The Art of Living

One would suppose from these remarks that the male American citizen spends his days chiefly at caucuses; whereas, as we all know when we reflect, he goes perhaps twice a year, if he be a punctilious patriot like Julius Cæsar, and if not, probably does not go at all. If the consciousness that his wife could vote at a caucus would act as a spur to the masculine political conscience, the male American citizen could well afford to dine at a restaurant on election-days, or to cook his own food now and then.

Of course, even a man with views like Julius Cæsar would be sorry to have his wife the slavish, dollish, or unenlightened individual which she was apt to be before so-called women’s rights were heard of. As he himself has proclaimed, he adores his wife, and he is, moreover, secretly proud of her æsthetic presentability. Without being an advanced woman, Dolly Cæsar has the interests of the day and hour at her fingers’ ends, can talk intelligently on any subject, whether she knows anything about it or not, and is decidedly in the van, though she is not a leader. Julius does not take into account, when he anathematizes the sex because of its ambitions, the difference between her and her great-grandmother. He believes his wife to be a very charming specimen of what a woman ought to be, and that, barring a few differences of costume and hair arrangement, she is practically her great-grandmother over again. Fatuous Julius! There is where he is desperately in error. Dolly Cæsar’s great-grandmother may have been a radiant beauty and a famous housekeeper, but her brain never harbored one-tenth of the ideas and opinions which make her descendant so attractive.

Those who argue on this matter like Julius Cæsar fail to take into account the gradual, silent results of time; and this is true of the results to come as well as those which have accrued. When the suffrage question is mooted one often hears sober men, more dispassionate men than Julius – Perkins, for instance, the thin, nervous lawyer and father of four girls, and a sober man indeed – ask judicially whether it is possible for female suffrage to be a success when not one woman in a thousand would know what was expected of her, or how to vote. “I tell you,” says Perkins, “they are utterly unfitted for it by training and education. Four-fifths of them wouldn’t vote if they were allowed to, and every one knows that ninety-nine women out of every hundred are profoundly ignorant of the matters in regard to which they would cast their ballots. Take my daughters; fine girls, talented, intelligent women – one of them a student of history; but what do they know of parties, and platforms, and political issues in general?”

Perkins is less violently prejudiced than Julius Cæsar. He neither saws the air nor pounds on the table. Indeed, I have no doubt he believes that he entertains liberal, unbiassed views on the subject. I wonder, then, why it never occurs to him that everything which is new is adopted gradually, and that the world has to get accustomed to all novel situations. I happened to see Mr. Perkins the first time he rode a bicycle on the road, and his performance certainly justified the prediction that he would look like a guy to the end of his days, and yet he glides past me now with the ease and nonchalance of a possible “scorcher.” Similarly, if women were given universal suffrage, there would be a deal of fluttering in the dove-cotes for the first generation or so. Doubtless four-fifths of womankind would refuse or neglect to vote at all, and at least a quarter of those who went to the polls would cast their ballots as tools or blindly. But just so soon as it was understood that it was no less a woman’s duty to vote than it was to attend to her back hair, she would be educated from that point of view, and her present crass ignorance of political matters would be changed into at least a form of enlightenment. Man prides himself on his logic, but there is nothing logical in the argument that because a woman knows nothing about anything now, she can never be taught. If we have been content to have her remain ignorant for so many centuries, does it not savor both of despotism and lack of reasonableness to cast her ignorance in her teeth and to beat her about the head with it now that she is eager to rise? Decidedly it is high time for the man who orates tempestuously or argues dogmatically in the name of conservatism against the cause of woman on such flimsy pleas as these, to cease his gesticulations and wise saws. The modern woman is a potential reality, who is bound to develop and improve, in another generation or two, as far beyond the present interesting type as Mrs. Julius Cæsar is an advance on her great-grandmother.

On the other hand, why do those who have woman’s cause at heart lay such formal stress on the right of the ballot as a factor in her development? There can be no doubt that, if the majority of women wish to vote on questions involving property or political interests, they will be enabled to do so sooner or later. It is chiefly now the conviction in the minds of legislatures that a large number of the intelligent women of their communities do not desire to exercise the right of suffrage which keeps the bars down. Doubtless these bodies will yield one after another to the clamor of even a few, and the experiment will be tried. It may not come this year or the next, but many busy people are so certain that its coming is merely a question of time that they do not allow themselves to be drawn into the fury of the fray. When it comes, however, it will come as a universal privilege, and not with a social or property qualification. I mention this simply for the enlightenment of those amiable members of the sex to be enfranchised who go about sighing and simpering in the interest of drawing the line. That question was settled a century ago. The action taken may have been an error on the part of those who framed the laws, but it has been settled forever. There would be no more chance of the passage by the legislature of one of the United States of a statute giving the right of suffrage to a limited class of women than there would be of one prescribing that only the good-looking members of that sex should be allowed to marry.

Many people, who believe that woman should be denied no privilege enjoyed by man which she really desires to exercise, find much difficulty in regarding the right of suffrage as the vital end which it assumes in the minds of its advocates. One would suppose, by the clamor on the subject, that the ballot would enable her to change her spots in a twinkling, and to become an absolutely different creation. Lively imaginations do not hesitate to compare the proposed act of emancipation with the release of the colored race from bondage. We are appealed to by glowing rhetoric which celebrates the equity of the case and the moral significance of the impending victory. But the orators and triumphants stop short at the passage of the law and fail to tell us what is to come after. We are assured, indeed, that it will be all right, and that woman’s course after the Rubicon is crossed will be one grand march of progress to the music of the spheres; but, barring a pæan of this sort, we are given no light as to what she intends to do and become. She has stretched out her hand for the rattle and is determined to have it, but she does not appear to entertain any very definite ideas as to what she is going to do with it after she has it.

Unquestionably, the development of the modern woman is one of the most interesting features of civilization to-day. But is it not true that the cause of woman is one concern, and the question of woman suffrage another? And are they not too often confounded, even deliberately confounded, by those who are willing to have them appear to be identical? Supposing that to-morrow the trumpet should sound and the walls of Jericho fall, and every woman be free to cast her individual ballot without let or hindrance from one confine of the civilized world to another, what would it amount to after all by way of elucidating the question of her future evolution? For it must be remembered that, apart from the question of her development in general, those who are clamoring for the ballot have been superbly vague so far as to the precise part which the gentle sex is to play in the political arena after she gets her rattle. They put their sisters off with the general assertion that things in the world, politically speaking, will be better, but neither their sisters nor their brothers are able to get a distinct notion of the platform on which woman means to stand after she becomes a voter. Is she going to enter into competition with men for the prizes and offices, to argue, manipulate, hustle, and do generally the things which have to be done in the name of political zeal and activity? Is it within the vista of her ambition to become a member of, and seek to control, legislative bodies, to be a police commissioner or a member of Congress? Those in the van decline to answer, or at least they do not answer. It may be, to be sure, the wisdom of the serpent which keeps them non-committal, for they stand, as it were, between the devil and the deep sea in that, though they and their supporters would perhaps like to declare boldly in favor of competition, or at least participation, in the duties and honors, they stand in wholesome awe of the hoarse murmur from the ranks of their sisters, “We don’t wish to be like men, and we have no intention of competing with them on their own lines.” Accordingly, the leaders seek refuge in the safe but indefinite assertion that of course women will never become men, but they have thus far neglected to tell us what they are to become.

It really seems as though it were time for woman, in general congress of the women’s clubs assembled, to make a reasonably full and clear statement of her aims and principles – a declaration of faith which shall give her own sex and men the opportunity to know precisely what she is driving at. Her progress for the last hundred years has been gratifying to the world, with the exception of pig-headed or narrow-minded men, and civilization has been inestimably benefitted by the broadening of her intelligence and her interests. But she has now reached a point where there is a parting of the ways, and the world would very much like to know which she intends to take. The atmosphere of the women’s clubs is mysterious but unsuggestive, and consequently many of us feel inclined to murmur with the poet, “it is clever, but we don’t know what it means.” Unrepressed nervous mental activity easily becomes social affectation or tomfoolery, in the absence of a controlling aim or purpose. To exhaust one’s vitality in papers or literary teas, merely to express or simulate individual culture or freedom, may not land one in an insane asylum, but it is about as valuable to society, as an educating force, as the revolutions of the handle of a freezer, when the crank is off, are valuable to the production of ice-cream. For the benefit of such a congress, if haply it should be called together later, it will not be out of place to offer a few suggestions as to her future evolution. In this connection it seems to me imperative to go back to the original poetic conception of woman as the wife and mother, the domestic helpmate and loving, self-abnegating companion of man. Unedifying as this formula of description may seem to the active-minded modern woman, it is obvious that under existing physiological conditions she must remain the wife and mother, even though she declines to continue domestic, loving, and self-abnegating. And side by side with physiological conditions stands the intangible, ineffable force of sexual love, the poetic, entrancing ecstasy which no scientist has yet been able to reduce to a myth or to explode. Schopenhauer, to be sure, would have us believe that it is merely a delusion by which nature seeks to reproduce herself, but even on this material basis the women’s clubs find themselves face to face with an enemy more determined than any Amazon. A maid deluded becomes the sorriest of club members.

What vision of life is nobler and more exquisite than that of complete and ideal marital happiness? To find it complete and ideal the modern woman, with all her charms and abilities, must figure in it, I grant; the mere domestic drudge; the tame, amiable house-cat; the doting doll, are no longer pleasing parties of the second part. To admit so much as this may seem to offer room for the argument that the modern woman of a hundred years hence will make her of the poet’s dream of to-day appear no less pitiable; but there we men are ready to take issue. We admit our past tyranny, we cry “Peccavi,” yet we claim at the same time that, having taken her to our bosoms as our veritable, loving companion and helpmate, there is no room left, or very little room left, for more progress in that particular direction. Her next steps, if taken, will be on new lines, not by way of making herself an equal. And therefore it is that we suggest the vision of perfect modern marital happiness as the leading consideration to be taken into account in dealing with this question. Even in the past, when woman was made a drudge and encouraged to remain a fool, the poetry and joy and stimulus of life for her, as well as for her despot mate, lay in the mystery of love, its joys and responsibilities. Even then, if her life were robbed of the opportunity to love and be loved, its savor was gone, however free she might be from masculine tyranny and coercion. Similarly, after making due allowance for the hyperbole as to the influence which woman has on man when he has made up his mind to act to the contrary, there is no power which works for righteousness upon him comparable to the influence of woman. There is always the possibility that the woman a man loves may not be consciously working for righteousness, but the fact that he believes so is the essential truth, even though he be the victim of self-delusion. This element of the case is pertinent to the question whether woman would really try to reform the world, if she had the chance, rather than to this particular consideration. The point of the argument is that the dependence of each sex on the other, and the loving sympathy between them, which is born of dissimilarity, is the salt of human life. The eternal feminine is what we prize in woman, and wherever she deflects from this there does her power wane and her usefulness become impaired. And conversely, the more and the higher she advances along the lines of her own nature, the better for the world. Nor does the claim that she has been hampered hitherto, and consequently been unable to show what her attributes really are, seem relevant; for it is only when she develops in directions which threaten to clash with the eternal feminine that she encounters opposition or serious criticism. And here even the excitability and unreasonableness of such men as our friend Julius Cæsar find a certain justification. Their fumes and fury, however unintelligent, proceed from an instinctive repugnance to the departure or deviation from nature which they find, or fear to find, in the modern woman. Once let them realize that there was no danger of anything of the kind, and they would become gentle as doves, if not all smiles and approval.

There is no more beautiful and refining influence in the world than that of an attractive and noble woman. Unselfishness, tenderness, aspiring sentiment, long-suffering devotion, grace, tact, and quickly divining intelligence are her prerogatives, and she stands an ever-watchful guardian angel at the shoulder of man. The leading poetic and elevating associations of life are linked with her name. The lover’s passion, the husband’s worship, the son’s reverential affection are inspired by her. The strong man stays his hand and sides with mercy or honor when his mother speaks within him. In homelier language, she is the keeper of the hearth and home, the protector and trainer of her children, the adviser, consoler, and companion of her husband, father, son, brother, or other masculine associates.

Now, the modern woman, up to this point, has been disposed, on the whole, to regard this as the part which she is to play in the drama of life. At least she has not materially deviated from it. Her progress has been simply in the way of enabling her to play that part more intelligently and worthily, and not toward usurpation, excepting that she claims the right to earn her daily bread. Higher education in its various branches has been the most signal fruit of her struggle for enlightenment and liberty, and this is certainly in entire keeping with the eternal feminine, and to-day seems indispensable to her suitable development. By means of education similar to that lavished upon man she has been enabled, it is true, to obtain employment of various kinds hitherto withheld from her, but the positions of professor, teacher, nurse, artist, and clerk, are amplifications of her natural aptitudes rather than encroachments. She has, however, finally reached the stage where she will soon have to decide whether the hearth and the home or down-town is to be the principal theatre of her activity and influence. Is she or is she not to participate with man in the tangible, obvious management of the affairs of the world?