BY FRANCES E. WILLARD,
President National W. C. T. U.

CHAPTER IV.

Thus far I have been trying to impress upon you the reasons why you should cultivate individuality and independence in word and deed. I have claimed that each one of you has a “call” to some specific work, indicated by God’s gifts to you of brain, or heart, or hand. But I would not have you only, or indeed chiefly, concerned with the evolution of your powers for your own sake. If you acquire, let it be that you may dispense; if you achieve, that others may sun themselves in the kind glow of your prosperity. The people who spend all their strength in absorbing are failures and parasites. It is alike the business of the sun and of the soul to radiate every particle of light that they can muster. There is reason to believe that this is precisely what they are for. And so, having made sure of your light, strength and discipline, strike out from the warm and radiant center of a self-poised brain and heart, into the lives about you, and you will find that “What is good for the hive is also good for the bee.” The luminous characters of history have done this, always. Losing their lives in those of other men, they have found them in the crest of the world’s gratitude and fame. What they have done on a grand scale, we, from identical motives, may do on a small one. Such natures are as different from those who cultivate their strongest gift simply for their own sake, as a lighthouse is different from a dark lantern. “Self-culture” is much in vogue nowadays, and has for its high priests some of the most incisive minds of this or any age. But self-culture stops in the middle of the sentence I would fain help you to utter. It says: “Make the most of your powers;” it does not say “for others’ sake as well as your own.” It claims that if we set the candle of our gifts upon the candlestick of modern society, its light will inevitably radiate according to its power of shining, and thus while brightening ourselves we shall have done our utmost toward lighting up the general gloom. But self-culture forgets that a candle is no type of you and me. We are human spirit-lamps, whose rays should be directed and intensified by the blow-pipe of an unceasing purpose; for we are all so made that unless we will to light up other lives, we can never do so to the limit of our power. Self-culture is never base; it is often noble, but it can never be the noblest aim of all.

Why is the memory of Mrs. Browning loved beyond that of almost any poet who has sung? Because “the cry of the human” is so strong in that wondrous voice of hers. Why is the name carved deepest on the republic’s heart that of its martyr President? Because he gave their manhood back to four millions of slaves, and lived and toiled for his people’s sake, “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” Why was the lamentation well nigh universal when under the sea flashed the telegraphic message, “John Stuart Mill is dead?” Because this quiet thinker lived for other men; because he “struck out from the center,” from himself, that pitiful pivot on which so many human wind-mills turn, and measured, in the swift flight of its benignant thought, the long radius between him and the remotest circle of human need; because, more than any other philosopher of his day, he labored for the time when “all men’s weal shall be each man’s care.”

Nay, while I mourn, as I have seldom mourned for an historic character, the cloud that early dimmed, for Stuart Mill, the Star of Bethlehem, I will not, as a woman, withhold from his memory the tribute of my humble gratitude. But while I speak of all these lives, shining like beacon lights of our own day, I would not fail to point you in conclusion toward a wide-armed cross upon a lonely hillside, while I repeat his words who said, “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.” Dear girls, Christ is the magnet of humanity, and she has found the best vocation, and the highest, who brings most souls diseased within the healing power of his immortal gospel. This is a work for which women have gifts preËminent. The Saxon word for lady means “a giver of bread,” and is full of beautiful significance, but America’s new century shall evolve another meaning, freighted with greater blessing for humanity: lady, giver of the bread of life! In later years we have had a revelation of our duty to the ungospeled masses, the “elbow heathen,” as an evangelist has called them, to the intemperate (who, as a rule, are quite beyond the hearing of the pulpit’s voice), and to the dusky dwellers in the Zenana, whose faces are misty with the unshed tears of generations passed in misery and shame. Two thirds of the Church of Christ are women. By the freer life and richer opportunity which you and I enjoy; by society’s growing tolerance, not to say its kindly appreciation, of our activities; by the heart transformed and the peace imparted through the gospel, the voice of our Redeemer pleads for our consecrated service. I would not undervalue the culture of the intellect, but would exalt the culture of the heart.

In all that has been written until now, I have simply tried to outline the new horizon opened up to the gentler sex as the supreme outgrowth of that civilization which He introduced, of whom history records the significant fact that women were “last at his cross, first at his sepulchre.” To attempt some delineation of the landscape enclosed by that far-reaching horizon is my more difficult task in the chapters now to follow. Many letters have come to me as a result of the articles thus far; they bristle with questions and are eloquent with aspiration. Later on I may ask space for a “symposium” with these “inquiring friends” in the genial pages of our tolerant Chautauquan. One speaking with authority exhorts me to “Be practical—that’s what we want!” As if I hadn’t been! But every mind is the prisoner of its own material and method. I can but give of such things as I have; can only tell what life has told to me. According to my own habits of thought, the sequence seems logical, when I turn for a while from the presentation of the modern outlook for women, with its opportunity and hope, to the rationale of this new horizon stretching so far away. Let us note the pathway that has led up to this more hopeful point of view, asking the inevitable question, “Why does that seem natural and fitting for a young woman to do and to aspire to now, which would have been no less improper than impossible, a hundred years ago?” Sweet friends, it is because the ideal of woman’s place in the world is changing in the average mind. For as the artist’s ideal precedes his picture, so the ideal woman must be transformed before the actual one can be. In an age of brute force, the warrior galloping away to his adventures waved his mailed hand to the lady fair who was enclosed for safe keeping in a grim castle with moat and drawbridge. But to-day, when spirit force grows regnant, a woman can circumnavigate the globe alone, without danger of an uncivil word, much less of violence. We shall never span a wider chasm than this change implies. All our inventions have led up to it, and have in nothing else wrought out beneficence so great as they have accomplished here, purely by indirection. In brief, the barriers that have hedged women into one pathway and men into another, altogether different, are growing thin, as physical strength plays a less determining part in our life drama. All through the vegetable and animal kingdoms the fact of sex does not widely differentiate the broader fact of life, its environment and its pursuits. Hence, the immense separateness which sex is called in to explain when we reach the plane of humanity, is to be accounted for largely on other purely artificial grounds. In Eden it did not exist, nor in the original plan of creation, as stated in these just and fatherly words: “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, after our own likeness. Let them have dominion.’ … So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them, and God blessed them, and said unto them, ‘ … replenish the earth and subdue it … and have dominion over every living thing.’” After the fall came the curse, which was no part of the original design, and from which the gospel’s triumph is releasing us, for there is “neither male nor female in Christ Jesus.” I believe that the origin of evil came in with man’s supremacy over one who was meant to be his comrade, and that Paradise regained will come only when the laureate’s prophecy is realized:

The times when a new ideal is moulded, in church, state, or society, mark the epochs of history. Amid what throes did Europe pass from that of supreme authority in the church to the incomparably higher one of supreme liberty in conscience; from the divine right of kings to the divine right of the people. But there was to come a wider evolution of the same ideal, namely, the coequal power of the copartners, man and woman, in working out the problem of human destiny. This newest and noblest of ideals marks the transition from physical force ruling, to spiritual force recognized. The gradual adjustment of everyday occupation, custom and law, to this new ideal, marks ours as a transition period. Those who have the most enlargement of opportunity to hope from the change, will, in the nature of the case, move on most rapidly into the new conditions, and this helps to explain, I think, why women seem to be climbing more rapidly than men, to-day, the heights of spiritual power, with souls more open to the “skyey influences” of the oncoming age.

More women study to-day than men; a greater proportion travel abroad for purposes of culture; a larger share are moral and religious. Half of the world’s wisdom, three fourths of its purity, and nearly all its gentleness, are to-day to be set down on woman’s credit side. Weighted with the alcohol and tobacco habits, Brother Jonathan will have to make better time than he is doing now, if he keeps step with Sister Deborah across the threshold of the twentieth century. For the law of survival of the fittest will inevitably choose that member of the firm who is cleanliest, most wholesome, most accordant with God’s laws of nature and of grace, to survive. To the blindness or fatuity which renders him oblivious of the fact that the coming woman is already here, our current writer of the W. D. Howells and Henry James school owes the dreary monotony of his “society novel.” Not more “conventional” was the style of art known as “Byzantine,” which repeated with barren iteration its placid and colorless “type,” than are the dudesque pages of this pair of literary martinets. The “American novel” will not be written until the American woman, a type now to be found in Michigan, Madison, Boston, Cornell, and other universities, shall have taken her place, twentieth century product that she is, beside the best survivals of young men in similar institutions, and wrought out the Home, the Church, the State that are to be. Measuring each other on all planes, these life partners will know each other’s value, and no appeal to the divorce court will be made to relieve them, a few years after marriage, from an incompatibility that has ripened into open war. Happy homes will dot the country from shore to shore, in which both the man and the woman will do their best to lift the world toward God.

“Self-knowledge, self-reverence, and self-control; these three alone lead life to a sovereign power,” and these are fast becoming essential to any ideal of womanly character which the modern age will recognize as the product of its institutions. Of self-knowledge, these talks have said much. Self-reverence I would fain help you to develop in your character as a woman. If my dear mother did me one crowning kindness it was in making me believe that next to being an angel, the greatest bestowment of God is to make one a woman. With what contempt she referred to the old Jewish formula in which the less refined sex rolled out the words, “I thank thee, O God, that thou hast not made me a woman,” and with what pathos she repeated the gentle prayer of the other, “I thank thee, O God, that thou hast made me as it pleased thee,” with the pithy comment, “What could have pleased Him better, I should like to know, than to make one so rare, so choice, so spiritual as woman is?” Perhaps some of you may have thought you wanted to be a boy, but I seriously doubt it. You may have wanted a boy’s freedom, his independence, his healthful, unimpeding style of dress, but I do not believe any true girl could ever have been coaxed to be a boy. Reverence yourself, then, if you would learn one of the first elements of “How to Win” in this great world race, with its “go-as-you-please” terms, but its “Lucifer-may-take-the-hindmost” penalty for failure.

What will the new ideal of woman not be? She will never be written down in the hotel register by her husband after this fashion: “John Smith and Wife.” He would as soon think of her writing “Mrs. John Smith and Husband.” Why does it not occur to any one to designate him thus? Simply because he is so much more than that. He is a leading force in the affairs of the church; he helps decide who shall be pastor. (So will she.) He is perhaps the village physician, or merchant (so she will be, perhaps—indeed, they are oftentimes in partnership, nowadays, and I have found their home a blessed one). He is the village editor. (Very likely she will be associate.) He is a voter. (She will be, beyond a peradventure.) For the same reason you will never read of her marriage that “the minister pronounced them man and wife” for that functionary would have been just as likely to pronounce them “husband and woman,” a form of expression into which the regulation reporter will be likely to fall one of these days, it being, really, not one whit more ridiculous than the time-worn phrase, “man and wife.” The ideal woman of the future will never be designated as “the Widow Jones,” because she will be so much more than that—“a provider” for her children, “a power” in the church, “a felt force” in the state. I think George Eliot is the first woman to attain the post-mortem honor of having her husband called “her widower,” John W. Cross having been thus indicated in English papers of the period. A turn about is fair play, and the phrase is really quite refreshing to one’s sense of justice. The ideal woman will not write upon her visiting card, nor insist on having her letters addressed, to Mrs. John Smith, or Mrs. Gen. Smith, as the case may be, but will, if her maiden name was Jones, fling her banner to the breeze as “Mrs. Mary Jones Smith,” and will be sure to make it honorable. She will not be the lay figure made and provided to illustrate the fashions of Monsieur Worth and lesser lights of the same guild, but will insist that the goddess Hygiea is the only true modiste, and will dutifully obey her orders. As the Louvre gallery proves that when men were but the parasites of the court they too decked themselves with ear-rings, high heels, powdered hair and gaudy garments, so the distorted figures in the detestable fashion plates of to-day are the irrefutable proofs of woman’s fractional estate; but this will not be so to-morrow, when she finds her kingdom—which is her own true self. The ideal woman will cease to heed the cruel “Thus far and no farther,” which has issued from the pinched lips of old Dame Custom, checking her ardent steps throughout all the ages past, and will be studious only to hear the kindly “Thus far and no farther” of God.

The ideal woman will play Beatrice to man’s Dante in the Inferno of his passions. She will give him the clue out of materialism’s Labyrinth. She will be civilization’s Una, taming the Lion of disease and misery. The State shall no longer go limping on one foot through the years, but shall march off with steps firm and equipoised. The keen eye and deft hand of the housekeeper shall help to make its everyday walks wholesome; the skill in detail, trustworthiness in finance, motherliness in sympathy, so long extolled in private life, shall exalt public station. Indeed, if I were asked the mission of the ideal woman, I would reply: It is to make the whole world homelike. Some one has said that “Temperament is the climate of the individual,” but home is woman’s climate, her vital breath, her native air. A true woman carries home with her everywhere. Its atmosphere surrounds her; its mirror is her face; its music attunes her gentle voice; its longitude may be reckoned from wherever you happen to find her. But

Some people once thought it was, and they thought, also, that you might as well throw down its Lares and Penates as to carry away its weaving loom and spinning wheel. But it survived this spoliation; and when women ceased to pick their own geese and do their own dyeing, it still serenely smiled. The sewing machine took away much of its occupation; the French and Chinese laundries have intruded upon its domain; indeed, men, by their “witty inventions,” are perpetually encroaching on “woman’s sphere,” so that the next generation will no doubt turn the cook stove out of doors, and the housekeeper, standing at the telephone, will order better cooked meals than almost any one has nowadays, sent from scientific caterers by pneumatic tubes, and the debris thereof returned to a general cleaning-up establishment; while houses will be heated, as they are now lighted and supplied with water, from general reservoirs.

Women are fortunate in belonging to the less tainted half of the race. Dr. Benjamin Ward Richardson says that but for this conserving fact it would deteriorate to the point of failure. A bright old lady said, after viewing a brewery, distillery and tobacco factory: “Ain’t I thankful that the women folks hain’t got all that stuff to chew and smoke and swallow down!” It behooves us to offset force of muscle by force of heart, that what our strong brothers have done to subdue the material world for us, who are not their equals in physical strength, may be offset by what we shall achieve for them in bringing in the reign of “Sweeter manners, purer laws.” For the world is slowly making the immense discovery that not what woman does, but what she is, makes home a possible creation. It is the Lord’s ark, and does not need steadying; it will survive the wreck of systems and the crash of theories, for the home is but the efflorescence of woman’s nature under the nurture of Christ’s gospel. She came into the college and elevated it, into literature and hallowed it, into the business world and ennobled it. She will come into government and purify it, into politics and cleanse that Stygian pool as the waters of Marah were cleansed; for woman will make homelike every place she enters, and she will enter every place on this round earth. Any custom, or traffic, or party, on which a woman can not look with favor is irrevocably doomed. Its welcome of her presence and her power is to be the final test of its fitness to survive. All Gospel civilization is radiant with the demonstration of this truth:

The most vivid object lesson on history’s page is the fact that his deterioration is in exact proportion to his isolation from the home of woman’s pure companionship. To my own grateful thought, the most sacred significance of woman’s work to-day lies in the fact that she occupies the outer circle in this tremendous evolution of the Christian idea of home. Ours is a high and sacred calling. Out of pure hearts, fervently let us love God and humanity; so shall we be Christ’s disciples, and so shall we safely follow on to know the work whereunto we have been called.

and no true mother, sister, daughter or wife, can fail to go in spirit after her beloved and tempted ones, as their adventurous steps enter the labyrinth of the world’s temptations. We can not call them back.

There is but one remedy; we must bring the home to them, for they will not return to it. Still must their mothers walk beside them, sweet and serious, and clad in the garments of power. The occupations, pleasures and ambitions of men and women must not diverge so widely from each other. Potent beyond all other facts of everyday experience is the rapidly increasing similarity between the pursuits of these two factions that make up the human integer. When brute force reigned, this rapport was at zero. “Impediments to the rear,” was the command of CÆsar and the rule of every warrior—women and children being the hindrances referred to. But to-day there is not a motto more popular than that of the inspired old German, “Come, let us live for our children;” and as for women, “the world is all before them where to choose.”

No greater good can come to the manhood of the world than is prophesied in the increasing community of thought and works between it and the world’s womanhood. The growing individuality, independence and prestige of the gentler sex steadily require from the stronger a higher standard of character and purer habits of life. This blessed consummation, so devoutly to be wished, is hastened, dear girlish hearts, by every prayer you offer, by every hymn you sing, by every loving errand of your willing feet and gentle hands. You are the true friends of tempted manhood, bewildered youth and every little child. The steadfast faith and loyal, patient work you are to do, will be the mightiest factor in woman’s contribution to the solution of this Republic’s greatest problem, and will have their final significance in the thought and purpose, not that the world shall come into the home, but that the home, embodied and impersonated in its womanhood, shall go forth into the world.

I have no fears for the women of America. They will never content themselves remaining stationary in methods or in policy, much less sound a retreat in their splendid warfare against the saloon in law and in politics. The tides of the mother’s heart do not change; we can count upon them always. The voice of Miriam still cheers the brave advance, and all along the line we hear the battle cry: “Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.”