Part 5 (2/2)

If our instructors in moral philosophy will only base their theory of ethics as broadly as this, we shall no longer need to advertise ”Homes Wanted;” for the joint efforts of men and women will soon provide them.

THE ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION

Nothing throws more light on the whole history of woman than the first ill.u.s.tration in Sir John Lubbock's ”Origin of Civilization.” A young girl, almost naked, is being dragged furiously along the ground by a party of naked savages, armed literally to the teeth, while those of another band grasp her by the arm, and almost tear her asunder in the effort to hold her back. These last are her brothers and her friends; the others are--her enemies? As you please to call them. They are her future husband and his kinsmen, who have come to aid him in his wooing.

This was the primitive rite of marriage. Vestiges of it still remain among savage nations. And all the romance and grace of the most refined modern marriage--the orange-blossoms, the bridal veil, the church service, the wedding feast--these are only the ”bright consummate flower” reared by civilization from that rough seed. All the brutal encounter is softened into this. Nothing remains of the barbarism except the one word ”obey,” and even that is going.

Now, to say that a thing is going, is to say that it will presently be gone. To say that anything is changed, is to say that it is to change further. If it never has been altered, perhaps it will not be; but a proved alteration of an inch in a year opens the way to an indefinite modification. The study of the glaciers, for instance, began with the discovery that they had moved; and from that moment no one doubted that they were moving all the time.

It is the same with the position of woman. Once open your eyes to the fact that it has changed, and who is to predict where the matter shall end? It is sheer folly to say, ”Her relative position will always be what it has been,” when one glance at Sir John Lubbock's picture shows that there is no fixed ”has been,” but that her original position was long since altered and revised. Those who still use this argument are like those who laughed at the lines of stakes which Aga.s.siz planted across the Aar glacier in 1840.

But the stakes settled the question, and proved the motion. _Per sim muove_: ”But it moves.”

The motion once proved, the whole range of possible progress is before us.

The amazement of that Chinese visitor in Boston, the other day, when he saw a woman addressing a missionary meeting; the astonishment of all English visitors when young ladies teach cla.s.ses in geometry and Latin, in our high schools; the surprise of foreigners at seeing the rough throng in the Cooper Inst.i.tute reading-room submit to the sway of one young woman with a crochet-needle--all these simply testify to the fact that the stakes have moved. That they have yet been carried halfway to the end, who knows?

What a step from the horrible nuptials of those savage days to the poetic marriage of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett--the ”Sonnets from the Portuguese” on one side, the ”One Word More” on the other! But who can say that the whole relation between man and woman reached its climax there, and that where the past has brought changes so vast the future is to add nothing? Who knows that, when ”the world's great bridals come,” people may not look back with pity, even on this era of the Brownings? Perhaps even Elizabeth Barrett promised to obey!

At any rate, it is safe to say that each step concedes the probability of another. Even from the naked barbarian to the veiled Oriental, from the savage hut to the carefully enshrined harem, there is a step forward. One more step in the spiral line of progress has brought us to the unveiled face and comparatively free movements of the English or American woman.

From the kitchen to the public lecture-room, from that to the lecture-platform, and from that again to the ballot-box,--these are far slighter steps than those which gradually lifted the savage girl of Sir John Lubbock's picture into the possession of the alphabet and the dignity of a home. So easy are these future changes beside those of the past, that to doubt their possibility is as if Aga.s.siz, after tracing year by year the motion of his Alpine glacier, should deny its power to move one inch farther into the sunny valley, and there to melt harmlessly away.

THE LOW-WATER MARK

We constantly see it a.s.sumed, in arguments against any step in the elevation of woman, that her position is a thing fixed permanently by nature, so that there can be in it no great or essential change. Every successive modification is resisted as ”a reform against nature;” and this argument from permanence is always that which appears most convincing to conservative minds. Let us see how the facts confirm it.

A story is going the rounds of the newspapers in regard to a Russian peasant and his wife. For some act of disobedience the peasant took the law into his own hands; and his mode of discipline was to tie the poor creature naked to a post in the street, and to call on every pa.s.ser-by to strike her a blow. Not satisfied with this, he placed her on the ground, and tied heavy weights on her limbs until one arm was broken. When finally released, she made a complaint against him in court. The court discharged him on the ground that he had not exceeded the legal authority of a husband.

Encouraged by this, he caused her to be arrested in return; and the same court sentenced her to another public whipping for disobedience.

No authority was given for this story in the newspaper where I saw it; but it certainly did not first appear in a woman-suffrage newspaper, and cannot therefore be a manufactured ”outrage.” I use it simply to ill.u.s.trate the low-water mark at which the position of woman may rest, in the largest Christian nation of the world. All the refinements, all the education, all the comparative justice, of modern society, have been gradually upheaved from some such depth as this. When the gypsies described by Leland treat even the ground trodden upon by a woman as impure, they simply ill.u.s.trate the low plane from which all the elevation of woman has begun. All these things show that the position of that s.e.x in society, so far from being a thing in itself permanent, has been in reality the most changing of all factors in the social problem. And this inevitably suggests the question, Are we any more sure that her present position is finally and absolutely fixed than were those who observed it at any previous time in the world's history? Granting that her condition was once at low-water mark, who is authorized to say that it has yet reached high tide?

It is very possible that this Russian wife, once scourged back to submission, ended her days in the conviction, and taught it to her daughters, that such was a woman's rightful place. When an American woman of to-day says, ”I have all the rights I want,” is she on any surer ground?

Grant that the difference is vast between the two. How do we know that even the later condition is final, or that anything is final but entire equality before the laws? It is not many years since William Story--in a legal work inspired and revised by his father, the greatest of American jurists--wrote this indignant protest against the injustice of the old common law:--

”In respect to the powers and rights of married women, the law is by no means abreast of the spirit of the age. Here are seen the old fossil footprints of feudalism. The law relating to woman tends to make every family a barony or a monarchy, or a despotism, of which the husband is the baron, king, or despot, and the wife the dependent, serf, or slave. That this is not always the fact is not due to the law, but to the enlarged humanity which spurns the narrow limits of its rules. The progress of civilization has changed the family from a barony to a republic; but the law has not kept pace with the advance of ideas, manners, and customs. And, although public opinion is a check to legal rules on the subject, the rules are feudal and stern. Yet the position of woman throughout history serves as the criterion of the freedom of the people or an age. When man shall despise that right which is founded only on might, woman will be free and stand on an equal level with him,--a friend and not a dependent.”[1]

We know that the law is greatly changed and ameliorated in many places since Story wrote this statement; but we also know how almost every one of these changes was resisted: and who is authorized to say that the final and equitable fulfilment is yet reached?

[Footnote 1: Story's _Treatise on the Law of Contracts not under Seal_, -- 84, p. 89.]

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