Ii — Woman
“Virtue sure
Were blind as fortune, should she choose the poor
Rough cottage man to live in, and despise
To dwell in woman’s stately edifice;
Woman’s approved the fairer sex, and we
Mean men repent our pedigree.
Why choose the father’s name, when we may take
The mother’s a more honor’d blood to make,
Woman’s of later, though of nobler birth,
For she of man was made, man made of earth,
The son of dust, and though her sin did breed
His fall, again she raised him in her seed;
Who had he not her blest creation seen,
An Anchorite in Paradise had been.”
Pythagoras said that only good things were to be predicted of women, since they were the mothers of ornaments, of conversation and of confidence, and that he who invented names, perceiving that women were adapted to piety and friendship, gave to each of their ages the name of some Deity—to a maiden, Core, or Proserpine, to a bride Nymphe, to a mother, Mater, to a grandmother, according to the Dorian dialect, Maia. And in accordance with the like persuasion the oracles were always unfolded into light by women. Tacitus tells us that the Northern nations also held women in high esteem, “believing ladies had something divine about them.” And this faith has descended to men of the Saxon name, the best regarding her as endowed with magical properties, the type of the highest culture the advanced nations have attained. Endowed with magnetic gifts; by necessity of sex, a realist and diviner, she lives nearest the cardinal facts of existence, instinct with the mysteries of love and fate; a romance ever attaching itself to her name and destiny. Entering the school of sensibility with life, she seizes personal qualities by a subtlety of logic overleaping all deductions of the slower reason; her divinations touching the quick of things as if herself were personally part of the chemistry of life itself. We cannot conceive her as distinct, distant, unrelated, she seems so personal, concrete, so near; yet can never come quite up to her discernments, nor gainsay their delicacy and truthfulness. Then constancy, fidelity, fortitude, kindness, gratitude, grace, courtesy, discretion, taste, conversation, the adornments of life, were bare names without the splendor of illustration of which the history of the sex affords so many brilliant examples. It seems as if in moulding his world the Creator reserved his choicest work till the last, and consummated his art in her endowments. Shall our sex confess to some slight in not having been mingled more freely of her essence, that so we too might have had access to the crypts into which she is privileged by birthright to enter? Hers is the way of persuasion, of service, forbearance:
“If thou dost anything confer that’s sweet,
In me a grateful relish it shall meet,
But if thy bounties thou dost take away,
The least repining word I will not say.”
As there was only solitude till she brought company, conversation, civility, so stooping still to conquer, she is fast gaining ascendancy over passions and prejudices that have held her subservient and their victim. Can we doubt the better rule will be furthered indefinitely by a partnership in power thus intimate and acknowledged by States? What ideal republics have fabled, ours is to be. Nor need we fear the boldest experiments which the moral sense of the best women conceive and advocate. Certainly liberty is in danger of running into license while woman is excluded from exercising political as well as social restraint upon its excesses. Nor is the state planted securely till she possess equal privileges with man of forming its laws and taking a becoming part in their administration. No jury of men, however honorable or wise, are equal to pronounce upon questions relating to woman; questions involving considerations that concern the whole structure, not only of society, but of humanity itself. The public morals are insecure till the family is chastely planted, the state guarded by the continency of its male members.
A man defines his standing at the court of chastity by his views of women. He cannot be any man’s friend nor his own if not hers. Either nature dealt coldly by him in his descent, else he is the victim of vices which his passions have inflamed till they have their own way with him.
“They meet but with unwholesome springs,
And summers which infectious are;
They hear but when the mermaid sings,
And only see the falling star
Who ever dare
Affirm no woman chaste and fair.”
The very name of woman becomes soiled if we seek to be related to her by the coarse ties of appetite, instead of the tender threads of affection, the charm of ideas. There are pleasures for keeping as enjoying,—for using delicately, the zest lasting long, the more affluent when tasted with moderation and seldom.
“Who can to love more rich gift make
Than to love’s self, for love’s own sake?
Love, that imports in every sense delight,
Is fancied in the soul, not appetite:
Why love among the virtues is scarce known
Is that love is them all contract in one.”