"the unutterable shameThat turns the coward's heart to steel, the sluggard's blood to flame."
"the unutterable shameThat turns the coward's heart to steel, the sluggard's blood to flame."
"the unutterable shame
That turns the coward's heart to steel, the sluggard's blood to flame."
For the South knew the negro, his bad qualities as well as his good; and, while the women of the South knew that their elder house-servants would protect them with their lives, if necessary, they also knew that the horde of fieldhands, intoxicated by a liberty whose nature they could not understand, would turn at once to the gratification of the savage nature which slept chained within them and would make of the land an offense to heaven.
This was bad enough; but worse yet, since the attempt had miserably failed, was the fact that the North saw none of these things. It did not, seemingly could not, understand. 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; and so completely had prejudice and fanaticism clouded the conscience that when Wendell Phillips made of this man a certain blasphemous comparison she was not shocked, but, carried away by her enthusiasm, hailed the words as true and deserved. This does not apply to all the daughters of the North; there were some who saw clearly and were not blinded by the simoom of fanaticism which swept over that section; but there was a minority which dared not lift its voice against the clamor of the masses. The most fatal of all causes of strife had fallen upon the North: it did not understand.
But this in turn the Southern woman could not comprehend. She could not see that the peril to her honor, so plain to her, was beyond the scope of Northern vision. Therefore she in her wrath accused her sisters of the North of carelessness of her honor in their enthusiasm for the cause of a race which would put that honor in peril; she held them indifferent to the preservation of the crown of her womanhood, so that a few blacks might be given a freedom which they would turn to the worst account. She laid it all to sectional hatred, to the cherished anger of the Puritan against the Cavalier; she was intolerant--and who can blame her, seeing as she did?--of the canonization of John Brown, which was chiefly the work of her Northern sisters, to whose enthusiasm that of the men, even of such fanatics as Phillips, was as nothing. So, begun and fostered in mutual misunderstanding, grew the breach between the sections; and of all the hands that digged the grave of Peace, the most eager and rapid were those of the women of our land.
Where shall we place the blame? Each side saw the other in utter distortion, each twisted to its own understanding the acts and utterances of the other, and each was justly incensed according to its own view. In her ignorance of the certain results of the attempt whose failure she deplored, the Northern woman saw in the rejoicing of Southern womanhood over the failure and fate of John Brown only a savage and unwomanly exultation over the martyrdom of one who had sacrificed himself that others might live in freedom, the heritage of every American, and who, in pursuit of his noble ideal, had of necessity attacked the wealth of the South, which wealth was ill-gotten and ill-held. The Southern woman looked upon the attempt to give power over her honor to a lower race, civilized only in certain aspects and with all the worst of barbarism sleeping like a tiger within it, and occasionally displaying itself in aspect of terror, as the expression of the feeling of the North, the ultimate goal of the fanaticism which was rising higher and higher as the Abolitionists grew in power. To both, John Brown represented the dominant spirit of the North; but each translated his aspect in different ways. Each was bitterly unjust; each was utterly in the wrong; and each was convinced with a perfect conviction of the righteousness of her own stand and of her thought of the other. When such position is taken, peace is doomed.
Society was disrupted. It had maintained a certain cohesion where the sections mingled; it had been shaken, but not overthrown. But the hanging of John Brown gave American society, as comprising all parts of the country and devoid of sectional aspects, its death-blow. Another society of like aspects was later to arise, perhaps never again to be overthrown, so that we can again talk of American society in the larger sense; but this which we know is not that which held its chief fortalice in Washington before the capital was yielded to the perils of the centre of strife. The daughters of even such closely contiguous States as Pennsylvania and Virginia could not meet in social function when each believed the other to be the representative of the most evil of civilizations, when every interest which either most cherished was inimical to every interest most dear to the other. Rapidly the representatives of Southern society forsook the capital, going to their own country, where they hoped soon to form another and yet more brilliant circle than that which had given to the centre of our republicanism much of the glitter and all theprestigeof a royal court. The result of the presidential campaign would decide the future of the South; but that there would be separation of the sections, for a time or permanently, few doubted. The chief question that remained to be decided was whether the separation would be peaceful or won at the point of the bayonet.
Perhaps, had they foreseen the consequences of their enthusiasm, the women of both sides would have been more moderate in their advocacy of their respective creeds; but women rarely look to the end, and the feminine enthusiasts of those days were no exception to the rule. With all their strength, and whether for good or evil, there is none greater in effect, they urged their husbands and lovers and brothers, the one side to wipe out in blood, if need and opportunity were, the insult to their womanhood; the other to free the oppressed from bondage and from the tyranny shown by Southern women as well as men. The actions and utterances of each were plain to the other; the standpoints which dictated those acts and words were hidden by the dense mist of prejudice. Thus by woman's influence was precipitated the conflict which had already become almost inevitable.
The election of Abraham Lincoln to the chief magistracy annihilated the last hope of peaceful solution of the vexed question of the time. Hope, indeed, there was in few female breasts, for with deplorable unanimity the women of our country looked forward to war as the most desirable result of all the anger that smouldered in both sections. Secession followed hard upon the election of Lincoln; the Southern senators and representatives resigned their seats in the councils of the nation; and that nation was a nation no more.
Though there were many contributing circumstances, and those of the gravest, the women of our country had been the most influential cause of the rupture and its immediate result of war. They had inflamed the hearts of the men so that the few who retained some coolness of judgment and some tolerance of spirit could make no headway against the extremists. The women were now to bear the brunt of the hard-following consequences of their furious enthusiasm; but, before they began to feel those consequences in full measure, they were to enjoy a brief period of delight: that delight which their sex ever finds in the "pomp and circumstance of glorious war," until they learn something of its stern realities.
When peace was formally declared impossible, the women of both sections found congenial vent for the enthusiasm which had been so fatal to the efforts of the peacemakers. Each side firmly believed its cause pure and right, without the shadow of doubt being possible, and each acted from the depths of a conviction which was as much the child of education as of environing circumstances. All over the country there was enthusiasm which hardly stopped short of gala merriment. The younger women of both sides embroidered banners for their pet regiments and with their own fair hands gave those banners into the keeping of their knights, who swore--they did not know the difficulties of the task--to bring back those flags unsullied by defeat. The men were eager enough to meet the hardships and perils which they had not yet measured; but the women surpassed even the masculine eagerness, hurrying their sons and lovers and brothers and often husbands to the front, hardly finding time for tears in their enthusiasm and patriotism.
For patriotism, though sometimes not easily distinguished from selfish delight in the romance which precedes war, it was on both sides--a patriotism which was to be sorely tried and never to fail. It was misdirected in most cases as yet; the social functions which made brilliant the rival capitals for a time were mistaken expressions of the deep feeling which glowed beneath; but they had their meaning and were promises of better things to come. From Maine to Texas there burned a flame of patriotism such as had not been called forth in like eagerness of display even by the days of the Revolution, and its chief expressions were from the women of the divided land. So trivial and misdirected as yet were the majority of its expressions that it might have been thought shallow and unenduring; but it was to prove its intensity and depth in other guise, and these first ebullitions were but the foam that glances on the unsounded sea.
There was little fear of suffering on either side. Each believed that, so good was its cause, so valiant its supporters, it must triumph within a short space. A prominent New York journal prophesied the fall of Richmond within three months, saying: "We spit upon a longer-deferred justice." The South thought that Washington would be taken at one blow. In these beliefs, which seem to us, knowing the men who were to bear the standards of both causes, such wild folly, the women more than shared. Northern and Southern woman alike believed with full conviction that the men of her country were unconquerable and that God fought on her side of the quarrel; how then could defeat or disaster come to the cause she loved? It was impossible.
It must be admitted that in the first stages of the war the weight of feminine enthusiasm was in the Southern scale. There was good reason for this. At the first call of battle, the South sent forth her best and bravest, her own most cherished sons, while the North responded more tardily, leaving much of its work in the hands of substitutes of the lower class and of mercenaries. The foreigners who had of late come to our shores in such numbers had settled in the North and Northwest; and they naturally fought rather from necessity and wish for bounty than from patriotism. The flame was as steady in the North, but it was not so vivid; it had not yet been blown to full fervor. Moreover, in the North the full gravity of the task undertaken was still less recognized than in the South. When McDowell marched upon Johnston and Beauregard at Bull Run, carriages full of the leaders of Washington society, women as well as men, came to make gay his camp and see the total discomfiture of the enemy; and the flight back to the capital which followed his defeat included many women of the upper circles, whose terrors and sufferings were not undeserved as results of the extremes into which their enthusiasm had misled them. This was a poor expression indeed of the patriotism which glowed in the female breast of that day; but the time produced a better specimen and showed how the feeling found true as well as false vent. It was a young girl who brought to Beauregard the first intelligence of McDowell's movement upon Manassas and enabled him to give Johnston the warning which led to the timely juncture of their forces and the result of the battle. The young lady had heard some officers of the Union army discussing the projected movement while at the table of her father in his house near Washington. Delicately nurtured and reared as she had been, with her own hands she saddled her horse and rode through the night, partly through camps of coarsely jesting soldiery, partly along hardly-marked roads, amid darkness and in loneliness, that she might serve the land she loved. It was the first of many such services that were to be done by the women of the South, who alone had opportunity to render them, or they had surely found many rivals.
If the romantic aspect of war received in the North a rude shock in the disaster of Bull Run, it was but enhanced in the South. Moreover, the enthusiasm of the Southern woman, and particularly of the girl, found more present and congenial vent than did that of her Northern sister. Not only did the former frequently see the forms and even the deeds of the leaders of her cause, but some of those leaders were calculated to awaken enthusiasm to a degree that could not be rivalled by any of the generals of the North. The soldiers of the Union had no Stuart, with his gay laughter and merry jest and his floating feather to heighten the romance of his achievements and present him as a veritable knight of old; no Pelham with his beardless face and modest blush to make one marvel that this laughing boy should be in battle a very genius of war as he fought his guns against fearful odds. Custer, with his flowing locks, might have won some hearts had the war been carried into Northern territory; but Custer had not at his back the fame of Stuart, whose rides around McClellan made him a hero of romance, nor had he the social qualities that made so popular the Southern leader, while the latter's purity of life and deep religious feeling, beneath all his frivolity of manner, appealed with power to the finer natures of the Southern women. He was the chosen knight, the adored hero, of Southern womanhood; and when his feather appeared at the head of his daredevils there was feminine rejoicing and eager welcome.
It was in the facts of the personal devotion inspired by some of their leaders, Lee,--Jackson, and Stuart, especially,--of the proximity of those fighting for her cause, of her presence on the scene of strife, and of her deeper sufferings and greater call for endurance, that explanation must be found of the indubitable phenomenon that there was far more of enthusiasm displayed by the woman of the South than by her of the North, at least during the first years of the war. Enthusiasm only, not devotion to principle. That was assured in both; both gave a deep and effective love to the cause which they held as right and just, and for which they were willing to give their very lives if need were. The Southern woman was called upon to make greater sacrifices, to bear greater sufferings, than her sister of the North; but none can doubt that the latter would have borne all these as nobly had fate called upon her to do so. Those who know the story of Southern womanhood in those terrible days must give to it all honor and admiration; but these must not be granted as exclusively its right, without due sense of the sufficient patriotism and courage displayed by Northern womanhood at the call of country. Each gave all that she had to give; each proved that her patriotism was not a mere name.
If among the women of the South there was more fervent enthusiasm than among those of the North, there was also deeper hatred of the enemies of their cause. When General Butler, as master of New Orleans, issued the equally famous and infamous proclamation that won for him for all time the title of "Beast Butler" among the women of the South, setting forth that any woman who insulted on the street a Union soldier might be treated, without redress on her part, as a woman of the town, he not only consigned his memory to odium, but recorded the bitterness of the feminine spirit among the conquered people. The best friend of Southern womanhood cannot deny that this bitterness often took unjustifiable expression. The very issuance of the proclamation proved that the ladies of New Orleans were given to unseemly vituperation of the soldiers who bore aloft the cause so bitterly hated by the women of the invaded land, and in other ways and places the obligations of ladyhood and even of femininity were too often forgotten in the impulses of hatred and wrath. These ebullitions of the female spirit were not to be repressed by circumstances; that spirit flamed but the more fiercely as it found itself in danger of result. In these days of calmer judgment we know what excuse there was among Southern women for the feeling of hatred and bitterness; we know what it meant to ladies of delicacy and refinement to be insulted by a brutal soldiery, too often unrepressed even by their officers; we can understand the helpless wrath that filled the breast of the Southern woman as she saw her dearest household possessions taken from her or wantonly destroyed by mercenaries, as was the rule rather than the exception when Sherman and his "bummers" went "marching through Georgia" and forgot the rules of civilized warfare, or when Sheridan almost fulfilled his boast that he "would make the Valley of Virginia so barren that a crow flying over it would have to carry its own rations," or when Milroy and his German troops burned and harried and oppressed. Had the operations of war been set in the North as in the South, there would doubtless have been equal cause for hatred in that section, but the only time that warfare was carried thither it was governed and directed by a general who would not tolerate the modern methods of making war upon unarmed people, and the burning of Chambersburg was the sole act of vandalism of which the North ever had the knowledge that comes of suffering. So the history of womanhood during the war between the sections is largely a history of the women of the Confederacy, just as the latent and mediate effects of that war first showed themselves among Southern womanhood.
Indeed, after the first impulses of enthusiasm were over, the part played in the war by the women of the North was largely confined to endurance and sacrifice of the emotions--neither a small thing, yet only a part of that which was borne by their Southern sisters. They gave their dear ones uncomplainingly and even gladly and they endured suspense and sorrow and sometimes hardship while the breadwinner was absent on the business of his country; but of personal suffering they knew nothing. Far be the thought of minimizing their gifts; the thousands of bereft wives and mothers laid on the altar of their country their greatest sacrifice, and they did this with a grand spirit of faith and endurance that was alike beautiful and inspiring; but all that they did in this wise was done also by the Southern women, and these bore added pangs of suffering in the destruction of their homes, in the loss of all their substance, and in personal peril and privation and the rest of the woes that await womanhood in a conquered country.
Nor must it be forgotten that the Southern woman was peculiarly unfitted by the circumstances of her nurture and training to bear the privations which fell to her lot in such full measure. She had been reared in the greatest luxury that this country could give; she had been from time immemorial the spoilt child of our land, taught that there was not and never would be need for her to raise her hand in effort or to express an ungratified wish; she was refined and cultured and totally, as it seemed, unfitted for rude contact with the world. Yet she forgot all these things when the need came. The Virginia lady, when the tide of war flowed irresistibly over her State, frequently "refugeed," to use her own most unjustifiable and abominable vocable, into some less perilous section of the land, where she lived the life of a peasant, doing her own housework, mending and making the clothes worn by herself and her children, cooking her poor meal of bacon and substituting for the fragrant Mocha to which she had been accustomed beans whose flavor made a mere mockery of the coffee they were intended to represent, and doing all with a gallant cheerfulness which found its sole failure when she thought of the sufferings of her husband and sons in the starving and barefooted army of Lee. To this pass was she reduced, she who had lived upon "the fat of the land," for whom had been reserved the daintiest morsels that the land could supply, and whose hands had never known a weightier task than some dainty embroidery. The North could show no like evidence of patient courage, not having opportunity for its display. The one point at which the women of the two sections met on common ground was in the hospital service; and here the Northern woman had the advantage in efficiency, though not in tenderness. The organization of these matters was extremely poor in both the Union and the Confederacy; but, because of greater facilities springing from greater command of money, the hospital organization of the North, both field and fixed, was far better than that of the South, which indeed could hardly be said to have a hospital organization at all. In these hospitals worked thousands of devoted women, and their ministrations to the wounded and dying of both sides must not be forgotten when we reckon up the sum of the work of American womanhood. On both sides, ladies of culture and refinement devoted themselves to this pious work, and this was the most worthy and lasting outlet that was found for Northern feminine enthusiasm in the cause of the Union, and the name of Dorothea Lynde Dix, the head of the organized force of Northern hospital nurses, will always be held in especial honor for devotion and ability in this noble cause, as well as in the amelioration of the condition of the indigent insane, to which latter cause her whole life was chiefly devoted.
There were few especial heroines developed by the war; heroism was so general when there was call for it among the women that it attracted but little notice and won no lasting fame, even in its most remarkable displays. There has come down to us hardly a single female name as being especially singled out during this time for any noteworthy action. Indeed, there was such dearth of especial women heroines that one poet was driven, when he wished to stir the blood of his people with enthusiasm for feminine heroism, to invent one; but the present day wisely refuses to put any faith in the hoary legend of Barbara Frietchie, which indeed, as given by Whittier, is full of the most absurd improbabilities. To say nothing of the unlikelihood of "Stonewall" Jackson ordering a platoon--it could hardly have been a regiment--to fire at a flagstaff instead of directing someone to enter the house and remove the objectionable object,--though even this would have been uncharacteristic of the man who smiled and saluted when a pretty girl laughingly flourished an American flag in his face as he rode past her in the streets of Frederick,--the quickness of the old lady in catching that flag as it fell from the staff, to say nothing of her activity in getting to the window from the spot where she was presumably sheltered from "the rifle-blast," would put a professional juggler to shame. Then again, why Jackson should have been "riding ahead" does not seem clear, since that is not the place for a general while on the march, and every detail of the incident is sufficiently unmilitary to have been, as it was, the conception of one who had never in his life as much as smelt gunpowder. No; the legend of Barbara must be given up, even though it deprive us of one of the few heroines of its day.
The debatable ground "between the lines" did, however, furnish history with some notable incidents wherein women figured as the chief influences, even if the names of these heroines were not chronicled. For obvious reasons, the names were not disclosed at the time of the incidents when the respective armies alternately held the ground where lived the women whose deeds were chronicled, and afterward these deeds were forgotten in graver matters. One fair inhabitant of Washington in the early days of the struggle used to give Stuart, who for a time after the battle of Bull Run held the southern bank of the Potomac, most valuable information by means of a cunningly devised system of signals, executed by the raising and lowering of the window shades in her house, which was within full sight of the Confederate pickets. For a time the Confederacy had a regular force of female spies in the capital of their opponents, and some of the information thus gained was of great service.
Of course the Federal government also maintained a corps of female spies, though the name of only one of all the roll on both sides--that of Belle Boyd--is known to fame. Belle Boyd's adventurous career during the war doubtless produced some few results in the movement of the armies of the South; but even she hardly did yeoman service for her cause. In respect of espionage, the Confederacy had a decided advantage over its enemies, for the society at Richmond, both social and official, was made up of more constant and, therefore, better known elements than that of the always fluctuating population of Washington. So at Richmond it was hardly possible for a woman to seem that which she was not in the matter of sympathy, while in the national capital the constant influx of strangers and sojourners made the keeping of a military or political secret a matter of the utmost difficulty.
These more military pursuits, however, are hardly creditable and little congenial to true womanhood, and the present record does not care to concern itself with them. There was enough of passive heroism displayed during the time of strife to fill the onlooker with admiration for the courage as well as the patriotism of American womanhood, and these things are more pleasant to look upon than is professional espionage. The display of courage and endurance was varyingly manifested in the different parts of the country and under different conditions; but it was constant in its spirit. The debt of the Union to its women has never been acknowledged, perhaps because never understood. The many triumphs of the Confederate arms on the battlefield gave rise to a strong "peace party" in the North; and, though general history makes no mention of the fact, there can be in the mind of one who remembers the trend and expressions of public sentiment little doubt that it was chiefly the women of the North who barred the way of that party to ultimate victory. Because the most prominent expressions in matters political come from male sources, we are apt to neglect to recognize the home influence which is so frequently a factor in the total result that accrues from the consequent action. It was the men who fulminated against peace, the men who went to the polls and by their votes decided that the war must continue until either the South had been brought back into the Union or the cause of the latter was so hopeless that to continue the struggle were folly; but it was in large measure the women who, by their steadfastness of devotion to the cause, impelled the men to such action. There will be few among those who remember the interior history of those terrible days who will not agree in the statement that to the women of the North was due, in great measure, the hearty affirmative response which rose from the country to the question, "Shall the war go on?"
Southern womanhood was equally steadfast in the cause of liberty, as the South deemed it; indeed, the Southern women, as unyielding in principle as their Northern sisters, were yet more admirable in their constancy, because of the conditions under which that constancy was displayed. They were not daunted by the ruin of their homes, by the death of their loved ones, by their own sufferings and perils. Unlike the North, the South recognized its unpayable debt to its women, perhaps because the evidences of that debt were so much more patent than where these were confined to the direction and fostering of public sentiment. The Southern chronicler of that woeful time gladly acknowledged how the women, by their enthusiastic encouragement and their gallant loyalty, encouraged the men and kept them to their duty if only from shame of their displaying less constancy than the sex which was termed the weaker. When Lee stood at bay in Petersburg, it was less upon the bayonets of his ragged army that the Southern Confederacy was upheld in its last struggle than upon the fiery constancy of its women. Fine as was the spirit of that little army, which laughed at its own plight and jestingly termed its components "Lee's Miserables," in punning allusion to Victor Hugo's great work, then just issued in America, it was, after all, but the reflex and expression of the spirit of the delicate ladies of the little town, who lived unconcerned amid the clamor of bursting shells and even held their little social gatherings in the centre of the whirlpool of war, that the soldiers might have some recreation during the scant hours of rest from duty. When at last the skeleton army was driven from its defences and forced to lay down its arms at Appomattox, it was the women of Richmond who received the news with bitterest grief but least dismay, and faced with calmest courage the threat of the indignities and sufferings which they feared would result from Northern occupation. That these fears were groundless, even the baser elements of the soldiery being in the leash of a man who believed in civilized warfare, does not detract from the gallantry which anticipated rapine and sack without quailing.
The surrender of Johnston's army, following hard upon that of Lee's forces, ended the struggle, and the South was left to face the consciousness and consequences of defeat. On none of its children did the blow fall with such stunning force as upon its daughters. That the South could not be conquered, that it must attain its independence, that God fought its battles, formed the creed of every Southern woman, and even when the end was in sight to the vision of Lee and Johnston, still fighting desperately as their duty rather than in any hope, the women refused to believe in such a possibility. But the possibility became a certainty, and Rachel could do nothing but mourn for her children and turn with what courage she might to face conditions full of threat of the worst; nor even here did her courage falter, though her beliefs had proved but broken reeds and her hopes had been swept away, leaving nothing in their place. The South was a land of mourning, not of death only, but of failure of a beloved and trusted cause. Meanwhile, the North was a land of rejoicing; and her women, like all their sex, were immoderate in their triumph, and did not consider, as had the soldiers of the victorious armies, the feelings of those who had fought so long and well. But there was scant opportunity for the display of triumph; for the terrible blow which fell upon the whole country, South as well as North, when Lincoln died under the hand of the assassin, changed joy into mourning, and made of a victorious people one that tasted all the bitterness of sorrow. Heavier calamity never visited this land; and its effects upon the feeling of our womanhood were almost as far-reaching and distressing as its political results. For the women of the South, sore in defeat and unjustly holding Lincoln responsible for the sorrows that had come upon them, openly rejoiced in his taking-off, and forgot their womanhood in their exultation over the foul crime. It was the spirit that awoke at John Brown's insurrection over again, though differently directed; and it awakened a natural response in the North, which saw in the exaltation of murder as the judgment of God a perversity and even criminality of thought which could spring only from innate baseness. 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 trial of those implicated in the assassination of Lincoln gave a name to be remembered in the annals of American women, though the record be of the saddest. That Mrs. Surratt was legally guilty of complicity in the murder of the martyred president is at least doubtful; it may even be questioned if she were guilty of foreseeing the crime, her part in the conspiracy most probably ending with the plan of abduction which was the forerunner of the murder. None the less, she suffered a shameful death, the passions of the time being too strong for the cooler voice of justice to be heard; and again was enacted, in minor form, the national drama that followed upon the insurrection of John Brown. The women of the South, if they did not go to the lengths of their Northern sisters on the former occasion, looked upon Mrs. Surratt in the light of a martyr to their lost cause, and so expressed themselves with a bitterness and forgetfulness of the true nature of the case which was a denial of their best attributes as women; and the Northern woman, holding Mrs. Surratt to be a very devil of malignity and criminality, could not patiently hear her name spoken with aught but horror and detestation. So the war ended, as it began, in misunderstanding, and, therefore, the bitterest of hatred between the two sections of a land which was at the end of the struggle no more united than at the beginning.
It is pleasant to turn from these manifestations of all that was worst in American womanhood to the consideration of woman's social conditions at the time of the expiration of the war. Even during the period of strife there had been uplifted a new voice from the women of our land, though as yet that voice was too feeble and too drowned in the clash of battle to attract much attention. One of the expressions of this new spirit which had arisen in at least a portion of our women is worthy of note as being in some sense a pioneer. In 1864 there was issued a book calledWoman and Her Era, by Eliza W. Farnham. The object of the author was to demonstrate the superiority of women over men: not superiority in comparative sense or even for certain ends, but absolute and unimpeachable. The leading argument of the book, as it appeared in syllogistic form and in all its wonders of capital letters, was as follows: "Life is exalted in proportion to the Organic and Functional Complexity; Woman's Organism is more Complex and her Totality of Function larger than those of any other being inhabiting our earth; Therefore her position in the Scale of Life is the most exalted--the Sovereign one." The minor proposition was supported by arguments which belong to the lecture room of the anatomist. Passing in silence over that which the lady calls the "Organic Argument," a little of that which she terms the "Religious Argument,--wherefore, is not clear,--may be quoted with a view to entertainment if not to profit:
"Organic Superiority is in itself proof positive of Super Organic Superiority.... Life is the most advanced which employs, in the service of the greatest number of powers, the most complex mechanism for the End of Use. We are therefore prepared to find in it" [the feminine structure] "the embodiment of a larger number of powers and higher aims in its Use... a deeper feeling for the Ends of Use, a more abiding faith in and loyalty to Development, as the one aim that makes life worthy of acceptance and sweet in its passing taste, and on the other hand to see that its failure herein is more fatal and destructive than it is in the masculine life.... The feminine includes the masculine, transcending it in all directions."
This is the synopsis of the major part of the argument, given in the lady's own words; but her conclusion has a more familiar sound to our ears. Here it is:
"The question of Rights settles itself in the true statement of Capacities. Rights are narrowest where Capacities are fewest broadest where they are the most numerous.... It is plain, then, as between masculine and feminine, where the most expanded circle of Rights will be found; and equally plain the absurdity of man, the narrower in Capacities, assuming to define the sphere of Rights for Woman, the broader."
Such was the trumpet-blast sent out by Miss Eliza Farnham, one of the pioneers of the movement which took for its slogan her own cry of "Women's Rights." The work made no stir and has long since passed to the limbo of forgotten books, but it was undeniably suggestive and seems worthy of being rescued, at least in name and purpose, from the oblivion into which it passed. Absorbed in nearer if not weightier questions, the women of that day gave scant welcome to the theories of Miss Farnham; but the appearance of those theories, even if in rudimentary form, was ominous, though the omen was not recognized. It was one of the first guns of a struggle compared with which even the war which was then raging was tame and half-hearted, and of which the end is not yet; perhaps never will be.
For the time, however, the women of our land were concerned with national rather than sexual questions. Indeed, the physiological argument never took root among the theories of women when they discussed their place in the scheme of creation; but the mental argument, the position that women were in all mental attributes equal to men and therefore should be possessed of equal rights, proved to be seed sown in good ground. Time was needed for its development into the grain of general or even partial acceptance; but it grew and was even then growing, even if not directly under the fostering of the author ofWoman and Her Era.
Already there had been more than whispers of such theories. As is usually the case, the first movements were clumsy and ill-directed and were too radical to hope for general popularity even among those whom they were intended to benefit. There had been among certain disgruntled women a movement toward "dress reform"--not, however, having as its end aesthetic or even sanitary considerations, but merely an assertion, of strange and even ridiculous nature, of equality with the men. Even before Miss Farnham had uttered her call to battle there had come into existence those strange bifurcated garments called "bloomers," though their adoption had been limited to very few indeed among the women of our land. Moreover, nearly fifteen years prior to the appearance of Miss Farnham's book, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had signed a summons to the first "Woman's Rights" convention, which was held at the home of Mrs. Stanton, at Seneca Falls, New York. On this occasion was made the first formal claim for suffrage on the part of women; but the movement accomplished little and was rather suggestive than effective.
The female suffragists had accomplished nothing at this time; they had not even influenced the general thought of their sex, and such works as that of Miss Farnham--the most radical and yet representative in its theories and therefore selected as typical--were as few as ineffective. The failure of the movement to spread beyond a few rabid enthusiasts was doubtless because of its radicalness of theory; it was not content, being in this respect like almost all new movements, to make gradual progress, but must upset established institutions, both domestic and political, at a blow. Therefore it won from all sensible people either ridicule or neglect; it made no more real headway than had the sporadic outbursts of misdirected religious enthusiasm in older times, which indeed it greatly resembled in its methods and propagandists. Its central theory was so overlaid by cumbering cloaks of absurdity that, whatever might be its real attractions and merits if seen stripped of its fantastic garb, it could but be repugnant in present guise to all true womanhood; it was sent forth in "bloomers," as it were, and was thus made a figure of fun and deprived of the dignity which it might have held had its dress been simple and dignified. Yet it was portentous, though the portent was not of the thing that was seen but of that which was to be born of it.
Such radical "reformers" as Susan B. Anthony, with her adoption of semi-masculine costume, just sufficiently masculine to render it unfeminine and nothing more, or Lucretia Mott, with her impracticable theories of "women's rights," presented in such form as to be repellent to all the better attributes of true womanhood, could win but ridicule, good-natured or acrimonious, as their portion; yet, in a sense, they were the leaders of the great movement which in altered guise was to come as a preponderant question of its day. Not in 1866, however, had that movement taken or even promised to assume any definite shape or one likely to win sufficient adherents to make it worthy of notice. As yet American womanhood was content with its sphere. It still ruled the home, and found in that rule all of "right" that it desired. It was content to send to the polls, as to the battle, its male representatives and to guide them by its influence into the paths which seemed best. It did not "lift up its voice and contend in the streets"; it was quietly strong.
The close of the Civil War, then, found the outer conditions of the American woman, speaking of them in general and not as affected by the material results of that war, just as they had been at the beginning of the strife. Society had indeed been rent into fragments; but the components of that society which had flourished four years before were unchanged in their status. Socially speaking, there had come no change to the women of America during the period of the Civil War; yet by that war and its results there had been created conditions that were to bear fruit in after days.
During the era which is generally known in the political history of our country as the "Reconstruction Period," there came about many and significant changes in the status and thought of the women of our land, particularly in the Southern portion thereof. It was a period of honest error on the part of those who guided the destinies of the nation, and the errors made by them, largely founded on the old base of misunderstanding of actual conditions, reacted upon the womanhood of the South and prolonged the sectional animosity which still held its place of prejudice and bitterness in our midst. Justice of judgment, as far as applied to national issues and affairs, was unknown; hence, amelioration of existent conditions, always the work of wise and tolerant public opinion, was impossible. During that period the South, and with it its women, passed through greater stress and suffering than even the days of the Civil War had brought upon it.
In the North there were no such hampering conditions to development, therefore there was progress in all social matters. Society, as generally termed, became re-formed and settled down to its old pursuits and ambitions; but there had come a great difference in its conditions. The era of centralization which had dawned with the close of the Revolution had again passed away. Never again, as far as we can see and foresee, was Washington to be the social centre of the country. The traditions of the White House had been overthrown, and the leadership of the social world was not to be looked for from that quarter as of old. For the future, the mistress of the White House might be in theory "the first lady of the land," but she was no longer to be at the head of a court or even a coterie. The social glory of Washington had departed. Society resumed its ways all over our country; but when American women were spoken of there was no longer in the mind of speaker or listener the inevitable suggestion of the social world as generally recognized. The term had emerged from its narrowness of meaning and had resumed all its old inclusiveness; North and South, East and West, it was recognized that American womanhood includes society, and not society American womanhood. And this recognition of a great truth helped the coming of a new era which was hard at hand.
Meanwhile, America was two countries, joined in a force-born alliance but with no true union, far less unity. And of all the manifestations of this deplorable fact, none was so convincing as the bearing of our womankind in their attitude toward those of the opposite section. The women of the South steadfastly refused to be "reconstructed." The same feeling was prevalent among the men of that section; but it was at its height among the women, who utterly refused to pretend to any feeling of loyalty to the Union, and, worse yet, did not affect to conceal their hatred of all things Northern. 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. Lacking the long line of racial traditions and experiences which alone could give grasp of the situation, she took council of her preconceived ideas only, and from her darkness of ignorance and prejudice believed that she could shed light into benighted souls. She was honest to a fault; but her honesty was based in the supreme folly which believes that it can better see into the nature of things than they to whom those things have been life-long conditions. Seeing her, the Southern woman naturally believed that she was a type of the womanhood of the North,--which she was not. Hearing her reports, written from a standpoint utterly fatal to their truth or even fairness, of the existent culture in the conquered country, the Northern woman believed that her accounts gave a true picture of the conditions of civilization and thought prevailing in the South,--which they did not. So increased the poison of misunderstanding in the veins of both sections.
The Southern woman was rebellious; the Northern woman was intolerant. Were the women alone to be consulted, there was small hope of ever fusing into one the severed elements which theoretically composed the nation. And yet, because of conditions arising from the deplorable state of things which then existed, the women were to become, though only gradually and not of set purpose, the dominating constituents in such fusion. The mills of the gods were grinding and the grist was to prove of sustenance to the country in unlooked-for ways. Before following to its end the movement which began in want and need, however, it may be well to cast a glance at the conditions which gave to that movement its rise and direction.
Not only had the South become deeply impoverished as a result of the long struggle and of the loss of its slaves, but it was suffering from many of the evils which the cooler heads among statesmen, North and South, had foreseen as the result of the sudden emancipation of the negroes. Moreover, there had been imported into the Southland a most undesirable element in the persons and families of those who were contemptuously termed "carpet-baggers," and these were, unhappily, in the ascendant in matters political and wished to become so in matters social. It was a time of the rule of the demos in its worst form--thedemoswhich has broken loose from restraint and has turned upon its former masters as its natural prey. As a consequence of all these things, society as once known did not exist in the South. The social element was of course present and recognized; but it was unable to find expression in its wonted manner. The man who once had lived upon the labors of his dependents was now forced to earn his own bread, generally in scanty quantity, by his own work, manual or mental; and his wife, who had once glittered resplendent in the social circle and had found her every desire as well as need supplied almost as quickly as formed, was now compelled to assume even more than the normal duties of the typical housewife and to bend all her energies toward eking out the small subsistence which her husband was able to provide. Naturally, under such uncongenial circumstances, there was little thought of social gathering or function, except in a very few of the larger towns, which refused to abandon their ways because of poverty. Such a town was New Orleans, with its brilliant circles of Creoles. In general, however, there was no attempt to emulate the gaiety of the capital of Louisiana; the women of the South faced with courage the conditions which were imposed upon them, but they could not make merry in their sadly altered circumstances.
In the North the effects of the war were of course less severely felt; but still there were effects detrimental to the interests of society as generally understood. Many a home had lost its chief worker and felt the sting of poverty as a consequence. The war had cost the North great treasure of money as well as blood, and the cost, while never thought of with a pang of regret, was often present to the consciousness of the people who bore its results. There was less impulse of gaiety among all classes; there was a graver trend of thought than ever before, and there was the recognition of past peril and present loss. These changes affected the women more than the men. The latter indeed felt but little of the detrimental consequences of the war, for the most part taking up their lives where they had temporarily put them aside to spend themselves in the service of their country. The women, however, where they felt the stress at all, felt it severely. Aside from their stricken hearts, there were problems of everyday life presented to them which clamored for solution, if that life were not to be made worse than a burden. In far better case than their sisters of the South, they yet had sufficient cause for gravity of thought and call of courage. Many were the fortunes that had been made during the war by Northern men who battened upon the needs of their country; but the more diffused loss of sustenance more than overbalanced even these fortunes and swayed the scale to the side of loss instead of gain in the totality of result.
Before considering the results which accrued from these conditions, North and South, it may be interesting to turn aside for a moment to make record of one of the most picturesque figures among American womanhood of that day, even though her fame was but local. About 1815 there was born in the city of Baltimore, of Irish parentage, an infant who was named Margaret Gaffney. She married young, and in 1836 went with her husband, whose name was Haughery, to New Orleans. Left a penniless widow in less than a year, she entered into the service of the city orphan asylum as a domestic, and when the second building was erected the Sisters, finding her faithful and intelligent, placed her in charge of the large dairy which was a part of the establishment. Soon she became associated with all the labors of the Sisters and by her efforts materially contributed to free the establishment from debt. When this had been done she opened a dairy on her own account, and in 1866 added a bakery to her business. She made money with a rapidity which was accountable only by the wide celebrity which she had gained by her labors in the cause of the orphans, for she was known far and wide as "Margaret, the Orphans' Friend." She retained the simplicity of her thought and life throughout, herself driving the cart by means of which her bread and milk were distributed, and all the money that she made was contributed to the cause of the forsaken children whom she loved. She died in 1882, and to her was erected the first monument to a woman ever reared in the United States. 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. Even yet, in these days of rush and bustle, New Orleans has not forgotten the woman whom it knew by the simple name of "Margaret," neglecting further identification of title; for to New Orleans there was but one Margaret, and the name carried unique meaning, even as would that of a reigning queen.
To return from this substitution of the individual for the general: Reconstruction, in a political sense, was happily of brief life in the South; but Feminine Reconstruction, which had its birth in the same time as the political, was destined to prove lasting in its work and effects. There was need of complete reconstruction, of thought as well as society, if woman were not to be a clog rather than an aid to the efforts of man; for the conditions which had enabled the latter, at least in the South, to look upon woman as the companion only for his leisure had disappeared, while in both sections there were left destitute thousands of women, with mouths which must be fed, both of themselves and of little ones. Moreover, in both sections the home was no longer the inevitable and perfect refuge which it had been. Either the father, the breadwinner, had been swept away by the destroying tide of war, together with the brothers upon whom the home might still have leaned, or he was so disabled in body or purse that he could not care for those who by nature were dependent upon him. These conditions did not press so heavily upon the Northern homes, since in that section there was plenty of work for willing hands and the men had little difficulty in obtaining a sufficient living for their households; but in the South those conditions were widespread. They were imperative in their instant demands; they must be satisfied; but how?
Only one answer met the necessities of the case; the women must work. For themselves, and often for their households, they must win support; the young girls, just verging upon womanhood, must go out from the homes where they had been so carefully and tenderly nurtured and face the battle for independence. It is difficult for us in these days of broader thought to understand the horror with which the women of the South contemplated this necessity. For a woman of the "upper classes"--and it must be remembered that, in the South, there was practically no middle class at that period--to labor for money was, in the eyes of the Southern lady, reared in all the prejudices and traditions of affluence, a real degradation. For herself she might have borne it uncomplainingly, as she had borne so many other hardships; but for her daughters it was terrible in her thought. To guard them from the rough touch of the world had been one of her first duties; now she must learn to fit them, if possible, for that contact, she must send them out to fight for their hands in the strife of existence. Elder as well as younger women were thus forced to fight; but it was for the latter, not for themselves, that the elders felt the stress. They had learned in hard schools to endure; but their daughters had been shielded as well as might be even in the nearest coming of hardship and peril, and they could not bear the thought of removing from those daughters their watchful and tender care.
The younger women themselves faced the situation with more courage; but that they were daunted by the prospect cannot be denied. They were eager to contribute to the support of those who had thus far cherished them; they grudged no pain of labor to effect this end; but they recoiled from the actual going out into the world, alone and unaided, to meet its coarseness and lack of sympathy. Yet, the need once acknowledged and proved, they met it firmly. They still retained some prejudices as to the limits within which it was possible for a lady to labor and retain her claim to the title she valued; they had not at a bound attained to the independence of thought and action which is a mark of womanhood in the days in which we of the present live; but they were ready to do all that within those limits fell to their hands, if so they might relieve their parents of part of the burden which weighed so heavily upon them.
Thus, in the pangs of bitter necessity, was born among women the era of the worker. It was an era which was to last to the present and to reach into the future as far as the eye of prophecy can penetrate; but, like all infants, it was feeble at birth and even its first steps were tottering and uncertain. The beginnings of the true Feminine Reconstruction were made under stress of circumstance and not of choice; but they were none the less admirable in result, though slower in attaining thereto. This was the fruit of the Civil War, its great gift to the womanhood of our land. That fruit first blossomed in the South, since here there was the greater need; and her daughters went out from their homes into the crowded marts of business and claimed a share in the work of men. Not at first; indeed, the more radical impulse in this wise came from the North, where also conditions had changed since the first half of the century. The Southern girl saw but little proper direction for her efforts beyond the profession of education; she went out as teacher or governess, and considered that thus she had reached the uttermost bourne of possibility in this wise. But the educational circle became so thronged that on its margin, vainly endeavoring to enter, stood a countless throng of girls and women who must work or be a burden upon those they loved, if even this shameful refuge was open to them. So perforce they turned away, battling with their prejudices, to seek other employment; and when they had found it they discovered to their relief and delight that they had gained rather than lost caste in the eyes of the world, even of their own circles.
Under varying conditions but to similar purpose, there was an equal movement among Northern womanhood. Timidly at first, for they too had their prejudices to conquer, the women of the North sought to enter into the great competition for the means of existence; and, having once tasted independence, they found it sweet. There was almost the same hesitancy and the same circumscription of womanly calling in the North as in the South; but the Northern woman, with her stronger sense of independence in right-doing, sooner shook herself free from the shackles of tradition. Had there been equal need in both sections, the North would doubtless have taken and maintained the lead in the emancipation of women from the servitude of the obligations of caste as in those days held; but because of the greater incentive among the women of the South these were in the van in the new movement until that movement became so general that there was no longer front or rear thereto. That time was not long in coming; revolutionary as were its theories, the country had long unconsciously been prepared for them, and when they were set up they were almost universally acknowledged as the proper standard. There still remained some whose prejudices in this respect were irrefragable, but they gradually found themselves in a constantly weakening minority. The worker in the hive of humanity found herself not only tolerated, as she had hoped as the best possible, but honored, even more than the queen bees; she found herself, though originally forced there by circumstances, in an environment which was in all ways congenial to the best of her nature. Not a little of this result, it must be proudly admitted, was owing to the chivalry of the American man. With all respect, as all courtesy, he welcomed to participation in his pursuits the woman whom he had looked upon as by training and even nature cut off from such participation, and he gladly embraced the opportunity to prove to the women of the land that his deference for their sex was not limited to the bounds of the drawing room, but was a thing which was unlimited in application. With their contact with the world of affairs thus made easy for them by those upon whose hitherto exclusive territory they were intruding, the women of America found their new life not only tolerable but pleasant.
That "the ages call and heroes come" has risen to the dignity of an apothegm; but if "inventions" were substituted for "heroes" in the saying it would be at least as true and perhaps of more practical value and meaning. It does not appear that the typewriter has ever been mentioned as one of the determining factors of our present feminine status, but that it deserves such credit does not admit of a doubt. That invention, whose use is now so nearly universal that it is difficult to remember that it has been with us but a scant twenty years, came at the psychological moment in the history of American womanhood. It opened, as nothing else, an avenue for the direction of feminine effort in the struggle for existence; and it displayed its possibilities just at the period when the supply of women workers began far to exceed the demand. There were still recognized limitations to female effort, far straiter than those now laid down, if indeed any limitations, other than those drawn by physical conditions can be said now to exist. As formerly in educational circles, so now in those of affairs there was overcrowding among the women who sought work; and just in time to relieve the stress there was opened a new field of labor, peculiarly adapted to the feminine nature and need, in the manipulation of the novel instrument of record. Quickly was the field seized and cultivated by the eager women; and it not only was itself rich in harvest, but it led into new and hitherto uncultivated fields of effort, and from the time of the acceptance of the typewriter as a necessity of business, the position of women in the world of affairs was assured and established.
Before the nineteenth century had passed the eighth mile-stone of its existence the foundation of Feminine Reconstruction had been laid in enduring material, and each succeeding lustrum saw the edifice arise in fairer and more definite proportions. So accustomed to the new status of women did we soon become that we failed to recognize how radical was the change which had taken place in the general conception of the sphere of womanhood. The very fact that there was no definite and determined movement looking to the desired end made for success. The woman worker did not come with demand for equality of recognition, with parades and conventions and speeches; she simply entered upon the field which she desired to possess, and made it her own by right. Therefore that right was instantaneously recognized, and there was tacit acceptance, which is the most significant and enduring of all.
Meanwhile, the "reformers" among women had not been idle. In many respects true reformation had taken place: legislation had from time to time assured women of equal rights in property--in some respects had even recoiled to the opposite extreme and had given to the married woman, whose property was once entirely under the control of her husband, immunity from just responsibilities and made her lot in this respect far more enviable and secure than that of the man whose rights she shared.
Though somewhat too radical in effect, the spirit of these things was admirable, and women had cause for self-gratulation upon the success of their efforts to be safeguarded and recognized in their just claims. Had the efforts of the "reformers" stopped here there could have been but praise for their work and its aims; but this was not the case. More and more insistent became the cry for equal footing with the men in matters which were not generally deemed within the sphere of femininity. The advocates of female suffrage in particular uplifted their voices and would not cease their clamor, though disowned by a majority of their own sex. Near the beginning of the tenth decade of the century a large number of the women of Massachusetts, to show their lack of sympathy with the radicals, even formed themselves into a "Ladies' Anti-Suffrage League." Yet even this open enmity to their cherished schemes among those who were most concerned did not deter the "reformers." In 1884, when political excitement reached its post-bellum height, Mrs. Belva Lockwood, a female practitioner of law in Washington, actually announced her candidacy for the presidential chair; and though she did not ultimately go to the poll, she took the stump in her own behalf and in all other respects emulated the male candidates for the chief magistracy. This was the climax of feminine effort in politics and doubtless had its deterrent effect in making disciples to the theory of female suffrage.
Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a type of her class. Born in 181 5, and living until 1902, nearly the whole of her long life was devoted to the promulgation and attempt to establish theories of feminine equality with men in all respects of "rights." She was one of those restless spirits which find in fanaticism of some kind their needful expression, and she was never weary of the notoriety and prominence that accrued from her efforts for the "emancipation" of women. Her share in the first "Woman's Rights" convention has already been mentioned. In 1854 she addressed the New York legislature on the subject of the rights of married women, and in 1860 she again appeared in the halls of law as an advocate for divorce on the grounds of drunkenness. In 1867 she canvassed Kansas, and in 1874 Michigan, when the question of female suffrage was submitted to the decision of the people of those States. In 1868 she was actually a candidate for a seat in Congress on the platform of female suffrage, and though she failed in gaining a place in the legislature of the nation she subsequently appeared many times before that legislature, or committees thereof, in behalf of her cherished theory. These efforts, together with her incumbency of numerous presidencies in societies and leagues in sympathy with her purposes, made up the sum of her existence. Personally she was a woman of many attractions of mind and bearing; but her fanaticism in the fancied cause of those who repudiated, in their vast majority, her theories and aims made her the type of the restless and radical "reformer."
Yet the efforts of the would-be female reformers, however, misdirected in their immediate aims, did good in rousing the women of America to a consideration of their place in the polity, at least in social matters, of the commonwealth. They might not care to go to the polls and struggle with the men in an endeavor openly to rule the destinies of the nation; but they awoke to a more intelligent interest than they had yet displayed in the theories of government and the social questions of the day. Many of the chief reforms in these matters which have come about during late years have been effected by the direct influence of the women of our land, either in leagues or through recognized and accredited representatives of some accepted theories. This feminine interest in the larger affairs of the nation, rightly directed to internal rather than to external policy, has been admirable in its results, and its rise and development may in large measure be attributed to the incitement of the reform spirit in other matters. That the concerted efforts of the women of our country are invariably wisely directed and governed it were folly to claim; but the spirit is always pure and high, and the masculine framers or advocates of legislation are not of such unimpeachable wisdom that they can afford to speak in scorn of the theories or work of the other sex in this wise, while at least the motives that direct feminine influence cannot be called into question. The tendency of the sex toward extremes, and its blindness, in its sense of the desirability of its end, to the unwisdom of the means which it sometimes proposes to use, are occasionally in evidence in matters of paternal legislation, but these are but minor flaws, and are not incorrigible.
So the era of Feminine Reconstruction resulted in the working woman and the thinking woman; and on these lies much of the hope of our country's future. Thus the Civil War at the last brought us a blessing instead of a curse, and in the halls of labor American womanhood once more joined hands in amity and became a unit in its aims and influence.