Women and the Alphabet written by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

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WOMEN AND THE ALPHABET

A Series of Essays

by

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

1881

PREFATORY NOTE

The first essay in this volume, "Ought Women to learn the Alphabet?"
appeared originally in the "Atlantic Monthly" of February, 1859, and has
since been reprinted in various forms, bearing its share, I trust, in the
great development of more liberal views in respect to the training and
duties of women which has made itself manifest within forty years. There
was, for instance, a report that it was the perusal of this essay which led
the late Miss Sophia Smith to the founding of the women's college bearing
her name at Northampton, Massachusetts.

The remaining papers in the volume formed originally a part of a book
entitled "Common Sense About Women" which was made up largely of papers
from the "Woman's Journal." This book was first published in 1881 and was
reprinted in somewhat abridged form some years later in London
(Sonnenschein). It must have attained a considerable circulation there, as
the fourth (stereotyped) edition appeared in 1897. From this London reprint
a German translation was made by Fraeulein Eugenie Jacobi, under the title
"Die Frauenfrage und der gesunde Menschenverstand" (Schupp: Neuwied and
Leipzig, 1895).

T.W.H.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

CONTENTS

I. OUGHT WOMEN TO LEARN THE ALPHABET?

II. PHYSIOLOGY.
Too Much Natural History
Darwin, Huxley, and Buckle
The Spirit of Small Tyranny
The Noble Sex
The Truth about our Grandmothers
The Physique of American Women
The Limitations of Sex

III. TEMPERAMENT.
The Invisible Lady
Sacred Obscurity
Virtues in Common
Individual Differences
Angelic Superiority
Vicarious Honors
The Gospel of Humiliation
Celery and Cherubs
The Need of Cavalry
The Reason Firm, the Temperate Will
Allures to Brighter Worlds, and leads the Way

IV. THE HOME.
Wanted--Homes
The Origin of Civilization
The Low-Water Mark
Obey
Woman in the Chrysalis
Two and Two
A Model Household
A Safeguard for the Family
Women as Economists
Greater includes Less
A Copartnership
One Responsible Head
Asking for Money
Womanhood and Motherhood
A German Point of View
Childless Women
The Prevention of Cruelty to Mothers

V. SOCIETY.
Foam and Current
In Society
The Battle of the Cards
Some Working-Women
The Empire of Manners
Girlsterousness
Are Women Natural Aristocrats?
Mrs. Blank's Daughters
The European Plan
Featherses

VI. STUDY AND WORK.
Experiments
Intellectual Cinderellas
Cupid-and-Psychology
Self-Supporting Wives
Thorough
Literary Aspirants
The Career of Letters
Talking and Taking
How to speak in Public

VII. PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT.
We the People
The Use of the Declaration of Independence
Some Old-Fashioned Principles
Founded on a Rock
The Good of the Governed
Ruling at Second-Hand

VIII. SUFFRAGE.
Drawing the Line
For Self-Protection
Womanly Statesmanship
Too Much Prediction
First-Class Carriages
Education _via_ Suffrage
Follow Your Leaders
How to make Women understand Politics
Inferior to Man, and near to Angels

IX. OBJECTIONS TO SUFFRAGE.
The Fact of Sex
How will it Result?
I have all the Rights I want
Sense Enough to Vote
An Infelicitous Epithet
The Rob Roy Theory
The Votes of Non-Combatants
Manners repeal Laws
Dangerous Voters
How Women will legislate
Individuals _vs._ Classes
Defeats before Victories

INDEX

I

OUGHT WOMEN TO LEARN THE ALPHABET?

Paris smiled, for an hour or two, in the year 1801, when, amidst Napoleon's
mighty projects for remodelling the religion and government of his empire,
the ironical satirist, Sylvain Marechal, thrust in his "Plan for a Law
prohibiting the Alphabet to Women."[1] Daring, keen, sarcastic, learned,
the little tract retains to-day so much of its pungency, that we can hardly
wonder at the honest simplicity of the author's friend and biographer,
Madame Gacon Dufour, who declared that he must be insane, and soberly
replied to him.

His proposed statute consists of eighty-two clauses, and is fortified by a
"whereas" of a hundred and thirteen weighty reasons. He exhausts the range
of history to show the frightful results which have followed this taste of
fruit of the tree of knowledge; quotes from the Encyclopedie, to prove that
the woman who knows the alphabet has already lost a portion of her
innocence; cites the opinion of Moliere, that any female who has unhappily
learned anything in this line should affect ignorance, when possible;
asserts that knowledge rarely makes men attractive, and females never;
opines that women have no occasion to peruse Ovid's "Art of Love," since
they know it all in advance; remarks that three quarters of female authors
are no better than they should be; maintains that Madame Guion would have
been far more useful had she been merely pretty and an ignoramus, such as
Nature made her,--that Ruth and Naomi could not read, and Boaz probably
would never have married into the family had they possessed that
accomplishment,--that the Spartan women did not know the alphabet, nor the
Amazons, nor Penelope, nor Andromache, nor Lucretia, nor Joan of Arc, nor
Petrarch's Laura, nor the daughters of Charlemagne, nor the three hundred
and sixty-five wives of Mohammed; but that Sappho and Madame de Maintenon
could read altogether too well; while the case of Saint Brigitta, who
brought forth twelve children and twelve books, was clearly exceptional,
and afforded no safe precedent.

It would seem that the brilliant Frenchman touched the root of the matter.
Ought women to learn the alphabet? There the whole question lies. Concede
this little fulcrum, and Archimedea will move the world before she has done
with it: it becomes merely a question of time. Resistance must be made here
or nowhere. _Obsta principiis_. Woman must be a subject or an equal: there
is no middle ground. What if the Chinese proverb should turn out to be,
after all, the summit of wisdom, "For men, to cultivate virtue is
knowledge; for women, to renounce knowledge is virtue"?

No doubt, the progress of events is slow, like the working of the laws of
gravitation generally. Certainly there has been but little change in the
legal position of women since China was in its prime, until within the last
half century. Lawyers admit that the fundamental theory of English and
Oriental law is the same on this point: Man and wife are one, and that one
is the husband. It is the oldest of legal traditions. When Blackstone
declares that "the very being and existence of the woman is suspended
during the marriage," and American Kent echoes that "her legal existence
and authority are in a manner lost;" when Petersdorff asserts that "the
husband has the right of imposing such corporeal restraints as he may deem
necessary," and Bacon that "the husband hath, by law, power and dominion
over his wife, and may keep her by force within the bounds of duty, and may
beat her, but not in a violent or cruel manner;" when Mr. Justice Coleridge
rules that the husband, in certain cases, "has a right to confine his wife
in his own dwelling-house, and restrain her from liberty for an indefinite
time," and Baron Alderson sums it all up tersely, "The wife is only the
_servant_ of her husband,"--these high authorities simply reaffirm the
dogma of the Gentoo code, four thousand years old and more: "A man, both
day and night, must keep his wife so much in subjection that she by no
means be mistress of her own actions. If the wife have her own free will,
notwithstanding she be of a superior caste, she will behave amiss."

Yet behind these unchanging institutions, a pressure has been for centuries
becoming concentrated, which, now that it has begun to act, is threatening
to overthrow them all. It has not yet operated very visibly in the Old
World, where, even in England, the majority of women have not till lately
mastered the alphabet sufficiently to sign their own names in the marriage
register. But in this country the vast changes of the last few years are
already a matter of history. No trumpet has been sounded, no earthquake has
been felt, while State after State has ushered into legal existence one
half of the population within its borders. Surely, here and now, might poor
M. Marechal exclaim, the bitter fruits of the original seed appear. The sad
question recurs, Whether women ought ever to have tasted of the alphabet.

It is true that Eve ruined us all, according to theology, without knowing
her letters. Still there is something to be said in defence of that
venerable ancestress. The Veronese lady, Isotta Nogarola, five hundred and
thirty-six of whose learned epistles were preserved by De Thou, composed a
dialogue on the question, Whether Adam or Eve had committed the
greater sin. But Ludovico Domenichi, in his "Dialogue on the Nobleness of
Women," maintains that Eve did not sin at all, because she was not even
created when Adam was told not to eat the apple. It was "in Adam all
died," he shrewdly says; nobody died in Eve: which looks plausible. Be
that as it may, Eve's daughters are in danger of swallowing a whole
harvest of forbidden fruit, in these revolutionary days, unless
something be done to cut off the supply.

It has been seriously asserted, that during the last half century more
books have been written by women and about women than during all the
previous uncounted ages. It may be true; although, when we think of the
innumerable volumes of _Memoires_ by French women of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries,--each justifying the existence of her own ten
volumes by the remark, that all her contemporaries were writing as
many,--we have our doubts. As to the increased multitude of general
treatises on the female sex, however,--its education, life, health,
diseases, charms, dress, deeds, sphere, rights, wrongs, work, wages,
encroachments, and idiosyncrasies generally,--there can be no doubt
whatever; and the poorest of these books recognizes a condition of
public sentiment of which no other age ever dreamed.

Still, literary history preserves the names of some reformers before the
Reformation, in this matter. There was Signora Moderata Fonte, the
Venetian, who left a book to be published after her death, in 1592, "Dei
Meriti delle Donne." There was her townswoman, Lucrezia Marinella, who
followed, ten years after, with her essay, "La Nobilita e la Eccelenza
delle Donne, con Difetti e Mancamenti degli Uomini,"--a comprehensive
theme, truly! Then followed the all-accomplished Anna Maria Schurman, in
1645, with her "Dissertatio de Ingenii Muliebris ad Doctrinam et meliores
Literas Aptitudine," with a few miscellaneous letters appended in Greek
and Hebrew. At last came boldly Jacquette Guillaume, in 1665, and threw
down the gauntlet in her title-page, "Les Dames Illustres; ou par bonnes
et fortes Raisons il se prouve que le Sexe Feminin surpasse en toute
Sorte de Genre le Sexe Masculin;" and with her came Margaret Boufflet
and a host of others; and finally, in England, Mary Wollstonecraft,
whose famous book, formidable in its day, would seem rather conservative
now; and in America, that pious and worthy dame, Mrs. H. Mather Crocker,
Cotton Mather's grandchild, who, in 1848, published the first book on the
"Rights of Woman" ever written on this side the Atlantic.

Meanwhile there have never been wanting men, and strong men, to echo these
appeals. From Cornelius Agrippa and his essay (1509) on the excellence of
woman and her preeminence over man, down to the first youthful thesis of
Agassiz, "Mens Feminae Viri Animo superior," there has been a succession of
voices crying in the wilderness. In England, Anthony Gibson wrote a book,
in 1599, called "A Woman's Woorth, defended against all the Men in the
World, proving them to be more Perfect, Excellent, and Absolute in all
Vertuous Actions than any Man of what Qualitie soever, _Interlarded with
Poetry_." _Per contra_, the learned Acidalius published a book in Latin,
and afterwards in French, to prove that women are not reasonable creatures.
Modern theologians are at worst merely sub-acid, and do not always say so,
if they think so. Meanwhile most persons have been content to leave the
world to go on its old course, in this matter as in others, and have thus
acquiesced in that stern judicial decree with which Timon of Athens sums up
all his curses upon womankind,--"If there sit twelve women at the table,
let a dozen of them be--as they are."

Ancient or modern, nothing in any of these discussions is so valuable as
the fact of the discussion itself. There is no discussion where there is no
wrong. Nothing so indicates wrong as this morbid self-inspection. The
complaints are a perpetual protest, the defences a perpetual confession. It
is too late to ignore the question; and, once opened, it can be settled
only on absolute and permanent principles. There is a wrong; but where?
Does woman already know too much, or too little? Was she created for man's
subject, or his equal? Shall she have the alphabet, or not?

Ancient mythology, which undertook to explain everything, easily accounted
for the social and political disabilities of woman. Goguet quotes the story
from Saint Augustine, who got it from Varro. Cecrops, building Athens, saw
starting from the earth an olive-plant and a fountain, side by side. The
Delphic oracle said that this indicated a strife between Minerva and
Neptune for the honor of giving a name to the city, and that the people
must decide between them. Cecrops thereupon assembled the men, and the
women also, who then had a right to vote; and the result was that Minerva
carried the election by a glorious majority of one. Then Attica was
overflowed and laid waste: of course the citizens attributed the calamity
to Neptune, and resolved to punish the women. It was therefore determined
that in future they should not vote, nor should any child bear the name
of its mother.

Thus easily did mythology explain all troublesome inconsistencies; but it
is much that it should even have recognized them as needing explanation.
The real solution is, however, more simple. The obstacle to the woman's
sharing the alphabet, or indeed any other privilege, has been thought by
some to be the fear of impairing her delicacy, or of destroying her
domesticity, or of confounding the distinction between the sexes. These may
have been plausible excuses. They have even been genuine, though minor,
anxieties. But the whole thing, I take it, had always one simple,
intelligible basis,--sheer contempt for the supposed intellectual
inferiority of woman. She was not to be taught, because she was not worth
teaching. The learned Acidalius aforesaid was in the majority. According to
Aristotle and the Peripatetics, woman was _animal occasionatum_, as if a
sort of monster and accidental production. Mediaeval councils, charitably
asserting her claims to the rank of humanity, still pronounced her unfit
for instruction. In the Hindoo dramas she did not even speak the same
language with her master, but used the dialect of slaves. When, in the
sixteenth century, Francoise de Saintonges wished to establish girls'
schools in France, she was hooted in the streets; and her father called
together four doctors, learned in the law, to decide whether she was not
possessed by demons, to think of educating women,--_pour s'assurer
qu'instruire des femmes n'etait pas un oeuvre du demon_.

It was the same with political rights. The foundation of the Salic Law was
not any sentimental anxiety to guard female delicacy and domesticity; it
was, as stated by Froissart, a blunt, hearty contempt: "The kingdom of
France being too noble to be ruled by a woman." And the same principle was
reaffirmed for our own institutions, in rather softened language, by
Theophilus Parsons, in his famous defence of the rights of Massachusetts
men (the "Essex Result," in 1778): "Women, what age soever they are of, are
not considered as having a sufficient acquired discretion [to exercise the
franchise]."

In harmony with this are the various maxims and _bon-mots_ of eminent men,
in respect to women. Niebuhr thought he should not have educated a girl
well,--he should have made her know too much. Lessing said, "The woman who
thinks is like the man who puts on rouge, ridiculous." Voltaire said,
"Ideas are like beards: women and young men have none." And witty Dr.
Maginn carries to its extreme the atrocity, "We like to hear a few words of
sense from a woman, as we do from a parrot, because they are so
unexpected." Yet how can we wonder at these opinions, when the saints have
been severer than the sages?--since the pious Fenelon taught that true
virgin delicacy was almost as incompatible with learning as with vice; and
Dr. Channing complained, in his "Essay on Exclusion and Denunciation," of
"women forgetting the tenderness of their sex," and arguing on theology.

Now this impression of feminine inferiority may be right or wrong, but it
obviously does a good deal towards explaining the facts it assumes. If
contempt does not originally cause failure, it perpetuates it.
Systematically discourage any individual, or class, from birth to death,
and they learn, in nine cases out of ten, to acquiesce in their
degradation, if not to claim it as a crown of glory. If the Abbe Choisi
praised the Duchesse de Fontanges for being "beautiful as an angel and
silly as a goose," it was natural that all the young ladies of the court
should resolve to make up in folly what they wanted in charms. All
generations of women having been bred under the shadow of intellectual
contempt, they have, of course, done much to justify it. They have often
used only for frivolous purposes even the poor opportunities allowed them.
They have employed the alphabet, as Moliere said, chiefly in spelling the
verb _Amo_. Their use of science has been like that of Mlle. de Launay,
who computed the decline in her lover's affection by his abbreviation of
their evening walk in the public square, preferring to cross it rather
than take the circuit; "from which I inferred," she says, "that his
passion had diminished in the ratio between the diagonal of a rectangular
parallelogram and the sum of two adjacent sides." And their conception,
even of art, has been too often on the scale of Properzia de Rossi, who
carved sixty-five heads on a walnut, the smallest of all recorded symbols
of woman's sphere.

All this might, perhaps, be overcome, if the social prejudice which
discourages women would only reward proportionately those who surmount the
discouragement. The more obstacles, the more glory, if society would only
pay in proportion to the labor; but it does not. Women being denied, not
merely the training which prepares for great deeds, but the praise and
compensation which follow them, have been weakened in both directions. The
career of eminent men ordinarily begins with college and the memories of
Miltiades, and ends with fortune and fame: woman begins under
discouragement, and ends beneath the same. Single, she works with half
preparation and half pay; married, she puts name and wages into the keeping
of her husband, shrinks into John Smith's "lady" during life, and John
Smith's "relict" on her tombstone; and still the world wonders that her
deeds, like her opportunities, are inferior.

Evidently, then, the advocates of woman's claims--those who hold that "the
virtues of the man and the woman are the same," with Antisthenes, or that
"the talent of the man and the woman is the same," with Socrates in
Xenophon's "Banquet"--must be cautious lest they attempt to prove too much.
Of course, if women know as much as the men, without schools and colleges,
there is no need of admitting them to those institutions. If they work as
well on half pay, it diminishes the inducement to give them the other
half. The safer position is, to claim that they have done just enough
to show what they might have done under circumstances less discouraging.
Take, for instance, the common remark, that women have invented nothing.
It is a valid answer, that the only implements habitually used by woman
have been the needle, the spindle, and the basket; and tradition reports
that she herself invented all three. In the same way it may be shown that
the departments in which women have equalled men have been the
departments in which they have had equal training, equal encouragement,
and equal compensation; as, for instance, the theatre. Madame Lagrange,
the _prima donna_, after years of costly musical instruction, wins the
zenith of professional success; she receives, the newspapers affirm,
sixty thousand dollars a year, travelling expenses for ten persons,
country-houses, stables, and liveries, besides an uncounted revenue of
bracelets, bouquets, and _billets-doux._ Of course, every young
_debutante_ fancies the same thing within her own reach, with only a
brief stage-vista between. On the stage there is no deduction for sex,
and, therefore, woman has shown in that sphere an equal genius. But
every female common-school teacher in the United States finds the
enjoyment of her four hundred dollars a year to be secretly embittered
by the knowledge that the young college stripling in the next schoolroom
is paid twice that sum for work no harder or more responsible than her
own, and that, too, after the whole pathway of education has been
obstructed for her, and smoothed for him. These may be gross and
carnal considerations; but Faith asks her daily bread, and fancy must
be fed. We deny woman her fair share of training, of encouragement, of
remuneration, and then talk fine nonsense about her instincts and
intuitions. We say sentimentally with the Oriental proverbialist,
"Every book of knowledge is implanted by nature in the heart of
woman,"--and make the compliment a substitute for the alphabet.

Nothing can be more absurd than to impose entirely distinct standards, in
this respect, on the two sexes, or to expect that woman, any more than man,
will accomplish anything great without due preparation and adequate
stimulus. Mrs. Patten, who navigated her husband's ship from Cape Horn to
California, would have failed in the effort, for all her heroism, if she
had not, unlike most of her sex, been taught to use her Bowditch's
"Navigator." Florence Nightingale, when she heard of the distresses in the
Crimea, did not, as most people imagine, rise up and say, "I am a woman,
ignorant but intuitive, with very little sense and information, but
exceedingly sublime aspirations; my strength lies in my weakness; I can
do all things without knowing anything about them." Not at all: during
ten years she had been in hard training for precisely such services; had
visited all the hospitals in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, Lyons,
Rome, Brussels, and Berlin; had studied under the Sisters of Charity,
and been twice a nurse in the Protestant Institution at Kaiserswerth.
Therefore she did not merely carry to the Crimea a woman's heart, as her
stock in trade, but she knew the alphabet of her profession better than
the men around her. Of course, genius and enthusiasm are, for both sexes,
elements unforeseen and incalculable; but, as a general rule, great
achievements imply great preparations and favorable conditions. To
disregard this truth is unreasonable in the abstract, and cruel in its
consequences. If an extraordinary male gymnast can clear a height of ten
feet with the aid of a springboard, it would be considered slightly absurd
to ask a woman to leap eleven feet without one; yet this is precisely what
society and the critics have always done. Training and wages and social
approbation are very elastic springboards; and the whole course of history
has seen these offered bounteously to one sex, and as sedulously withheld
from the other. Let woman consent to be a doll, and there was no finery so
gorgeous, no baby-house so costly, but she might aspire to share its
lavish delights; let her ask simply for an equal chance to learn, to labor,
and to live, and it was as if that same doll should open its lips, and
propound Euclid's forty-seventh proposition. While we have all deplored the
helpless position of indigent women, and lamented that they had no
alternative beyond the needle, the wash-tub, the schoolroom, and the
street, we have usually resisted their admission into every new occupation,
denied them training, and cut their compensation down. Like Charles Lamb,
who atoned for coming late to the office in the morning by going away early
in the afternoon, we have first, half educated women, and then, to restore
the balance, only half paid them. What innumerable obstacles have been
placed in their way as female physicians; what a complication of
difficulties has been encountered by them, even as printers, engravers,
and designers! In London, Mr. Bennett was once mobbed for lecturing to
women on watchmaking. In this country, we have known grave professors
refuse to address lyceums which thought fit to employ an occasional female
lecturer. Mr. Comer stated that it was "in the face of ridicule and
sneers" that he began to educate American women as bookkeepers many years
ago; and it was a little contemptible in Miss Muloch to revive the same
satire in "A Woman's Thoughts on Women," when she must have known that
in half the retail shops in Paris her own sex rules the ledger, and
Mammon knows no Salic law.

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