John Ruse Larus

“ That the future of our country depends, as its past has largely depended, upon its women is but a truism; it is something more, however, that we can look forward with calm confidence to that future as upheld by American womanhood. To-day the American woman stands but on the threshold of her career. Behind her are noble traditions, fraught with lesson, with admonition, and in some cases with warning; before her are the coming centuries, pregnant with possibility, to be made her own. Every step that she takes is a determination of her destined path ”

“ So it was that in America, as nowhere else, woman was in the mid-colonial days held in honor and honest reverence, and so it was that the American home, founded amid the clamor of the war-whoop and standing as the true stronghold of civilization, grew to be the finest emblem of the spirit of the new land and the noblest monument to the character and influence of its women. ”

“ Again there was misunderstanding; for the women of the South, blinded by their prejudices and sufferings to the true character and greatness of the dead man, held him in detestation and rejoiced over his death as that of a hated foe, while they of the North, listening to the cry of exultation that arose from their Southern sisters and unmindful of the sources,--however false in themselves, yet bearing some excuse, if only of madness,--which led to that demonstration of joy, naturally held that Southern women were hardly better than human fiends and utterly unworthy of the guise of womanhood. ”

“ The American woman, alone of all the representatives of the higher cultures, has no effective nationality to shape her trend. She is a product of her time only, not of time and ancient tradition mingled; she has no distinct nationality of growth and line of progress. Every other woman of Caucasian race has a past to which to refer as inspiration and cause, a past which is a story of upward growth, of ever-increasing culture. The American woman found her culture ready for her--was already, at her birth, the child and expression of the highest civilization known to her day. ”

“ They were survivals, these women, of the primitive type of American womanhood: strong, grave of countenance and bearing, caring little for pleasure or recreation, putting duty before all things in their lives as in their esteem, almost masculine in determination and courage. To their hands the rifle was more familiar than the distaff, for upon them often depended the safety of home and children when their husbands were afield or slain; yet they were feminine in many ways of the best and fitted to become the mothers of a sturdy race of warriors and tillers of the soil. ”

“ Longfellow's story of Hiawatha is famous for many reasons, but the chief among them is not its fidelity to truth of conditions. Yet so truly has the name of Minnehaha, "The Laughing Water," become even as a household word to many of our readers of poetry that this sketch would seem incomplete were no reference made to it here. All know the poetic story: how the demi-god Hiawatha, miraculous of birth, tutelary genius of the Indians of North America, wise, benign, powerful, teacher of all good, protector against all ills, marries the lovely Minnehaha, the daughter of the old Dakota arrow-maker. ”

“ In Virginia the women were free, untrammelled by public sentiment, to indulge their taste for gay apparel, to trick themselves off with all the gauds and gewgaws that fashion could invent. The towering heads of hair which were such an offence in the eyes of our Puritan forefathers were tolerated, if not admired, by our grandsires of Virginia; the brocade skirt, the exposed bosom, the embroidered jupe, straight corset, and gay farthingale were entirely congenial to the theories of the Virginia colonists, men as well as women. The gaiety in dress was answered by gaiety of life. ”

“ All through the wonderful march to the capital, through the honorable reception accorded to Cortés, through the siege which was the consequence of Spanish treachery, through the "Terrible Night," which saw the banishment of Spanish power for a time from Tenochtitlan, through the long march back to the coast, through all perils, as through all triumphs, Marina stood by the side of her lover, watchful of his welfare, wise in suggestion, tender in helpfulness, in all things a noble type of woman. ”

“ Perhaps the most romantic era of South American women was that of the buccaneers. It was a brief time and one that held much of peril to womanly honor and virtue; but it also held delightful possibilities for the daughters of Spain in their new home. These ladies, even some of noble birth, looked not unkindly upon the "hereticos" who came with fire and sword to gain wealth in the shape of booty and ransom. Do we not read in quaint old chronicle of that paladin of a filibuster, Revenau de Lussan, who, in 1685, put Panama to ransom and then occupied the town of Queaquilla? ”

“ Mexico was no longer New Spain; she was herself, even as, a few years before, a greater country on her borders had come to be itself in the matter of nationality, even before it had gained autonomy. To be a Mexican woman was not merely to be a lesser Spaniard, but to be something definite, something individual. Some of the older national traits had become developed, some atrophied; but long before Mexico had achieved her independence, the Mexican woman had attained her own freedom from Spanish dominance in matters of custom, thought, and even heredity. ”

“ In Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer we have seen two types of the New England woman as leaders of men. The former was perhaps more of a power, the latter of an influence; but each was complement to the other, not in task but in type. It needs no wonderful discernment to see in these women the rise and florescence of the New England spirit which has come down to our own day and has permeated and informed the whole American genius of femininity. ”

“ Yet, even though there was such rout and revel at Williamsburg and kindred towns, it was in the houses of the great planters that one saw the true Virginia social existence, that one found the Virginia woman of the time in her truest apparition. Under the influences of the coming of the Cavaliers and the Huguenots--for the descendants of the latter perpetuated the restless gaiety of their forsaken land rather than the austerities of the faith which had been the cause of their exile--there had arisen in Virginia something of a cult of the social function. ”

“ Where the woman of the South saw in John Brown only the brutal assailer of all that womanhood held most precious, she of the North,--who could she have realized the peril in which her Southern sister stood, would have stirred the North with her cry,--saw in him only the martyr to the cause of freedom, the man who gave his life in the attempt to bring from bondage an oppressed and ill-treated race ”

“ American womanhood still stood for all the best of its kind. Removed from the chief temptations offered by Old World conditions, it knew no taint, felt no canker at its heart. Its head was often in the wrong, but its heart never. The importation of European customs and manners, as well as of European fashions, had worked its will upon the outward bearing of the American woman; but European morals, then at a low ebb in all the Latin countries and not too high in England herself, had not yet succeeded in gaining foothold among our women. ”

“ Among the evils which Reconstruction had brought in its train was the advent in the South of a type of Northern woman, entirely honest in her enthusiasm in the cause of the negro and entirely ignorant of the true methods to further that cause. She came armed with a thousand ill-founded prejudices, and she calmly proceeded to work upon the lines suggested by those prejudices, with utter disregard of the real conditions which she desired to ameliorate and with dense ignorance of the true tendencies and nature of the people, white and black, among whom she worked. ”

“ It is now time to turn to a consideration of the women of South America as we usually think of them, the product of a grafted Spanish civilization rather than a survival or result of primitive cultures. Yet when we turn to such consideration we find but little that is characteristic or even interesting. It is not to Spanish-founded countries that we must look for the greatest advances in the status or culture of women; in such lands there has ever been stagnation and even retrogression, while there has rarely been any marked individuality of personal or national trait. ”

“ As the first woman to be thus honored she deserves to be remembered by more than local affection; and it speaks well for our country that the pioneer shaft raised to a woman did not commemorate the triumphs of intellect or even militant bravery, but the labors and unselfishness of one who could not so much as write her name, signing with a cross the will by which she made her last gift to the orphans--Protestant as well as Catholic, for her large soul knew of them nothing but that they were in need of care--of the city of New Orleans. ”

“ It was the presence of this gallant band, as well as their courage and endurance, which assures us of one of the most predominant traits of the most distinctive American womanhood in those days. That trait is the love of home. It was to seek a home, a habitation and spot of ground that should be their very own, that the pioneer and his wife dared the perils of the wilderness; and in this search the wife was at least as instrumental as the husband. To have a home was the ambition of every American woman of those times ”

“ There was needed some cataclysm to rescue American womanhood from the peril which she was approaching; and it was well for her that that cataclysm came at need, however terrible it may have been in the coming.
Yet even in those days the social world did not represent all that was best in American womanhood or even all that was most noteworthy. Therein alone, it is true, were to be found those whose individuality became famous; but in other fields there labored many American women who were unknown to all but those of their immediate environment, and yet whose work was of national importance. ”

“ Foreigners are apt to say that we children of this western world do not submit to the tender emotions with the same self-abandonment as those who are born nearer to the rising sun; that our hearts are as cold and selfish as our manners; and that we live more for the lower and grovelling passions than for sentiment and the affections. Most sincerely do we wish that every charge which European jealousy and European superciliousness have brought against the American character was as false as this. ”

“ It is true that there were many, women as well as men, even more of the former, whose loyalty was but lip-service, who cherished in their hearts a devotion to the cause of freedom to which they dared not give utterance for fear of oppression; but there were also many who loved the flag of England as the banner of all that was truest and best, and who looked upon the resisters of British authority as rebels of the baser sort. ”

“ With such names inscribed upon her banner, we may well forgive her such as the infamous Angelique de Pean and forget the madness that came upon her when Bigot lorded it in Quebec and virtue and honor were looked upon by most of the women of that city as encumbrances to pleasure or ambition. To-day her women worthily sustain the standard which has been left them as a legacy by their noble sisters of the past; so Canada may well be content in this wise, even though she has furnished no leaders in the march of present-day womanhood toward its desired goal. ”

“ Even when we shall be forced to record the great dissension which separated our country into two nations and accentuated all the sectional traits of its womankind as of its men there will be but different expressions of womanhood to record, not different types,--different conditions of existence, having effect of direction, not differing spirits and impulses. It was in the days before the darkening of the shadow of the Revolution that the American woman, untrammelled by conditions of residence or descent, began to appear as a type. ”

“ By this time, Jamestown had grown to have a population of more than five hundred souls, of whom not more than two hundred were fighting men; so that the proportion of women and children must have been far larger than might be supposed by those looking at the circumstances of colonization and existence. It must have taken a stout heart in a woman's breast to face the unknown dangers of the unknown world; and soon the women of the infant colony had need for all their bravery. ”

“ The Indian warrior can perhaps be brought to understand that for him better conditions are possible than those which have been his lot in times past; but it is well-nigh impracticable for him to grasp the truth that it is possible for his slave, his chattel, his beast of burden, to be aught, to herself or to him, than that which she has been almost for time immemorial. ”

“ The stately dame, lapped in luxury all her days and a stranger to hardship or even anxiety, gave up to her country's cause her dearest joys, and not only sent husband or son to the forefront of the battle, but herself, if she was in the path of war, bore unflinchingly the outrages of an incensed soldiery and saw her home given to the flames and the very lives of herself and her children threatened, and yet thought it not too great a price to pay for her country's liberty. ”

“ And into her nature has also come another spirit distinctively American--the spirit of the wilderness subdued and conquered, of a barren land made to yield its treasures to the arm of the pioneer the spirit of conquest. There is no new gift of mind or soul brought to her by other nations that has not been modified by these twin spirits. Thus, though heir to all nations and peoples, though product of all cultures, she remains typically American in dominant traits, in the path in which she has chosen to set her feet. Latin and Teuton, Slav and Celt, she has in her veins the blood of them all ”

“ On the other hand, the Mexicans have come to look upon Americans of the North with respect and even affection, and to welcome them to their country and often to their homes. The result, of course, has been partly to establish a heterogeneous culture, neither Spanish, Indian, nor American, and yet a commingling of all three, at least in outward form. But beneath the veneer of the new culture the Mexican woman preserves the characteristics which have been hers for centuries and which in their greater part came down to her from her Indian forebears. ”

“ The present era of American womanhood, indeed, may be classified as supremely that of concentration. Throughout our country are constantly springing up women's societies having definite aims and purposes, and the effort which was formerly diffused, and therefore unavailing, now tends from a consolidated source to a clearly discerned end. Whether for purposes of amelioration of sex-position or of general beneficence, women have learned the power which lies in concentration of effort and have penetrated the secret of the most effectual putting forth of the strength which lies in them. ”