A Few Hours in a Far-Off Age/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
ON quitting the last group, I had resolved no other enticement should detain me from the first darlings of my acquaintance; but here is a large case of fashions, and it is customary to swerve a little in that cause. I care not who knows how great its interest for my mind. Fashion is a subject upon which I have thought very earnestly for many years, and know too well the powerful influence it exerts over the right and wrong of both present and future time. Indeed, I see it is one of the principal factors of the numerous chaotic minds now steadfastly pursuing their course of omissive sinning.
Faithfully modelled before me are many curiously-habited humans—quite savage and partly savage. Here are the gloomy Puritans, also the over-magnificent Cavalier. The rigid Quaker. Women who dwindled themselves to look like a dressed stick. Others who inflated their coverings until they resembled a barrel carrying a scarcely human head. Others with that portion of their body—which is generally considered naturally very exuberant—swelled into an appearance most monstrous and repulsive. A wretched sight to contemplate, because it is the result of weakened power to use the intelligence they are striving to drive from their minds. And—yes, there you are, my hideously-shaped contemporary! Little stilts under your boots, giving you a penguin-out-of-water appearance. Your swaddling clothes. Your abnormally swelled hips. Your ribs bent into the place nature intended only for delicate organs, the perfect health of which is requisite for healthy mind. Your crooked shoulders, the result of vain endeavours to move and breathe easily under so idiotic a régime. Your painted cheeks. Your black daubs over eyebrows,—the repulsive dirty sham plainly lying on the skin between the hairs. And a fitting crown to all that degrading deception is the impure false hair, which you imagine decorates your narrowed, distorted-looking head—a head Nature intended should have been intellectual, kind and truthful in form.
And there you are, likewise, hideous young man contemporary! Stilts under your boots. Ungraceful clothes. Hair cut in patterns on face to resemble the natural growth of your ape-relative's whiskers. Head shorn of its ornamental covering, leaving the ears standing out resembling ugly handles to an ugly bowl; altogether giving the unfortunate owner an appearance of having been modelled while in the crisis of a dangerous disease.
Worthy male for such a female, to the world's distraction! For how can aught but retrogression proceed from the union of two such fools! Oh, women! awaken to your responsibilities. Be it plainly understood I address only those whose type is in this case for a far-off age to learn what shams they are. Abandon your shameful practical lying. Where is the benefit it brings you? No mental improvement. No physical beauty. It only begets the short-lived admiration of semi-idiots, or the worship of deceived boys, whose inevitable enlightenment brings so fierce a contempt for the whole of our sex, that I have known it last until it became part of nature—not, alas! to be uprooted by even honourable and truthful women. Should you marry any so deceived is it possible you could expect your husbands to respect women who would sink to such pitiful means to win them? These are some of the great world troubles your thoughtless shams bring upon human kind. You thereby strengthen man's injustice towards women, and while that continues no progress can take deep root. It should always be the aim of woman to rise from the degrading position assigned her in the age of bestial ignorance and brute power. To rise, by noble thought and act, until man, in very shame, yield her her fair share of world's advantages, which he continues to usurp, partly from ignorance and partly from little-mindedness, but always blindly as to the wrong he is working to the whole of the human species.
Away with your shams! Be no longer encouraged by cunning men to waste your energies on the absurd and injurious reduction of your waists, or the set of bows, &c. They do so to thus basely dwindle your nobility of nature, that you may become their weak-brained tools instead of their equals. This world is ours as much as men's. They have no greater right to it than we have. Oh, women! how can you sit inanely smiling over the fashion of a dress or other paltriness while man makes laws affecting you and your children—the dear children you are rearing with your blood—as he does over any other animal he possesses? His laws are that he may take your child from you, give it to strangers' care, rear it in rascality if it so suit his purposes, and finally will it from you. The husband cowardly enough to defame his wife can do so with impunity. Those other base curs who repeat his untruths are also able to gratify their dirty inclinations. You have no legal redress, wives! Man's laws are for his own safety and glorification in all matters. It was not many years since a law existed in England regulating the thickness of the stick with which a man might legally beat his wife. Our divorce records show that alarming brutality, and the greatest of immoralities on the man's part, have not constituted "sufficient cause" for breaking such devilish bonds. Awake, women! Be fooled no longer! Examine man's sapient laws! You will be amazed at their rubbish and injustice. Especially after their having told you for thousands of years how wise and moral they are. Read them! Find out the extent of their reason and justice! It will be a revelation to you which will eventually have most beneficial results for human kind. They prevent you from learning and reflecting upon important subjects by flattering your sillinesses, and encouraging you to waste thought and time in trifles. Step out of the contemptible groove! Learn—above that, think, and you will soon claim your right to legislate for yourselves. Man has neither the right nor the ability to make laws in which the happiness and health of our lives are concerned, unless with our co-operation.
It is as unjust as if we were to legislate on man's greatest interests without consulting him; though I feel certain the very worst of us would do so in a far greater spirit of justice and benevolence than he has manifested in his cruel, impertinent and ignorant laws on our sex. Laws which have broken or withered millions of loving hearts, though medical men have called those murders by less conspicuous names.
It was only natural that so savage and selfish a being as man should have originally usurped all power over the weaker by reason of his greater brute strength; but that is no proof of larger mind. The tiger could crush the strongest man. Yet I think not a single man would give the palm for mind to the tiger. To beat, kick and trample on a weaker body is no proof of superiority of intellect; but it is by such means that men have claimed it. It is not astonishing that the vanity of those semi-brutes in the past closed women's mouths, crippled her intellectual exertions, enacted that she had not enough brain to learn, and availed themselves of every means "divine"—so they "piously" called it—or any other, to degrade the muscularly weaker sex, and that they should have promulgated theories, unsound as conceited, laudatory of the greater brute; but now that there has grown higher intellect in all human kind, it is full time men should repair, as far as possible, those most calamitous injuries to our species which have been brought about through their selfish devotion to the lack-brain errors of our ancestors. Ever since the first important record of men's speech they have branded women as false, illogical, immoral and weak-minded. Whenever they wish to very much insult one of their own sex they liken him to a woman. Anybody who reads current literature frequently sees the following sickeningly ignorant phrases, disgracing manhood and what, in other respects, are cleverly-written articles:—"Scolding like au enraged Woman," "With truly feminine vindictiveness," "Woman's tongue, never still," "Illogical as a woman," and many similar which most people have seen, and, excepting small-brained males, are quite weary of seeing. And all this unmerited abuse of unoffending woman is unfailingly given when public men choose to quarrel or wrangle over some little matter, which, unfortunately for woman's prestige, is very frequently; as in senate, bar and pulpit—the three public educators, they tell us—there is always abundance of scolding.
Pass inns—men babbling nonsense or scolding. Go through the streets—everywhere men's tongues; very little of women's. Listen while journeying in train, 'bus or steamer, waiting anywhere—the men are the talkers. And, if you care to listen, you will find it mostly stupid verbiage they utter. Then they go home and say to their energetically busy wives what men consider smart things about "woman's tongue," "feminine cackle," &c. Men have the audacity to call us deficient in reason! Examine their vaunted ideas! You will laugh till probably tears of sorrowing pity fill your eyes at their constant exposition of their own lack of it. They began all things unreasonably—a round of absurdities and impossibilities for the abasement of the defenceless half of human kind, in the unreasonable imagining that they thereby exalted the other half; and to carry out their unreason they made their god unreasonable!
They call us immoral! Were we one-thousandth part so immoral as they themselves are the world would be worse than any or all things in Dante's hell!
They have so hedged us with the legality of their own immorality, that the most virtuous lady smilingly receives our Solomons and Davids without a misgiving, or thinking how her house is polluted by their presence. But let their victims come to her door, or accidentally brush against her, she would shudderingly spurn them—to further ruin. Her Solomon husband and David friend would at once set about constructing laws for her deliverance from so intolerable an abomination. They would call out the judicial and clerical police to clear the street. Away with the poor creatures to esoteric, shameful, humiliating usefulness! Away with them to some retreat where the Solomons and Davids can find them with least injury to their own sacred persons!
But should the unfortunates leave their allotted boundary—driven, maybe, by fierce hunger for bread—to carry on the vile trade men have forced them into, then, exoteric Justice, bustle up to your bench of wisdom, fouled by so much of wrong and idiocy! Have those poor profaned bodies seized! Men have so seared their hearts it matters little about breaking a few! Fine, imprison, insult the wretched beings! Rid the earth of them, that fresh, less-jaded victims may take their places! But, my worthy judicial and clerical masters, let no harm come to the cowardly factors of all this maddening impurity—the real prostitutes—the men! For they tell us they were made in the image of their God. They are wanted in their churches to look respectable—and worship Solomon.
Not very long ago a young girl sought judicial protection from ruffians who had treated her in so cruelly debasing a way that could we have records of early man's morality they could contain nothing worse, probably not so infamous.
The acts were not denied. For defence it was made known that she had been cohabiting with another of this brute type, who aided the others in the performance of their bestial deeds. That was sufficient for the beneficent wisdom of our Dogberries. Cast her to perdition! But save those righteous young Solomons! Soon they will be of law-making age!
Oh, women of pure lives, have you thought enough to think what was the fate of that child—she was only sixteen—when she left the court of justice, after hearing the heartless decree? Reflect what is her life now; and if you have left your hearts room enough for blood, they must bleed at such imaginings. Should the hunted girl kill one of her assailants, she would be hanged. I think we all agree that any death would be better than the dreadful life to which the judicial and most unbenevolent idiots doomed her. Women abandon your injurious style of clothing! Allow your physical organs to have room for healthy life, that your minds may expand. Work all you can to stop these egotistical dolts from legislating for us without our aid! They cannot do it justly, or with any good to the world.
If Solomons and Davids read what I have written, they will cry with true Pharisaical screech—a tone too familiar to our ears—"Shameful, that woman should meddle in such unwomanly matters! Down with her! Respectability, tread upon her! Avoid her! She is dangerous, &c.!" And so she is, to all that is exoterically good—but so false and foul within.
It is time to throw aside artificial modesty, all of you! I tell you, women, it is woman's duty to try to save, help and raise woman—it matters not how fallen. You know too well such wrongs exist. To feign ignorance and practise indolence of thought is not virtue. If any of you are really ignorant of the deplorable sink into which so many thousands of our sex have been plunged, and from which they now find it impossible to rise, seek the truth for yourselves. It is right you should know it; and as you value the purity and welfare of your daughters, and your spirit's happiness when it shall have left its present abode, do your best to redeem and comfort those poor creatures. Not with vicious dogmas, or wearying, witless traditions of our ape-like ancestors, but with woman's pitying, helping love for the helpless and defenceless. Remember they are women, with woman's feelings—having woman's nature to suffer and endure heroically. Alas, so crushed!—But only crushed. They could rise from all their sad mistakes and wretchedness if you would but hold a hand to them. And you, especially, who possess wealth and influence with, happily for yourselves, time to effect such good work. You are the women who could most accomplish. The noble among men would help you in this, as in every other noble effort for the world's advancement; but at present their numbers are so small, compared with the Solomons, that they could do little without your earnest co-operation. An association which has lately been formed for helping young mothers is one great step.
Resolve, women! Act energetically to aid our poor sisters, or how will you bear the company of their sad spirits when all meet in another life, each alike divested of everything earthly, having only thought and memory remaining? Let us work while we have the power! Build a refuge—to be both school and home—but into which let no "myth-men" or other myth-teachers enter, to preach and weary the poor refugees into monotony and bewilderment with vain endeavors to think over, and believe in, the unreasonable or impossible. Show them good, and awaken reverence for good by your own acts.
After a certain time shall have elapsed, employ them. There would, doubtless, be some failures, though I think not many. Women are not inherently depraved. They do not sink by predetermination. Circumstances have placed young girls in danger—mere children in mind-growth, while their bodies have attained earlier maturity—or girls left without requisite care and instruction at an important age. These are some of the causes which have brought women to a mode of living they afterwards loathed; but forced by the "virtuous" world to remain and suffer. Think how very bitter must be such suffering. Those are the ones who could be helped to a good and happy life.
When you commence the urgent work—and I believe it will be commenced, for the prosperous and fortunate are more thoughtless than radically selfish—you will find my subscription ready, and if you all give in like proportion to your means, this new monument of woman's womanliness will quickly be raised to bless the world!
Men call us "weak-minded," and unfit for mental labour, That such women as George Eliot and Mary Somerville, without naming many other talented, studious women, should have compelled even men to acknowledge their talents—that they should have risen to public estimation straight through the deadly weight of ignorant men's prejudice—proves quite the contrary. In Mary Somerville's case it was considered so very unfeminine for a woman to cultivate her intellect that they deprived her of light in the winter evenings, to prevent her studying; but had she been of the other sex every facility would have been gladly given, and then the boasting of those abilities would have lasted as long—well, as long as male boasting always lasts when a clever mind of that sex appears. And we all know how few they have—considering the millions of millions of men who have been born, and had the advantage of their sex to attain what height they could! Had they the amazing excellence in reason they are ever telling us of, they would know why they have so miserably failed to occupy the great mental positions they ought, by this era, to have reached.
It is only a few years since women were permitted to join men in the race for education's honours—yet, how they already disprove the male libel that they have no power for study! When our University of Melbourne opened to women, the first who passed and gained the highest honour was scarcely fifteen years of age. Though men are inclined to keep woman's progress as unknown as possible; in spite of all precautions, the girls' successes are sometimes published—thanks to large-minded editors, whose thought has taught them valuable lessons in the world's economy. Wherever women are permitted to compete with men the result is amusingly favourable to our sex, when we reflect how pitiably we have been kept by man's doltish enactments imprisoned in one narrow, senseless groove for—who knows how many hundreds of thousands of years?
There are some men who, wishing to excuse the past irrational action of their own sex, say:—" However right it was once to rule over women, it is no longer so, &c." It was never 'right.' If the sexes had started on equal terms the general mind would have sooner expanded, and the beautiful earth would not have been saturated with the blood of advanced thinkers, who have been courageously honourable enough to try to benefit human kind by the honest avowal of their opinions. Women, all, shake off the dangerous apathy into which man's ignorance has thrown you! Teach them, or the earth will again have to treasure away for future learners relics of another fallen nation—teach them no whole can long exist if only one half of it be cared for! It is time men's suicidal oppression should cease. That it will do so is certain, for all the Infinite's works result in perfection, and there can be none in human kind until man become just to woman as to his own sex.
It rests with you whether it shall be soon or late. The sooner you work towards so desirable a completion of wise designs—by rejection of absurdities which have been thrust upon your understanding, and by firm, sensible claim to your rights as humans—the sooner must they yield what they have so long deprived us of—our equal share in the world's advantages; which world is ours, by all moral right, as much as it is theirs. I write not for myself. Man's tyrannical laws are powerless to wound me more. My suffering has been borne. No alteration of laws could now benefit me; but there are thousands enduring the pain I have experienced through man's injustice, and thousands to follow, until there be just legislation. For those—for the progress of all human kind—I strive, and will continue to do so while power be left me to speak or hold my pen.