Melusina Fay Peirce

“ The feminine sphere that for ages stood so immovable beneath our feet, the mighty mechanical powers are rolling, rolling away from under us. In great part it is already gone, and sewing-machines, washing-machines, machines for every smallest office, are taking from us the little that is left of the old manual labour by which we once fed and clothed the world, and whose shadow we yet cling to so desperately. Crowding us together on the fast-lessening area, it would seem as though men were determined that women should have no longer a serious interest or an earnest occupation in the universe. ”

“ In truth, it almost makes one laugh to see Harvard, for example, congratulating herself that she is now a "University," when the curriculum of her studies is wanting in only about half of the circle of the arts and sciences, and when also she shuts out the best minds of half the human race. No university proper has ever yet existed or can exist, until every department of human knowledge is represented in it, and until mind is free to come there for culture as mind simply, and not as mind plus a particular sex. ”

“ The English club-house, stronghold of intensest egotism, built of women's hearts and cemented with their tears,—the living tomb of love,—is beginning to rise against us all over the land; so that, utterly excluded as we are from their business and their politics, men may shut us out also from their pleasures and their society, and even from their hearts,—for club-men, as is well known, easily dispense with matrimony. ”

“ If men not only voted us the vote,—if they voted every vote of ours to count five of theirs,—what would it avail us if some day they voted to take it away again? So I am against this making of treaties and defining of rights between the all-powerful and the all-weak. Like the international relation between the United States and the Indians, it could only be a sham and a mockery, a political lie, and therefore containing the seeds of political disease and death. Let us have some self-respect. We have not tried yet to influence the world as women; why, then, should we demand to do it as men? ”

“ If the tailor who made clothes for his own sex were correctly valued by the doughty old standard, as only "the ninth part of a man," what a mere shred must he be who busies himself about the clothes of women! And, in truth, the excessive smallness, meanness, and cunning of many of the faces among the men in the dry-goods stores must be admitted by everybody who gives them a moment's attention. How can our sturdy farmers allow their young sons to go into such a contemptible business! When modern manhood falls so utterly below its proper level, why should modern womanhood be blamed? ”

“ What is the matter with men, that they do not wish us to be noble, that they are not noble toward us? It is that they have no faith in the absoluteness of our sex. The "feminine," the "beautiful" in us constitutes our highest value to them. And seeing our modes of life so different from their own, they imagine that the secret of the charm is in this, and they cannot bear any suggestion of change. Then we ourselves must be softly brave against their prejudices and distrust; must insist that women can very easily combine the beautiful and the useful, the real and the ideal ”

“ Our smattering of the arts and sciences does not emancipate us from the old feminine slavery to manual labour. Cooking, sewing, dusting, arranging, still stand there to be done; and, slight them as we may, we are yet compelled to attend to them just sufficiently to prevent our doing anything else well. So we accept superficiality in everything, and, as a consequence, find ourselves at many a turn unequal to the situation. Goaded by her aspirations and fretted by her imperfections, it is no wonder that the young American matron grows thin, nervous, even prematurely old ”

“ Because we are poor, dependent on our fathers and husbands for food and shelter, and our vote, therefore, could represent neither physical strength nor money,—the two "powers behind the throne" that uphold all governments, and the only two that give the vote its value or even its meaning. I am not one of those who desire "manhood suffrage" for women, but I confess I am painfully impressed with the impotence and insignificance of my sex, when I see that "laughter" is all that generally greets the discussion of its enfranchisement, even in the graver hall of Congress! ”

“ Indeed, is not the typical American gentleman himself rather a melancholy object,—with his intense and unremitting devotion to dollars and cents, which leaves him no time for reading, drawing, or music, none for the love and study of out-door nature, none for communion with himself or with his fellows, so that every night he is tired to death with his day's work, and hates society because the faculties which properly come into play in company are in him wholly undeveloped? ”

“ A great gift for acting stands in the same category with a great voice. Both should be used for the delight of mankind, and for the benefit of its possessor. I never see the refined and brilliant performance in private theatricals of these young ladies and gentlemen who rehearse together only a few weeks, and play together only a few times, without thinking what a pity it is that the stage is not a pure and honourable calling, and the dramatic talent not yet recognized as one implanted by the Creator to be developed for his glory and for human happiness as much as any other. ”

“ Perhaps the world would have learned in no other way than by brute force, but surely we can look back and see that if men could have voluntarily co-operated in their agriculture and their arts, all the dreadful suffering of the ages of slavery and serfdom might have been spared. The alternative is not presented to women. We cannot, even if we would, enslave each other, and let us thank God that we have always been kept from the temptations and the crimes which so generally go with power! Our temptation is a negative one, but I believe it scarcely less fatal to human happiness and virtue. ”

“ But our palace must be beautiful as well as ample, and to make it so we must send also from their housewifery all the gifted feminine artists we have, that they may carve the slender pillar and fling the graceful arch, paint the rich ceilings and inlay the mosaic borders; while the music swells and falls, and the poetesses from their airy towers survey the wide world like the watching sister in the nursery tale, and tell of all the new hopes that appear on the horizon. ”

“ For what indeed is this great "world" we talk about, that roars outside our doors and mocks us or treads us under foot if we try to get into it, but a vast masculine realm of co-operative industries and activities, in which we have neither part nor lot, and whose masters do not wish us to have any? And why should they care for our thought and labour, except that they get them cheaper? They help and employ, they buy and sell with each other, each one taking what he can do best, and getting paid for it according to its value. ”

“ Let the co-operative housekeepers demolish it for ever, by declaring that it is just as necessary and just as honourable for a wife to earn money as it is for her husband; let them, moreover, resolve that time and skill is what they will pay for, and not sex, and the age will soon see what efforts women can make after excellence when there is hope of a just reward for it. Then alone shall we begin to walk in self-respect, and the poor, wronged work-woman throughout the world will raise her drooping head. ”

“ Lounging over a magazine or a piece of fancy-work, and making less downright exertion in a week than they do in a day, we complain of their indolence and inefficiency, forgetting that practically they are our slaves from morning until night, while, from some inscrutable and unjust arrangement of things, we, as far as they can discover, have nothing to do but to enjoy ourselves, and to spend constantly on the merest trifle of pleasure or adornment the sum which it costs them a whole week of incessant toil to earn. Worst of all, we take no care either of their happiness or their morals. ”

“ Our servants are now too unskilful, and we ourselves too ignorant of business, too limited and superficial in our knowledge of dress-making and cooking, to venture on becoming suddenly responsible for the clothing and meals of several hundred persons. If the criticisms of a single husband upon over-done meat or under-done vegetables are enough to drive a luckless housekeeper to despair, how could she endure the anathemas of fifty hungry husbands hurled at her at once! It is evident that there must be no slips in co-operative housekeeping. ”

“ But shall men do all the work of the world? Are we indeed come to be made of porcelain, that we must be shelved from all practical utility, and stand like the painted figures of the mantel-piece, looking down from our narrow perch at the toiling and earnest multitudes at our feet? It is time that faithful women ask themselves these questions, and try to find out what is the matter with our work that we cannot do it well, with ourselves that we cannot take delight in it. ”

“ Offering up our small jealousies on the altar of a nobler womanhood, we will forego, as all our brothers have done who have risen above barbarians, a little of our present starveling independence of each other for the sake of the inestimable freedom and safety and abundance that must ensue to us all in an organized feminine community. For the leaders of our association we will elect the women who, by their pre-eminent fidelity and success in the "small things" of their own households, have shown themselves worthy of the great things of many households combined. ”

“ Why, then, are we to wait for Heaven before we begin our proper development? Do you think that giving a young girl, for a time, the diet and exercise of a prize-fighter would turn her into a man? It would only help to make her a physically strong and perfect woman. So, too, the feminine mind and heart cannot be made masculine by any abundance of education, freedom, and responsibility, but will round, through their means, into curves of beauty and harmony, expressive of force and health indeed, but from these very qualities only the more enchanting. ”

“ So, too, a native-born, white American citizen has a right to vote, because it is an inheritance from his father, upon which he legally enters when he is twenty-one years of age. But no other person has a "natural right" to the American manhood suffrage, nor any right at all, until he acquire it by purchase, gift, or conquest from the supreme American authority. It is the same with education. The whole realm of knowledge has been reclaimed and cultivated by men alone; it is they who have founded and sustained the great institutions of learning. ”

“ The man or woman, therefore, who from talent or education is capable of giving brain labour to the world, and chooses instead to give the muscular or manual labour that ignorant persons can perform equally well, robs society of the thought-power that it needs, and the great unthinking mass of the only work that it can do. Educated women, then, should seek to produce, not with their hands, but with their heads, by the better organization of the millions of ignorant women who are already manufacturing producers,—the factory operatives, seamstresses, and servants of the civilized world. ”

“ If women, by means of co-operative housekeeping, should "go into business," as the phrase is, and begin making and saving money, I trust they may be preserved from that greed and fury of selfishness, that unholy eagerness to grasp more than a fair share of the comforts and luxuries of life, that in all ages have made men so willing to grind down their fellow-creatures into starvation of body and brutishness of mind, that they may reap the fruits of their prolonged and unrequited toil. ”

“ It seems to me not well for us any longer presumptously to decide for each other what is and what is not "feminine," instead of simply taking it for granted that, when God gives a woman talent and aspirations other than domestic, he means her to use them. Agriculture is the noblest and manliest of all industrial pursuits, as well as the most indispensable; but if, for fear they were not "masculine," all men should suddenly betake themselves to the plough, this great civilization of theirs, with all its splendours, would disappear like a dream. ”

“ Beautiful it stands, but, against the crowded cannon of the grim masculine battlements, as defenceless as the child's bubble that an instant rests upon the sward. Will they ever open upon its crystal walls? nay, will they even dare to thunder against each other as they have done through so many bloody generations? The roar alone would shatter its delicate pillars and fairy arches, and bury their builders in the fall.—The builders? yes, the women builders, the beloved, the wives and mothers of men. ”

“ But the fundamental difference between the sexes is not that men have "rights" and women have none. It is that men are organized among themselves while women are not, and the very fact that we are begging them for rights shows that they are not rights at all, but favours. Therefore I would rather take my stand on that which, as they have not given, so they could hardly take away,—on the solidarity of our sex,—on the moral weight of a united womanhood. ”