A New Atmosphere Part 3

Mind, I counsel no penuriousness, no mean retrenchment for acc.u.mulation, no domestic pillage, no mere selfish gratification. I suggest intelligent and high-minded economy for the purpose of liberal expenditure. I would take in sail where only sensualism and ostentation blow; but I would spread every rag of canvas to catch the smallest breath of an enlarged and Christian happiness. I would cease to pinch the angel, that the beast may wax fat. I would keep the beast under, that the angel may have room.

Do you say that the picture is fanciful? Everything is fanciful till it is put in practice. Fancy is often but the foreshadow of a coming fact.

If some such course as this is not possible, if we must inevitably and perpetually move on in the same rut in which we move now, then, in a thousand and a thousand cases, life seems to me not worth the living.

VII.

It is not simply that women are chained to a body of death. Men are equally victims. The world is kept back from its goal. One member cannot suffer without involving all the members in its suffering.

Marriage, in its truest type, is love spiritualizing life; the union of the mightiest and subtlest forces working the n.o.blest results.

Marriage in its commonest manifestations is a clumsy mechanical contrivance. Marriage is too often mirage,--far off, in books, in dreams, lovely and divine; approached, it resolves itself into was.h.i.+ng and ironing and cooking and nursing and house-cleaning and making and mending and long-suffering from New Year to Christmas and from Christmas on to New Year, to the great majority of all the women I know anything about. I do not mean simply the dull, uninteresting women, of whom there are really not many, but the bright and intellectual, capable of adorning any station, of whom there are more than you think, because, buried under household ruins, you scarcely catch a glimpse of what they long to be and what they might be. And they do not like it. Volumes may be written and spoken, extolling the tidy kitchens, the trim wives, the snowy table-cloths, and telling us how beautiful a woman is when doing her house-work; and a few foolish women will be found to accept it all and work the harder. Hundreds of years ago, when a person I know was inconceivably young, and found great delight in hanging about the kitchen during the seed-time and harvest of pies and preserves, to glean up the remnants of mince-meat and various mixtures left in the pans, a tiny relative much more acute than he used to practise upon his approbativeness by soliloquizing to himself while both their spoons were clattering around the sides of the tin pan with frantic rapidity, "Now Peggoty isn't going away, and let me have the rest. Peggoty is going to stay and eat it all up." The result was that Peggoty used immediately to walk off and leave his cormorant kinsman to the undivided booty. Just about as astute as the kinsman, and just about as silly as Peggoty, are the men who prepare and the women who suck the thin pap of our milk-and-water novels and newspapers. But the latter are growing fewer and fewer every day. Some women have a natural taste for cooking. Some women are specially skilled in sewing. Some women are born with a broom in their hands, and some find the sick-room their peculiar paradise: but I never saw or heard of any woman who had a natural fondness for being worked and worried from morning till night, hurrying from pillar to post, and conscious all the time that things were left in an unfinished state, from sheer want of time to complete them properly. Within a week, a woman, a model housekeeper, devoted to her family,--a woman who never wrote a word for print, nor ever addressed so much as a female meeting of any kind, a woman whose husband looks upon strong-mindedness as a species of leprosy, to be lamented rather than denounced, but at any cost kept from spreading,--has told me that, if it were not for the talk it would make, she would shut up her house, take her whole family, and go to a hotel to board from June to October, so worn and wearied is she with her household duties. Yet her family consists of only three members, and her husband is full of loving-kindness and consideration. Another woman, equally accomplished in all domestic arts and graces, and equally happy in her conjugal relations, once told me that she has seen from her window a carriage of friends coming up the road to her house, and has been forced to wipe away the tears before she could go to the door to greet them; so utterly disheartened was she at the prospect of still further weight upon her already overburdened shoulders. Yet she was no misanthrope, no nun. She loved society, and was fitted to s.h.i.+ne in it; but the inexorable, unremitting labor of her household was such, that it was impossible for her to receive from society the solace which it ought to give and which it has to give. So heavily pressed the yoke, that a party of friends was no pleasure to look forward to, but only more cake to be made, more meat to be roasted, more sheets to be washed.

Women are accounted the weaker s.e.x; but there is no comparison to be made between the labor of the weaker and the stronger. Of fathers of families and mothers of families, the real wear and tear of life comes on the latter. If there is anxiety as to a sufficiency of support, the mother shares it equally with the father, and feels it none the less for not being able to contribute directly to the supply of the deficiency; forced, pa.s.sive endurance of an evil is quite as difficult a virtue as unsuccessful struggle against it. If there is no anxiety in that direction, the occupations of men can scarcely give them any hint of the peculiar perplexing, depressing, irritating nature of a woman's ordinary household duties. Pamphleteers exhort women to hush up the discords, drive away the clouds, and have only smiles and suns.h.i.+ne for the husband coming home wearied with his day's labor.

They would be employing themselves to much better advantage, if they would enjoin him to bring home smiles and suns.h.i.+ne for his wife. She is the one that pre-eminently needs strength and soothing and consolation. She needs a warm heart to lean on, a strong arm, and a steady hand to lift her out of the sloughs in which she is ready to sink, and set her on the high places where birds sing and flowers bloom and breezes blow. The husband's work may be absorbing and exhaustive, but a fundamental difference lies in the simple fact, that a man has constant and certain change of scene, and a woman has not. A man goes out to his work and comes in to his meals. Two or three times a day, sometimes all the evening, always at night and on Sunday, he is away from his business and his place of business. The day may be long or short, but there is an end to it. A woman is on the spot all the time, and her cares never cease. She eats and drinks, she goes out and comes in, she lies down and rises up, tethered to one stone. It does not seem to amount to much, that a man closes his shop and goes home; that he unyokes his oxen, ties up his cows, and sits down on the door-step: but let the merchant, year after year, eat and sleep in his counting-room, the schoolmaster in his school-room, the shoemaker over his lapstone, the blacksmith by his anvil, the minister in his study, the lawyer in his chambers, with only as frequent variations as a housekeeper's visiting and tea-drinkings give her, and I think he would presently learn that he needs not to possess powers acute enough to divide a hair 'twixt north and northwest side, in order to distinguish the difference. A distance of half a mile, or even a quarter of a mile, breaks off all the little cords that have been compressing a man's veins, and lets the blood rush through them with force and freedom. It is change of scene, change of persons, change of atmosphere, and a consequent change of a man's own self. He is made over new.

But his wife moils on in the same place. Dark care sits behind her at breakfast and dinner and supper. The walls are festooned with her cares. The floors are covered with them as thick as the dust in the Interpreter's house. _He_ shakes off the dust from his feet and goes home: _her_ home is in the dust. What wonder that it strangles and suffocates her?

Moreover, a man's occupation has uniformity, or rather unity. His path lies in one line; sometimes he has only to walk mechanically along it.

Rather stupid, but not wearing work; for generally if he had been a man upon whom it would have worn he would have done something else: always he has power to bring everything to bear on his business. If it is mental labor, he has the opportunity of solitude, or only such a.s.sociation as a.s.sists. His helpers, and all with whom he is concerned, are mature, intelligent, trained, and often ambitious and self-respectful and courteous. He can set his fulcrum close to the weight, and all he has to do is to bear down on the lever.

The wife's a.s.sistants, if she has any, are unspeakably in the rough, and little children make all her schemes "gang a-gley." The incautious slam of a door will shatter the best-laid plans, and the stubbing of a chubby toe sinks her morning deep into the midday. Children are to a man amus.e.m.e.nt, delight, juvenescence, a truthful rendering of the old myth, that wicked kings were wont to derive a ghoul-like strength by transfusion of the blood of infants. The father has them for a little while. He frolics with them. He rejoices over them. They are beautiful and charming. He is new to them, and they are new to him, and by the time the novelty is over it is the hour for them to go to bed. He feels rested and refreshed for his contact with them. They present strong contrasts to the world he deals with all day. Their transparency s.h.i.+nes sweetly against its opacity. Even their little wants and vanities and bickerings are to him only interesting developments of human nature. His power is pleased with their dependence; his pride flatters itself with their future; his tenderness softens to their clinging; his earthliness cleaves away before their innocence, and he thinks his quiver can never be too full of them.

This is the poetry, and he reads it with great delight; but there is a prose department, and that comes to the mother. She has had the cherubs all day, and she knows that the trail of the serpent is over them all. She sees the angel, in their souls as well as he, often better; but she sees too the mark of the beast on their forehead,--which he seldom discovers. His playthings are her stumbling-blocks. The constancy of her presence forbids novelty, and throws her upon her inventive powers for resources. All their weariness and fretfulness and tumbles and aches are poured into her lap. She has no division of labor, no concentration of forces; no five or ten hours devoted to housework, and two or three to her children, taking them into her heart to do good like a medicine. They patter through every hour to stay her from doing with her might any of the many things which her hands find to do. Nothing keeps limits; everything laps over. G.o.d has given her a love so inexhaustible, that, notwithstanding the was.h.i.+ngs and watchings, the sewing and dressing which children necessitate, notwithstanding the care, the check, the pull-back, the weariness, the heartsickness, which they occasion, the "little hindering things" are--my pen is not wont to be timid, but it shrinks from attempting to say what little ones are to a mother. But divine arrangement does not prevent human drawback; and looking not at inward solace, but outward business, it remains true that the business of providing for the wants of a family is not of that smooth, uncreaking nature to the mother that it is to the father. Let a man take two or three little children--two or three? Let him take one!--of one, two, three, or four years of age, to his shop, or stall, or office, and take care of him all the time for a week, and he will see what I mean.

I do not say that a man's work may not be harder for an hour, or five or ten hours, more exhaustive of mental and vital power, more exclusive of all diversions than his wife's for the same time. It may or may not be; quite as often the latter as the former: but I do say that severe prearranged, intermittent labor wears less upon the temper, the nerves, and the spirits, that is, upon body and soul, than lighter, confused, unintermitting labor. Work that enlists the energies and the enthusiasm will weary, but the weariness itself is welcome, and brings with it a satisfaction,--the pleasant sense of something accomplished. The multiplicity of a woman's labors distracts as well as wearies, and each one is so petty that she has scarcely anything to look back on. Not one of them is great enough to brace and stimulate, and all together they form a mult.i.tudinous heap, and not a mountain. It is a round of endless detail; little, insignificant, provoking items that she gets no credit for doing, but fatal discredit for leaving undone. n.o.body notices that things are as they should be; but if things are not as they should be, it were better for her that a millstone were hanged about her neck, &c.!

In a community, you find the husbands devoted to different pursuits.

Baker, miller, farmer, advocate, clerk,--each one has a peculiar calling for which he is supposed to have a special taste, fitness, or motive, perhaps all; but their wives have no room for choice. Whether they have a gift of it or not, they have the same routine of baking and brewing and house-cleaning. Suppose the woman does not like it?

The supposition is not an impossible, not even an unnatural one.

Woman's-sphere writers confound distinctions; they seem to think that woman was not created in the garden in native honor clad like man, but rather, like the turtle, with her house on her back, and that a modern American house and its belongings; so that if she dislikes any of the conclusions which such a house premises, it is as unnatural and unwomanly as if she should be coa.r.s.e or cruel. Womanliness, in their vocabulary, implies fondness of and pleasure in domestic drudgery.

Their ideal woman is enamored of wash-tubs and broom-handles and frying-pans. But modern housekeeping is no more woman's sphere than farming is man's sphere, nor so much. If you go back far enough, you will find that man was directly and divinely ordained to that very pursuit. The Lord G.o.d took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden, _to dress it and to keep it_. His sphere was expressly marked out. He was to be a gardener, a farmer, a tiller of the soil. What of the woman? "The Lord G.o.d said, It is not good _that the man should be alone_: I will make him an help meet for him." What kind of help was meant is here implied, but is more clearly discovered further on by Adam's own interpretation: "The woman whom thou gavest _to be with me_." She was made for society, to be company for him; to talk and laugh and cheer and keep him from being lonesome. Not a word about housekeeping. Adam is concerned to put the very best face on the matter, and he does not say, "the woman whom thou gavest to train up the vines, to pare the apples, to stone the raisins, to gather the currants, to press the grapes, to preserve the peaches," or for any other purposes of an Eden household. It is simply "thou gavest _to be with me_." Whatever may have come in afterwards to modify the original arrangement, came for "the hardness of your hearts." But here, before the fall, is seen, in all its beauty and simplicity, the original plan. You have the whole "woman question" in a nutsh.e.l.l. Yet people who are fond of quoting the Bible manage to skip this. They go back to the curse, "thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee," and there they stop. Their nature is nature accursed, and even that is silent on the point of menial service: they do not go back to nature innocent, where it is excluded by implication. But if the Bible is proof on one side, it is proof on the other. If the husband is made to be the head of the woman, he is also made to be her serving-man.

Nay, even the silence of the curse is more golden than the speech of man, for the same allotment of penalty which lays upon her the sorrow of conception lays upon him the sorrow of toil: so that every man whose wife is obliged to eat bread in the sweat of her brow is out of his sphere, and has failed of his "mission." He lays upon the shoulders of a weak woman his own burden as well as hers. And every man who is not a farmer is out of his sphere, and should put himself into it before he casts a single stone at any woman; and he is as much more guilty as his sphere is more accurately defined.

So much for the revelation of the word; now for the revelation of nature.

Naturally, I suppose women's tastes are not any more likely to be uniform than men's tastes. The narrow range of their lives has undoubtedly tended to keep them down towards one standard, but every new-born child is a new protest of nature,--a new outburst of individuality against monotony, so that the work is really never done, and never comes anywhere near being so far done as that all women, or the majority of women, should choose the life of a housekeeper. As far as my observation goes, the best women, the brightest women, the n.o.blest women, are the very ones to whom it is most irksome. I do not mean housekeeping with well-trained servants, for that is general enough to admit a "brother near the throne"; but that, alas! is almost unknown in the world wherein _I_ have lived; and a woman who is satisfied with the small cares, the small economies, the small interests, the constant contemplation of small things which many a household demands, is a very small sort of woman. I make the a.s.sertion both as an inference and an observation. A n.o.ble discontent--not a peevish complaining, but an inward and spiritual protest--is a woman's safeguard against the deterioration which such a life threatens, and her proof of capacity and her note of preparation for a higher. Such a woman does not do her work less well, but she rises ever superior to her work. I know such women.

You talk about the mother-instinct. The mother-instinct makes a mother love her children, but it does not make her love to destroy herself with unremitting toil for them. It makes her do it, but it does not make her love to do it. And because, in her great love, she will do it when the necessity is laid upon her,--a wicked perversion of G.o.d's good gift often lays the necessity upon her when G.o.d does not. The mother-instinct in woman corresponds to the father-instinct in man; and the wifely love to the husbandly love. Each is strong enough to bear joyfully all that G.o.d lays upon it, and patiently much that he does not lay and never intended to be laid. But he who counts upon that strength, for the purpose of abusing it, is guilty of a high crime against humanity. Each s.e.x has the same uniformity in its loves, and would undoubtedly have the same variety in its tastes if it were not hindered. Men do not themselves believe so much as they profess in this menial gravitation. If they did, they would never lecture women so much about it. The very frenzy and frequency of their exhortations are suspicious. They join together what G.o.d has not joined. They claim ident.i.ty where he has established diversity. Women are continually and publicly admonished of their household obligations, but who ever heard an a.s.sembly of men admonished of theirs? Yet men are as often derelict in furnis.h.i.+ng provision for their families as women are lax in its administration. And while the husband may do his part in the way which seems good in his own eyes, the wife must do hers in only one way, whether it seem good or bad. The wise woman must tread "the old dull round of things" as well as the foolish woman, and then she is so footsore that she cannot enter upon that higher path which is open only to her, and shut to the foolish woman. The low necessities usurp the throne of the lofty possibilities. Oh! for this what tender consideration should she not receive! Confined to the uninteresting routine of domestic drudgery, while her tastes incline and her powers fit her for other things, no admiration is too deep, no sympathy too warm. The gentlest and most thoughtful attention is her smallest due.

Let men fancy for a moment that at marriage they must give up the law, the pulpit, the machine-shop, the farm, in which they excel, and which is adequate to purse and pleasure, and turn hod-carrier or road-mender, and they may have a glimpse of the sacrifice which many a gifted woman has made. If she made it unwittingly, marrying before she knew her powers, or the life which marriage involves, a generous pity and love will smooth her path as much as may be, and press back the unexpected thorns. If she made it wittingly, choosing, in her strong love, to lay upon the altar her pleasant things, so much the more will a generous man constrain her to forget, in the fervor and efficacy of his love, the fruit which once her soul longed for. If he cannot prevent the sacrifice, he can cause that it shall not have been made in vain.

Again, a man receives immediate and definite results from his work. He has salary or wages,--so much a day, a year, a job. He is Lord High Chancellor of the Exchequer and irresponsible. His wife gets no money for her work. She has no funds under her own control, no resources of which she is mistress. She must draw supplies from her husband, and often with much outlay of ingenuity. Some men dole out money to their wives as if it were a gift, a charity, something to which the latter have no right, but which they must receive as a favor, and for which they must be thankful. They act as if their wives were trying to plunder them. Now a man has no more right to his earnings than his wife has. They belong to her just as much as to him. There is a mischievous popular opinion that the husband is the producer and the wife the consumer. In point of fact, the wife is just as much a producer as the husband. Her part in the concern is just as important as his. She earns it as truly, and has just as strong a claim and just as much a right to it as he; if possible she has more, for she ought to receive some compensation for the gap that yawns between work and wages. It is much more satisfactory to receive the latter as a direct result of the former, than as a kind of alms. Many a woman does as much to build up her husband's prosperity as he does himself. Many a woman saves him from failure and disgrace. And, as a general rule, the fate and fortunes of the family lie in her hands as much as in his.

What absurdity to _pay_ him his _wages_ and to _give_ her money to go shopping with!

A woman who went around to make a collection for a small local charity, told me that she could not help noticing the difference between the married and the unmarried women. The latter took out their purses on the spot and gave their mite or mint without hesitation. The former parleyed and would see about it, gave rather uncertainly, and must speak to Edward before they could decide. Now it may well be that a woman who has only her own self to provide for can give more liberally than one upon whose purse come the innumerable requisitions of a family. The mother may be forced to make many sacrifices, and yet be so blessed in the making that there shall be no sacrifice. The pleasure shall overbalance the pain. But there is no reason why a married woman should hesitate, or be embarra.s.sed, or consult Edward as to the expenditure of a dime or a dollar, any more than an unmarried one. There may be more calls on the purse, but she ought to be mistress of it. She ought to know her husband's circ.u.mstances well enough to know what she can afford to give away, and she ought to be as free to use her judgment as he is to use his. In any unusual emergency, each will wish to consult the other; but he does not think of asking her as to the disposal of every chance quarter of a dollar, neither should she think of asking him. If circ.u.mstances make it necessary to sail close to the wind, sail close to the wind; but let both be in the same boat.

All this miserable and humiliating halting arises from the miserable and humiliating notion that the husband is the power and the wife the weight. It comes out, more convenient in substance, but just as objectionable in shape, in the wife's "allowance." The husband _allows_ her so much a year for her expenses. If it means simply that so much is set aside for that purpose, very well; only it would sound rather strange to say that she allows him so much to carry on his business. A woman does not wish to be conversant with the details of her husband's shop any more than he wishes to understand the details of her kitchen: but he desires to know enough of that to be sure of prompt, sufficient, and agreeable meals, and a tidy house, at a cost within his means. So she should know with sufficient accuracy the extent and sources of their income to be able to arrange her ordinary disburs.e.m.e.nts without constant recurrence to him. He does not take his dinner as a boon from her. He feels under no obligations for it. He does not consider himself on his good behavior out of grat.i.tude. It is a regular inst.i.tution, a blessing entirely common to both, and excites no emotion. So should her money be,--as regularly and mechanically supplied as the dinner, exciting no more comment and needing no more argument. Whether it is kept in her pocket or his may be of small moment; but as she does not lock up the dinner in the cupboard, and then stand at the door and dole it out to him by the plateful, but sets it on the table for him to help himself: so it is better, more pacific, that he should deposit the money in an equally neutral and accessible locality.

I portray to myself the flutter which such a proposition would raise in many marital bosoms; would that they might be soothed. It is well known among farmers that hens will not eat so much if you set a measure of corn where they can pick whenever they choose, as they will if you only fling down a handful now and then, and keep them continually half starved. At the same time they will be in better condition. So, looking at the matter from the very lowest stand-point, a woman who has free access to the money will not be half so likely to lavish it as the woman who is put off with scanty and infrequent sums.

She who knows how much there is to spend will almost invariably keep within the limits. If she does not know, her imagination will be very likely to magnify the fountain, and if but meagre supplies are forthcoming, she will attribute it to n.i.g.g.ardliness, and will consider everything that can be got from her husband as legal plunder; and with under-ground pipes and above-ground trenches it shall go hard but she will drain him tolerably dry. Then he will inveigh against her extravagance, and so not only lose his money, but his temper, his calmness, and his complacency, all the while blaming her when the fault is chiefly his own. If he had but frankly acquainted her with the main facts; if he had but permitted her to look in and see what was the capacity of the reservoir, instead of leaving her to sit under the walls, knowing nothing of its resources but what she could learn from the occasional spouting of a single small pipe, he would have avoided all the trouble. It is so rarely that a wife will recklessly transcend her reasonable income, that I do not think it worth while to suggest any provision against the evil. It is an abnormal and sporadic case, to be treated physiologically rather than philosophically. The man has unfortunately allied himself to a mad woman, or he has found to his regret that there is nothing more fulsome than a she-fool.

It irks me to say these things. It is almost a profanation to connect such cold-blooded business matters with a relation which is supposed to involve, and which should involve, the highest, the purest, the fairest traits of human life. In true marriage there is indeed no need of these considerations. A complete and perfect marriage breaks down all barriers, and fuses each separate interest into one. In such there is no mine and thine, but unity and ident.i.ty. For perfect marriages I do not write; but for the imperfect, and the marriages not yet contracted. Let us have another standard set up, another starting-point established, another goal fixed, that we may run without weariness, and walk without faintness, and be crowned at last with a laurel worth the wearing. A ten years' wife once said to a young lady who was spending money rather freely,--money which was, however, her own, for which she had to depend upon no one,--"You ought to lay up something for yourself. You should have a little money--if only five hundred dollars, it will be better than nothing--in the bank, so that when you are married you will have something of your own to go to, and not have to depend entirely upon your husband. You will be a great deal happier to have something that you can do what you choose with, and not feel that you must account for every cent, and make it go as far as possible." But it seems to me that this is _felo de se_. Doubtless, people often find that they have married the wrong person; but it is supposed to be a mistake, and not a walking into the ditch with eyes open. If a girl knows, or even suspects, or entertains the possibility beforehand, that she is going to marry a man from whom it is necessary to provide for herself a pecuniary refuge, why does she marry him at all? If she deliberately unites herself to one who she believes, or even fears, will not receive her as a trust from G.o.d, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, she forfeits all sympathy and pity, whatever may befall her. If the husband whom she is to take threatens to be greedy, or unsympathizing, or selfish, or stolid, her best defence against him is, not to put money in a bank, but to keep herself out of his reach. It is impossible to conceive of happiness in marriage, where the financial wheels do not run--I will not say smoothly, but evenly. The road may be rough, roundabout, and steep, without precluding wholesome and hearty happiness; but if one wheel drags while the other turns, if one goes back while the other goes forward, if for any reason the two do not move by parallel lines in the same direction, the whole carriage is bewitched, the whole journey is embittered, the whole object is baffled.

It is marvellous to see the insensibility with which men manage these delicate matters. It is impossible for a man to be too scrupulous, too chivalrous, too refined, in his bearing towards his wife. Her dependence should be the strongest appeal to his manhood. The very act of receiving money from him puts her in a position so equivocal, that the utmost affection and attention should be brought into play to rea.s.sure her. The velvet touch of love should disguise the iron hand of business. A sensitive woman is fully enough alive to her relations.

There is need that every gentle and tender courtesy should a.s.sure and convince her that the money which she costs is a pleasure and a privilege. Her delicacy, her self-respect, her confidence in his appreciation, are the strongest ties that can bind her to himself. Let them but be sundered, and he has no longer any hold on happiness, any safeguard against discord. Let chivalry be forgotten, let sensitiveness be violated, let money intrude into the domain of love, and the spell is broken. Your stately silver urn is become an iron kettle.

Yet men will deliberately, in the presence of their wives, _to_ their wives, groan over the cost of living. They do not mean extravagant purchases of silk and lace and velvet, which might be a wife's fault or thoughtlessness, and furnish an excuse for rebuke; but the butcher's bill, and the grocer's bill, and the joiner's bill. Man, when a woman is married, do you think she loses all personal feeling?

Do you think your glum look over the expenses of housekeeping is a fulfilment of your promise to love and cherish? Is it calculated to retain and increase her tenderness for you? Does it bring suns.h.i.+ne and lighten toil, and bless her with knightly grace? Do you not know that it is only a way of regretting that you married her? It is a way of saying that you did not count the cost. You may not present it to yourself in that light, but in that light you present it to her. And do you think it is a pleasant thing to her? You go out to your shop, or sit down to your newspaper, and forget all about it. She sits down to her sewing, or stands over her cooking-stove, and meditates upon it with an indescribable pain. I do not say that every kind of uneasiness regarding expense is or ought to be thus construed. There may be an uneasiness springing directly from love. A strong and great-hearted affection frets that it cannot minister the beauty and the comfort which it longs to do, or defend against the emergencies which a future may bring. But this uneasiness is rarely if ever mistaken. Love can usually find a way to soothe the sorrows of love, and a wife's hand can almost always smooth out the wrinkles from the brow which is corrugated only for her. The complaint which I mean is of quite another character. Women know it, if men do not;--the women who have suffered from it, for it is pleasant to think that there are women to whose experience every such sensation is entirely foreign. These very men who complain because it costs so much to live will lose by bad debts more than their wives spend. They will, by sheer negligence, by a selfish reluctance to present a bill to a disagreeable person, by a cowardly fear lest insisting on what is due should alienate a customer, by culpable mismanagement of business, by indorsing a note, or lending money, through mere want of courage to say "No," or of shrewdness to detect dishonesty or incapacity, lose money enough to foot up half a dozen bills. They will waste money in cigars, in oyster-suppers, in riding when walking would be better for them, in keeping a horse which "eats his head off," in buying luxuries which they would be better off without, in sending packages and luggage by express, rather than have the trouble of taking them themselves, in numberless small items of which they make no account, but of which the bills make great account. If one might judge from the newspapers, extravagance is a peculiarity of women. So far as my observation goes, the extravagance of women is not for a moment to be compared with the extravagance of men.[3] A man is perversely, persistently, and with malice aforethought, extravagant. He is extravagant in spite of admonition and remonstrance. Where his personal comfort or interest is concerned, he scorns a sacrifice. He laughs at the suggestion that such a little thing makes any difference one way or another. He has not even the idea of economy. He does not know what the word means. He does not know the thing when he sees it. Women take to it naturally. A certain innate sense of harmony keeps them from being wasteful. Their extravagance is the exception, not the rule. They are willing to incur self-denial. They do not scorn to take thought and trouble, and be put to inconvenience, for the sake of saving money. The greater animalism of man also comes out here in full force. If sacrifice must be, a woman will sacrifice her comforts before her taste. The man will let his tastes go, and keep his comforts, and call it good sense. A woman's extravagance is to some purpose. A man's to none. She buys many dresses, but she gives her old ones away, or cuts them over for the children, and works dextrously. A man buys and destroys. Look at the manner in which men manage the national housekeeping, and see whether it is men or women who are extravagant. Look at the clerks.h.i.+ps in the departments, look at members of Congress browsing among government supplies, look at army and navy; walk through a camp: see the barrels of good food thrown away, see the wood wasted, see the tools wantonly destroyed. I think the wives of the soldiers could support themselves comfortably on the fragments of the soldiers'

feasts. n.o.body complains. A great nation must not look too closely after the pennies. A great army always makes great waste, say the newspapers that exhort women against extravagance, as if it were as much a law of nature as gravitation. Why not say housekeeping is always wasteful, and fall back on that as a primal law of nature also?

Because housekeeping is not always wasteful, you say. Precisely.

Housekeeping is nearly always economically conducted, and your animadversions amount just to this: because women are generally prudent, they are to be chided for all shortcomings. But men are always wasteful, therefore they must be let alone. Only be universally bad, and you shall be as unmolested as if you were good. You say that it is easier to be economical in a family than in an army. Perhaps so; but if the soldiers, instead of being men, were women, do you for a moment imagine that there would be any such waste? Let all other circ.u.mstances be unchanged. Let all the cost come upon the government just as it does. Let all provisions be furnished in the same abundance as now, and I do not believe there would be much more waste than there is in average families. I do not believe you could force women at the point of the bayonet to such reckless prodigality as men indulge in.

It is against their nature. It hurts them. It violates G.o.d's law, written in their hearts. They would also be too conscientious to do it. They would not consider the fact that "Uncle Sam foots the bills"

a reason why a saw should be tossed aside on the first symptom of dulness, and a new one bought. They would not throw away a half loaf because there were plenty of whole ones, but keep it and steam it. And not only would there be a great deal less waste, but there would be a great deal better supply. If women had charge of the commissariat, I do not believe there would have been one half so much friction as there has been. Hungry regiments would not get to the end of a long march and find nothing to eat. Sick soldiers would not be expected to recover health from salt pork and muddy coffee. Experience or no experience, red tape or no tape, women would have managed to bring hungry mouths and hot soups together, and to furnish delicate food for delicate health. They would not only have supplied the soldiers at less cost to government, but the less cost would have produced a larger bill of fare. How did the English army fare till Florence Nightingale came by and knocked their granary doors open? That my remarks are not mere theory, or rather that my theory is founded on truth, is abundantly proved by a statement printed in the North American Review for January, 1864, long after my words were written.

It is from an article on the Sanitary Commission.

[3] The discussions which, since this was written, have arisen concerning expenditure and extravagance, in connection with the women's pledge against the purchase of foreign goods, only increase the strength of my position.

But let it be remembered, that I speak not for an emergency, but for the conduct of life.

"At this moment, the only region in the loyal States that is definitely out of the circle is Missouri. The rest of our loyal territory is all embraced within one ring of method and federality.

This is chiefly due to the wonderful spirit of nationality that beats in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of American women. They, even more than the men of the country, from their utter withdrawal from partisan strifes and local politics, have felt the a.s.sault upon the life of the nation in its true national import. They are infinitely less _State-ish_, and more national in their pride and in their sympathies. They see the war in its broad, impersonal outlines; and while their particular and special affections are keener than men's, their general humanity and tender sensibility for unseen and distant sufferings is stronger and more constant.

"The women of the country, who are the actual creators, by the labor of their fingers, of the chief supplies and comforts needed by the soldiers, have been the first to understand, appreciate, and co-operate with the Sanitary Commission. It is due to the sagacity and zeal with which they have entered into the work, that the system of supplies, organized by the extraordinary genius of Mr. Olmstead, has become so broadly and nationally extended, and that, with Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Louisville, Pittsburg, Philadelphia, New York, Brooklyn, New Haven, Hartford, Providence, Boston, Portland, and Concord for centres, there should be at least fifteen thousand Soldiers' Aid Societies, all under the control of women, combined and united in a common work,--of supplying, through the United States Sanitary Commission, the wants of the sick and wounded in the great Federal army.

"The skill, zeal, business qualities, and patient and persistent devotion exhibited by those women who manage the truly vast operations of the several chief centres of supply, at Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, and New York, have unfolded a new page in the history of the apt.i.tudes and capacities of women. To receive, acknowledge, sort, arrange, mark, repack, store, hold ready for s.h.i.+pment, procure transportation for, and send forward at sudden call, the many thousand boxes of hospital stores which, at the order of the General Secretary at Was.h.i.+ngton, have been for the past two years and a half forwarded at various times by the 'Women's Central' at New York, the Soldiers' Aid Society of Northern Ohio, at Cleveland, the Branches at Cincinnati and at Philadelphia, or the Northwestern Branch at Chicago, has required business talents of the highest order. A correspondence demanding infinite tact, promptness, and method has been carried on with their local tributaries, by the women from these centres, with a ceaseless ardor, to which the Commission owes a very large share of its success, and the nation no small part of the sustained usefulness and generous alacrity of its own patriotic impulses.

"To collect funds (for the supply branches have usually raised their own funds from the immediate communities in which they have been situated) has often tasked their ingenuity to the utmost. In Chicago, for instance, the Branch has lately held a fair of colossal proportions, to which the whole Northwest was invited to send supplies, and to come in ma.s.s! On the 26th of October last, when it opened, a procession of three miles in length, composed of wagon-loads of supplies, and of people in various ways interested, paraded through the streets of Chicago; the stores being closed, and the day given up to patriotic sympathies. For fourteen days the fair lasted, and every day brought reinforcements of supplies, and of people and purchasers.

The country people, from hundreds of miles about, sent in upon the railroads all the various products of their farms, mills, and hands.

Those who had nothing else sent the poultry from their barnyards; the ox, or bull, or calf, from the stall; the t.i.tle-deed of a few acres of land; so many bushels of grain, or potatoes, or onions. Loads of hay, even, were sent in from ten or a dozen miles out, and sold at once in the hay-market. On the roads entering the city were seen rickety and lumbering wagons, made of poles, loaded with mixed freight,--a few cabbages, a bundle of socks, a coop of tame ducks, a few barrels of turnips, a pot of b.u.t.ter, and a bag of beans,--with the proud and humane farmer driving the team, his wife behind in charge of the baby, while two or three little children contended with the boxes and barrels and bundles for room to sit or lie. Such were the evidences of devotion and self-sacrificing zeal the Northwestern farmers gave, as in their long trains of wagons they trundled into Chicago, from twenty and thirty miles' distance, and unloaded their contents at the doors of the Northwestern Fairs, for the benefit of the United States Sanitary Commission. The mechanics and artisans of the towns and cities were not behind the farmers. Each manufacturer sent his best piano, plough, thres.h.i.+ng-machine, or sewing-machine. Every form of agricultural implement, and every product of mechanical skill, was represented. From the watchmaker's jewelry to horseshoes and harness; from lace, cloth, cotton and linen, to iron and steel; from wooden and waxen and earthen ware, to b.u.t.ter and cheese, bacon and beef;--nothing came amiss, and nothing failed to come, and the ordering of all this was in the hands of women. They fed in the restaurant, under 'the Fair,' at fifty cents a meal--fifteen hundred mouths a day, for a fortnight--from food furnished, cooked, and served by the women of Chicago; and so orderly and convenient, so practical and wise were the arrangements, that, day by day, they had just what they had ordered and what they counted on,--always enough, and never too much. They divided the houses of the town, and levied on No. 16 A Street, for five turkeys, on Monday; No. 37 B Street, for twelve apple-pies, on Tuesday; No. 49 C Street, for forty pounds of roast beef, on Wednesday; No. 23 D Street was to furnish so much pepper on Thursday; No. 33 E Street, so much salt on Friday. In short, every preparation was made in advance, at the least inconvenience possible to the people, to distribute in the most equal manner the welcome burden of feeding the visitors, at the fair, at the expense of the good people of Chicago, but for the pecuniary benefit of the Sanitary Commission.

Hundreds of lovely young girls, in simple uniforms, took their places as waiters behind the vast array of tables, and everybody was as well served as at a first-cla.s.s hotel, at a less expense to himself, and with a great profit to the fair. Fifty thousand dollars, it is said, will be the least net return of this gigantic fair to the treasury of the Branch at Chicago. It is universally conceded that to Mrs.

Livermore and Mrs. Hoge, old and tried friends of the soldier and of the Sanitary Commission, and its ever active agents, are due the planning, management, and success of this truly American exploit. What is the value of the money thus raised, important as it is, when compared with the worth of the spirit manifested, the loyalty exhibited, the patriotism stimulated, the example set, the prodigious tide of national devotion put in motion! How can rebellion hope to succeed in the face of such demonstrations as the Northwestern Fair?

They are bloodless battles, equal in significance and results to Vicksburg and Gettysburg, to New Orleans and Newbern."

Men, have you read this paragraph? Please to read it again! Think of all your inveighing against female extravagance and incapacity, and read it yet again. Put on sackcloth and ashes, and read it aloud to your wife, to your mother, to your daughter, to your sister, to your grandmother, to your aunt, to your niece, to your mother-in-law, and all your relatives-in-law, and to every woman who suffers your presence, and then lay your hand on your mouth, and your mouth in the dust, and cry, "Woe is me! for I am undone." Inexperience? Had Mrs.

Hoge and Mrs. Livermore any more experience in feeding fifteen hundred mouths a day than the quartermaster of a regiment? Have the women of Chicago generally devoted their lives to trafficking in tame ducks, loads of hay, thres.h.i.+ng-machines, and beef and bacon? Yet you have the very essence of business tact in "nothing came amiss, and nothing failed to come"; and the very essence of economy in "always enough, and never too much"; and the crowning glory--write it on the posts of thy house, and on thy gates; teach it diligently unto thy children, and talk of it when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up; bind it for a sign upon thine hand, and let it be as a frontlet between thine eyes--"the ordering of all this was in the hands of women."

This ascription of female extravagance, whether made publicly in newspapers or privately in family conclave, is not only false and fatal, but it is fatal in the very innermost and vital points of life.

What is destroyed is not an advent.i.tious thing, but the spring of all satisfaction. The relations between a man and his wife decide the weal of his life. The whole chain of his circ.u.mstances can be no stronger than the link between him and her. He may be ever so rich or renowned, but he can bear no heavier weight of happiness than that link can sustain. The newspaper paragraphs do the harm of confirming individual men in their notions that it is the wife who incurs the unnecessary expense, and so divert their attention from their own duties, and urge them on in their evil courses to their own undoing. But a man is just as powerful for good as he is for evil. By as much as he can alienate his wife from himself by his petty financiering, by so much can he draw her to his heart by a gentle chivalry. Invested by the law with power, he has only to trans.m.u.te it into love to secure a loyalty capable of any sacrifice. Let a wife read in her husband's face and bearing how grateful is her society, how precious her life, how sweetest of all pleasures to him is the knowledge of her pleasure; let her feel that she is to him something different from all earthly interests,--something above and beyond all other joys; let her see that, with her coming, money ceased to be mere current coin, that labor acquired a new dignity, and prudence a new charm, because they all might minister to her convenience or delight; let her see that she adjusts, harmonizes, and completes his life; that she is the central sun, about which all minor interests and plans revolve; and--what have you gained? A good housekeeper? A well-ordered household? More than this. An empire. Supreme dominion. You have only to be tender and true, and nothing can sweep away the golden mist through which, whatever you may be to others, you shall appear to her eyes a knight without fear and without reproach.

Wrong opinions concerning the relations between husband and wife are also occasionally expressed in another and opposite manner. A wife comes into the possession of property. The husband, determined not to encroach upon her rights, leaves the disposal of the property to her.

He insists that it shall be invested in her name. He will take no responsibility as to the mode of investment. This may be done from honorable motives. The man means to be just and blameless; and if he is conscious of innate weakness or wickedness, or if the marriage be an ill-a.s.sorted one, he may be pursuing the best course. There may also be outside, merely business reasons which make it the best course. But to do it simply from a notion of justice, is as far as possible from what ought to be. The man shows himself entirely at fault regarding the range of justice. If life were what it should be, the law would be right in recognizing for the woman no existence separate from her husband. Love is but the fulfilling of that law. The reason why such a law is unjust is, that life is so constant a violation of the higher spiritual law, that this lower one which embodies it works mischief. It fits the righteous theory only, not the wicked facts. But law is for the evil, not for the good. There is no enactment that a man shall possess his own property. The enactments are to punish those who attempt to wrest his property from him. There need be no enactment that a man shall be master of his wife's possessions; he has but to be to her a true husband, and all that she has is his. The law should punish him for neglect of duty and disregard of claims, by a forfeiture of property. If the law this day completely reversed the position of husband and wife, it would make no jot or t.i.ttle of change in their actual position, where they love each other as they ought. Women naturally have a distaste to business, and an indifference to money. Of their own motion, they would leave such things in the hands of men, if the instinct of self-preservation did not force them to interference. In addition to this generic negative willingness, the happy wife has a positive delight in enriching with every blessing the man she loves. When Aurora gave her love with all lavishment, and prayed Romney,

"If now you'd stoop so low to take my love, And use it roughly, without stint or spare, As men use common things with more behind, To any mean and ordinary end,-- The joy would set me like a star, in heaven, So high up, I should s.h.i.+ne because of height And not of virtue,"--

did she make a mental reservation to herself of the money which her books had brought her?

What the law should do, is to step in and guard woman against the possible disastrous consequences which may spring from the spontaneous self-abnegation of love. What it should not do, is to guarantee to the miser, the spendthrift, the tyrant, debauchee, or vampire, the things which _a man_ would possess of his own inalienable right. What a husband should do, is to show himself great enough and good enough to know and feel that, in love, giving and receiving wear the selfsame grace. What he should not do, is to talk of justice when they twain should be one flesh.