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

CHAPTER I.

Long ago, and long ago it was, in the days when I used proudly to write “School Teacher” after my name, I bought a certain book for the express purpose of reading it to “the girls I’ve left behind me.” The book is one beloved by train boys, of which they and other venders have sold so many that the latest “dodgers” read, “Twentieth thousand now in press.” It is sensible in matter, attractive in style, and goes by the enticing name of “Getting on in the World.” Naturally enough it was written in Chicago, and like most “Garden City” notions, is “a success.” But the trouble with this volume was that it didn’t fill the bill. I wanted to read it to “my girls,” to stir up their pure minds by way of remembrance that “life is real, life is earnest,” and the rest of it. But as I scanned its bright and pleasant pages I found out—what do you think I found? Why, that with the light of a new dispensation blazing in upon him, and the soprano voices of several million “superfluous women,” crying, “Have you no work for me to do?” this honored author had written never a word about creation’s gentler half! His book contained 365 pages, but if you had read a page each day, all the year round, you wouldn’t have found out at last that such a being as a woman was trying to “get on” in this or any other world. Not a bread-winning weapon had he put into the hand of the neediest among us, nor had he, even in a stray chapter or “appendix,” taken us off by ourselves and drawn us a diagram of “our sphere.”

I was so pained by this that I wrote Prof. Matthews (the gifted author, and my personal friend), asking him why he had thus counted out the women folks in his book upon success in life. I even ventured to hypothecate his reason, saying to him:

Whereupon came a prompt and gracious reply, with the frank and manly admission:

Now, you perceive, it set me thinking—this obliquity of mental vision, which had led a writer so talented and wise to squint thus at the human race, seeing but half of it. I recalled the fact that, into most families, are born girls as well as boys; nay, as many an over-burdened pater familias can testify, they come not unfrequently in largely superior, if not exclusive numbers. Having, also, at a remote period of my history, belonged to the same helpless fraternity, I was haunted by the wish that I might write a sequel to the Professor’s excellent book, talking therein to girls and women about success in life. Perhaps my time has come; perhaps, in the generous pages of The Chautauquan, whose editor is so tolerant of the “strong minded” sisterhood, I have the largest audience that has yet consented to listen to my “views.” Anyhow, I mean, in these newly acquired pages to talk to girls of “How to Win” in something besides the sense treated of in books of etiquette and fashion magazines, or systematically taught in dancing schools.

And now, my dears, if you are patient and my small assistant keeps me in lead pencils, I shall try to show that if every young woman held in her firm little hand her own best gift, duly cultivated and made effective, society would not explode, the moon would not be darkened, the sun would still shed light. Somehow, dear girls, when I see an audience of young men, they remind me of a platoon of soldiers, marching with fixed bayonet, to the capture of their destiny. An assembly of young women, on the other hand, recalls a flock of lambs upon a pleasant hillside. They frisk about and nibble at the herbage and lie down in the sun, while above them soars the devouring eagle of their destiny, sweeping in concentric rings through the blue air, and ready to pounce down upon them, while the meek little innocents turn their white faces upward and mildly wonder “what that graceful creature is up yonder?” They remind me, too, of the reply given by a bright young friend of mine to the solemn exhortation that she should “make the most of life.”

“Humph!” she exclaimed with a rueful grimace, “I have no chance, for life is busy making the most of me!”

The trouble is, we women have all along been set down on the world’s program for a part so different from the one we really play upon its stage. For instance, the program reads: “Woman will take the part of Queen in the Drama of Society,” but often times, before the curtain falls, the stage reveals her as a dressmaker, a school teacher, perchance that most abused of mortals, a reformer! The program reads: “This august actress will be escorted to the stage by Man, her loyal and devoted subject, to whom has been assigned the part of shielding her from the glare of the footlights, and shooting anybody in the audience who dares to hiss.” But, alas! ofttimes the stage reveals her coming in alone, dragging her own sewing machine, while her humble and devoted subject, with tailor’s goose in one hand and scissors in the other, indicates by energetic pantomime his fixed intention to drive her speedily behind the scenes. The program, my beloved innocents, attires you all in purple and fine linen and bids you fare sumptuously every day, but not infrequently the stage reveals you attired in calico gowns, and munching your hard-earned crackers and cheese. The world’s theory furnishes every young lady that draws breath, with a lover, loyal and true, but the world’s practice shoots him on the battlefield, or poisons him with alcohol and nicotine until he can only “rattle around” through life in the place God meant him to fill within home’s sacred sanctuary. It is just this discrepancy that I complain of, and the generous age we live in is complaining of it with a thousand tongues, so that “the logic of events” that happen, instead of events that ought to happen, is impelling toward nobler fortunes that phenomenal creature whom a French author has called “the poor woman of the nineteenth century.”

Naturally enough, in thinking over the “case,” I contrast your aims in life with what were once my aims, your outlook upon life with mine. The other day—a rainy one, you may be sure—I brought from the vasty deep of the family garret some of my girlish journals, which I was curious to compare with the diary of a friend and former pupil at Evanston. Let me give you a few parallel passages because of the lesson they teach. My pupil (aged sixteen) writes thus:

From mine at fifteen years I read:

Later:

From my pupil’s diary, a few months later, take this extract:

From mine, at a similar age (you see precocity was not among my failings):

From my young friend I quote again:

From mine:

From my pupil at seventeen I quote once more:

Finally, from mine:

My readers smile at this, but they may be assured there are such blots upon the page where it was written, as briny drops alone can make.

You see, dear friends, from this contrast I have drawn, showing a glimpse of past and future in two eager, young lives, how fast this world is getting on. What is the difference in the outlook of your life that is, and mine that used to be? Let us consider: I was a daring sort of girl; you are the sort of girls who dare. I had aspiration; you have opportunity. I breathed an atmosphere laden with old time conservatisms, from which my glorious mother’s liberality of soul was my one safety valve of deliverance. But you are exhilarated by the vital air of a new liberty. “The world is all before you, where to choose.” If I required but little of myself, it was because the world required so little of me. No college of first rank in east or west—save noble old Oberlin and generous Antioch—could have been coaxed to count me in when she made up her jewels. Briefly, public opinion proposes to give you a chance. It proposed to let me shirk for myself. It means to put a shield in your left hand and a sword in your right. It let me go forth, as best I could, to beat the air with unarmed hands, or to sharpen my weapons on the field and in plain sight of the enemy.

Society set before me very few incentives, and commended to me only the passive virtues. Indeed, she never really bestirred herself on my behalf at all, save that she ceased not in story and poem, by sermon and song by precept and example, and (most cogently of all) by setting no other hope before me to ground me, so far as she was able, in the philosophy that sustained the illustrious Micawber. “Now my daughter,” thus was she wont to speak, “do you but be docile and obedient, as a young woman should, and something, something very particular indeed will most assuredly turn up.”

But I learned early to distrust a Mentor who took so little cognizance of the imperious ardor of my youth; who was so stupidly oblivious of the varied possibilities in brain and hand and heart, and so I began early to follow out my own devices as to a plan of character and work. Would that the generous impulse of your enthusiasm, guided by your broader opportunity, might

More anon.

Evanston, January 31, 1885.