle age last, they are pleasant
enough to those who like the kind of thing, and do
not think a man without higher aims than to be a
successful lady-killer worse than a nuisance; but when
they become old, yet will remain young-when they
are old beaux, old bucks, old fops, by what name so
ever we choose to designate them, can anything be
more contemptible, more ludicrous, more unworthy?
One thing only-a mature matron aiming at youth;
a mother setting herself in rivalry to her daughters.
There are however, some of us who live for other
things but society and admiration; some of us who
take up the woman's question, say, and work at it
heartily and without foolish exaggeration; a few, mar-
vellously few! who give ourselves up to study, and the
enriching and enlarging of our minds, without further ob-
ject in personal and practical use; and a great many of
us who work for love of work and not remuneration, who
go into one or other of the many channels of philan-
thropy, and lay ourselves out to do good to our
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fellow-creatures.
And there are some of us who think
that our own home is our fittest sphere, and that to
act a noble life in quietness and self-respect is a fitter
thing than to talk about it, while leaving the practical
application to others. But without in the least depre-
ciating the efforts of those who are trying to get juster
laws and a higher recognition for us, I would say one
thing-there is too much talk among us women about
the injustice with which we are treated, and too little
done to compel men to regard us with the respect
which must of necessity precede admission into pri-
vileges hitherto denied. The remedy lies in the
hands of the matrons, to be used when and as
soon as they will. No man despises the wife whose
great heart and noble nature have helped him in his
life's hard struggle; whose love has been greater than
her fear; and whose counsels have always been for the
better way, no matter what the dangers and difficulties
to be encountered; and no man despises the mother
whose precepts and example, both harmonious with
each other, have been ever from his youth his ideal of
feminine sweetness and purity, of womanly generosity
and charity. If a man has had for wife or mother a
thoroughly fine-natured woman, he respects her in the
whole sex: if, on the other hand, his wife, or yet more,
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his mother, has been vicious, vain, weak, unworthy,
for her sake too, and warped by her bad influence, he
despises the whole sex, and thinks the best of them
but whited sepulchres. For we must never forget that
if men have the command of things, women have in-
fluence over men; and that though the influence of a
wife over her husband may be limited, that of a mother
over her son is almost unlimited. And indeed humanity
only asks leave to love and respect !-it finds no pain
so great as that which follows on the breaking of a
youthful idol, the discovery that a youthful ideal has
been a sham and a delusion, and that venerated names
have been names only, but things by no means worthy
of veneration! The first doubt which comes to a
man of the integrity, the truth, the perfect propriety of
his mother, is perhaps the most agonizing he can
know. The degradation runs through all his veins,
and he suffers on every side; in his sonship, and in
the whole of his relations with women, all of whom are
tainted henceforth with the leprosy that has touched.
the issues of his mother's life. The misconduct of a
father, bad as this is in family history, is not so bad as
the failure of a mother. But then, just in proportion
to the grave influence of her offence, is the beneficent
influence of her nobleness;—and surely it is no light
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}
office to be the guide of a man's inner life-to be the
thing that has kept him pure in times of temptation,
and the remembrance of which, in its holy teaching
and spotless example, comes ever before him as a
model to live up to and a love to be worthy of.
This is eminently one of the circumstances of human
life in which the physical instinct and the spiritual
meaning go together in importance-I mean the im-
mense value which has been always attached to
maternity. Women cry out now-a-days against the
theory of being born into the world only to be married,
and claim the right of independence, and of respect
and power in isolation. So be it, and may each
woman have free space to walk when and how it seems
best to her; with no cavilling from the world around,
and no hindrance from social prejudices of any kind.
But she cannot undo the ordained decree for all her
efforts she cannot make her barren isolation of so
much value as a noble maternity, which is the highest
meaning, if we look at it aright, of a woman's whole
life. Not in the mere fact of giving citizens to the
state, as it used to be considered in times when men
were wanted as so many tribal possessions, so much
defence work against the enemies on the borders, so
much wealth in the community, but as the means.
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whereby great thoughts are carried on, great lives are
formed, and the unseen foundations of progress are
set. Is not all root-work in the dark? only when the
growth is perfected are the roots sometimes laid bare;
but while the growth is going on they are always un-
derground and hidden. So with the progress of
humanity, which depends so greatly on the unseen
and silent influence of mothers; on the example set
and the manners tolerated or repressed by the matrons
of society. If we were resolute to discountenance all
this fastness, vulgarity, loose talk, and looser action,
all this vanity and greed and worldliness that we cry out
against each effecting the reform in her own home-
we should soon put it all down. Do we find boys or
girls of the period in the houses of noble, gracious,
sensible women? Not a bit of it !-only in the houses
of the weak, the vain, and the fast on their own ac-
count-only when the mother wishes to be as young
as her daughters, and when she has learned nothing.
deeper of life than the love of pleasure and the desire
to get on in the world.
There is no fact to be more warmly insisted on than
the boundless importance of the power and of the in-
fluence of women. If we would but work out our lives.
on our own natural ground lines, thoroughly and
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honestly, we should be the true saviours of society.
One great fault lies in our discontent with our inevi-
table lot, because of the valuelessness which we our-
selves have suffered to come about; but instead of
trying to go out of our sphere, as some are attempting
to do, if we would but resolve to enrich, enlarge, and
perfect our present duties, we should be indeed the
noble women we ought to be-matrons in whose very
title would rest honour and the best welfare of the
nation. But the reform must come from us and by us ;.
till the matrons make themselves nobler, the men and
the girls will be as they are, and worse.

223

WOMANLY DEPENDENCE.
NE of the most frequent moral anodynes sought
to be administered to those women who are
anxious to have more power than they possess now,
is to tell them, that if they have no active rule in
affairs, they have instead an immense amount of un-
seen influence; and that influence is far better for
them than power, being more certain if less showy,
and more lasting if not so notorious. And there are
some among us who prefer this influence to confessed
authority; while others, if but weak in numbers yet
for the most part strong in intellect, would rather seem
to be the things they are than live under false pre-
tences of any kind—would rather own to the exact
part they play in the great drama of society, than act
one character while set down in the world's play-
bill for another.
224
WOMANLY DEPENDENCE.
But the trite truth that nothing is single in its action,
makes this part of the woman question very difficult
to deal with. For womanly influence and manly
domination so act and react on each other, that we
may take either side we like, according to our own
views and experience. We may make out quite to
»ur own satisfaction, and with a very fair array of facts
for our proofs, that women are the real masters of
ociety or the most abject slaves; we may say that
man flourishes the whip-and uses it too: that part of
the matter being undeniable-while woman holds tha
reins; that though he appear to drive the whole team
according to his pleasure, all his sole action is to goad
and punish and make a disturbance, while the other
actually guides, checking and diverting and directing
at her will. Or we may show that women have no
part whatsoever in the conduct of life, and that all
they do is to make frantic clutches at the reins, re-
ceiving as their reward the loose end of the thong
across their hands.
This may or may not be so; but what is true, is, that
women are crying out against the present state of
things with or without reason; and are beginning to
demand an honest and open recognition of such power
as they may possess already, with a wider area and a
225
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WOMANLY DEPENDENCE.
freer scope than any yet afforded them. And they are
beginning to cry out too against their life-long depen-
dence on men, and to desire the exercise of their own
free will and the power of self-support-leave to take up
the parable for themselves and to live as seems best
to themselves, not only as is pleasantest and most
flattering to men.
The root of it all is money-that root of all social
life if also of all evil. Women want to make money
independently of men. They want to be freed from
the state of bondage which the necessity of being fed
by another's hand imposes on all hunian beings. For
they know that marriage, when stripped of its senti-
ment (which however, is a largely modifying power)
and reduced to its basic element, is in great part a
matter of food and clothing; and that if they were in-
dependent of man's support, and could feed and clothe
themselves unhelped, and maintain their own socia!
status unassisted, they could make better terms for
themselves and compel a more just and liberal treat-
nent. For there is no doubt about this part of the
great quarrel, that women are badly treated and harshly
handled. And there is no doubt that, self-interest
being one of the chief motive powers of humanity, if
the wife brought into the home half the family income,
226
WOMANLY DEPENDENCE.
and not only the administrative faculty, as she does
now-if, by taking herself away she would also take
away half the joint funds-then men would be chary
how they offended her, and would be more inclined
than not to overlook faults inconvenient to discover.
As it is, men have the right to demand from their wives
absolute attention to their wishes, because they are
their property, their dependents, creatures whom they
feed and clothe in return for certain services, of which
the careful administration of their earnings is one.
These words will revolt many, both men and wo-
men; but it is a true saying if a hard one-true, thar
is, on one side only, not universally; because putúng
out of court all question of sentiment and love. Still a
man naturally, and so far justly, thinks that the wife
for whom he works, to whon. he gives a social status
which else she would not have, who bears his name-
thus losing her own individuality and all her past in
favour of him-that this mere reflex of his state and
dependent on his strength should be subject to him,
and that his will, not hers, should be paramount in
their lives. She is but a servant to him; an honoured
servant if you will, but a servant all the same; and
while she has not the means of self-support she can be
nothing else, and must show herself obedient if she
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WOMANLY DEPENDENCE.
would be grateful. It is a severe but an inexorable
logic; and the natural dislike the world has to hear
a painful truth stated crudely and cruelly will not break
the links of the chain.
No one but women themselves know how bitter this
dependence is to them. Many a wife even after long
years of marriage, and when kindly treated by her hus-
band, the mother of his children and used to the
manipulation of the housekeeping allowance, many
even of this blessed class, feel bitterly that nothing is
theirs, that it is not their own. It is their husband's; and
if in their confidence you may hear them passionately
exclaim, "Oh! that I had money of my own! however
small, if I had only something, and was not obliged to
go to my husband for every pair of gloves or yard of
ribbon !"
This is the real meaning of the modern revolt-
women want to be independent, and to be on terms
of monetary equality with men.
Slavery has ceased to be respectable in society.
The feeling of the times goes against the idea of one
human being living in abject subjection to another,
and the theory of personal responsibility and indivi-
duality is taking its place. And we Englishwomen apply
to ourselves what the emancipationists have applied to
228
WOMANLY DEPENDENCE.
the negro, and demand the same results. The law
makes us slaves. We may gild the bitter pill as we
will by putting our slavery on our weakness, our
consequent need of protection, and the like; the fact
remains the same. We are worse off in England than
we are in any other country assuming to be civilized
at all, even than in that Mohammedan East where the
theory of protection is carried out to its ultimate, in
the loss of all personal liberty that might bring danger
to the woman-or the husband; all roving power
chiefly, or isolation, and its consequent freedom of
action. But it must be owned, sorrowfully, that in
England we are very badly dealt by. Our whole state
here is a compromise between antiquated laws and mo-
dern feeling; and between the two we come near
to falling to the ground. Socially we are free; we can
come and go, and make plans and assignations at
Our own will-by law we are bound and have
no power, save what our husbands permit: theoreti-
cally we are the chattels of our respective barons,
and by the statutes take rank with
with infants
and idiots-in fact we are too often tyrants, and
make home a place of torture to the bored husband
whom we hold tight fastened to the apronstring; by
the Church Service we are endowed with all his worldly
229
WOMANLY DEPENDENCE.
goods, by the law of the land we do not possess
the right to a shilling of our own money save under
trust, conveyed to some other man as our friend pro-
tecting us from our husband; we swear to him obedi-
ence, and receive from him the oath of worship; but
we perform our part of the contract badly enough, and.
come off worse in the performance of his. This is the
condition of things in England, this land of compro-
mises and make-believes, where "nothing is but all
things seem," and where a peculiar virtue is assumed
to belong to appearances and the maintenance of legal
fictions.
We can judge better what the possibilities of a
woman's sufferings are as sanctioned by the law-that
dread and venerable law which people make their
juggernaut and their fetish-when a husband chooses
to be cruel and tyrannical. We can then see how
irresponsible and tremendous is his power, and how
utterly impotent every one else is in the way of pro-
tection and help. If he simply takes care to keep
within the letter of the law, he may do pretty much as
he likes with us, short of violent assault or murder,
He can force us to live where he will, though the air
of the place he chooses as our residence is slow death.
to us; he can keep us in comparative poverty, say
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WOMANLY DEPENDENCE.
with a little marchioness in the country, while he is
spending his thousands in luxurious chambers-for
professional purposes, understood; but as his rated
home is with us in the Essex marshes, we have no legal
redress, and we must accept it, however wretched, as our
own without a murmur; he can give our money, if not
settled on ourselves by trust, to his mistresses, and
leave it all to his illegitimate children, while cutting us
and his legitimate children entirely out of his will; he
can forbid us to hold any intercourse with our own
friends, but he can compel us to receive his; to his
active tyranny we can oppose only the passive resis-
tance which, to do us justice, we know very well how
to oppose, and which we generally use in no stinted
measure. But if we appeal for protection to the law,
we appeal to that on which we have no claim, which
·loes not recognise that we have grounds of complaint,
and which cannot and will not help us. We must be
very badly off indeed before the law will put out its
hand for our behalf. Can we show bruises ?-can we
swear we are in fear of our lives ?-can we prove infi-
delity coupled with extra revolting circumstances?
Unless we can do this our suit will not lie, and we can
get no protection. But English gentlemen, even of
the worst type, are not in the habit of striking their
231
WOMANLY DEPENDENCE.
wives or using the dog-whip in the drawing-room; and
no man, unless he is wishing for a divorce, parades his
infidelities or brings them into the house, so as to give
his wife a hold over him. So that really it is difficult
for a woman to get any satisfactory release from a
husband who ill-treats her only up to a certain point;
for all that this ill-treatment may be the absolute ruin
of her life and happiness; but if it stops short of the
definition of legal cruelty, it is nothing of which justice
can take cognizance.
As for the settlement question now under public
discussion, there are many friends of women who ad-
vocate the trustee's system of settlements because they
say women are so weak, so guided by their affections,
and so easily got over, that, give them the free use of
their own money, and they would be infallibly ruined;
for they would let themselves be coaxed out of it or
bullied out of it, as the humour of the man went, and
the last state of those poor victims would be worse
than the first. Do we however find this in France?
There, women have the right to their own property;
they can trade, earn, and keep; and on the whole they
are more of a power, both in the house and in society,
than they are here.
Again, many say that womanly independence would
232
WOMANLY DEPENDENCE.
loosen the marriage tie. If so, this only shows that
what the extreme party says is true, and that women
are held by self-interest and the necessity of food, not
by love. Is marriage really nothing but this? is it
only the squaw and the brave put into European
dress? If love then is of no account in the conside-
ration of this matter, if family instincts go for nothing,
and only the lowest material conditions are of practical
value, then let the truth be known, and let all such
fables as sentiment, reason, and morality go to the
winds. If on the contrary, the food question
while the basis is only part of the whole, and
if a larger share of independence to women would.
only readjust the over-weighted balance, let that
be tried without slavish fear or subservience: for if
vox populi vox dei is in its literal sense a fallacy, the
righteousness and need of recognition belonging to
class movements is a fact. All that we can or ought
to do with a large class movement is to discuss it
fairly, and endeavour to give it a good and wise direc-
tion. It is cruel tyranny to repress it; and for the
most part a futile tyranny. For we might as well
attempt to check the growth of a plant or of a human
being, by merely wishing, as to check the progress of
ideas by either refusing to recognise that they exist,
233
WOMANLY DEPENDENCE.
or by angrily saying that they are bad. The only way
that has yet been found by which obnoxious doctrines
may be effectually crushed out of existence, is by a
vigorous application of the fire and sword; as used to
be in old times, when heresies were things to be fought
against and put down, not by reason and argument and
a better teaching, but by suffering and blood. However,
this kind of thing would not exactly do for the woman
question; for not even the most ardent advocate of
feminine submission would like to see the strong-
minded of the sex broken alive on the wheel, or burnt
at Smithfield, or given over to the tender mercies of
the Maiden and the bootikins.
What then are we to do with uncomfortable ques-
tions, such as this irrepressible woman question which
meets us at every turn? The theory is that women are
tender handed and half-glorified creatures, almost
without sin and surely without a serious care, kept in
a safe asylum where they suffer no want, see no evil,
meet with no rough usage, where they are kept at the
expense of men who go out into the world to toil and
suffer that they may be cared for and safe; that they
are given up to the best and purest affections, loved
and protected, and thoroughly happy in their womanly
submission, while in reality possessing all the power.
234
WOMANLY DEPENDENCE.
This is the theory of woman's life, and now we come
to the FACT; and after all facts are stubborn things,
and go further than all the theories ever invented.
Wisely or foolishly-that is not the question, nor
whether they are right or wrong-a certain number of
women are dissatisfied with their lives as arranged by
law and social observances. They despise the safe and
claustral home so long vaunted as the holy asylum of
all the virtues; they want freedom, and the house door
unbarred, and set wide open for them as for men.
They do not respect the feeling in men which would
keep them secluded from the world, but want to be
out and trying conclusions with the powers of life all
the same as their brothers and their fathers. They
want to be able to live by their own exertions, and so,
never to be forced to marry for a settlement when
not impelled to do so by choice. They want, if mar-
ried, to be half the active power of the family, and
not only the passive administrator of their husband's
earnings, which are never their income-the distribu-
tors of the results of his energy which shames their
own supineness. They want to range themselves side
by side with him as his equal, not to be only the
petted toy of his home or the superior servant of his
establishment; they want to make their sphere
:
235
WOMANLY DEPENDENCE.
independent of his, but in no wise antagonistic; and
there is no use whatever in pooh-poohing all this as
folly or wickedness, or both. If the feeling exists
with women, it will have to be expressed, and sooner
or later it must force a recognition for itself. If it is
only a fancy, or a thing put on them-assigned to them
by others--it will not come to anything; but if it is a
reality, it will have to be brought to its final issues,
and the world must needs see to the end of it.
on man.
But all women do not covet this independence. To
a very large number-I am bound to say the larger
number as yet a wider sphere of action and a more
unfettered freedom would be as intolerable as the un-
protected liberty of a Christian woman to the veiled
and guarded Moslem. To some women their sole
ambition, their very life blood, lies in their dependence
They like to be worked for by him; they
like to owe their all to him, and are prouder of his
place and fame than of their own; they put their
honour in serving him as their superior, and the more
lovingly they prostrate themselves before him, the
more they are exalted in their own esteem and the
greater their reflected pride. But these women love.
They love beyond and to the annihilation of indivi-
duality, consequently their honour resides in the ex-
236
WOMANLY DEPENDENCE.
altation of the being beloved. If love was universal
in marriage we should hear nothing of this cry for in-
dependence; but marriage being what it is, so often a
dead failure and the leashing together of foes not
friends-or at the best the loose-held tie between two
cool and tepid companions-it is only natural that the
women who are unhappily mated should desire to be
freed from tyranny, and to have the power of efficient
self-support since they are denied the satisfactory pro-
tection of man.
Still the whole question is a tangled web from first
to last, and no one can see his way quite clearly
through its mazes. Of course it is utterly revolutionary
and subversive of the whole existing order of things;
but that is no argument against a fair trial of its
merits; unless we have come to finality and the Abso-
lute, and have touched the apex of ultimate perfection.
With a more settled order of society the great merit of
womanly submission has ceased to exist, because the
great need of manly protection has passed away; and
hence, because women are safer they may also be
freer. But it ought to be one thing or the other; and
with more wholeness of heart than it is at present. If
and while they are dependent they owe men submission,
obedience, and that attention to his wishes which the
237
WOMANLY DEPENDENCE.
+
one kept should show to the one who keeps; only
when they are self-supporting can they assume to be
equals, owing love truly but not subservience, cour-
tesy but not humility, graciousness and tenderness and
sweet consideration, but not obedience, nor yet
submission from any such meagre motive as now
exists. But never, let this be distinctly understood, can
any personal condition whatever free them from the
obligation of their natural and womanly duties
the contrary, the nobler and braver and higher they
are, the more perfectly and reasonably ought these
duties to be performed. Stand where we will the
; on
cradle must be our sweetest, dearest, holiest altar!
·God put far from us the time when it shall cease to be
this!

238

OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
A
LL transitional states are more or less unlovely,
even though the transition is from a lower to a
higher type. In all cases we find perfected inferiority
more beautiful than imperfect improvement; as, for
one instance, a salmon is a more beautiful thing than
a porpoise, yet a mammal is higher in the scale of
creation than a fish. Perhaps the modern woman is
to be judged by the same principle; perhaps the cause
of all her faults and eccentricities, the answer to
her present moral unloveliness, is to be found in the
imperfection inseparable from the period of growth-
in the amorphous condition of a development that is
yet unfinished. Let us hope so, and believe that from
the queer compound of idleness and fastness, neglected
duties and usurped offices, characteristic of the sex at
this present moment, we shall see finally evolved a
239
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
being infinitely superior to her past self, lifted to a
higher sphere, and with a wider and nobler influence
than she has ever had or known.
Impatience with her life as it has hitherto been
mapped out for her by the needs of society and the
laws of nature, and a restless ambition to do something
of a more active and notorious kind than the domestic
duties assigned to her for her portion, are the two
predominant characteristics of the modern woman, in
what way soever the individual may express herself.
There are good and bad sides to this state. Of
the bad are, a cynical indifference to love, and even a
dread of it, as the cord by which she is bound to
slavery, the veil which hoodwinks her and gives power
to her captor; an inordinate desire for money, be-
cause of the social influence and excitement it can
command; a horror of maternity, because of the
personal trouble it brings with it, and the loss of
pleasure-as the world counts pleasure-that must.
needs accompany and follow it; envy of man's place
and wild endeavours to rival him in his own domain,
while repudiating all her own special and peculiar
duties. These are the leading evils of woman's state,
taking them at their worst and honestly confessing
them. Let us confess too, that the good which is
240
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
to come out of this present ungainly metamorphosis of
type is but vaguely sketched in the future; and yet it
is surely a matter of historic necessity! There must
be a moral law ruling and shaping all this eccentric
growth; and though every thoughtful person is deplor-
ing its particular direction, yet there must be more in it
than mere vice or wantonness. Besides, to call a class
movement vicious is not to explain anything—we come
no nearer to the why. And what the student of human
nature and society has to settle-if he can-is why
such and such a moral phenomenon has arisen, under
what law has it been created? by what law is it guided?
and to what result is it tending?
We have been so long accustomed to think of the
arrangements of social and domestic life as we have
them in Europe as finalities-things sent down from
heaven direct, and as stable and eternal as the universe
itself—that we cannot imagine the possibility of a
change. And though we see how much everything has
changed during even the short period in which we have
had a reliable history, yet we will not learn of the
past and so predicate for the future; we will not be-
lieve in still further modifications of our system, which
will be beneficial after the effervescence has subsided,
after the transition-state has been passed through, and
241
R
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
the improved type has got itself perfected in all its
parts. If we look back over our condition in the past,
we shall see at a glance how much it has been changed.
from the good old times to the present day; and we
must needs think as we look-why should not the
future be as the past has been ?
In olden times, as still in savage countries, women
were emphatically the slaves of men-beasts of bur-
den sent into the world for the use and pleasure
only of the stronger sex-with no individual rights-
merely useful as the wives and mothers of men, as the
producers and servants of the braves. This was and
is because they were less important members of the
community than were the men. In the struggle for
existence which goes on throughout all creation, it is of
course the weakest which gets off the worst; in the
apportionment of care and honour in human society,
naturally those who are of least value get least of
either, and those who have much receive more. This
state of things holds good everywherein savage-
countries and in London alike; in the East with
special regard to women, and in the West with com-
parative regard to women also, as well as to the lower
orders as they are called. The North however, never
gave in to the extreme doctrines of female inferiority.
242
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
Throughout all the families of the Gothic race, a cer-
tain amount of consideration was shown to women on
their own account; because their strength gave them a
certain amount of power in the community, because
by their natural independence of character they pos-
sessed that first and absolute condition for the respect
of others, namely, self-respect. When chivalry was
instituted, one of its aims was to still further exalt
women by making them the dispensers of honour A
another was to supply a protection beyond the written
law, by giving them loyal and devoted champions, even
against their husbands. The hard-handed baron held
his wife in the sense of his chattel truly; by law she
was his property, and he had almost absolute power
over her; but the law of courtesy redressed the in-
justice of the law of force, and the lady might choose
a knight to be her defender and protector, bound
by her favour to her service, ready at all times to do
battle for her when she was maligned, and to release
her when she was oppressed.
Women in those early
warlike times were necessarily closely kept, but they
were free within the circle of their tether.
The un-
settled state of the country held the lady and her
handmaidens close to bower and castle-wall; but the
frequent absence of her lord left her unchecked
243
R 2
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
mistress in her own domain. Her sole activities
were then perforce those of the housekeeper and
the mistress. If anything higher than a mere human
sloth, who only dozed away her time by the blazing
hearth or in the sunshine in the courtyard, she
must needs occupy herself in her cookery, her
bread-serving to her retainers, her charities, her needle-
work. Mass and confession truly came in as part of
her duties, and she clung to them with the love of
one who knows that she holds fast by her friend; for
the crozier and the pastoral staff helped her as much
as the bolder shield of chivalry. Thus though, as I
said before, she was in a manner bound, yet was she
a potent influence in her own sphere-a refining, en-
lightening influence, which worked silently but power-
fully, and gave back in blessings what she received in
curses.
As time went on and the country became less dis-
turbed but still not safe, as locomotion became some-
what easier, yet still difficult, and fashions travelled
more quickly yet still slowly, we find the differences be-
tween town and country creeping in and growing apace.
Women were still housewives as before, and their
honour resided in the thoroughness and skill with
which they performed their homely duties; but a cer-
244
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
tain lighter tone and gad-about tendency took pos-
session of the city madam; mainly because she could.
gad-about with more safety than heretofore; while the
country dame was fain to find her only happiness at
home, because she could not seek it elsewhere had
she been inclined. Then also society began to
organize itself a little with reference to what pleased
and displeased the ladies; and their delicacy gradually
grew to be respected as a power. Though manners
were still gross-as we may see by the old plays, the
best mirror of manners to be had, and which are too
coarse and licentious to be read or acted now—yet the
fact that women were consulted as to minor moralities
and conventional decencies, showed as great a re-
volution of public sentiment as anything we could
instance of the revolution going on at this present
time. And by degrees, their admission into the more
public proceedings of society, purified and redeemed
much that was objectionable and bad; till we were
threatened to be overwhelmed by their mock-modesty,
their ultra-squeamishness. more fatal to national
masculinity than even to coarseness.
Thus, on looking back we find that the place of
woman changes according to the state of public
security, by which is measured her comparative value.
245
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
When, as in savage life, it is simply a constant war-
fare of tribe against tribe, a ceaseless struggle for
existence in a world thronged with competitors and
foes, her worth is only in proportion to her value to
the community. As an individual she is nowhere.
She is merely the means by which the supply of
fighting men is kept up; and the machine which brings
the meat killed by the hunters ready cooked to their
mouths. Hence the logical necessity of caring for
the brave before the squaw; the brave representing
the potentiality of many squaws, but the squaw being
only herself and of very small comparative value to
the "nation." In half-civilized times, as in the dark
ages, when life was still also a hand-to-hand contest
with many enemies-though growing up on the edge of
the battle-field were many sweet and gracious flowers
of knightly courtesy, and though the womanly ideal of
the Mary Mother insensibly infused a higher tone into
men's minds towards the womanly reality-she was
only a chattel by law, if a power by courtesy. From
the sixteenth century onward she was wife or mistress,
that is, the helpmate or the plaything of men; but it
marked a change that men had leisure and care to
make her a plaything; and she was an arbiter of
fashion and forms. At the present time she is the
246
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
absolute potentate of society; and the gravest of all
the questions afloat is-Whether she shall or shall not
become identical in power with man, and utterly re-
moved from his protection and control?
There are many causes for the agitation of this
question at this moment in England, but the main
cause is the superabundance of women coincident
with their want of independent means.
There are
not husbands for all, and fathers of the middle class.
as a rule make no provision for their daughters, but
trust to the chances of their marrying, or else leave
them as a legacy to their sons; there are no nunneries
into which the unmarried can be drafted, or so few
that they are not worth counting; life is so much
more costly and luxurious than it was, and men in
consequence so much more disinclined to marry on
small incomes, that marriage, when even possible, is
less frequent than at any other time in the history of
the nation; all of which circumstances working
together, leave a large mass of women doomed to
celibacy and without the means of self-support.
Hence the agitation for extended rights and indepen-
dence as a logical sequence of their present condition,
which is one neither of protection nor of indepen-
dence, neither of dowered ease nor of possible earnings.
247
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
Again, there never was a time when women were
so useless in their own homes, so idle, so unthrifty, so
unwilling to perform their natural domestic duties;
therefore, as they must do something, so mad in the
pursuit of pleasure, or so frantic for abnormal work,
as their tendencies chance to lie. This house idle-
ness of theirs is due partly to the cheapness of labour
and the consequent multiplication of domestic ser-
vants. If servants were more difficult to procure, and
if wages were higher, ladies would be forced in self-
defence to attend to their household duties more
closely than they do now, and would be driven to do
some amount of practical work. They would find
too that practical work is not necessarily mindless
work; and that to keep a house well takes more
intellect and more knowledge than the foolish occupa-
tions to which they give themselves up now, under the
name of work.
The old landmarks by which the reflected honour
of woman was once determined, have been swept
away. The days when the mother of many sons was
blessed above the mother of but few, have gone; so
have those when old maidenism was a scorn, and
childlessness a curse. At least in England. We feel
now that a large family is by no means the personal or
248
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
national blessing it used to be; and that in this over-
populated time of ours, those women are the greatest
benefactresses who give fewest citizens to the clogged
and loaded state. Perhaps this is the unknown in-
stinct which is making women shrink from maternity as
much as they do: perhaps too the law of multitudes
to hold the earth for the future, is being gradually
abrogated in favour of the law of selection, and the
best to inherit; and women are unconsciously helping.
on the course of history, and doing the will of God
without knowing it, by their disinclination to become.
mothers. Can there not be an historical and mental.
magnetism by which our minds are shaped, and our
actions crystallized, we all the while ignorant of the
forces working in us, and even fighting against them
for the sake of what we have already known and
proved? How often the flower of good lies in the
evil seed! Indeed, what is the loveliest plant we know
but the transmutation of soiling earths and foul gases?
And may not this be an analogy with human history,
and the instinctive direction of national thought?
The great future before woman is undoubtedly a
larger area of work—an increased power of self-sup-
port-and equality, not likeness, with man. Here lies
the heart of the mistakes made by sundry of the
249
OUR PAST AND FUTURE,
aspiring and noble-minded sort, as by some of the
foolish and unwomanly. Equality is what every large-
hearted and large-minded man would wish to find in
woman-but not likeness. Likeness indeed is im-
possible, and the assumption of it is therefore as ugly
as it is silly. Two classes of women have to be
got rid of before the truer sort can worthily flourish-
the fine lady and the masculine women. The mere
pretty puppet, with her head in her dress and her
heart nowhere, silly, vain, idle, inconsequent, and
hopelessly ignorant, unable to learn anything and un-
able to do anything useful, and putting her salvation
in her eyes, her waist, and her toilette, is the worst
enemy to her own sex that can be found. She it is
who gives men the right to deride the whole world of
women, to refuse them respect or honour as one re-
fuses jewels and gold to a child. What can such
small simpletons do with respect and honour? says
the scornful man; would it not be casting pearls be-
fore swine to bestow on them power or influence?—
giving infants priceless diamonds for playthings?
Coarse and unlovely as is the masculine woman, she
is at least a power; and one can easily imagine circum-
stances in which she would be useful, and able to be
turned to good account. But the doll woman is
250
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
hopeless from the beginning; of no value whatever,
save as a toy to play with, and a pretty thing to
look at.
As for the masculine woman who tries to make her-
self the bad copy of a man, who thinks delicacy folly,
tenderness weakness, and womanly submission rank
cowardice, she too fashions weapons for the enemy to
use against herself and all her class; she repels and
perhaps alarms men quite as much as the doll woman
causes contempt. If that is to be the result of woman's
rights, they say, we had better continue their wrongs;
for assuredly these dreadful females who are neither
men nor women-these awful creatures who cannot
nurse a baby nor yet command an army-these half-
way monsters, sphinxes, chimeras, Medusas, what not,
are far less desirable in any sense than the silliest little
doll, or the most lackadaisical fine lady we can find;
both of whom at least would be good for petting if
not for leading. Men are wrong there, so some of us
think; but ninety-nine out of a hundred hold this
opinion, and as an opinion it has to be respected and
to have its own due weight.
Another reform has to come in the servant class;
and they too will have to follow the law of improve-
'ment, and be raised into something infinitely better
251
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
than they are at present. Like their mistresses they
are in a transition state, and their efforts after amelio-
ration are being clumsily expressed. Finery, eye-
service without love or heart in it, luxury of personal
habits, and the almost absolute denial of the right of a
mistress to inquire into the working of her own house-
hold, are the present ugly lines of the future nobler
structure. They are bad as absolutes, but not bad as
significations of a better possibility. But then service
has to be remodelled altogether, just as much as it has
been gradually remodelled from the time when it was
serfdom, and wholly devoid of rights: and my own.
belief is that the greater part of the change will come
by machinery. Machinery will do machine work, and
human power will no longer be wanted to do that
which wheels and pulleys can do as well, and perhaps
better. Already we have made many changes that way.
We have no more climbing boys to give their lives in
sweeping away sacks full of soot which a few lengths
of rod and a brush can sweep away as well as they;
knives and boots can be touched up and polished
better by machinery than by human hands; precious
hours need not be wasted in chopping meat and suet
into shreds; and so on through the as yet scanty list.
of domestic machinery. And with the loss of the
252
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
human machine, and the substitution of the material
one, will come, I believe, a nobler home and a grander
type of woman all through. Servants will be better
educated, and therefore nearer their mistresses, as
they were in the days when they were all ignorant
together; and being nearer, there will be more friend-
ship and more understanding between them, and less
hostility of class. We have not come yet to the end
of human improvement; and for my own part I be-
lieve that we are on the eve of an immense stride in
advance—a sudden and brilliant efflorescence; as the
aloe bursts into bloom in a night, after living for a
hundred years in preparation. With the application
of science to domestic life, and the use of machinery
to do the sordid and mindless work, we shall have
womanly duties raised into higher exercises than they
are now, and we shall see a clearer understanding
of their importance. For after all, woman's duties are
among the greatest for the future generations quite
as great as man's, if flowing in a different channel and
moulding in a different clay. For if men do the work
of the world, and conquer the forces of nature, it is
women who make them fit or unfit; and is not the
formative principle as important as the executive
faculty?
253
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
There is another question that must be touched on,
--woman's political rights. Right or wrong, wise or
foolish, I think all who can read present history will
agree with me in saying that these will have to be
conceded. No question of this kind was ever set
afoot and striven for that was not ultimately success-
ful. It all depends on the amount of fervour with.
which women seek political recognition, and the de-
gree of central force existing in the demand-which is
a very different thing from applied force. It may be
put down for the present-set aside, postponed; but
it will come up again year after year, till, perhaps bit.
by bit, perhaps in a sudden rush like our latest Re-
form Bill, the concession will be made, and the prac
tical working of the principle tried. It is an instinc-
tive utterance, and we shall have to reduce it to its
proper level by giving it room for action. At present
it is a superstition, a fetish that is to change the whole
order of society: practicality alone will place it in the
rank of an historic truth and a scientific experiment.
A vast amount of rubbish is talked now about the.
handsome men getting all the votes, and wives voting
blue while the husbands vote yellow, and so on; with
the domestic quarrels that would ensue on such a
splitting of votes. All these arguments are without
254
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
weight, because they can be applied to other condi-
tions, and their folly proved. A Turk would say the
same thing if it was proposed that his Fatimas and
Zuleikas should choose their own priest, or see and be
seen by the doctor; but we do not find that European
homes are made wretched, or that husbands are set
at naught, because our women may choose their own
religion, their own priest, and have unchecked inter-
course with the family physician.
Is it impossible to imagine a woman sweet and yet
strong, high-minded and yet modest, tender if self-
reliant, womanly if well-educated? - would a fine
political conscience necessarily deaden or depress the
domestic one? Surely not! A fine political con-
science would be only so much added-it would take
nothing away. If women thought worthily about
politics, as about smuggling and other things of the
same class, they would be all the grander in every rela-
tion, because having so much clearer perception of
baseness, and so much higher standard of nobleness.
At all events, the phase of woman's rights has to be
worked through to its ultimate. If found impracti-
cable, delusive, subversive, in the working, it will
have to be put down again. It is all a question of
power, both in the getting and the using. If women
255
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
are really in earnest about it they will carry the day,
because no power can withstand a compact organiza-
tion or the moral pressure of a large class move-
ment. If they are not in earnest, or rather while
they are not in earnest, the boon will be either dis-
dainfully conceded, even by its antagonists, under the
conviction that it will prove useless, or that it will
be misused, and so a case made out for withdrawal 1 ;
or it will be withheld altogether. But the seed has
been sown, and in time the prison flagstone will be
lifted up. Meanwhile, all the best friends of women
have but one duty to fulfil towards them; which is, to
raise the standard of excellence among them, and to
make them see for themselves that they can perma-
nently gain their rights solely by means of the volun-
tary respect of men, and that respect is given only to
those who deserve it.
Women are dissatisfied with things as they are, and
with cause; but the remedy lies in their own hands,
and is not to be looked for as a boon granted from
the outside. When they will to be noble, free, re-
spected and powerful, they can be all these; but they
must will not only wish; they must work towards the
higher goal in earnestness of purpose and faithful self-
devotion. They must remember that God helps those
256
OUR PAST AND FUTURE.
who help themselves, and that the secret of all success
is in endeavour. And above all, they must leave off
clinging to their faults as to so many special graces,
and thinking themselves most lovely when they are
most useless, and interesting in exact proportion to
their weakness and their vanity.

257

THE OLD MAID.
HE was a plain, rather hard-featured woman,
but with a shrewd, observant air that at least
betokened intelligence, if it did not insure amiability.
Certainly it did not betoken amiability of the soft,
caressing kind usual to women; though she looked
like one who would not mind a little hard work for the
sake of a friend, and who would sacrifice herself, if
need be, for an affection or a principle. But then,
she would very probably have "nagged" all the time
she was doing it, and, like all women of her type,
would have spoilt an act of heroism by her unpleasant
manner of performing it. She was dressed in a severe
old-fashioned style-her bonnet, cloak, gown, all
being of the mode in use about twenty years ago; a
huge worsted-work reticule of a spiky pattern, with a
frilled silk top, hung on her arm, and she carried a
258
THE OLD MAID.
bird-cage, of which she took as much care as if it
had been a baby. Perhaps she took more.
"Smoking here!" she said, sniffing, and looking at
the opposite passenger. "Some one has been smoking
in the carriage! Guard! guard! here!" she called,
leaning out of the window excitedly.
But the guard had gone forward, and was at this
moment afflicted with one of those fits of intermittent
deafness common to guards when called off duty by
testy old ladies intolerant of smoke. Then the lady
turned round and glared at all the men through her
spectacles, as if she expected to read in their faces
signs of the delinquent. But as they were all silent,
and suave, and inoffensive, and met her eyes in the
purest innocence, she could not "pounce," as she
was inclined to do, and had to bear the lingering
odours as she best could.
"Such a disgusting habit!" said our old maid, snap-
pishly. "Ah! times are changed, indeed, since I was
a girl! Men were gentlemen then," with a spiteful
emphasis, "and women knew how to keep them in
their places, and to make themselves respected by
doing so. Now society is nothing better than a bear-
garden, and the girls are as bad as the rest. Smoking
and slang, and chignons and crinolines, and those
259
S 2
THE OLD MAID.
horrid beards, and now those vile short coats and
curled-up hats, have been just the ruin of England;
and what with every navvy having a vote, and women
sitting in Parliament, and children that don't obey
their parents, and wives that like every man better
than their husbands, the world is turning upside-down,
and where we all are going to I am sure I can't tell!
It is all very bad, and the sooner everything is put a
stop to the better !"
"Oh, the world is very much as it was, madam,”
said an old gentleman, good-naturedly. "We have
always been going to destruction since I was a boy.”
"And now we have got to it," broke in the old
maid.
"Do you think so? No, no-not quite so bad as
that! With all due respect to you, ma'am, I think
our boys and girls are pretty much as we ourselves
used to be when we were young. I fancy their chief
sin is in their youth," he added, chuckling.
66
Pretty much the same as we used to be when we
were young!" echoed the old maid. "Speak for
yourself, sir, I beg. I for one deny the likeness!
Girls were girls in my day, not half-clothed, painted
dolls, as they are now. We dressed like modest
young women, as we were, and behaved ourselves as
260
THE OLD MAID.
such-our petticoats just clearing the ground, show-
ing a neat shoe and stocking with sandals, not drag-
ging yards behind us in dirty trains, or cut up half-
way to our knees, as the fashions go now-a-days; nice
little modest bonnets, that sat round our faces, and
were not a mere bunch of beads stuck upon the top
of a heap of false hair; and when we went out, cloaks
and shawls that covered our arms decently, and didn't
leave us half-naked, as if going to a ball, as those
Marie Antoinette fichus things do ;-that was the style
of dress worn when I was young, and a better style
twenty times over than anything one sees at the pre-
sent day."
"But the girls are all very pretty now," said the old
gentleman, in his suavest manner. "They are dressed
quaintly, I grant you, and some do go a little into
extravagances, but in general they are like so many
pretty pictures, and it is quite a pleasure to look at
them. I am sure the other night at a grand ball I
thought I had never seen such a collection of attrac-
tive creatures; but I suppose they were much the
same as usual, and that it was the dress which made
the difference."
“Well, there's no accounting for taste!" said the old
maid, disdainfully, "but I certainly never expected to
261
THE OLD MAID.
hear any gentleman in his senses praise the girls of
the day."
"Girls of the period," put in another passenger,
determined to have some fun with a lady who so
strongly objected to his favourite vice, smoking.
"That's the correct term now-girls of the period,
ma'am."
"Well, girls of the period, then, if you like that
better," said the old maid, contemptuously; "I am
sure I don't care what you call the minxes! As I
was saying, I certainly never expected to hear any one
in his senses praise the present style of girls at balls or
anywhere else. Balls, indeed! Balls were balls in
my day, not merely dull, overcrowded scrambles as
they are now. And people danced. If they did not do
their steps, and make ailes de pigeon, and double shuffle
and cut, as they did half a century ago, they still
danced; they didn't just loiter and lounge about as if
they were too weak and tired to stand upright. Why,
I actually saw a young man the other day dance with
his hands in his pockets! He should have had me for
a partner !" said the old maid, lifting her eyes over her
spectacles. "And as for those round dances, as they
are called, I fairly hate them! They are not nice-not
at all nice-and lead to a great deal of wickedness..
262
THE OLD MAID.
Even that bad man, Lord
Of that I am very sure.
Byron, said so; and I think what he said was improper
must be so ! Then look at the dresses of the present
day. Girls spend as much on gold cord and silver
fringe as would buy a modest trousseau. They are
really wicked those ball-dresses-wicked for cost and
indecent for cut. Half of them look as if a good shake
would shake them off altogether; they have only a
little gold strap across the shoulders; and I ask if that
is in any way decent? What a difference from the
dresses of my time!-a fresh white muslin that came
up round the shoulders and had modest sleeves to
cover the upper part of the arm; a white rose in one's
hair, and one's hair as smooth and shining as silk, with
a coil of Grecian plaits behind—and all one's own; a
pretty pink sash, or a blue one, tied at one side, just
to give a little relief for colour, and that was all. And
a great deal better than what one sees now-a-days!
That was my style when I was young and went to
balls, and I assure you I used to be thought something
of in those days. I had heaps of young gentlemen
asking for the honour,' and never knew what it was to
sit and be a wallflower, as I see so many misses are
now. And when we had finished our dance, we would
go to the refreshment-room for a glass of lemonade, or
<
263
THE OLD MAID.
a little weak negus made of home-made wine-none of
your intoxicating drinks like this claret-cup I hear so
much about; and as for anything so coarse as bitter
beer—I should have liked to have seen the young lady
of my day who would have asked for that at a ball!
She would not have had the chance of asking for an-
other, let me tell you. Flirting ?-well, if we did a
little of that, we did it differently; it was more inno-
cent and far pleasanter than it is now, and I tell you it
was a different thing altogether. Do you think I say
so because I am old? Nonsense! I say so because
it is so.
Who in my day ever heard of such a thing as
'scuffling,' forsooth! There was my niece Mimi the
other day talking of scuffling with Harry Forrest.
Scuffling, my dear!' I said, 'what on earth do you
mean? Were you and Mr. Forrest fighting?' I hate
that rude way of calling young men by their names
without the Mr., and always check Miss Mimi when
she does so. 'Oh, you stupid aunty, what a duffer
you are! Scuffling is only talking hard and fast, and
Harry is no end of good at that,' says Miss Mimi,
flinging back her wisp of hair. 'Oh, scuffling is talking
hard and fast, is it? and Mr. Forrest is no end of good
at that, whatever that most extraordinary expression
may mean, is he?' said I; 'then I just beg, miss, that
264
THE OLD MAID.
you and Mr. Forrest will leave off scuffling together,
and the next time I see you talking hard and fast, as
you call it, in corners, as you are so fond of doing, I
will write to your mamma, and tell her how you behave
yourself when you are away from her.' 'Now don't be
grumpy, aunty,' said Miss Mimi; 'Harry is a dear,
good boy, and there's no nonsense about him anyhow.
He don't spoon, you know, he only chaffs, and he is
such fun!'
'And that's the language young ladies use now-a-
days!" said the old maid, in a deeply tragic tone,
spreading out her hands and lifting up her eyes.
"Duffer, scuffling, no end of good, spoon, fun, chaff-
my goodness! where are we all going to !"
((
'Reading, ma'am," said a funny man, as a joke.
'Reading, ma'am!" snapped out the old maid.
"Don't you think I know that quite as well as you do?
Yes, you are going to Reading-and beyond," she
added. But whether she meant this as a double-
entendre or not, none of us of course could deter-
mine.
"And what is Miss Mimi like ?" asked the passenger,
who seemed bent on aggravating the poor lady. "Is
she pretty? I could think so "—with a look that said
plainly, "She must be pretty if she is like you."
265
THE OLD MAID.
"Pretty!" said the old maid, scornfully; "call that
pretty! No! she has red hair-though that pre-
Raphaelite painter of hers, that Mr. Wynam, who paints.
those crooked saints with wry necks, and both their
hands in the air, as if they were struck with astonish-
ment about something, he calls it golden. Golden,
indeed! In my day it was red. And how can a girl
be pretty with a fuzz of red hair done in a big bird's-
nest on the top of her head, and a long wisp hanging
straight down her back, and not even twisted into a
curl? If I had come to breakfast with my head in
such a state, looking as if all the fowls in the air had
been scratching at it, I wonder what my dear mother
would have said! I don't say that the girl would not
be pretty if she dressed herself differently; but as it is,
she makes herself a regular fright; and so I tell her.
However, she says that she is in the fashion, and
that I am not, and that she is only doing as others do,
and that I am miles behind the time. I often say that
I would rather be miles behind than where she is, little
saucy puss! Ah! if she had been my child, she would
have been very differently brought up. But my poor
sister has no character, and never had.”
“And does Miss Mimi cheek you very much ?" asked
the passenger, sympathetically.
266
THE OLD MAID.
"Sir?" replied the old maid, with dignity. "I do
not understand you," she then added, coldly; "I am
not a Hottentot, and I do not talk Hebrew; and when
you speak to me, I shall feel obliged if you will be kind
enough to use ordinary English, and such as I am ac-
customed to."
66
I beg you ten thousand pardons, madam; but, as
you say, slang is so infectious.”
"I said nothing of the kind, sir," she interrupted;
"and I will not have words put into my mouth that I
have not used. I do not know what next
I do not know what next you will say
I said. Slang may be infectious, but, thank heaven, I
never caught the disease, and should think that no
person with a proper mind or cultivated understanding
would. People who would talk slang are foois who
would commit any other impropriety that came in their
way."
"Oh!" they all cried.
"Yes, 'oh' as often as you like, but it's true. Who
once said, 'For want of decency is want of sense?'
And slang is indecent, and those who would commit
one crime would commit another. I believe this is
what would be called logic if a man had said it ?" And
she shook out the folds of her stuff skirt triumphantly.
To her own mind she was unanswerable.
267
THE OLD MAID.
"One of the worst features of modern society," she
continued, "is this horrid habit of talking slang; I look
on it as a national sin, and the cause of more than half
the evils in society."
"Tenterden steeple ?" said a passenger, with a note
of interrogation in his voice. "Skedaddle and forgery
-buffers and prejudice-eh? A clear case of Ten-
terden steeple!"
"No, sir, not Tenterden steeple at all," snapped
the old maid, without giving herself time to think;
"nothing half so good as a steeple. Steeple, indeed!
a vile, wicked habit like that to be compared to any-
thing about a church !"
All the men laughed; and the old maid could not
help smiling-sourly, as if under protest-when her
mistake was fully borne in on her.
"I hate such vulgar speeches," she said, crossly.
"Then prejudice apart, you really think the girls of
the day absolutely worse, more immoral, and more un-
principled than their predecessors ?" asked a passenger
from the corner. "Miss Mimi, for instance; do you
think she would do anything really wicked, anything
dishonourable—say, to get fine dresses; or improper,
for the purpose of admiration ?”
"Mimi is my niece, sir; and silly as she is, I hope
268
THE OLD MAID.
she knows better than to disgrace herself and her
family," said the old maid, stiffly.
66
Ah, there it is, you see!" continued he,
((
we all
say that of our own, and, mind you, I do not say that
we are wrong. But then, is it not, after all, that we
judge harshly because we do not know intimately, and
arrive at conclusions from insufficient premises? Do
we not take the outside appearance to be too entirely
the expression of the internal morality? I think so. I
think my thesis will bear examination," he added,
with the contented air of a man who thinks he has said
a good thing.
"I hate pedantry," said the old maid crossly, just
as she had said she hated vulgar speeches.
"Now come, ma'am," called out an old gentleman,
in a rollicking manner that gave double weight to his
words, “tell the latest enormity of Miss Mimi. We'll
cap stories, and I bet you two to one in ponies that
mine will beat yours."
(6
Sir, I regard your conversation as an insult," said
the old maid, sitting bolt upright; "what do you take
me for a horse-jockey? Do you think I, a lady,
would bet with any one about anything, least of all in
horses? What could I do with your ponies if I were to
win them? What do I want with ponies, or horses either?”
269
THE OLD MAID.
"Miss Mimi was about right," said one, in a loud
whisper; "no mistake about the duffer."
'If by that you mean that I am a gentlewoman
such as gentlewomen used to be, and dislike both
slang and fastness, I hope I shall remain a duffer, as
you call it, to the end of my life," said the lady. "Ah,
gentlemen," she then said with a certain pathetic dig-
nity that became her far better than the cross and
snappish aspect which seemed the more usual condi-
tion, "you think it fine fun doubtless to ridicule me,
because I am that fair game for strong men's satire,
'an unprotected female'—an old maid, if you will.
Well, I am an old maid, and I am not ashamed of my
state, nor afraid of my future as ape-leader," she added,
with grim humour. 'I might have been married once
in my time ;—you need not laugh. I was not always
past forty; and the ugliest woman they say, has her
chance once in life; besides, I was not ugly then,
whatever I may be now. But my dear mother would
never have borne that I should have left her-and I
preferred her happiness to my own. It cost me a little
at the time perhaps; but we soon live down such
sentimental sorrows as those, and, thank God, I never
regretted my decision. I made my dear mother's last
days happy; and what would have been my feelings if I
66
270
THE OLD MAID.
had married Captain-never mind his name—and had
heard of dear mamma's paralysis when I was miles
away up the country among the Himalayas, where he
was stationed? I should never have forgiven myself.
No, I owed my first duty to her, dear soul, and I ful-
filled it."
"And the gentleman, madam ?”
"The gentleman, sir? He first of all threatened to
blow his brains out because I would not have him,
and then he married my young sister," replied the old
maid drily.
"And Miss Mimi ?"
"Mimi is that sister's child," she returned, as drily
as before.
“And a pickle,” said a passenger.
'You are right for once-she is a pickle !" cried her
aunt fervently. "Goodness only knows what will
become of the child," she continued, changing her
tone and manner as people do when they fall on the
track of a well-worn grievance. "I took her last year
to the seaside; her mother was ill, and could not go.
Since she was a widow" (this was said in a lower tone)
"she is often ill, and the care of the girl naturally falls
on me; and a pretty time I have of it.
It is 'Aunty,
come here,' and 'Aunty, go there,' and 'Oh, do let us
271
THE OLD MAID.
go to this ball,' and 'We must get tickets for that con-
cert.' It is out here and out there, and never a bit of
sewing done, nor an improving book read, nor one
single individual thing got through of any good or use
to any one. It is all dress and finery and flirting
from morning to night, and I declare she worries my
life out. Between her lovers and her racketings she
gives me no peace. And then the wonderful way she has
of getting over me! I come down to breakfast fully de-
termined to give Miss Mimi a thorough good talking
to, but up she comes with her little coaxing ways, and
when I look into her fresh face with its blue eyes and
rosy cheeks, and see her happy little mouth smiling
like a cherub's, and think of all the misery she may
have in after-life, I cannot find it in my heart to scold
her just now, and so put it off till the next time. She
is a spoilt puss, and so I tell her; and if she were not
my own niece, I would never speak to her. She takes
away my breath sometimes-positively she does.
What with her red hair, done up in that hideous
bunch on the top of her head, her short costume-
dresses as she calls them, her high boots, her slang,
and her fastness, she is just appalling. But the creature
has a good heart underneath it all, thanks to her
mother and me. Her father too had a good heart,
272
THE OLD MAID.
though a light head, so that she comes of no bad
blood either way.
and I'll tell you one.
Now you want a story about her,
As you do not know her sur-
know it, it does not so much
name, and never will
signify; else I am not quite the kind of person to tell
family histories to strangers, and to take into my con-
fidence a carriage-full of persons I never saw before,
and shall never see again.
"Last summer we were down at the seaside, as I
think I said before. Mimi's great friend, the Mr.
Harry Forrest I spoke of, was there; and so was
Mark Wynam, the pre-Raphaelite painter who calls
Mimi Beatrice, because he once painted her as Bea-
trice in Much Ado About Nothing'-a most objec-
tionable young woman I should say, and one not to
be taken as a model in any way. And so I told Mr.
Wynam; but he is far too self-opinionated to mind.
what any one else thinks; so he painted her as Bea-
trice, and has called her Beatrice ever since. At that
time we knew a certain Miss Rosa Lucas—and a very
bad companion she was too for Miss Mimi-a bold,
painted, forward little minx, who would have ruined
her outright if she had been anybody else. I am sure
the way she used to go on with Mr. Wynam—it was
really shameful! and nearly as bad with Mr. Forrest.
273
T
THE OLD MAID.
But, as I say, if Mimi is silly she has been well
brought up, and early education goes a long way in
making girls what they should be. I did not like the
association, and did all I could to prevent it; but
Mimi was obstinate, and the more I objected to Miss
Rosa the more she seemed determined to keep with
her. She always said she knew that she was good,
and that her looks and manners were the worst of her.
I am sure I don't know how it was that she so fasci-
nated Mimi; she never fascinated me.
"One day Mimi came in to me in a tremendous
state of excitement: 'Oh, aunty,' she said, 'I want.
twenty pounds, please!'
"Twenty pounds, child!' I said; 'two hundred,
perhaps?'
"No, only twenty,' she answered, quite simply:
' and, aunty dear, I MUST have it.'
"Well, child,' I said, going on with my netting, 'if
you must, you must, I suppose; but not from me. If
your mother likes to throw away her money, that is.
her business, not mine. I cannot afford to give twenty
pounds whenever I may be asked; and what is more,
I will not, without knowing why you want it.'
"I cannot tell you, aunty,' she said. 'I want it, that
is all I can say.'
274
THE OLD MAID.
"Very well, my dear, then you must want it,' was
my answer.
"Mimi burst into tears. 'Aunty, if I could only tell
you! if I only might! but I must not ; and you would
not be pleased with me if I did.’
"One thing Miss Mimi knows very well with me
I cannot bear to see her cry. God help her! tears
will come soon enough which cannot be dried away by
any number of pounds; and my heart softened when
I saw her distress. But I would not let her see it.
"You are just a spoilt child, Mimi,' I said as
crossly as I could. 'It is always I must and I will
with you; and then when you cannot, you cry about
it. Tell me what you want that money for, and if I
approve of the purpose, perhaps I'll help you.'
"But she was self-willed as usual; and just shak-
ing her head she ran sobbing out of the room, and.
in a few minutes I heard the street-door slam, and.
looking out of the window I saw Miss Mimi tearing
down the Parade more like a mad thing than a
sane, properly behaved, well brought-up young lady.
I put on my bonnet and went after her, but lost.
her before I had gone half a dozen steps from the
door. She was far away down the Parade then, and I
suppose turned down some street leading into the
275
T 2
THE OLD MAID.
town; for she suddenly disappeared, and there was
an end of her. I went about all over the place, but
could not find her; and so came home again not a
little distressed, as you may imagine. I wished so
much I had given her that twenty pounds! If she
would have come then, I would have given her twice
twenty, had she wished it. She had been too hasty—
much too hasty. Why could she not have coaxed me
a little? Why had she been so sharp with me—so
impatient? She should have borne with me longer—
she should have understood me better! She ought
to have known how I put on my cross manner as a
defence against myself, and how my heart often bleeds.
at the very moment when I affect to be most stern.
But she had misunderstood me, and I had nothing for
it but to suffer. Dinner-time came-tea-time—even-
ing-night; and no Mimi. By this time I was almost
crazed, and had been to every place I could think of,
asking for her; but I could hear nothing. At last,
after ten o'clock, she came in, trembling, pale, weary,
and Rosa Lucas with her. You may be sure I was
too glad to see her again to
scold her for the fright
she had given me; and I think I kissed Miss Lucas
too, for mere joy to see Mimi with her, though I did
dislike the girl so much! However, one has not time
276
THE OLD MAID.
to think of one's dislikes when one has just got over
great terror and a great danger.
"I am afraid I have been the cause of some anxiety
to you,' began Miss Lucas, in that harsh, metallic
voice of hers which is one of the things that has
always set me against her; but if it had not been for
Mimi here--who has been such a brick !-I don't
know what I should have done !'
"Dear old aunty!' said Mimi, kissing me till she
almost smothered me-oh, that child! she has a good
heart, bless her!' I was so sorry to distress you, as
I know I have; but what else could I do? Dear old
thing! I wouldn't if I could have helped it!'
(66
'My dear child,' I said, 'I don't know what you
have been doing, so I cannot answer your question.
Miss Lucas says you have been a brick, but that does
not convey much idea to my mind, as I don't exactly
know the functions of young ladies when they make
themselves bricks.'
"I saw the two girls look at each other, but that did
not trouble me. I thought it my duty to check Miss
Rosa whenever I had the chance; and, to do myself
justice, I never missed.
"Well, being a brick is standing between a friend
and ruin,' said Miss Rosa.
277
THE OLD MAID.
666
Humph!' I answered; 'I cannot exactly see
what ruin could come to a good girl, Miss Lucas ! If
you had been as prudent and discreet as you ought
to have been, I am very sure there would have been
no 'ruin' for Mimi to have stood against. However,
I hate mysteries, so you had better tell me the story
at once, and then I shall not fancy it worse perhaps
than it is.'
“I am married!' said Miss Rosa-only I suppose I
ought not to call her Miss Rosa now—'I was married
to Mark Wynam two months ago, just after we came
here; and mamma and papa know nothing about it,
and will be screaming mad when I tell them.'
"I was both glad and sorry when I heard this:
glad, in a way, for her sake-because if she was the
young man's wife, you know, her forwardness was a
little excusable; but sorry for her sake too-for the
idea of a girl that I knew doing such a thing secretly,
and being a married woman all the time we had called
her miss, revolted me. Then I liked young Mark
Wynam very well, though he was so conceited; and I
had always fancied that he had liked Mimi, and she
him. So he had, I am sure, in early days. Why did
I not have to scold Miss Mimi once about him? and
did not she cry and blush, and make such a fuss about
278
THE OLD MAID.
it, that I dared not do it again? She behaved very
differently when I spoke to her about Mr. Forrest;
and though I don't know much about love-affairs, I am
happy to say I am not quite stupid. Well, to go back
to Miss Rosa-or Mrs. Wynam, rather.
66 6
'Papa and mamma are very proud people, you
know,' she went on to say-I didn't know it, but I
took her word for it—and they wanted me to marry
a rich man old enough to be my father; and I liked
poor dear Mark, with nothing but his paint-pots, a
great deal better. So to put temptation out of
my way for Mr. Sale is awfully rich, and I
am awfully fond of money — I thought the best
thing I could do was to marry Mark out of hand
at once; and then, you know, I could not be Mrs.
Sale if even I wished it! But Mark has not much
money, you know; and somehow his pictures don't
sell, though they ought; and I suppose making love
ain't so lucrative as work. So the upshot of it all is,
he was arrested to-day for twenty pounds, and neither
I nor Mimi had a quarter of the sum between us. I
dared not ask papa and mamma, for they would have
soon wormed the whole thing out of me; and as they
expected Mr. Sale, it would have made my dose all
the hotter, because of the disappointment-so they
279
THE OLD MAID.
were impossible. Mimi ran to Harry Forrest; but he
was out for the day, dear boy, else I am sure he would
have lent it to me, for he and Mark are great chums;
and there was nothing left but you-and you wouldn't."
"Of course not, if I was not told why,' I said. 'If
you or Mimi had told me why she wanted it, perhaps
I would have done it for Mr. Wynam; though really
if one has to keep from arrest all the foolish young
men who marry on nothing, and get into debt as the
consequence, one would have enough to do! You
ought to have told your papa and mamma, Miss
Lucas. You ought to tell them now. They will have
to know some time, and the longer it is put off the
worse it will be for you.'
'Only till I am of age,' said Rosa, in a kind of
pleading voice, as if I was the arbiter of her destiny.
'Then I will. But if I tell them before, they will
put Mark in prison, and make him divorce me."
"Stuff!' I said. And a good thing, too, if they
did! But this does not tell me what you have been
doing all the day, Mimi child," I said, smoothing-
smoothing! no, that was impossible—but just putting
my hands over the dear child's tumbled hair; and
though it is red, still it has pretty shades in it in some
lights, and after all I like it, bless her!
280
THE OLD MAID.
(
Oh, aunty, I have had such a day!' she answered.
I had just enough money to go up to London with,
third-class, and I ran off to old Mr. Newton, our lawyer
you know, and told him the whole story, and actually
coaxed him out of my half-year's dividend in advance.
Was not that clever? and wasn't it awfully kind of the
dear old boy? Good old fellow! I declare I kissed
him for it; and he looked so funny, and said, 'Don't
do that again, Miss Mimi,' as grave as you please. But
I think he liked it all the same. If Harry had been at
home, it would have been all right; but you see he
wasn't ; so I had nothing for it but to go up to London
and get the needful for poor Mark. For you know,
aunty, if one doesn't stand by one's friends when they
come to grief, who will? And what's one good for
else? And then you know,' said the girl, lifting up her
face—and an expression came into it that went to my
heart like a knife, because I understood it-' I always
liked Mark, aunty, and I like Rosa too.' And she
held out her hand to Mrs. Wynam, and tried to smile ;
but her smile faded away, and she buried her face in
my lap, with her arms round my waist, and sobbed as
if her heart would break.
"How I hated Rosa when I understood it all! and
how I loved that dear, generous child, who had borne
281
THE OLD MAID.
her sorrow so bravely-who had seen her friend step
in and take away her lover without a single word of
complaint, without a moment of spite, of jealousy, of
littleness; and who, when the dark hour came, was
the first to help them, without a thought of herself in
any way. Ah!" said the old maid, wiping her eyes.
furtively, "I can forgive even her slang and her short
petticoats when I think of her noble nature; for she
is noble, she is truthful and generous and straight-
forward-more so than any one I have ever seen,
though I am her aunt who says it. But that does not
excuse that little viper Rosa!" she added, spitefully.
"And Mr. Forrest?" asked a passenger.
"Does.
he like her, or does their scuffling mean nothing?"
"I am afraid it does not mean much-I wish it
did," said the old maid. "They are very intimate,
and a great deal too familiar-that I will say; but
though I think he loves her dearly, and would marry
her to-morrow if she would have him, I don't think
her mind is set that way at all-I wish it was. Mr.
Forrest is a young man of great promise, and really a
very charming person. I like him vastly-better than
most young men; and he has a pretty way of calling
me aunty that I must say pleases me, or as Mimi says
'gets over me.' It was he who gave me my dicky
282
THE OLD MAID.
when I lost Moses, my cat, and I call him Harry for
the donor's sake. Yes, I should be well pleased to
see Mimi married to Mr. Forrest"-musingly; "he is
a good son, a handsome young man, clever, and well
behaved. He smokes, certainly, and goes about in
what he calls his prowling coat; but then every one
does these things nowadays, and it is difficult to keep
out of the fashion, as Mimi says. They would make
a pretty couple enough, and are fairly matched in age,
condition, and appearance. Who knows? More un-
likely things have happened before now—and then he
would be my nephew in real earnest.-After all, gen-
tlemen, much as I dislike the present style of things,
I cannot deny that there is a great deal of good left in
the world. God help us else! And though we
ought to be better than we are, it is only common
sense to be thankful for the good that is in us.
"X-
*This little trifle appeared in Routledge's "Christmas
Annual" for 1868. It is inserted here because, in its light
way, it bears upon the woman question; and as many will
perhaps think the Essays dull, the Old Maid may take off
the heaviness of the general effect, and leave a brighter im-
pression for the last. At all events it shows that I am not
intolerant even where I disapprove, and that I am not the
enemy of my sex because their censor,
THE END.
t
[December, 1883.

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Dick Temple.
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Thornicroft's Model.
The Leaden Casket.
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Fated to be Free.
BY HENRY JAMES, Jun.
Confidence.
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The Dark Colleen.
The Queen of Connaught.
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Oakshott Castle.
Number Seventeen.
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Patricia Kemball.
The Atonement of Leam Dundas.
The World Well Lost.
Under which Lord?
With a Silken Thread.
The Rebel of the Family.
"My Love!"
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Dear Lady Disdain.
The Waterdale Neighbours.
My Enemy's Daughter.
A Fair Saxon.
Linley Rochford.
Miss Misanthrope.
Donna Quixote.
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Paul Faber, Surgeon.
Thomas Wingfold, Curate.
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Quaker Cousins.
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The Evil Eye.
Lost Rose.
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The New Republic.
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Touch and Go.
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Phoebe's Fortunes.
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31
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A Dog of Flanders.
In a Winter City.
Ariadne.
Friendship.
Motive.
Pipistrello.
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Lost Sir Massing
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A Perfect Trea-
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Gwendoline's Har-
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Like Father, Like
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Bentinck's Tutor. A Marine Resi-
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Halves.
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32
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The Mystery of Marie Roget.
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Valentina.
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It is Never Too Late to Mend.
Hard Cash.
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Griffith Gaunt.
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Her Mother's Darling.
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A Levantine Family.
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Gaslight and Daylight.
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One Against the World.
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The Lion in the Path.
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A Match in the Dark.
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The Afghan Knife.
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Diamond Cut Diamond.
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The Way We Live Now.
The American Senator.
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Tom Sawyer.
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What She Came Through.
Sabina.
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Land at Last.
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Fcap. 8vo, picture covers, 18. each.
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The Twins of Table Mountain. By
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Kathleen Mavourneen. By Author
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Lindsay's Luck. By the Author of
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Pretty Polly Pemberton. By the
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Trooping with Crows. By Mrs.
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The Professor's Wife. By LEONARD
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A Double Bond. By Linda Villari.
Esther's Glove. By R. E. FRANCILLON.
The Garden that Pald the Rent.
By TOM JERRold.

12
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