“The non-combatant population is sure to fare ill during the ages of combat. But these defects, too, are cured or lessened; women have now marvellous ways of winning their way in the world; and mind without muscle has far greater force than muscle without mind.”—Bagehot’s Physics and Politics, c. ii., § 3.

I am at a loss to understand an assertion made by Rev. Dr. Hedge, at an educational meeting in Boston, that “the course of civilization hitherto has tended to develop and confirm sexual difference of employment.” He adds, according to the report in the Daily Advertiser, that, “the more civilized the country, the more the vocations of men and women divide: the more savage the nation, the more they blend and coincide.”

With due respect for Dr. Hedge on many grounds, and especially as having been the first man to demand publicly in presence of the Harvard alumni the admission of women to the university, I must yet express great surprise at his taking what seems to me so utterly untenable a position. To me it seems, on the contrary, that it is the savage period which is remarkable for the industrial separation of the sexes; and that every epoch of advancing civilization—as the present—blends them more and more. The fact would have seemed to me so plain as hardly to need more than simply to state it, but for the authority of Dr. Hedge upon the other side.

As we trace society back to savage life, what are the prevailing employments of the male sex? More and more exclusively, war and the chase. From these two vocations, monopolizing literally the whole active life of the savage man, the savage woman is almost absolutely excluded. Precisely at the point where the man’s sphere leaves off, in each of these pursuits, the woman’s sphere begins. Among American Indians, the man takes the captive, the woman tortures him. The man kills the deer, carries it till within sight of his own village, and then throws it down, that the squaw may go out and drag it in. Much that seems cruel and selfish in Indian life is the result, as Mrs. Jameson long since pointed out, of this complete separation of functions. The reason why the Indian woman carries the lodgepoles and the provisions on the march is that the man’s limbs may be left free and agile for the far severer labors of war and of the chase, from which she is excluded. The reason why she finally brings the deer to the camp is because he has had the more exhausting labor of hunting and killing it.

Contrast now this absolute “sexual difference of employment” with the greater and greater blending of civilized society,—a blending, observe, which proceeds from both sides, and not from woman only. It is hard to say which is more remarkable, within the last half-century,—the way in which women have encroached on men’s work, or the way in which men have encroached on women’s.

In many mechanical and commercial pursuits,—as printing and bookkeeping,—once almost monopolized by men, you now find a very large number of women. In some pursuits, as in education, the women have come to outnumber the men enormously, at least in America; in others, as telegraphy, they seem likely to do the same. We constantly hear of new channels opening. A friend of mine, the other day, just before addressing an audience on woman suffrage, stepped into a barber’s shop, and to his great amazement was shaved by a woman. On inquiry, he learned for the first time, that a good many of that sex, mostly Germans, pursued this occupation in New York and elsewhere. Thus do the vocations of men and women now “blend and coincide.” On the other hand, the leading dressmaker of the world is a man; our bonnetshops are largely conducted by men; the eminent hotel cooks, whose salaries exceed any paid by Harvard University, are men; and the lady who goes to rest in a sleeping-car on our railroads has her pillow smoothed and her curtains drawn, not by a chambermaid, but by a chamberman.

These are the facts which seem to me, I must say, quite fatal to Dr. Hedge’s theory. And there is one thing worth noticing in the very different criticisms passed on men and on women as to these invasions of each other’s province. If you call attention to the way in which men are everywhere taking part in women’s work, people say approvingly, “To be sure! greater energy, greater skill! they do even women’s work better than women themselves can.” But if you point out, that, on the other hand, women are also doing men’s work, and in some cases—as in literature and lecturing—are actually obtaining higher prices than most men can obtain, the same people shake their heads disapprovingly, and say, “Unsexed; out of their sphere!” Now, if we lived in an age of chivalrous protection of women, it would be a different thing; but, as we live in an age of political economy, there is no reason why men alone should have the benefit of its laws. If practical life is to be regarded as a game of puss-in-the-corner, I should recommend to each ejected puss to make for the best corner she finds open, without much deference to the theories of the sages.

Is it better to stand on one’s own feet, or to depend on those of other people? We need clear views on that matter, certainly; and there is not much doubt which theory will ultimately prevail.

For one, I believe the whole theory of a leisure-class, whether for man or woman, to be a snare and a delusion. It seems to me that there is one great drawback that a young American may encounter,—namely, the possession of an independent property; and that there is one great piece of good fortune,—to be thrown on one’s self for support. Of all influences for development or usefulness, I know of none so great as “the wholesome stimulus of pecuniary necessity.” Of all forms of social organization, that seems to me the most favorable which opens to all most freely the opportunity of early education, and then calls upon each to exert himself for his own support.

To be sure, it is hardly possible to overrate the value of cultivated companionship and refined association. In other countries it may be worth while, for the sake of these, to be born to wealth: it is so hard to get them without wealth. But the happiest and best American households are apt to be found among such as Miss Alcott, for instance, habitually describes, where there is plenty of refinement and very little money; where perhaps there has been wealth in times past, but it has been lost just in time for the good of the children. All that money can bring—all books, all travel, all art—are not worth so much as the power to stand on one’s own feet. It is an essential to the character, and it is certainly the greatest of delights. To have earned, for a single year, one’s own support, gives one, in a manner, the freedom of the universe. Till that is done, we are children: after that we are mature human beings.

In England, where the whole social atmosphere is so different, there are many instances of much service done to art and philanthropy by persons born to leisure. And yet, even in England, if the admissions of English people may be trusted, these instances are bought by a frightful disproportion of wasted lives; and the best work is, after all, done by those who have learned to stand on their own feet. This last fact is certainly true of France, Germany, and America. So far as my own observation goes, for one American born to leisure who makes a good use of it, there are a dozen who lead empty or vicious lives. And even that exceptional one, with all his advantages, is often distanced in the race by the men who have early had to stand on their own feet. The man of leisure is usually so limited, either by the absence of stimulus or by the tiresome narrowness of a petty circle, or by missing the wholesome attrition of other minds, that he dwindles and grows feeble. If such a man attains by the aid of wealth what the man of the next inferior grade attains without it, we are all glad, and say it is “an honorable instance.” Not that the rich are worse than other men. It is no calamity to earn wealth, or even to inherit it after we have learned the lesson of self-reliance. It is the children of wealth who are to be pitied.

Now, all women who are born outside of actual poverty in America are as badly off as if they had been born to wealth. They are systematically discouraged from the delightful tonic of self-support. But when it is said that they never even feel the desire to support themselves, I must dissent. For twenty years I have been encountering young women who so longed for the sense of an independent position that even the happiest paternal home could not satisfy them unless it gave them so much to do that they might honestly feel that they earned their living. Otherwise the most luxurious arm-chairs in their own houses would not satisfy them, they so longed to learn the use of their own feet. I have known girls to rejoice in their father’s loss of property, because it would release them to enjoy the happiness of self-reliance; and, for one, had I the good fortune to have a dozen daughters, I should wish them all to be of this way of thinking. Any other theory would give us a world of mere amateurs and dilettantes, and very little work would be done. We are getting over the theory that it is undignified for a man to stand upon his own feet; and we shall one day get over it in regard to women.

In a certain New England town I lived opposite the house of a thriving mechanic. His wife, a young and pretty woman, soon attracted the attention of my household by the grace and vivacity of her bearing, and the peculiar tastefulness of her own and her little boy’s costume. On further acquaintance, we found that she did every atom of her housework, washing and all; that she cut and made every garment for herself and her child; and that, finding her energies still unsatisfied, she took in sewing-work from a tailor’s shop, and thus earned most of the money for their wardrobe. It may be well to add, to complete this story of New England social life, that her husband was one of the very earliest volunteers for the war of the Rebellion; that he went in captain, came out brigadier-general, and now holds an important government office.

There is nothing isolated or unexampled about this instance. My pretty and ladylike neighbor was only energetic, ready, capable, and ambitious, or, to sum it all up in the New England vernacular, “smart.” Whatever she saw in society or life that was desirable for herself or her husband or her child, that she aimed at, and generally obtained.

She “hadn’t a lazy bone in her body;” and she never will have, though she may wear that body out prematurely by nervous tension. Wherever she goes, she will carry the same restless, tireless energy; and, should her husband ever go to Congress or to the Court of St. James, she will carry herself with perfect fearlessness and ease. And in all this she represents one great type of New England women.

When you ask of such a woman if she shrinks from work, it is as if you asked, Does a deer shrink from running, or a swallow from flying? She loves the work: indeed she loves it, in my opinion, far too much, and sets a dangerous example. All theories of the natural indolence of man—or woman—fall defeated before the New England temperament, traditions, training, climate; before that “whip of the sky,” as a poet has sung, that urges us on. If, therefore, “household work is thought degrading,”—and Miss Ingelow asserts too hastily that “nowhere is this so much the case as in America,”—it certainly is not merely because it is work.

For myself, I doubt the fact, and demand the evidence. So far as the free States of the Union are concerned, it seems to me that household labor is thought less degrading than in England, and that the proportion of well-taught and ladylike women who contentedly do their own work is far greater in America, and keeps pace with the greater spread of average education. There is not a city in the land, I suppose,—certainly not a village,—where the housework in a large majority of the American-born families is not done by Americans; for the large majority are always mechanics and laborers, among whom, as a rule, the work is done by the wives and sisters and daughters. The wages of domestics are so much higher in America than in England,—being almost double,—that it is here a more serious expenditure to employ such aid.

I think, therefore, that we must be very cautious before we say that housework, as such, is held degrading in the free States. No doubt, American women feel, as their husbands and brothers feel, that all work should be done by machinery, as far as possible, and that the washing-machine and the carpet-sweeper are as legitimate as the patent reaper or mower. They would be foolish if they did not. They also feel, as American men feel, that, in this great assemblage of all nations, the place for the American is rather in posts of command than in the ranks. In our ships you find men of all nations in the forecastle, but Americans in the cabin. In the regular army it is the officers, commissioned or non-commissioned, who are Americans. Go as far west as you please, you are surprised to find that the railway officials, superintendents, conductors, baggage-masters, are not merely American-born but often New-England-born. The better average education tells. It is in the fitness of things that the under-work of household life also should be done by the under-class of foreign elements, and that it should be Americans who do the direction and guidance. Some such instinct as this is the explanation of much that Miss Ingelow takes for a contempt of household labor. An American woman does not despise such labor, properly speaking, any more than an American man despises mechanical labor. Both aim, if they can, to rise to occupations more lucrative and more intellectual.

It is not the labor, it is not even the household labor, to which objection is made. When you come to household labor for other people, done in a capacity recognized as menial,—ay, there’s the rub! There is a widespread feeling that domestic service in other people’s families is menial.

For one I have publicly remonstrated against the excess of this feeling, and think it is carried too far. Women will never compete equally with men, until they are willing, like men, to do any honest work without sense of degradation. This is one point where enfranchisement will help them. So long as a man bears in his hand the ballot, that symbol of substantial equality, his self-respect is not easily impaired by the humblest position. “A man’s a man for a’ that,” he knows, before the law. But a woman, not having this, has only the usages of society to guide her; and, so long as society talks about “master” and “servant,” I do not blame the American girl for refusing to accept such a position,—just as I do not blame, but applaud, the American man for refusing to wear livery. I only condemn them, in either case, when the alternative is starvation or sin. Then pride should yield.

But this is the conclusive proof that it is not the housework which is held degrading: the fact that there is no difficulty in securing any number of American girls in our large country hotels, where they associate with their employers as equals, and call no man master. The fact that the proprietors of such hotels invariably prefer American “help” to Irish, shows that the philosophy of the whole question lies in a different direction from that indicated by our good friend Miss Ingelow. The evil of which she speaks does not properly exist: the real difficulty lies in a different direction, and cannot be settled till we see farther into the social organization that is to come.

It is the English theory, that society needs a leisure class, not self-supporting, from whom public services and works of science and art may proceed. Even Darwin recognizes this theory. But how little is England doing for science and art, compared to Germany! and the German work of that kind is not done by a leisure class, but by poor men. I believe that the necessity of self-support, at least in the earlier years of life, is the best training for manhood; and it does not seem desirable that women should be wholly set free from it.

A clever writer, on the other hand, maintains in the New York Independent that women should never support themselves if it be possible honorably to avoid it. “Pecuniary dependence, degrading to men, is not only not undignified, but is the only thoroughly dignified condition, for women. In a renovated and millennial society all women will be supported by men,—will have no more to do with bringing in money than the lilies of the field.” This statement is delightfully uncompromising, and it is a great thing to hear an extreme position so clearly and unequivocally put. Especially on a question so difficult as the labor and wages of women, it is particularly desirable to have each extreme worked out to its logical results.

It is certainly the normal condition of woman to be a wife and a mother. It is equally certain that this condition withdraws woman from the labor-market, during the prime of her life. The very years during which a man attains his highest skill, and earns his highest wages,—say, from twenty-five to forty,—are lost to woman, in this normal condition, so far as earning money is concerned. This is the main fact, as I judge, which keeps down the standard of both work and pay among women, as a class. If men, as a class, were thus heavily weighted, the result would be as clearly seen. Where one sex brings into the market the full vigor of its life, and the other has only crude labor, or occasional labor, or broken labor, to offer, the result cannot be doubtful. Yet this is precisely the state of the competition between man and woman.

I believe, therefore, with this writer, that woman was not intended to be the equal competitor of man in business pursuits—or, indeed, to be self-supporting at all—during her career of motherhood. It is generally recognized as a calamity, when she is obliged to support herself at that time. Most people believe with Miss Mitford that “women were not meant to earn the bread of a family,” and that men are. But to earn the bread of a family is not self-support: it is much more than self-support. And when this writer takes a step beyond, and says, “I think the necessity of earning her own living is always a woman’s misfortune,” then she seems to theorize beyond good sense, and to confuse things very different. Self-support is one thing: supporting seven small children is quite another thing.

That which should never be left out of sight is the essential dignity of labor. Woman during the period of maternity is rightly excused from earning money; but it is because she is better occupied. She is not exempted in the character of lily of the field, but in the capacity of mother of a family. It is an important distinction. For labor in the lower sense, she substitutes what, in a higher and more sacred sense, we still call “labor.” She is not supported because she is a woman, but because, in her capacity as woman, she happens to have home-duties. If she had no such duties, there seems no reason why she should be supported any more than if she were a man. To be a wife and mother is a vocation, and one which usually for a time precludes all others. Merely to be a woman is not a vocation; and, so long as one can make no better claim on the world than that, the world has a right to demand something more. The Irishwoman who locks her little children into her one room, that she may go out to earn their bread, seems to me in a position no falser than that of the over-worked father who breaks himself down with toil that his daughters may live like the lilies of the field.

For one, I have never been fascinated by the style of domestic paradise that English novels depict,—half a dozen unmarried daughters round the family hearth, all assiduously doing worsted-work and petting their papa. I believe a sufficiency of employment to be the only normal and healthy condition for a human being; and where there is not work enough to employ the full energies of all, at home, it seems as proper for young women as for young birds to leave the parental nest. If this additional work is done for money, very well. It is the conscious dignity of self-support that removes the traditional curse from labor, and woman has a right to claim her share in that dignified position.

Yet I cannot agree, on the other hand, with Celia Burleigh when she says that her “True Woman” should be self-supporting, even in marriage. Women’s part of the family task—the care of home and children—is just as essential to building up the family fortunes as the very different toil of the out-door partner. For young married women to undertake any more direct aid to the family income is in most cases utterly undesirable, and is asking of themselves a great deal too much. And this is not because they are to be encouraged in indolence, but because they already, in a normal condition of things, have their hands full. As, on this point, I may differ from some of my readers, let me explain precisely what I mean.

As I write, there are at work, in another part of the house, two paper-hangers, a man and his wife, each forty-five or fifty years of age. Their children are grown up, and some of them married: they have a daughter at home, who is old enough to do the housework, and leave the mother free. There is no way of organizing the labors of this household better than this: the married pair toil together during the day, and go home together to their evening rest. A happier couple I never saw; it is a delight to see them cheerily at work together, cutting, pasting, hanging: their life seems like a prolonged industrial picnic; and, if I had the ill-luck to own as many palaces as an English duke, I should keep them permanently occupied in putting fresh papers on the walls.

But the merit of this employment for the woman is, that it interferes with no other duty. Were she a young mother with little children, and obliged by her paper-hanging to neglect them, or to leave them at a “day-nursery,” or to overwork herself by combining too many cares, then the sight of her would be very sad. So sacred a thing does motherhood seem to me, so paramount and absorbing the duty of a mother to her child, that in a true state of society I think she should be utterly free from all other duties,—even, if possible, from the ordinary cares of housekeeping. If she has spare health and strength to do these other things as pleasures, very well; but she should be relieved from them as duties. And, as to the need of self-support, I can hardly conceive of an instance where it can be to the mother of young children any thing but a disaster. As we all know, this calamity often occurs; I have seen it among the factory-operatives at the North, and among the negro-women in the cotton-fields at the South: in both cases it is a tragedy, and the bodies and brains of mother and children alike suffer. That the mother should bear and tend and nurture, while the father supports and protects,—this is the true division.

Does this bear in any way upon suffrage? Not at all. The mother can inform herself upon public questions in the intervals of her cares, as the father among his; and the baby in the cradle is a perpetual appeal to her, as to him, that the institutions under which that baby dwells may be kept pure. One of the most devoted young mothers I ever knew—the younger sister of Margaret Fuller Ossoli—made it a rule, no matter how much her children absorbed her, to read books or newspapers for an hour every day; in order, she said, that their mother should be more than a mere source of physical nurture, and that her mind should be kept fresh and alive for them. But to demand in addition that such a mother should earn money for them, is to ask too much; and there is many a tombstone in New England, which, if it told the truth, would tell what comes of such an effort.

Talking, the other day, with one of the leading dressmakers of a New England town, I asked her why it was, that, when women suffered so much from scanty employments and low pay, there should yet be so few good dressmakers. “You are all overrun and worn out with work,” I said, “all the year round; every lady in town complains that there are so few of you; and it is the same in every town where I ever lived.” She answered, as such witnesses always answer, “Women do not engage in occupations, as men do, for a lifetime. They expect only to continue in them for a year or two, until they shall be married. I employ twelve girls, and not one of them expects to be a dressmaker for life. They work their ten hours a day, under my direction, and that is all.”

Here lies the point of difference between the work of women and that of men, as a class: I mean, in their industrial pursuits, the work that earns money. Until we reach this point, or get a social philosophy that explains this, we are yet upon the surface only. The enfranchisement of woman will help us towards this, but will not, of itself, solve the problem of wages; because that depends on other than political considerations.

Why do the mass of men work? Not from taste, or for love of the work, but from conscious need. If they do not work, they and their families will starve. It is a necessity, and a permanent necessity. It will last all their lives, except in the case of a few who will “come into their property” by and by, like Mr. Toots—and their work is usually worth about as much as his. We see this every day in the sons of rich men. Their fathers may bring them up to work, yet the mere fact that they are to be relieved from this compulsion within a dozen years is apt to paralyze their active faculties. They study law or medicine, or dabble in “business;” but they only play at the practice of their pursuits, because there is no conscious necessity behind them. There are exceptions, but the exceptions are remarkable men.

Now, theorize as we may, the fact at present is, that what thus paralyzes the energies of a few young men brings the same paralysis to many young women. Those whose parents are wealthy do not learn any regular occupation at all. Those whose parents are poor are obliged by necessity to learn one: yet they do not learn it as men in general learn theirs, but only as rich young men do, as if it were something to be followed for a time only,—till they “come into their property.” To the rich young man the property is a landed estate or some bank-stock. To the poor girl the prospective property is a husband. She expects to be married; and after that her money-making occupation is gone, and a new avocation—that of housekeeping and maternity—begins. It is no less arduous, no less honorable; but it is different. In it her previous special training goes for nothing; and the thought of this must diminish her interest in the previous special training. It is only a temporary thing, like the few years’ labor of a rich young man. There are exceptions, but they are extraordinary.

One reason why women’s work is not at present so well paid as that of men is because it is not ordinarily so well done, especially in the more difficult parts. All employers, male and female, tell you this; and one great reason why it is not so well done is because women have not, as men have, a spring of permanent necessity to urge them on. How shall we supply the spring? This is the question we need to answer. As yet I do not think we have reached it. It does not seem to me to be, like the suffrage question, one easily settled. The reader will find very important facts and testimonies bearing upon it in Virginia Penny’s “CyclopÆdia of Female Employments.”^[13]

I confess myself unable, even after a good many years of study, to solve it fully; but a few propositions, I think, are sure, and may be taken as axioms to begin with. The general wages of women will always depend greatly on the amount of skill acquired by the mass of them. The mass of women will always look forward to being married, and, when married, to being necessarily withdrawn from the labor-market. Those who look forward to this withdrawal will not, as a rule, concentrate themselves upon learning their vocation as if it were for life; and, at any rate, when they leave it, they will take their skill with them, and so lower the average skill of the whole.

The problem, therefore, is, how to equalize wages between a sex which works continually throughout life, driven by conscious necessity, and a sex which habitually works with temporary expectations, looking forward to a withdrawal from the labor-market in a few years, and which, when so withdrawn, carries its acquired skill with it, leaving only inexperience in its place. We all wish to solve the problem: every man would like to have his daughters as well paid for their labor as his sons. The ballot will help to elucidate it, no doubt, by putting woman’s political protection, at least, into her own hands: but wholly to solve the problem will take the wisdom of several generations; nor will it be done, perhaps, until the greater problem of association vs. competition is also understood. It certainly never will be solved by slighting the marriage-relation, or by advocating either “free love” or celibacy for women or for men.

“The hopeless defect of women in all practical matters,” said a shrewd merchant the other day, “is, that it is impossible to make them thorough.” It was a shallow remark, and so I told him. Women are thorough in the things which they have accepted as their sphere,—in their housekeeping and their dress and their social observances. There is nothing more thorough on earth than the way housework is done in a genuine New England household. There is an exquisite thoroughness in the way a milliner’s or a dressmaker’s work is done,—a work such as clumsy man cannot rival, and can hardly estimate. No general plans his campaigns or marshals his armies better than some women of society manage the circles of which they are the centre. Day and night, winter and summer, at city or watering-place, year in and year out, such a woman keeps open house for her gay world. She has a perpetual series of guests who must be fed luxuriously, and amused profusely; she talks to them in four or five languages; at her entertainments, she notes who is present and who absent, as carefully as Napoleon watched his soldiers; her interchange of cards, alone, is a thing as complex as the army muster-rolls: thus she plans, organizes, conquers, and governs. People speak of her existence as that of a doll or a toy, when she is the most untiring of campaigners. Grant that her aim is, after all, unworthy, and that you pity the worn face which has to force so many smiles. No matter: the smiles are there, and so is the success. I often wish that the reformers would do their work as thoroughly as the women of society do theirs.

No, there is no constitutional want of thoroughness in women. The trouble is, that into the new work upon which they are just entering, they have not yet brought their thoroughness to bear. They suffer and are defrauded and are reproached, simply because they have not yet nerved themselves to do well the things which they have asserted their right to do. A distinguished woman, who earns perhaps the largest income ever honestly earned by any woman off the stage, told me the other day that she left all her business affairs to the management of others, and did not even know how to draw a check on a bank. What a melancholy self-exhibition was that of a clever American woman, the author of half a dozen successful books, refusing to look her own accounts in the face until they had got into such a tangle that not even her own referees could disentangle them to suit her! These things show, not that women are constitutionally wanting in thoroughness, but that it is hard to make them carry this quality into new fields.

I wish I could possibly convey to the young women who write for advice on literary projects something of the meaning of this word “thorough” as applied to literary work. Scarcely any of them seem to have a conception of it. Dash, cleverness, recklessness, impatience of revision or of patient investigation, these are the common traits. To a person of experience, no stupidity is so discouraging as a brilliancy that has no roots. It brings nothing to pass; whereas a slow stupidity, if it takes time enough, may conquer the world. Consider that for more than twenty years the path of literature has been quite as fully open for women as for men, in America,—the payment the same, the honor the same, the obstacles no greater. Collegiate education has until very lately been denied them, but how many men succeed as writers without that advantage! Yet how little, how very little, of really good literary work has yet been done by American women! Young girls appear one after another: each writes a single clever story or a single sweet poem, and then disappears forever. Look at Griswold’s “Female Poets of America,” and you are disposed to turn back to the title-page, and see if these utterly forgotten names do not really represent the “female poets” of some other nation. They are forgotten, as most of the more numerous “female prose writers” are forgotten, because they had no root. Nobody doubts that women have cleverness enough, and enough of power of expression. If you could open the mails, and take out the women’s letters, as somebody says, they would prove far more graphic and entertaining than those of the men. They would be written, too, in what Macaulay calls—speaking of Madame d’Arblay’s early style—“true woman’s English, clear, natural, and lively.” What they need, in order to convert this epistolary brilliancy into literature, is to be thorough.

You cannot separate woman’s rights and her responsibilities. In all ages of the world she has had a certain limited work to do, and has done that well. All that is needed, when new spheres are open, is that she should carry the same fidelity into those. If she will work as hard to shape the children of her brain as to rear her bodily offspring, will do intellectual work as well as she does housework, and will meet her moral responsibilities as she meets her social engagements, then opposition will soon disappear. The habit of thoroughness is the key to all high success. Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well. Only those who are faithful in a few things will rightfully be made rulers over many.

The brilliant Lady Ashburton used to say of herself that she had never written a book, and knew nobody whose book she would like to have written. This does not seem to be the ordinary state of mind among those who write letters of inquiry to authors. If I may judge from these letters, the yearning for a literary career is just now greater among women than among men. Perhaps it is because of some literary successes lately achieved by women. Perhaps it is because they have fewer outlets for their energies. Perhaps they find more obstacles in literature than young men find, and have, therefore, more need to write letters of inquiry about it. It is certain that they write such letters quite often; and ask questions that test severely the supposed omniscience of the author’s brain,—questions bearing on logic, rhetoric, grammar, and orthography; how to find a publisher, and how to obtain a well-disciplined mind.

These letters may sometimes be too long or come too often for convenience, nor is the consoling postage-stamp always remembered. But they are of great value as giving real glimpses of American social life, and of the present tendencies of American women. They sometimes reveal such intellectual ardor and imagination, such modesty, and such patience under difficulties, as to do good to the reader, whatever they may do to the writer. They certainly suggest a few thoughts, which may as well be expressed, once for all, in print.

Behind almost all these letters there lies a laudable desire to achieve success. “Would you have the goodness to tell us how success can be obtained?” How can this be answered, my dear young lady, when you leave it to the reader to guess what your definition of success may be? For instance, here is Mr. Mansfield Tracy Walworth, who was murdered the other day in New York. He was at once mentioned in the newspapers as a “celebrated author.” Never in my life having heard of him, I looked in Hart’s “Manual of American Literature,” and there found that Mr. Walworth’s novel of “Warwick” had a sale of seventy-five thousand copies, and his “Delaplaine” of forty-five thousand. Is it a success to have secured a sale like that for your books, and then to die, and have your brother penmen ask, “Who was he?” Yet, certainly, a sale of seventy-five thousand copies is not to be despised; and I fear I know many youths and maidens who would willingly write novels much poorer than “Warwick” for the sake of a circulation like that. I do not think that Hawthorne, however, would have accepted these conditions; and he certainly did not have this style of success.

Nor do I think he had any right to expect it. He had made his choice, and had reason to be satisfied. The very first essential for literary success is to decide what success means. If a young girl pines after the success of Marion Harland and Mrs. Southworth, let her seek it. It is possible that she may obtain it, or surpass it; and, though she might do better, she might do far worse. It is, at any rate, a laudable aim to be popular: popularity may be a very creditable thing, unless you pay too high a price for it. It is a pleasant thing, and has many contingent advantages,—balanced by this great danger, that one is apt to mistake it for success.

“Learning hath made the most,” said old Fuller, “by those books on which the booksellers have lost.” If this be true of learning, it is quite as true of genius and originality. A book may be immediately popular and also immortal, but the chances are the other way. It is more often the case, that a great writer gradually creates the taste by which he is enjoyed. Wordsworth in the last generation and Emerson in the present have been striking instances of this; and authors of far less fame have yet the same choice which they had. You can take the standard which the book-market offers, and train yourself for that. This will, in the present age, be sure to educate certain qualities in you,—directness, vividness, animation, dash,—even if it leaves other qualities untrained. Or you can make a standard of your own, and aim at that, taking your chance of seeing the public agree with you. Very likely you may fail; perhaps you may be wrong in your fancy, after all, and the public may be right: if you fail, you may find it hard to bear; but, on the other hand, you may have the inward “glory and joy” which nothing but fidelity to an ideal standard can give. All this applies to all forms of work, but it applies conspicuously to literature.

Instead, therefore, of offering to young writers the usual comforting assurance, that, if they produce any thing of real merit, it will be sure to succeed, I should caution them first to make their own definition of success, and then act accordingly. Hawthorne succeeded in his way, and Mr. M. T. Walworth in his way; and each of these would have been very unreasonable if he had expected to succeed in both ways. There is always an opening for careful and conscientious literary work; and, by such work, many persons obtain a modest support. There are also some great prizes to be won; but these are commonly, though not always, won by work of a more temporary and sensational kind. Make your choice; and, when you have got precisely what you asked for, do not complain because you have missed what you would not take.

A young girl of some talent once told me that she had devoted herself to “the career of letters.” I found, on inquiry, that she had obtained a situation as writer of “society” gossip for a New York newspaper. I can hardly imagine any life that leads more directly away from any really literary career, or any life about which it is harder to give counsel. The work of a newspaper-correspondent, especially in the “society” direction, is so full of trials and temptations, for one of either sex, in our dear, inquisitive, gossiping America, that one cannot help watching with especial solicitude all women who enter it. Their special gifts as women are a source of danger: they are keener of observation from the very fact of their sex, more active in curiosity, more skilful in achieving their ends; in a world of gossip they are the queens, and men but their subjects, hence their greater danger.

In Newport, New York, Washington, it is the same thing. The unbounded appetite for private information about public or semi-public people creates its own purveyors; and these, again, learn to believe with unflinching heartiness in the work they do. I have rarely encountered a successful correspondent of this description who had not become thoroughly convinced that the highest desire of every human being is to see his name in print, no matter how. Unhappily there is a great deal to encourage this belief: I have known men to express great indignation at an unexpected newspaper-puff, and then to send ten dollars privately to the author. This is just the calamity of the profession, that it brings one in contact with this class of social hypocrites; and the “personal” correspondent gradually loses faith that there is any other class to be found. Then there is the perilous temptation to pay off grudges in this way, to revenge slights, by the use of a power with which few people are safely to be trusted. In many cases, such a correspondent is simply a child playing with poisoned arrows: he poisons others; and it is no satisfaction to know that in time he will also poison himself, and paralyze his own power for mischief.

There lies before me a letter written some years ago to a young lady anxious to enter on this particular “career of letters,”—a letter from an experienced New York journalist. He has employed, he says, hundreds of lady correspondents, for little or no compensation; and one of his few successful writers he thus describes: “She succeeds by pushing her way into society, and extracting information from fashionable people and officials and their wives.... She flatters the vain, and overawes the weak, and gets by sheer impudence what other writers cannot.... I would not wish you to be like her, or reduced to the necessity of doing what she does, for any success journalism can possibly give.” And who can help echoing this opinion? If this is one of the successful laborers, where shall we place the unsuccessful; or, rather, is success, or failure, the greater honor?

Personal journalism has a prominence in this country with which nothing in any other country can be compared. What is called publicity in England or France means the most peaceful seclusion, compared with the glare of notoriety which an enterprising correspondent can flash out at any time—as if by opening the bull’s-eye of a dark lantern—upon the quietest of his contemporaries. It is essentially an American institution, and not one of those in which we have reason to feel most pride. It is to be observed, however, that foreigners, if in office, take to it very readily; and it is said that no people cultivate the reporters at Washington more assiduously than the diplomatic corps, who like to send home the personal notices of themselves, in order to prove to their governments that they are highly esteemed in the land to which they are appointed. But, however it may be with them, it is certain that many people still like to keep their public and private lives apart, and shrink from even the inevitable eminence of fame. One of the very most popular of American authors has said that he never, to this day, has overcome a slight feeling of repugnance on seeing his own name in print.

Every time a woman does any thing original or remarkable,—inventing a rat-trap, let us say, or carving thirty-six heads on a walnut-shell,—all observers shout applause. “There’s a woman for you, indeed! Instead of talking about her rights, she takes them. That’s the way to do it. What a lesson to these declaimers upon the platform!”

It does not seem to occur to these wise people that the right to talk is itself one of the chief rights in America, and the way to reach all the others. To talk, is to make a beginning, at any rate. To catch people with your ideas, is more than to contrive a rat-trap; and Isotta Nogarola, carving thirty-six empty heads, was not working in so practical a fashion as Mary Livermore when she instructs thirty-six hundred full ones.

It shows the good sense of the woman suffrage agitators, that they have decided to begin with talk. In the first place, talking is the most lucrative of all professions in America; and therefore it is the duty of American women to secure their share of it. Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble used to say that she read Shakspeare in public “for her bread;” and when, after melting all hearts by a course of farewell readings, she decided to begin reading again, she said she was doing it “for her butter.” So long as women are often obliged to support themselves and their children, and perhaps their husbands, by their own labor, they have no right to work cheaply, unless driven to it. Anna Dickinson has no right to make fifteen dollars a week by sewing, if, by stepping out of the ranks of needle-women into the ranks of the talkers, she can make a hundred dollars a day. Theorize as we may, the fact is, that there is no kind of work in America which brings such sure profits as public speaking. If women are unfitted for it, or if they “know the value of peace and quietness,” as the hand-organ-man says, and can afford to hold their tongues, let them do so. But if they have tongues, and like to use them, they certainly ought to make some money by the performance.

This is the utilitarian view. And when we bring in higher objects, it is plain that the way to get any thing in America is to talk about it. Silence is golden, no doubt, and like other gold remains in the bank-vaults, and does not just now circulate very freely as currency. Even literature in America is utterly second to oratory as a means of immediate influence. Of all sway, that of the orator is the most potent and most perishable; and the student and the artist are apt to hold themselves aloof from it, for this reason. But it is the one means in America to accomplish immediate results, and women who would take their rights must take them through talking. It is the appointed way.

Under a good old-fashioned monarchy, if a woman wished to secure any thing for her sex, she must cajole a court, or become the mistress of a monarch. That epoch ended with the French Revolution. When Bonaparte wished to silence Madame de StaËl, he said, “What does that woman want? Does she want the money the government owes to her father?” When Madame de StaËl heard of it, she said, “The question is not what I want, but what I think.” Henceforth women, like men, are to say what they think. For all that flattery and seduction and sin, we have substituted the simple weapon of talk. If women wish education, they must talk; if better laws, they must talk. The one chief argument against woman suffrage, with men, is that so few women even talk about it.

As long as talk can effect any thing, it is the duty of women to talk; and in America, where it effects every thing, they should talk all the time. When they have obtained, as a class, absolute equality of rights with men, their talk on this subject may be silent, and they may accept, if they please, that naughty masculine definition of a happy marriage,—the union of a deaf man with a dumb woman.

There are other things that women wish to do, it seems, beside studying and voting. There are a good many—if I may judge from letters that occasionally come to me—who are taking, or wish to take, their first lessons in public speaking. Not necessarily very much in public, or before mixed audiences, but perhaps merely to say to a room-full of ladies, or before the committee of a Christian Union, what they desire to say. “How shall I make myself heard? How shall I learn to express myself? How shall I keep my head clear? Is there any school for debate?” And so on. My dear young lady, it does not take much wisdom, but only a little experience, to answer some of these questions. So I am not afraid to try.

The best school for debate is debating. So far as mere confidence and comfort are concerned, the great thing is to gain the habit of speech, even if one speaks badly. And the practice of an ordinary debating society has also this advantage, that it teaches you to talk sense (lest you be laughed at), to speak with some animation (lest your hearers go to sleep), to think out some good arguments (because you are trying to convince somebody), and to guard against weak reasoning or unfounded assertion (lest your opponent trip you up). Speaking in a debating society thus gives you the same advantage that a lawyer derives from the presence of an opposing counsel: you learn to guard yourself at all points. It is the absence of this check which is the great intellectual disadvantage of the pulpit. When a lawyer says a foolish thing in an argument, he is pretty sure to find it out; but a clergyman may go on repeating his foolish thing for fifty years without finding it out, for want of an opponent.

For the art of making your voice heard, I must refer you to an elocutionist. Yet one thing at least you might acquire for yourself,—a thing that lies at the foundation of all good speaking,—the complete and thorough enunciation of every syllable. So great is the delight, to my ear at least, of a perfectly distinct and clear-cut utterance, that I fear I should rather listen for an hour to the merest nonsense, so uttered, than to the very wisdom of angels if given in a confused or nasal or slovenly way. If you wish to know what I mean by a clear and satisfactory utterance, go to the next woman suffrage convention, and hear Miss Eastman.

As to your employment of language, the great aim is to be simple, and, in a measure, conversational, and then let eloquence come of itself. If most people talked as well in public as in private, public meetings would be more interesting. To acquire a conversational tone, there is good sense in Edward Hale’s suggestion, that every person who is called on to speak,—let us say, at a public dinner,—instead of standing up and talking about his surprise at being called on, should simply make his last remark to his neighbor at the table the starting-point for what he says to the whole company. He will thus make sure of a perfectly natural key, to begin with; and can go on from this quiet “As I was just saying to Mr. Smith,” to discuss the gravest question of Church or State. It breaks the ice for him, like the remark upon the weather by which we open our interview with the person whom we have longed for years to meet. Beginning in this way at the level of the earth’s surface, we can join hands and rise to the clouds. Begin in the clouds,—as some of my most esteemed friends are wont to do,—and you have to sit down before reaching the earth.

And, to come last to what is first in importance, I am taking it for granted that you have something to say, and a strong desire to say it. Perhaps you can say it better for writing it out in full beforehand. But, whether you do this or not, remember that the more simple and consecutive your thought, the easier it will be both to keep it in mind and to utter it. The more orderly your plan, the less likely you will be to “get bewildered,” or to “lose the thread.” Think it out so clearly that the successive parts lead to one another, and then there will be little strain upon your memory. For each point you make, provide at least one good argument and one good illustration, and you can, after a little practice, safely leave the rest to the suggestion of the moment. But so much as this you must have, to be secure. Methods of preparation of course vary extremely; yet I suppose the secret of the composure of an experienced speaker to lie usually in this, that he has made sure beforehand of a sufficient number of good points to carry him through, even if nothing good should occur to him on the spot. Thus wise people, in going on a fishing-excursion, take with them not merely their fishing-tackle, but a few fish; and then, if they are not sure of their luck, they will be sure of their chowder.

These are some of the simple hints that might be given, in answer to inquiring friends. I can remember when they would have saved me some anguish of spirit; and they may be of some use to others now. I write, then, not to induce any one to talk for the sake of talking,—Heaven forbid!—but that those who are longing to say something should not fancy the obstacles insurmountable, when they are really slight.