Section II: The Effect Upon Women

Chapter IX: The Virtues of Subservience

"The virtues of the man and woman are the same."

—Antisthenes.

"I am ignorant of any one quality that is admirable in woman which is not equally so in man. I do not except even modesty and gentleness of nature; nor do I know one vice or folly which is not equally detestable in both."

—Dean Swift.

"Virtue consists not in refusal, but in selection."

—Lester F. Ward.

The old-fashioned word, virtue, is now familiar to us chiefly in certain phrases from the Hebrew Scriptures. The translators of King James used it in the original Latin sense as denoting the qualities of a man—strength, courage, capacity—as may be seen in the tenth chapter of Proverbs, where Solomon is describing the ideal mistress of a household. She whose price was "above rubies" appears to have been valued most for incessant and varied industry, and for her administrative ability; at any rate, nothing is there said about her personal appearance, nor her bodily habits. Words, even Biblical words, however, have a way of changing color according to the lights of those who use them. In the mouths of the Puritans of the past century the vigorous word virtue had all but lost its strong tint of manliness. It had come to signify, rather, the qualities of the chaste and docile female, who was the ideal Christian housewife in that society; and these qualities were carefully inculcated by a process of domestication.

In their development under domestication there is an interesting analogy between humankind and animals. The bull is still a thick-necked, violent, undisciplined creature, of slight use, except to propagate his kind; while his mate, the cow—which is not merely maternal, but also specialized along an important line of production—has developed the qualities of domestication to a high degree. She bears her young and gives up her milk meekly at the will of a master, losing the characteristics of the wild bovine under the discipline of unremitting fertility. In the United States, the male horse, unless deprived of the organs of sex, is isolated almost like a wild beast; in French cities he is made useful as a draft animal only by excluding mares entirely from the environs, and consigning them to the rural districts. Thus, in modern life, the sexual qualities of male animals often make them nuisances.

The point of significance of all this in the present discussion is, that the female domestic animal and the unsexed steer and gelding have been compelled, under the hand of man, to suppress the more aggressive traits native to them, and to put on the milder qualities of domestication. In much the same way the human female, under the double discipline of maternity and hard work, originally acquired the passive qualities of endurance, at the same time suppressing the ruder and more pugnacious virtues. This change took place, it may be supposed, just in proportion as her relation to the economic and political arrangements of society became indirect. As soon as wives and daughters ceased to be direct producers and accepted support and protection for as much or as little personal service as they chose to give, they put on, of necessity, the qualities which their supporters demanded or admired.

Mastery—or control, as we politely call it now—was the natural ambition of men not fully civilized; but, in a brutal, competitive world, they found it difficult to achieve over other men and contrary circumstances. All the more, therefore, they desired mastery in their households—it was easier to begin at home. The head of a family who spent his days even in mere commercial contest with other men, would naturally expect subservience in his wife and children, just as he did in his employés; nor would he be likely to tolerate in them original opinions and independent action.

Womenkind have generally had to please the Head of the Family if they wished to be comfortable and happy. Herbert Spencer remarks that the gentler type of women survived among primitive peoples, because they had to practise obedience or be knocked on the head; and that the sympathetic female was at a premium, because she could adjust herself to the moods of her lord. It is certain that even in quite modern times men have unconsciously preferred girls whose inexperience and apparent docility gave promise that at home, at least, the man's will would prevail. It not infrequently happened that the lover was deceived by the yielding temper of his betrothed, which, like the mating plumage of the male bird, had been assumed instinctively merely for the season.

The virtues of subordination in women, as in the laboring classes, are even yet found in tolerably exact measure as these classes are industrially dependent. Our grandmothers of the early Nineteenth Century were first-hand producers and, inevitably, partners with their husbands. Within the sphere of domesticity at least, they ruled with a degree of independence. The social history of their time dwells upon their courage and prudence, their loyalty and industry, but scarcely mentions docility and obedience, although these were required of them by the code of society and religion. But by the middle of the century the emphasis upon the qualities desirable in women had perceptibly shifted from the positive virtues of relative independence to the more negative qualities of subservience.

The discipline of dependence and maternity was further reinforced by the approving emphasis of society upon those qualities which men preferred in their subordinates. Women were taught by the clergy that "the men of the nation are what their mothers make them," and that they should not desire any power beyond the domestic circle.

"Of this realm Woman is Queen; it takes its cue and hue from her. If she is in the best sense womanly—if she is true and tender, loving and heroic, patient and self-devoted, she consciously and unconsciously organizes and puts in operation a set of influences that do more to mold the destiny of the nation than any man."

This kind of flattering half-truth was constantly urged as the reason why women should obey their husbands, and not venture outside their appointed sphere. The curious theological argument by which women justified it and convinced themselves that they were, therefore, morally superior to men, is rehearsed at length in the Woman's Record of 1872.

"For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the Angels. (I Cor. xiv, 10; also Tim. ii.). . . . Angels are witnesses that the woman is 'the glory of the man'. . . . This glory she would forfeit, should she attempt to usurp authority over him. And while the wife is commanded to reverence and obey her husband, is he not the superior? In the estimation of the world he is, because he holds the highest place in the family; but the tenure of his office proves her superior moral endowments. The wife must reverence and obey her husband because 'he is the saviour of the body' (see Ephes. v, 22-23); that is, the worker, the provider, the law-giver. God placed man in this office . . . and the wife should unhesitatingly submit to this law. . . . God, by commanding husbands to love their wives, has set his seal to this doctrine—that women are holier than men. The world also bears witness . . . for of all the sinful deeds done on earth, nine-tenths are committed by man. . . . The Church bears witness to this truth—more than three-fourths of the professed followers of Christ are women."

The ingenious feminine author of this logic, Mrs. Sarah J. Hale, not being wholly ignorant of the discontent of modern womenkind, clinched her argument with the following:

"Does any wife say that her husband is not worthy of this honor? Then render it to the office with which God has invested the head of the family; but use your privilege of motherhood to train your sons so that they may be worthy of this reverence and obedience from their wives. Thus through your suffering the world may be made better."

It is one of the humorous commonplaces of morals that men most admire the virtues they themselves possess, and minimize the value of those they find it difficult to practise. From time immemorial men have cultivated the qualities acquired by predominance, leaving to women and servants the less spectacular virtues of self-sacrifice, patience, obedience, humility, sweetness of temper, and sympathy, which were needed to make the home atmosphere soothing. While men found it convenient to inculcate the gentler attributes, women, per contra, found it safe and praiseworthy to exercise them. In truth, a triple premium was offered for the virtues of obedience, self-sacrifice, and patience—husbands demanded them, the Church insisted upon them, and any female who neglected to acquire them—who exhibited self-will, who scorned the deceits of affectation and loved truth, who was intellectually and physically brave—was almost sure to find herself outside the pale of marriage; or, if within it, a misfit. In any orthodox society she was regarded both as immodest and superfluous, a sport as it were, from the true feminine type.

The cultivation of these virtues produced, however, some corresponding feminine deficiencies. The more women practised obedience, the less occasion they had to reason, for to reason is often to differ from authority. Like the soldiers at Balaklava:

"Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die."

The "smart" woman, who could not help reasoning, while still under the necessity to obey, developed a sort of compensatory shrewdness. The "managing" wife was formerly a very common type; the woman of strong character, who nominally deferred to her husband in everything, yet achieved her own will by subtly persuading him that he was having his own way. Her powers of indirection-if not of deceit-thus became highly developed, while he was pacified with a swollen and often unmerited self-importance. The children, too, as they grew to discretion, sometimes joined in making the master comfortable, while at the same time outwitting him. But a clever woman in so anomalous a position was not altogether a dependable creature. She was likely to acquire vexatious tricks-refusing to be bridled now and then, and biting in the stall. Like the domesticated driving-horse, if she ever took the bit in her teeth and ran away, she could scarcely be trusted afterwards for family use.

In the past century, nevertheless, by far the larger number of women were well broken; and, in proportion as they were, they lost the power of thinking and deciding for themselves in any matter outside the household affairs for which they were responsible. Such women not only followed the lead of their husbands, but asked advice of the neighbors in every detail of life. If a child took the scarlet fever, the doctor might be called, but his orders were supplemented by the contradictory suggestions of the neighbor-women whom the mother consulted. She had, in fact, "no mind of her own," and submitted herself to every wind of doctrine, while thinking herself conscientious in doing so. Such a woman acquired a habitual state of indecision—choosing a dress pattern one day, and, after exhibiting it to a critical friend or two, returning to change it for another, which "she didn't know whether she liked or not;" and which, when made up, she would regard with discontent.

The model wife, when left a widow, transferred her submission to an older son or, in default of male relatives, to the attorney in charge of her estate, blindly accepting his dicta as to where she should live, how much she should spend, and what was "proper" for her, regardless of her own comfort or her technical rights. After half a lifetime, perhaps, of loyal industry and maternal sacrifice she was "bossed about by people who naturally regarded her as childish and incapable. In the practice of deference and submission she had often lost, also, not only the capacity to judge and decide for herself, but the belief that she ought to do so. It was as if the helpless people of a State should constantly exercise the referendum without the power to initiate measures or to recall those who fail to fulfil them. And, withal, she was apt to fall into a morbid state of suspiciousness toward those who attempted to guide her. Her second childhood thus began at middle age, or as soon as her husband's hand was removed.

There is no more dangerous virtue than selfsacrifice, for it cultivates complacency in those who consciously practise it, and is apt to produce selfishness in those who accept its benefits. Exceptional men have practised it in all the Christian ages for the purpose of attaining merit, while upon women it was enforced both by inevitable maternity and by their social dependence. If the quality of self-sacrifice in women and servitors had been as productive of antagonism and discomfort as moral courage, for instance, or justmindedness, it may be doubted whether it would have been so disproportionately lauded by man kind. Or, if women themselves had found unselfishness as difficult and odious as these upsetting attributes, it seems probable that they would not have claimed it for their characteristic virtue.

There is no virtue for which women have been more indiscriminately praised than patience. Of that blind acceptance of duty which is necessary to get the monotonous and unpleasant tasks of the world done, they have certainly the larger share as compared with men. It was a necessary qualification for child-rearing and domestic success—as it has been in the laboring peasant and the donkey on the treadmill. The mother who gave her whole time to the nurture of children and to household cares, would have become imbecile had she not been able to adjust her mind patiently and cheerfully to a succession of petty demands and services. She acquired, perforce, an instinctive endurance like that of the draft animal which has never learned to balk and does not know that it can run away. The woman who did not learn patience met with the disapproval of the world of men and women alike; and she who ran away faced social ostracism, if she were not cast into outer darkness.

But of that considered, reasoning patience with which the scientist and the inventor pursue far-off and inspiring mysteries through years of laborious experiment and failure, the ordinary woman developed very little. Because the issues of her life were small, innumerable, and rapidly succeeding each other, she had no time to consider them in perspective, or to do aught but attend to each faithfully as it arose. Her capacity for sustained effort was, therefore, determined by things closely related to her. Great numbers of men in the business world subordinate desire and comfort to the attainment of far-off ambitions; but women, like children, want to see immediate results.

But from the standpoint of the Nineteenth Century, self-devotion and uncomplainingness were, after all, subsidiary endowments in women as compared with physical purity. It might almost seem from the emphasis laid upon The Feminine Virtue, that our fathers must have misread one of their favorite Scripture passages:

"Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and

though I give my body to be burned,

And have not chastity,

It profiteth me nothing."

Under a tradition which had arisen when women were property, and with the injunctions of religion, this one quality became the specific and exclusively feminine attribute. Virtue had come to mean, not strength, courage, capacity, but chastity—the female sine qua non. A woman might be violent in temper, cruel in speech, selfish, idle, a devourer of the substance of industrious and generous men, yet if she were technically "pure" she kept her place in the Church and in her social circle. But if, like Mary Wollstonecraft or George Eliot, she gave herself openly, though there might be extenuation, and though she might have every other feminine virtue and some masculine ones besides, the pure women and the unchaste men of her world would have no place for her. Not even the high quality of courage and honesty with which she accepted her anomalous position, could save her from being classed with the parasitic mistress who gave bodily service in return for luxury. As for the few who, tormented by the natural human hunger for joy and adventure, broke away from home ties altogether, there was seldom even a modicum of pity. Yet, however futile their quest, they were at any rate, themselves not hypocrites—and surely every human being may have a choice of the kind of evil that is most tolerable.

For us, in an age more generous and discriminating toward human frailties, it is difficult to understand how so cruel a standard could have come about; yet it goes back to the primitive conditions of society, in which women were quasi-slaves and chattels. Professor Thomas has very acutely remarked:

"The morality of man is peculiarly a morality of prowess and contract, while woman's morality is to a greater degree a morality of bodily habits, both because child-bearing, which is a large factor in determining sexual morality, is more closely connected with her person, and in consequence also of male jealousy. . . . In the course of history woman developed an excessive and scrupulous concern for the propriety of her behavior, especially in connection with her bodily habits; and this in turn became fixed and particularized by fashion, with the result that not only her physical life became circumscribed, but her attention and mental interest became limited largely to safeguarding and enhancing her person."¹

Darwin, in the Descent of Man, says that habit was a more effective factor than selection in the development of human morality. It has already been shown, in the chapter on the Conventions of Girlhood, that a prudish degree of modesty was enforced upon girls literally from the cradle; and that the vaguely evasive phrases of teachers and clergymen about purity, coincident with a complete "conspiracy of silence" as to physiological facts, produced an abnormal state of mind toward the whole subject. Although clergymen were, as a class, more refined and gentle than average men, they were not the less inclined to insist upon men's standards of propriety for their female parishioners. In each community they stood for conservatism—for the "superior past," for the gospel of the Fathers as then interpreted—and, naturally, resisted any attempt to ameliorate the Puritan code of morality. Indeed, to men so high and narrow, propriety was morality. Humility, obedience, charity, Godliness, and, above all, propriety of behavior and chastity—these were the virtues indispensable to Christian women.

As to the attitude of women themselves, Miss Ida Tarbell has correctly described it:

"They got from the Church the reason for things as they found them—the reason for their submission to masculine authority—the explanation for their place in society, their program of activities . . . and, as a rule, they took the teachings quite literally and devoutly."

But, aside from the emphasis laid upon bodily purity by parents and moral teachers, the two great economic influences from which that insistence had originally come, dress and slavery, were operating in the Nineteenth Century, and still persist in some degree at the present day. The sociologists tell us that so long as the habit of nakedness was general, no such theory of modesty existed; but that so soon as humankind for any reason began to cover the body, nakedness became conspicuous, and, thus, clothing reinforced the suggestiveness of sex characters. It is a pertinent fact that in proportion as clothing became elaborate and dress a pursuit in itself, ideas of propriety became more inflexible and perverted. Among civilized peoples décolleté dress has no longer any relation to climatic conditions, but is coincident with a luxury-loving society; and the conspicuous outlining of the figure, which was once solely practised by the slave and the professionally unchaste class, has been adopted by the modest female of modern times.

In primitive and semi-civilized societies women were marketable commodities rather than human beings. Immodesty—that is, any behavior calculated to attract the attention of strange men—might cause the human chattel to be stolen, and the female who was unchaste, whether by accident or choice, was regarded as damaged goods. The phenomenon of jealousy even yet goes back obscurely to the fact that not even an unmarried woman owned her own person; while the appeal to the "unwritten law"

—still sometimes made to escape the penalty of murders of passion—is based on the convention that the possession of the body is the asset of an owner, not the gift of a partner.

The idea so prevalent in the Nineteenth Century, that chastity in a female constituted her chief qualification to the respect of mankind, produced some curious and even humorous perversions. Modesty—the behavior becoming to the chaste female—became an end in itself. It is related of M'a'am Betty, the dame-tutor of Lydia Child, "a spinster of supernatural shyness," that the chief calamity of her life was that Dr. Brooks once saw her drinking water from the spout of a tea-kettle. Yet this same proper lady, we are told, was not only shockingly untidy, but chewed tobacco! A similar distortion of ideas is illustrated by the persistence in some churches of the convention that women must not be uncovered; the woman who should take off her hat would be regarded as an "immodest female."

It has come to be a fact that conspicuity, which is everywhere and in all ages the professional qualification of the unchaste, may now be safely practised by any nice woman, so long as it is achieved in accordance with the current fashion. On the other hand, the adventurous woman, who is a sort of composite produced by idleness and ennui, by love of excitement and of luxury, plays on the passions of men while retaining the control of her own person. She begins, at least, by drawing a clear line between her own technical virtue and the wickedness of those who sell themselves frankly into bodily service.

Both the inflexibility and the inconsistency of the conventions involved in the requirements of technical chastity in the past century are best illustrated, perhaps, by the laws relating to the age of consent in young girls. Even as late as 1885, by the laws of many states, young girls were made capable of consenting to their own ruin at ten years of age, and in Delaware at the age of seven. Even yet there are two states which set the technical age of seduction at twelve and one at ten years of age. Yet girls in tutelage might not make wills, contracts, or deeds, under eighteen to twenty years of age. They were never willingly permitted to know anything about the physiology of their own bodies or the processes of reproduction—they must obey their parents—but they might be seduced with impunity during and even before the age of puberty. And when their childish bodies had been devoured by men, the virtuously conventional society of the Nineteenth Century made outcasts and harlots of them. In truth, there is no cruelty more terrible than that of ignorantly good people.

In the feministic literature of two generations ago certain words denoting moral qualities of the highest status are conspicuously lacking. Females were repeatedly adjured to be humble and patient, but courage was not urged upon them; they were besought to be tender and devoted, but just-mindedness was not included among their cardinal virtues. Charity, in both its senses, was inculcated, but of honor it was assumed that women could have slight need. The differentiation of morals was seemingly as complete as the social habits of the two sexes. For courage might have implied conscientious independence on the part of wives and daughters; which did not, of course, appeal to heads of families any more than it does now to political bosses. Justice is a far-off word, even in the mouths of men, and was certainly too high for the feeble minds of our foremothers. Such justice as there was, was precious; to be handed over in homeopathic doses by the heads of families, whose moral standards were practical rather than ideal. And as for honor, whether moral or commercial, men were, theoretically at least, still the protectors of women, and therefore entitled to its exclusive exercise.

Thus, in brief, it had come about in the Nine-. teenth Century that women had a monopoly of the passive virtues of subservience, and, for lack of exercise, the more positive and fundamental moral attributes were in abeyance. Their one essential and superlative virtue, chastity, overshadowed all and led to the neglect of others more spiritual and not less important. The more "typically feminine" a woman was, the more she was destined not merely to subordination, but to become the prey of shrewd and selfish persons. Her humble and narrow principles, evolved in devotion to home, husband, and children, gave her no leverage upon a wicked world; and she must piously shut her eyes to the unchastity of any man who offered himself as father to her unborn children. Lacking initiative, courage, and the normal egotism, when she was blindly driven into competitive industry she beat about among the underbrush, bruising her tender inexperience, and unable to follow or to mark out her own trail.