Frances Henrietta Müller

“ Thus we are put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor passion, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom ... There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man, and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. But in health the mind is presently seen again, its overarching vault bright with galaxies of unmutable lights, and the warm loves and fear which swept over us as clouds, must lose their finite character, and blend with God to attain their own perfection. ”

“ To do any consecutive work, to avoid the terrible waste of energy, wear and tear upon the health consequent on interrupted mental labour, a single life is almost necessary for a woman. She must refuse all that a man can freely, accept and enjoy; he accepts it not only without risk of having to pay for it too dearly, but with positive gain and impetus to his career. Where the husband derives support and spur to his labour, wholesome relaxation, and the inspiration of affection and happiness—a woman is crushed and annihilated ”

“ If this is the purest and holiest meaning of the love of mother and child, it is also the true meaning of that love and pity for suffering that inspires a woman to give her life for those who have no personal claim on her. If the love of the mother grows by continually rendering services to her child, the love of the woman grows by the protection she gives to the most helpless of humanity, and if the child has need of the mother, has not the unprotected girl much more need of the woman's help? ”

“ A really happy woman of this type is an object of envy to many—to those who have gained something but lost freedom in marriage, to unmarried colourless women who deny our right at once to be virtuous and happy, to those men whose past has been for ever robbed of the bloom which is life's sweetest gift.
It may be asked whether the community loses when she thus studies the welfare and full development of her own nature. Those principles of self-preservation and race-preservation which underlie all communities are the necessary elements of the permanent existence of a society. ”

“ First and foremost, they say, women must be wives, mothers, housekeepers; after that they may with propriety, and even with merit, become something more.
"If you have true genius," they assert, the trifling interruptions of a family, household cares, social claims that every individual is free to make upon a woman—will not seriously interfere with the development of your powers. Do not urge that such things not only swallow up your time, but make it impossible to secure the needful conditions or experience for the cultivation of your art. We know better. Genius laughs at obstacles. ”

“ Thus, in rejecting the personal or the grosser form of love, a woman only leaves herself more free to give a larger, holier and deeper love to those who need it most. It is abuse of language to claim that love means only sexual or parental affection; it is false to assert that because a woman feels neither sexual nor parental affection, she is incapable of love.
The two-fold nature of love will be recognized in the future, as it has not been in the past. The love of humanity has still to take its place as the highest of which mankind is capable. ”

“ She is fitted to fill a place which has always stood empty in the history of the world, that of a loving and tender woman armed with official power to redress the wrongs of women and children, to stand as their representative before the nation, the creator of their rights, and the shield of their weakness; those whose nature and necessities are known only to her, and to her only because she is a woman, have found in her a guardian, an advocate, and a friend. ”

“ The causes of liberty, of purity, of temperance, education, the liberation of the slaves in America, the reform of the laws in England, the progress of Liberty in Europe are to a man so many abstract political principles which he may endeavour to further from different motives, and to clothe with life as far as he can—to a woman they mean various expressions of the principle of good, and their obstruction represents to her human suffering in the concrete, which appeals to her with a keenness and urgency that takes no denial. ”

“ Such increased solidarity is always preceded by a process of differentiation. Every individual who desires to profit by this change in the social relations has the power to do so in his own hands, more or less. Those who through the circumstances of their life are able to minimize to the utmost the interference of law or society upon their actions, are fully able to do so, while strictly maintaining their ground as members of society. Not very long ago the bonds of conventionality were so galling that such liberty was difficult to all, impossible to a woman. ”

“ Bacon says, "The most ordinary cause of a single life is liberty, especially in certain self-pleasing and humorous minds, which are so sensible of every restraint, as they will go near to think their girdles and garters to be bonds and shackles."
The mental life of a single woman is free and untrammelled by any limits except such as are to her own advantage. Her difficulties in the way of development are only such as are common to all human beings. ”

“ Now the great fact of life is womanhood, with all its possibilities and varieties—wifehood and motherhood are incidental parts, which may or may not enter into the life of each woman. Womanhood and wifehood are not co-extensive, but up to this time we have acted as though they were. It is true that there always existed a small class who have led isolated lives in convents, and whose function was religious; but there has never until to-day been found an appreciable number of celibate women who have filled worthily a wide sphere of social and public usefulness. ”

“ Perhaps the necessary preliminary to such improved conditions is a woman's freedom of choice, the power of a woman to refuse marriage with advantage to herself. So long as marriage was the one alternative, so long as all women were pressed into it by necessity, moral or social or pecuniary, there seemed little reason why the lords of creation should trouble themselves to make marriage comfortable and easy for any one but themselves. ”

“ Speaking of the new order of women A. Dumas says: "Elle peut se passer de l'homme pour conquérir la liberté; elle commence a l'entrevoir, sans pour cela faire abandon de sa pudeur et de sa dignité; tout au coutraire, en développant son intelligence, en élargissant son domaine; et la liberté qui lui viendra par le travail sera bien autrement réelle et complête que la liberté purement nominale qui lui venait par le mariage. ”

“ The discipline of ordinary life, the invaluable lessons of experience, are as necessary to the development of a woman's character as of a man's; their instinct has led them, in common with men, to hail the modern awakening in national feeling. ”

“ An unmarried woman is able to secure better conditions of life to a nation of children who are neglected or abandoned, by devoting herself to public duties, to furthering their education, or to enlightening the public on the laws affecting them. Their happiness and welfare become hers, their improved condition is essentially the product of her life, as a mother a woman may benefit two or three, as a single woman she benefits thousands. ”

“ The moment a woman marries she is more or less the subject of every existing authority. Conventional society dictates to her how, where, and in what manner it is proper for her to live. In the eyes of the law her personal liberty and her status are nil, her husband may lock her up and refuse her friends access to her, the guardianship of her children is not hers; again, marriage involves her in personal discomfort, suffering, and danger to life. ”

“ It would be impossible to conceive any institution more needed than one which should furnish a shelter for the many women who, from poverty or domestic unhappiness or other causes, find themselves cast alone and unprotected into the battle of life ... it would largely mitigate the difficulty of providing labour and means of livelihood for single women,which is one of the most pressing, and in our own day one of the most appalling, of social problems. ”

“ Thus it is that by almost imperceptible changes have been brought about those steps towards higher organization and differentiation which exercise so great an influence in a civilized society and on the single women of to-day.
The old-fashioned tyranny which allowed to women no real life but marriage is truly passing away, and it begins to be recognized that special qualities are necessary for married life which all people do not possess. ”

“ The pains and penalties which Nature, or rather our own ignorance of Nature, impose upon a woman in marriage, have been mercilessly and wantonly aggravated by selfish laws, and by the careful cultivation of a public opinion which made it disreputable or ridiculous for a married woman to be anything but a slave to her husband. ”

“ No one denies that the conditions under which race-preservation is carried on are open to reform. Some of them could be immediately improved, others need greater knowledge of the laws of health in civilization than we already possess. If marriage is a natural condition, it ought to be a pleasurable and painless one; if it is not pleasurable and painless, we may conclude that our ignorance and negligence are leading us into grave error. ”

“ In marriage a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being." It is not surprising then that celibacy, whatever may be its disadvantages, should become attractive to women of a certain temperament, and that they should feel that their highest, noblest, and strongest characteristics can only be developed and maintained in conditions of liberty. It is objected that their highest qualities are tenderness and motherly love, &c., that these can only be developed through marriage, and that therefore an unmarried woman is undeveloped and incomplete. ”

“ This objection is based on two assumptions—first that marriage includes the highest love; second that marriage gives a woman complete development. We will deal with the second assumption first. It is granted that when a young woman is kept by her friends in a state of enforced idleness, of strict tyrannical tutelage, is denied all healthy interest in life, all engrossing occupation and mental activity, it is granted that wifehood and motherhood would mean for her an added interest—a certain amount of development. ”

“ In a young society, self-preservation of the whole is the primary necessity. Industrial welfare is and must be sacrificed to it; thus the aim to be reached is a maximum of social strength, and a minimum of individual freedom; but as the community grows, its self-preservation is secured, and the aim gradually changes in character, it seeks to combine the maximum of individual liberty compatible with social existence. Marriage was in early times the only or the most powerful bond that united the wandering, incoherent tendencies of peoples. ”

“ The women brought under its influence will have a wider horizon, the range of their sympathies will be enlarged, they will have more dignity and more happiness in their lives than the average woman of the old régime, their intercourse with women will be free from littleness, their manner towards men from ungraceful extremes of reserve or freedom—in a word, we shall see the utmost expansion of which the female nature is capable. ”

“ Although marriage sometimes develops the character in both sexes, in women it may secure this special development at a greater cost of general growth than is justifiable. When we are studying the development of the character for its own sake, and not for the sake of some special end, the nearest approach to a perfect character is reached by cultivating the faculties generally. If the absence of the special experiences of wife and mother are a loss to a woman, the loss may be more than compensated by the general knowledge of the world which her personal liberty places within her reach. ”

“ The first effect of the emancipation of women is that they are gradually liberated from the thraldom of such dogmas.
A process is going on in civilized communities which is called by some timorous spirits the decomposition of Society. It is true that even these fearful ones grant that "so far the decomposition has done only good; the women who will be, for several generations to come, most influenced by the movement, will be the very best of which our race is capable ... ”

“ When this stage of evolution is reached, the conditions are changed; the greater the number of persons, male or female, admitted to a share in the administration of law, the more public spirit is utilized in binding society together; every woman and every man that takes her or his share of social duty becomes a cementing element in society. When the class or sex hitherto excluded is admitted to these responsibilities, the first effect is and must be an increase of solidarity and unity throughout the nation. ”

“ The increasing power of public spirit has touched and profoundly modified their nature, it has made a breach in the old condition of things which relegated them to a life of domestic duty or to the convent, and denied to any of them a share in public responsibility But this change is not an abrupt departure from the old lines. It is a logical necessary sequence of what has gone before, as are all profound and extensive modifications of society. ”

“ However hard the battle of life may be, we all prefer to have our share in it. It could only be taken as a sign of weakness and the degradation of the spirit of women if they feared to meet the ordinary ills of life, or if they welcomed a deliverance from them by any such artificial and unwholesome scheme as a regenerated conventual system. ”

“ It is under the influence of this principle that a certain body of women appear to be led away from marriage and domestic life towards social and public work.
All women are modified by progress generally, as are all men, but this special process of differentiation, to which we now refer is modifying the lives—not as some people fear of all women—but only of a certain number, in the direction of public usefulness. ”