,. (“‘51 ‘ .‘_ MDENCES OF THE IDEA OF THE NATURE OF WOMAN IN AMERICAN WRITINGS PRIOR TO I900 Thanh far the Degree cf M. A. MICHIGAN STATE COLLEGE ‘flizabeth PaIIock I949 I - ".4- ___-.l 0-169 I Iate This is to 00"“in that [he llwsis (untitled presented 1):] has [won mw'qm-d luwnrcls quiIImc‘nl 01 [hr requirelm-nls Inr .. dc‘ql‘m‘ ill s. n..... . ...‘..._.-q l _._.__ _ —L_.“_l_ L’ -L 'I_’ I.- Put-L". ‘ ; 4‘3.“ 5% ~AM' WWW ' .;. EVIDENCES OF THE IDEA OF THE NATURE OF W CMAN IN.AMERICAN WRITINGS PRIOR TO 1900 Elizabeth Pollock A THESIS Submitted to the Graduate School of Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF'ARTS Department of English 1949 TH clans ACKNOWIE mEI'ZENT I wish to acknowledge appreciation to Dr..Anders Orbeck of’michs igan State College for the patience and time he expended in working out a form.for the presentation of the varied and complex citations of- fered as a substantiation of my assumption. I am indebted as well to Dr. Claude Newlin who gave me unstintingly of his time and guidance. nf-‘R‘vfi {—‘I‘; 'r-‘ 1‘34 (- r ‘ ‘ ,1 .r' . 14‘- } f I Introduction . . . . . . . . . . TABLE OF CONTENTS Suggested criteria expressions of the II Evidences of the idea Before 1600 1600-1650 . 1650-1700 1700-1750 1750-1800 1800-1850 1850-1900 III Bibliography _ for identifying and analyzing idea of the nature of woman of the nature 0 O O O O O 0 O 0 O 0 O O 0 of-waman. O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 0 O 0 O 0 V O O O . O O 0 Page 1 37 38 42 46 48 50 62 80 101 EVIDENCES 0F ‘IHE 1% OF THE NATURE OF WOMAN IN MRICAII WRITINGS FRIOR T0 I500 There are two ways of reading history, forwards and backwards. In the history of thought, we require both methods. Alfred North Whitehead Science and the Modern world I INTRODUCTION There probably exists no verifiable fact as to the history and condition of woman, in any society and in any century, which has not been investigated and documented. Surveys of woman's progress, as the deprived half of the human race, have occupied the historian, the educator, the scientist, the Jurist, the priest, the critic, and the poet. The struggle of the sex for recognition of its intellectual and political equality has been an immemorial theme of pclemical in- dictment or apology. But, like the Historian "loaden with old mouse- eaten records," whom Sidney castigates in the Apology, the scholar investigating woman's anomalous role, also has been "so tied, not to what should be but to what 1., to the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things that his example draueth no nec- essary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine.“ Pedantic concern for no more than the "particular truth" of ob- no mama ul order m fht 45.40“!“wa yfiék jective data has brought lath—MW about woman. The disparate incident and the irrelevant statement can 1. Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy...An Apology for Poetry, 15. wzartrn Chis? {7.1% become integrant with the pattern of Mdevelopmsnt only when we will have discovered the reasons why a distinction in human prerog- atives was based entirely on differences in sex. In this paper, I make no attempt so ambitious. I suggest, how- I ever, as a first step toward achieving a "fruitful doctrine,‘ consid- eration of intellectual criteria, hitherto ignored,,as an approach to the wealth of material now available. Will—harem j m wwc {7‘ dioceses-v, no attempt he—heea—mede to define these conceptual determin- M44) War} to (Cass/2: atives by which society generated, as-we-l—l—as nourishedfl attitudes whit: ‘ on distinctions of sex. Learned allusions to patristic authority, a , 1442444 91 ink? sham, have become a cliche of the ti e on the status of woman: W; 14» 6am muoh' afiou - WJW CM! flu (Jae W no .,,_v_- ._ -- -- - z - '1" A‘- \ _ . _ .‘ mu a universe divided strictly according to attributes and privileges of sex. My examination of material from periods ante-dating that to which this study is restricted arouses a suspicion that scholar- ship, both here and in Europe, has been making tracks around, instead of breaking through, the periphery of what may be one of the most vener- able, as uell as on of the most indestructible, of concepts: 313% 2.1; aha 9.12112. 2!. 92.19.29.- Pedantry has iffected a barrier to immediate recognition of this perennial notion, by an academic emphasis on rhetorical values at the expense of import in the study of literature. Pedagogical temerity, lest meaning be "read into" a passage, almcst has made verboten the identification of currently familiar dogma with its archetype, safely and deceptively alien in an archaic idiom. We observe this semantic alchemy at work, particularly in expressions on woman and her status, after the fifteenth century in England. What; we seem not to have recognised is that a dramatic transformation in the style of the re- corded material, not a change in a basic concept, persuaded us that 0 the modern western Christian idea of woman was radically different from the earlier and more primitive one. This is demonstrated vividly by a comparison of one of Caxton's earlier translations with a pious dominant of the next century. In 1484 Caxton translated The Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry from the original composed in 1371 by a French father for the gui- dance of his daughters. The fact that an even earlier English trans- latian was made may be taken as evidence that the literate British sympathetically accepted the attitude on feminine prerogative and decorun expressed in The Book. In one of the less earthy narratives, which the solicitous Knight offered as an example of justifiable discipline for a wife prone to garrulity, the offended husband “. . . smote her with his fists downs to the erthe; and thanne with hys fote he stroke her in the uisage and brake her nose, and all her 1yff after she had her nose croked, the whiche shent and dysfigured her uisage after . . . And this she had for her euelle and gret language, that she was want to saie to her husbonde. And therefore the wiff aught to suffre and lete the husbonde haue the wordes, and to bg her maister, for that is her worshippe . . ." From the blunt forthrightness with which Caxton rendered this little 2. In MS. Harl. No. 1764 of the Harleian collection in the British Museum (Thomas Wright, Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landgy, xiv.) 3. The Book'of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, ed. by Thomas Wright, xxx, 25. _ lesson in marital propriety, we easily may surmise precisely the value placed on feminine nature and its rights at that time. There is nothing ambiguous, either in the incident or in the manner of its relation; very likely because a fifteenth century Englishmen recog- nised precisely, and unapologetically, the inherent disabilities of the feminine constitution. It is difficult, from the perspective of our time, to recognise that so unabashedly brutal an incident was validated by a premise identical with that by which Richard Hooker, a century later, vali- dated a mellifluent cementary upon woman's secular condition: ". . . woman therefore was even in her first estate .framed by Nature, not only after in time, but inferior in excellency also unto man . . . is for the delivering up of the woman either by her father or by some other . . . the very imbecility of their nature and sex doth bind them; nmely, to be always directed, guided, and ordered by others . . .u 4 We have recent evidence that Hacker's rationale was not unique in his time, 1593. In a study of theological commentaries on Genesis issued between 1627 and 1633, Dr. Arnold Williams smarises authori- tative interpretations of Biblical lore on woman: . . . all believed that both in the state of innocence and after the fall woman is subjected to man . . . This subjection was not, however, harsh or onerous in the state of innocence, as it became after the fall . . . Woman saw the reasonableness of her position and obeyed man because his commands were right and honorable. 5 An important point should be made here, before I offer further 4. Richard hooker, “The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity," Works, II, 62-63. 5. Arnold Williams, The Cannon Expositor, 87. examples which appear as aspects of ideological change, but which were no more than alterations in terminology. Intentionally I have disregarded what may seem to indicate an ecclesiastical clue to the origin of the concept I am.examining. hy reasons for rejecting tra- ditional reliance upon theological doctrine, as the primary and sole source for the prejudicial attitude toward woman, are too complex to be presented in a study as limited as this. Sound evidence can be marshalled that makes highly questionable a too facile dependence up- on this overworked scholarly tradition. I am not, however, minimising the influence of theological authority in enhancing and perpetuating the conceptual expression of woman's secular role in western society, as will be shown by'my'later arguments. In fact the persistence of the derogatory idea of the nature of woman is demonstrated most sharp- 1y in churchly documents. A.particu1arly dramatic example of the change in rhetorical style and, most noticeably, in the very vocabulary of didacticism, occurred in a sermon delivered by Jeremy'Taylor about 1650. In a long and gentle analysis of the marriage bond, Taylor designated the union as one "instituted in paradise." He earnestly assurred the "good.woman" that the distinctive elements of her sex existed "only in her body.“ Souls belonged to God, were sexless, and devoid of the worldly factors of rank in His eyes. In order, however, to ob- tain a modicum of harmony in wedlock, a sensible woman should resign herself to the fact that her physical person was under the dispen- sation of her spouse. Taylor was at his most persuasive in assuring his listeners that, while the husband, like the "governor of a town," had the 22335 to abuse his authority, a Godly man assuredly would consider hhmself without the "right to do so." A.husband's power over his wife is paternal and friendly, not nagesterial and despotic . . . founded in the understanding, not in the will or force . . . 6 Not only the language, but the tone had undergone radical change, since Caxtcn's naively crude presentation of marriage propriety two centuries earlier. Intact, however, remained the idea of the nature of woman, in its secular dependence upon masculine dominance. To evaluate fully the connotative legerdermain Taylor wrought by his use of 22225.‘nd.£$5239 in this text, would necessitate an exhaus- tive appraisal of the accepted meanings of the terms in seventeenth century English usage and of Taylor's employment of then.in other sermons. For my'immediate purpose it is sufficient to recognize that Taylor's appeal to woman's "reasonableness," in.making the best of worldly subordination, increasingly characterised the more lofty Christian polamics on the theme. It became, as well, the rationale from which.was projected a more astringent attitude on the status of the sex. This view was expressed by George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, in an often-quoted letter of counsel, addressed to his young daughter in 1688. You muit myth“), i: downIfor allemilattfin in genera , ere s an negua y n e Sexes, and that for the better conomy of the REFIE, the Men, who are to be the Lawgivers had 6. Jeremy Taylor, "The Marriage Ring; or, The Mysteriousness and Duties of Marriage," in A.Ccurse of Sermons for all The Sundays in the Year, 219. . The disguise Caxton 's Reason , " The strating found in the larger share of Reason bestow'd upon them; by which means your sex is the better prepared for the Compliance that is necessary for the better performance of those Duties which seem to be most properly assigned to it . . . premise of discriminatory sexual prerogatives is without here; actually, no less crude than that which motivated unapologetic account of a husband, whose “larger share of justified his maltreating an annoyingly garrulcus mate. seventeenth century is particularly rich in material demon- the prevalent notion of female nature. Much of it may be advice on feminine behavior guaranteed to establish a suc- cessful marriage. Perhaps,the most well-known of such prescriptions was-~and still is--Sir Thomas Overbury's didactic poem which, in 1613, bore the title A Wife. After the death of the author, it ap- peared as A. Wife Now the Widdow of Sir Thomas 0verbu_r_y and so pleased contemporary readers that it had earned a sixteenth impression by 1638. Sir Thomas calmly enunciated the exact ingredients desired in feminine nature, that would assure masculine serenity and comfort: A passiue understanding to conceiue, And Judgement to discerne, I wish to find, Beyond that, all as hazardous I leaue, Learning and pregnant wit in Woman-kind lhat it findes malleable maketh fraile, And doth not adds more ballaste, but more saile. Bookes are a part of man's prerogatiue . . . 8 7. George Savile, ..Marquess of Halifax, "The Lady's New-Year's Gift: or, Advice to A Daughter," in Completeh’orks, 8. 8. Sir Thomas Overbury, The Overburian Characters, to which is added ‘ "1". 482. No advice column in a modern journal is more explicit in de- fining the psychological conditions of conjugal harmony, than were seventeenth century writers who sought the patronage of eager spin- sters. In The Bride, Samuel Rowland wasted little rhyme on epithal- emium abstractions, but promptly got down to pragnatic counsel that would convince the new wife that ". . . domestique cares of private businessh for the house within“ were her sole reason for married ex- istence. "Leauing her husband‘vntc his gaffaires" would prove the better part of wisdom. Rowland's argment for this sensible allo- cation of interests, according to differences of sex, he proved by describing discontented women who hankered after advantages Beyond their element, when they should looks To what is done in Kitchin by the Cooke . . . 9 By 1789, the women who, on the whole, appear to have accepted this masculine complacency without resentment, began to find de- fenders in their own ranks. In that year there appeared a brochure, signed m, bearing the title Woman Not Inferior to Man. Sophie's ardent claims for woman’s mental and spiritual equality roused to re- buttal a certain "Gentleman,“ who addressed to her his Man Superior to Ionian: or, A Vindication of Man's Natural Right of Sovereign Author- liner the Woman . . . The “Gentleman" admitted that some consider- ation was due the sex because of its “Part . . . in the Propagation of human Nature ,“ much "as a Field does on Account of the Vegetables it produces . . ." This phenomenon, however ,.was no reason 9. Samel Rowland, The Bride, D 6. "why they are to be considered on a Level with the Men they bring forth, any more than the Mould in a Garden is to be equally valued with the Fruits it produces . . ." 10 is final proof of the fallaciousness of Sephia's claims for I "the Natural Right of the Fair Sex to a perfect Equality of Power, Dignity d: Esteem, with the Men,“ the Gentleman resorted to the same indictment which Richard Hooker‘had employed so tellingly almcst a century and a half earlier: Let Women then give up their Claim to an Equal- ity with the Men, and be content with the dumble Station which heaven has alloted them . . . And since neither their Capacity of Head nor their Dispositions of heart can lift them to emulate us, let them apply their little Talents at least to imitate us . . . Let them remember that Man holds his Superiority over them by a Charter from Nature in his very Production . . .' 11 In the presumptiveness of the phrase Charter from Nature lies the crux of my argument that, up to the twentieth century, attitudes on woman and her status recorded in the English language were modi- fied by current influences only in the superficialities of rhetorical style, but were conditioned ideologically by predeterminant ideas as to the nature of the sex. Reduced to its most elementary factors, my assumption has been developed in some such manner as the following: 1. Written records postulate a dichotomy in human rights, based solely on differences in sex. 10. Man Superior to Woman, 17. 11. Ibid., 73. 10 2. The perpetuation of this dichotomy'neoessi- tated an impregnable conviction that attri- butes of sex were of more than biological character. 3. These attributes were believed to generate, within the soul and the intellect of the individual, qualitative tendencies. 4. So benignly rationed by Providence were these qualitative tendencies that they sharply dis- tinguished the nature of woman from.that of man. 5. This precise distinction was indicated by the inherent inoapacities of woman's nature for participation with:man, as his equal, in any social, intellectual, and/or political acti- vities, except those immediately domestic. With this as a conceptual gauge, I have endeavored to locate expressions on woman in American writing, prior to 1900, which were extensions of the classic attitude on the sex. The difficulty has he not been one of scarcity, but the need, 1hr a study such as this, to pare down to a minimum the available examples. In the American area John Winthrop's Journal appears to have been mined exhaustively by scholars bent on every other inquiry except that relevant to my theme. While considerable attention has been devoted to the theological and political implications of the Anne Hutchinson allusions in the Jour- nal, I have encountered no estimate of the extent to which the Cal- vinist conception of woman's nature might have weighed on the scales of Puritan Justice. ‘Ls it would involve a disproportionate measure of my study to analyze the effects of this attitude on critical de- cisions reached in the Hutchinson debacle, I confine myself to Win- throp's entry of September, 1637, in which he described the questions "debated and resolved" by the assembly} 11 "That though women might meet (some few'together) to pray and edify one another; yet such a set as- sembly . . . where sixty or more did meet every week, and one woman (in a prophetical way, by re- solving questions of doctrine, and expounding scripture) took upon her the whole exercise, was agreed to be disorderly, and without rule." 12 Another, more often quoted, illustration of the Calvinist idea of the ordained limitations of feminine nature was Winthrop's comment, in 1645, on the melancholy state into which intellectual pursuits had cast the wdfe of the governor of Hartford: ". . . a godly young woman, and of special parts, . . . who was fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason, which had been growing upon her divers years, by occasion of her giving herself wholly to reading and writ- ing, and had written many books. Her husband . . . was loath to grieve her; but he saw his er— ror, when it was too late. For if she had at- tended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, eto., she had kept her wits, and might have improved them.use- 13 fully and honorably in the place God had set her." Poignant recognition of this setting apart of the best of life, as "proper for men," may be found in the poetry of Anne Bradstreet. Sensitive, aware, she was unable to stifle an urgent creativeness. Despite burdensome obligations as a governor's wife in a pioneer so— oiety, the care of eight children, and her own ill health, she kept a journal of verse and metaphysical thoughts. Her poems, derivative for the most part and acknowledgedly'mod~ eled after duBartas, occasionally achieved genuine lyricism,:movingly 12. John Winthrop, Journal, I, 234. 13. Ibid., II, 225. 12 anticipatory of the more perceptive of the later deistio poets. Shyly, but determinedly, Anne Bradstreet questioned Calvinist derogation of womanly ability: "I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits, A Poetes pen all scorn I should thus wrong, For such despite they dast on Female wits: If what I do prove well, it won't advance, 14 They'l say it's stol'n or else it was by chance." Then, as if intimidated by her own daring, this gentle creature rendered homage where it properly was due : “Men have precedency and still excell, It is but vain unjustly to wage warre; Men can do best, and women know it well Preeminence in all and each is yours; Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours." In the year that Mrs. Bradstreet's poems appeared, 1650, John Cotton issued a commentary on the privilege of singing the gospel 16 during church service. My concern is not with the reluctance with which Cotton finally admitted that even women might join in song to praise the lord. It is with the title which he placed at the head of the section devoted to a discussion of woman's churchly privileges: "Concerning the Singers: Whether Women, Pagans ,and Profane and Carnal Persons." This caption provokes me to a digression I believe profoundly relevant to the ultimate implications of my study. To what extent 14. Anne Bradstreet, "The Tenth Muse ," Works, 101. 15. Ibid., 102. h 16. John Cotton, “Singing of Psalms a Gospelr0rdinance ," in A Library of bucrican Literature, I, 254-270. 13 were the ideas in such-expressions, hitherto dismissed as fugitive examples of Calvinistic piet‘gu, perpetuated later in the dialectic of an evolving constitutionalism? While I have no final answer to this question, I offer three remarkably suggestive counterparts of this theological attitude in the later political philosophy of the nation. At the risk of being over-explicit, I must indicate that the ex- amples I give seem to demonstrate that what, in the seventeenth cen- tury, appeared as the ecclesiastical segregation of a group (distinc- tive only in its physiology) within a minority otherwise limited to the mora15"1mtouchable,". reappeared in the next century as civil dis— crimination by government. The identification of woman with pariahs, social as well as religious, did not cease with the weakening of the Puritan oligarchy. What early had functioned as theocratic imposi- tion later beeame a political rationale. , , 4 .9 my: .45 WMfiWfi‘fj Wm“. 4.6 With M that of John Cotton, John Adams in 1776, proscribed franchise for children, propertyless males-wand mmen. Thomas Jefferson, although opposed to Adams on basic prin- ciples of hman rights, found it consistent, in 1816, to consign to a political limbs, designed for children and slaves, the women citi- zens. As late as 1867, militant feminists, having worloed selflessly for the anti-slavery cause, violently accused their one-time allies (who would have guaranteed franchise to the Negre male ahead of the women) of placing their sex beyond the suffrage pale “with lunatics, idiots and criminals." ' Had there occurred, after more than two centuries, no modification 14 in this prejudicial attitude, other than the exchange of an ostracism shared with the “pagans, profane and carnal persons," for one reserved for malefactors and the feeble-minded, woman, in nineteenth century America, might have concluded, as had Alice in LookirgGlass Land, that it had taken all the running she could do "to keep in the same place." But, unavoidably, ideological by-products of the classic attitude to- ward sex had been developing in the young nation ; trends, while dis- parate, so cunulative in force that, ultimately, they were fused into the militancy of organised suffragism. Examination of the causes, primarily economic and sociological, for these modifications is not within my province. 1 would suggest, however, that, despite the vast amount of observation and docunen- tation that has taken place in this area, a serious need exists to determine to what degree these changes were accelerated or retarded by the conflict between current social pressures and fixed historic attitudes. One source for such a study is Alexander Hamilton's "Re- " that prescient economic blueprint for a new port on Manufactures, world. Pertinent to my theme is the section of it headed "As to the ad- ditional employment of classes of the comunity not originally engaged in the particular business.“l.7 When Hamilton, in 1791, presented his recomendaticns, he was too concerned with the national crisis to miti- gate, by the usual sophistical hedging, an entirely objective evalu- ation of the female sex as _a potential labor commodity in an expanded 17. Alexander Hamilton','lianufactures,'I Works, 111, 294-420. 15 industrial market. In offering a plan which would insure “not only the wealth but the independence and security" of the infant nation, Hamilton argued for drafting into the service of the economy those . . . who would otherwise be idle, and in many cases a burden on the community, either from the bias of temper, habit, infimity of body, or some other cause, indisposi'ng or disquali- fying them for the toils of the country. It is worthy of particular remark that, in general, women and children are rendered more useful, and the latter more early useful, by manufac- turing establishments, than they would other- wise be. 18 By historical irony, this evaluation of the sex-~categorised again with the child and the delinquent!» by the lowest common de- nominator of economic worth was to place within its reach the key to eventual exemption. In woman's assumption of a secular entity, however niggardly, until then denied by the polity of church and of state, she acquired a value which, in the beginning and on the lowest plane, was divorced from the limitations traditionally credited to her "nature.“ Notable in this period were the insidious contradictions in the thinking of a people that could moralise, as will be shown, upon the spiritual preeminence of a sex and, at the same time, calculate upon its comercial exploitability. Analagous in all particulars, and for that reason an invidious comparison to the anti-feminist, was the rationale of the slavocracy during the same era. Further modifications of the standard idea of the inherent na- ture of woman, as fortuitous as that engendered by industrialization, 13. Ibid., 111, 314. 16 resulted from a social perversion of ecclesiastical pragmatism. The church's mistake was in permitting such palliatives as Jeremy Taylor's assertion that “a good woman is in her soul the same that a man is. . ." This was a noble and liberal expression of theological perception. But, in conjunction with the admonition that woman sensibly ignore her inescapable mental, physical, and civil subordination to man, this fine sentiment created, by the end of the eighteenth century, an an- achronistic formula. The rapid secularization of man's ethics, particularly in Ameri- can pioneer society, magnified intolerably the contradiction between doctrinal admission of woman's spiritual parity with man and ponti- fical insistence upon her total worldly subordination to him. Tem- poral extension of the theological recognition of woman's supernal properties was an enlargement of her intellectual horizons. This but served to widen the hiatus between oppressively unrealistic dogma and the imediacies of an expanding universe. The solution of the problem was achieved, as before, by a semantic juggling which was in- tended to preserwe intact the effectiveness of the classic idea of woman's inherent inferiority. By a hocus-pocus,that made a farce of didactic counsel for women during the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies, both in Merica and in England, proof of the sex's secular disqualifications, which once had been the measure of its impiety, imbecility and frailty, remained proof of its secular disqualifica- tions, by the measure of its saintliness, apperception and fragility. The 13“ 1unatic examples of this irrationality occur in the correspondence of such estimable statesmen as Benjamin Franklin and 17 John Adam. Franklin's attitude toward woman, other than the roman- tic, commonly is accepted as that delineated in his "salad days," by the item.in the “Do Good" papers, 1772, wherein he generously found ". . . it a very difficult matter to reprove women separate from men . . .“ By 1758, time had conspired to mitigate Franklin's gener- osity. In a letter to his Debby, his "Dear Child," Franklin advised her that it would be the better part of feminine prudence to refrain from political interests, for if ". . . your sex can keep cool, you maybe a means of cooling ours the sooner, and restoring more speedily that social harmony among fellow» citizens, that is so desirable after long and bitter dissensicns." 19 John Adams, in 1778, two years after his absolute rejection of women as responsible, enfranchised citizenry, could write in his diary, with the utter hunorlessness of the righteous-minded, “From all that I had read of history and gov- ernment, of human life and.manners, I had drawn this conclusion, that the mannersof wo- men were the most infallible barometer to as- certain the degree cf'morality and virtue in a nation. . . The manners of women are the surest criterion by which to determine whether a republican government is practicable in a nation or not . . ." 20 The most hysterical expression of the idea of the nature of we -- as a combination of inherently superior morality and disabling in- fantilism in worldly-matters--came, oddly enough, from.the agitators 19. Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography;& Selections from.His Writingg, 204-205. 20. John Adams, Works, 111, 171. for reform in woman's educational opportunities. There probably is no more ironic proof of the dichotomy wrought by a predeterminant concept, between the practice of and the idea of a theory, than was exposed by the activities and in the attitudes of two pioneers in women’s educa- tion, Catherine E. Beecher and Mary Lyon. Undaunted by every obstacle, Catherine E. Beecher literally roused a nation to supply women with institutions for advanced study. She, as valiantly, leagued herself with orthodox theology against the earliest feminist efforts. In an impassioned essay in 1837 she denied the right of the most devout woman to appear publicly in behalf of the slave: It is Christianity that has given to woman her true place in society. A man may act on society by the collision of intellect, in public debate; . . . and he does not outstep the boundaries of his sphere. But all the power, and all the con- quests that are lawful to woman, are those only which appeal to the kindly, generous, peaceful and benevolent principles . . . to be all ac- 21 complished in the domestic and social circle. . . Complementing this and out-reaching it in an excess of maudlin sen- timent, was the prospectus composed by Mary Lyon to interest parents and sponsors in the establishment of Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, 1835. It is difficult, in our time, to believe the passage below was not intended \ as a burlesque on the prevalent concept of “womanly nature" and its ob- ligationl. 21. Catherine E. Beecher, An Essa on Slavery and Abilition with refer- ence to the Duty of Merican éemales, 100-101. This pamphlet was addressed speciffcally to Angelina Grimke’, the young Southern woman who first brought into the abolition movement the critical question of the human right to plead for the slave, regardless of the sex of the individual making the appeal. . 18 Inasmuch as all we know of Mary Lyon's achievements in the in- terests of woman's moral and intellectual advancement. bears witness to her selflessness and her piety, we must accept this remarkable statement as soberly as it was intended: "All her Etna prospective woman student's] du- _ties, of whatever kind, are in an important sense social and domestic, They are retired and private not public, like those of the oth- er sex. Whatever she does beyond her own fam- ily should be but another application and i1- lustration of social and domestic excellence. She may occupy the place of an important tea-' cher, but her most vigorous labors should be modest and unobtrusive. She may go on a for- eign mission, but she will there find a re- tired spot, where, away from the public gaze, she may wear out or lay down a valuable life . . . she may seek in various ways to increase the spirit of benevolence and the zeal for the cause of missions; and she may labor for the salvation of souls: but her work is to be done by the whisper of her still and gentle voice, 22 by the silent step of her unwearied feet . . ." lest it appear that women were the principal transgressors in this distortion, I quote from the argusents of two of the more ef- fective molders of public opinion in the nineteenth century, Daniel Webster and Horace Bushnell. Webster in 1844 had occasion to ad- dress a group of southern ladies who had been his hostesses on a campaign tour. To console the audience for its civil exoommunioation the noted orator glibly assured them that The rough contests of the political world are not suited to the dignity and the delicacy of your 8.: e e e 22. Mary Lyon, "Mount Holyoke Female Seminary Prospectus, 1835," in Pioneers ofWomen's Education in the United States, 290. 25. Daniel Webster, Works, 11, 105. 20 The Reverend Mr. Bushnell was so aroused by the mounting feminist aggressiveness of 1869 that he published a little volune of remon- stranoe, in which he endeavored to persuade militant ladies that it was . . . as natural to women to maintain . . . beautiful allegiance to the masterhood and governing sway-force of men, both in the fam- ily and the State, e e e The 80131", cm. paigning work of political life is certainly in quite too high a key for the delicate or- gani‘Qtion e e e Of mmen. 24 As may be seen in the main bibliographic citations that fol- low, the nineteenth century was rife with this sophistry. That the church was more than compliant in such ideological propaganda is evident from its response to the incipient feminist stirrings early in the century. At the time, 1837, that Catherine E. Beecher was fulminating against the unChristian and unwomanly insistence of the Misses Grimkd upon their right to speak publicly in behalf of the slave, the General Association of the Congregational Churches of Massachusetts issued a “Pastoral letter," condemning the sis- ters. Not only were churches directed to deny their pulpits to the Grimlce’s, but there was presented a rationale upon which was based the rejection of feminine evangelism, whether in the service of God or for man's salvation: "When the mild, dependent, softening influence of woman upon the sternness of man's opinions is fully exercised, society feels the effects of it in a thousand forms. The power of wo- man is her dependence, flowing from the 24. Horace Bushnell, The Reform Against Nature, 138. 21 ccnscicumness of that weakness which God had given her for her protections, and which keeps her in those departments of life that form.the character of individuals . . ." 25 It must be obvious, from even this fragment of ecclesiastical dictum, that what we have here is the promulgation of a determin- ant concept. No longer was woman a secular pariah because of her inferior attributes, but because of her inherent moral superiori- ties combined with her blessed physical incapacity. The preolusive factors of the classic premise, by which the sex had been outlawed from full participation in man's world were amended so that, while it was understood that l. The attributes of sex generated positive and qualitative differences within the soul and the body of the ihdividual. 2..A benign Providence so unmistakably had be- stowed these qualifications, that the very nature and the sphere of woman were indi- cated by a) an ineffable moral superiority, which unfitted her for the sordid, worldly activities suited to the vulgar na- ture of the male, and b) a fragile physical constitution and reproductive functions, which condi- tioned her helplessness and her depen- dence upon the male's protectiveness, guidance, and dominance. ‘What this added up to, in practical terms of routine existence, was an incontrovertible assumption that the nature of woman, as ordained by the Deity and comprehended by man's reason, fitted her exclusively 25. “Pastoral Letter," quoted in History of Woman Suffrggg, I, 81-82. This was the document which aroused Whittier to a scathing re- ply in verse also entitled "Pastoral Letter." -as a fortunate complement to the ordained predilecticns of the male--fcr those pursuits associated with the kitchen, the nursery, the bedroom, and the parlor. Adherents to this doctrine were le- gion. It became the current opinion of the nature of woman, except for its vehement rejection by a little band of the "unwomanly." In the nineteenth century little attention was‘given to an e- merging conflict: between a beatific concept of feminine nature, on the one hand, and, on the other, its total negation by the economic imperatives affecting the lowest strata of the female population. The acceleration of mechanized industry had multiplied fabulously the possibilities for women to go outside the home as wage-earners. The masses of women, confronted with even the most meager advan- tages of commercial employment, were quite willing, if we may be- lieve the records, to barter the intangibles of a spiritual pre- gminence for the material premiums of corporeality. It would be well worth the investigation to discover how much woman's dissat- isfaction with her traditional infantilism resulted from the ad- vance of her educational opportunities at this time and how much from an “escape" into a world in which she was challenged as an in- dependent creature, however lowly a one. The historian knows that militant feminism was not a spontan- eous expression of current impulses in the nineteenth century. For that reason it is not understandable that the organized suffrage A protest of women invariably is lumped with those other reformist trends-”abolition, education, temperance, pena1--which were the ideological products of the Enlightenment and the concomitant pres- sures exerted by the new science and the philosophies of equalitarianism 22 23 and humanitarianism. In the instance of the feminist revolt, these were but the sparks that set off long-smoldering tinder. What we facetiously term the "modern woman problem" apparently was a con- ceptual enigma long before it reached the written record. Francis lee Utley, in The Crooked Rib, snnotates more than four hundred sa- tirical considerations of the perversities and the difficulties ob- served in female nature, as related ". . . in English and Scots Lit- 2 erature to the End of the Year 1568." 6 This is acknowledgedly but a m index of extant material in this area. To ascertain when, how, and fly this notion of the peculiar attributes of woman became an inviclable doctrine of western Christian thought probably would necessitate investigation in the area of oral tradition. The "pro- blem,“ very likely, is as old as sex. I All attitudes on women have not come from those who condemned her to a predestined subordination. There is evidence that the ra- tional mind, however alone in its dissidence, always refuted the idea of woman's inherent disabilities. A quarter of a century after the appearance of Caxton's version of The Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, Henrious Cornelius Agrippa, upon accepting the chair of Hebrew at Dol, 1509, delivered an oration upon the nature of we- man, as a tribute to the learned Princess Margaret of Austria. Three centuries before the most perceptive of the women in the Anor- ican abolitionary movement were to rest their claims for equality on 26. Francis lee Utley, The Crooked Rib, title page. 24 a simple stewent of human rights, Agrippa blamed "this universal prevalence of tyranny over divine rights and law" as the reason that ". . . the liberty that was given to women is vetoed by the unjust laws of men, is made null by custom and convention, is quenched by edu- cation. From the earliest moment of her birth . . . a woman's kept at home in idleness, and as though she lacked capacity for the other field, is forbidden a notion beyond her needle and thread. Then, when she grows up, she is handed over to . . . rule of a husband . . . or shut up in the unopening prison of the mona- stery . . . The discharge of public function is denied her by law . . . She is shut out from all exercises of authority, all decisions . . . Such is the ruthlessness of modern legi- slators . . . Through their tradition . . . they have declared women, sometimes of the highest natural distinction and of the most exalted rank, to be of cheaper status than all men whatsoever . . ." 2'7 In England, contemporary humanist expression on the sex was tempered by a consideration as rational, although not so defini- tive as Agrippa's. Except for Thomas More's delineation of them in the m, 1516, the problems of the sex's civil and social function was of less polemical concern to the hunanist than was the challenge of her intellectual potentialities. In a survey of the attitude of the period, as hasty as it must be here, the temptation is to employ, as the final token of hunanist ideas on woman, More's 27. William Beroher, The Nobility of Women, ed. by R. Warwick Bond, 148. The Agrippa comment is given by Mr. Bond from the Lyons edition, 1531, of De Nobilitate and Praecellentia Sexus Deolam- atio ad Mggaretamjustriacgogm and Burgundium, (II, 541.) 11;. Bond's introduction to the Beroher essay, which he claims is a translation of much of Agrippa's, is highly informative and covers the period and the genre of the material in question. The edi- tion I saw was in the rare book collection of the University of Michigan. Mr. Utley, in The Crooked Rib, lists the Bercher item, but states that he had been unable to examine a copy. 25 enhancement of the role of the sex in the Utopia, as well as the esteem he demonstrated for his exceptional daughters in his life and correspondence. He has been quoted often from the letter to Gonelh, . instructor to his children, in which More declared that he did not ". . . see why learning in like manner may'not equally agree with both sexes . . ."28 In his home More established, for his daughters and his son, an "academy,"29 praised.by'Erasmus and others of the group who enjoyed More's hospitality and marvelled at the advanced education for young women in a period of general feminine illiteracy. In the.Utgpi=JMore assigned to wives and to husbands obligations, in the civil, cultural and military areas of the state, identical or equated. So impressively rational was this conception that we are inclined to ignore certain anomalous tenden- cies in the 23223:, which seem to reflect the secular and theolog- ical cross purposes characteristic of the Reformation itself. For instance wives, whose Utopian privileges were in no man- ner less than their spouses', on holy days fulfilled the custom of 28. Vives and the Renasoence Education of Wbmen, 175-176. The orig- inal letter, in Latin, is in Mbre's Correspondence, 1209123. 29. The instructors More engaged for his daughters were scholars of the highest repute; among them, Nicholas Kratser, the re- nowned astronomer, and Richard hyrde, who translated The In- structiogigf a Christian Wbman, and who wrote a preface to Eargaret Roper's translation of an Erasmus item. Of Hyrde's preface Foster flatson speaks in great praise, considering it to be the earliest Renascence document in English on woman's education (Vives and the Renascence Education of Wbmen, 159-160.) 26 falling “. . . down prostrate before their husbandes fete at home . . ."30 This type of anachronism caused astute critics, such as R. F. Chambers in his Life of More and G. G. Coulton in Medieval Panorama, to agree that in More's philosophical bent there was an 3 " 1 A similar criticism emphasis "more medieval than modern . . . may be applied to all major humanist expressions on feminine na- ture. Were there time to examine the works of More's colleagues, who shared his interest in woman's intellectual progress-~Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, Richard Hyrde--it could be shown how, at the very core of their radical appreciation of woman's mental equality there functioned traditional and predetermihant ideas as to inherent physical and spiritual qualifications of her nature. Juan Luis Vives recommended in his Instruction of a Christian 1°29}; 1540, the most advanced training of woman, not only in do- mestic skills and social graces, but in a wide range of the most abstruse classical and ecclesiastical subjects. Despite the pre- sumption that feminine mentality had the stamina to cope with so demanding a reginm, Vives found it wise to advise against women acting as teachers ". . . because a woman is a frail thing, and of a weak discretion. and that may lightly be deceived, which thing our first Mother- Eve sheweth . . ." 32 30. Thomas More, Utopia, Book II, 135. 31. G. G. Coulton, Medieval Panorama, 615. 32. “The Instruction of a Christian Woman," in Vives and the Rena- .scenoe Education of Women, 56. 27 However many were the reservations of the hunanist idea of the complete nature of woman, its recognition of her intellectual potentialities served an admirable and practical purpose in the long struggle that stretched ahead of her. It brought into ser- ious focus the immemorial problem of her destiny as one-half the human race. Increasingly English polemical writing was to be con- cerned with the disturbing search for a solutionuwhich would pla- cate the sex and leave unchanged its status. Pro and con, the ar- guments were to rage during the centuries; of an equal sterility on either side. Those in defense of the sex substituted adulation, extravagant claims, and accusation for solid, matter-cf-fact as- sertions of the simple truths of nature. A few representative ti- tles suggest the treatment of the theme: Gunaielson: or, Nine Bookes of Various History Concerning Women, by Thomas Heywood, 1642; £91- lum Ieneris, or a Sanctuarj for Ladies, by Daniel Tuvil, 1616; _T_hc_ Woman's Glorie, by Samuel Torshell, 1650 3 A Dialogue Concerning. WomenLBeing a Defense of The Sex. . ., with a Preface by John Dryden, 1691; The Excellent Woman, described by her True Charac- ters and their Opposites. . .done out of French by T. D., 1695. Of the multitude of such effusions, none offered the objec- tive clarity of Agrippa's analysis or the warming intellectual ap- preciativeness of the humanist attitude. The soundest of the Eng- lish argmnents for a revaluation of feminine character was Mary Letell's Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their true and greatest interest, 1694, and, exactly a century 1a- ter, Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Women, 1791. The Lstell piece 28 was one of the earliest suggestions for higher education for Eng- lishwomen on an institutional basis. The rub in the scheme, both in Miss.Astell's time and by our own critical values, was that its author could envisage so ambitious and revolutionary a program only fulfilled under conditions alarmingly similar to those of a nun- nery. The dynamic effect of the Wbllstonecraft thesis, both on the continent and in America, was of greater profundity than the devel- opment of her arguments. The essay has been discussed so often that it would be a needless burden to add another appraisal. In eighteenth century America there were projected other ideas of the nature of woman besides those of complete disparagement or of sophistical enhancement of her spiritual being. A.more balanced, realistic conception was the subject of an often—quoted correspon- dence between Abigail Smith.Adams and.Mercy Otis warren, and was the theme of the "Occasional Letter" that appeared in 1775 in an issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine, while under the editorship of Thomas Paine. I would say, however, in the light of my'limited investigation, that the first deliberate and purposive attempt made in this coun- try to present a concept of woman's nature, as realistically per- ceived as that of . man's, occurred in the works of Charles Brockden Brown, In the novels he wrote between 1789 and 1801, he created portraits of women of startlingly forthright character, even "mas- culineaminded," and of varying degrees of conscious intellectuality. I deplore, in my discussion of Brown in the bibliographic section, 29 a critical tendency to dismiss this writer as a journalistic hack who had been influenced overmuch by Godwin, Wolstonecraft, and Condorcet. There has been little, if any, recognition of Brown's independence of thought and his genuine, if slight, perception of psycho legical compulsione. Even less familiar to our times than Brown's novels is M, an imaginative excursion into a Utopian realm designated as the "Paradise of Women." The sole purpose of this work, 1798, of which only a section is extant, was the demonstration of Brown's revolu- tionary idea of the inherent nature of woman. When compared with the absolute equation of woman's political, social, and even physi- cal privileges in m, the heterodoxy of the feminine role in Sir Thomas More's m pales to moderation. Much remains to be said-about this unique American writer, both as to his ideas and his skills. Neither of his American editors,” in recent tines, seems to have discovered in Brown the challenges implicit in his works. As little known to contemporary scholars is an attitude to- ward woman revealed by one of America's renowned early scholars, Timothy Dwight. In the period that Brown composed £13325, Dwight was making a tour of New York and New England, 1795-6, on leave from the Presidency of Yale because of his health. Dwight inept a journal of his observations, which was published after his death 33.. In 1926 Lewis Pattse edited Wieland. Ormond was edited by Ernest Marchand in 1937. Neither authority departed from tra- ditional avenues in evaluating Brown's sources and intentions. in 1821e In the Travels, Dwight cemented disparagingly on the "orna- mental" education bestowed upon young women of the middle class in this country. He favored for them a rugged intellectual and physi- cal oourse of training, equivalent to that given young men. The assunption upon which he based this reccmendation for feminine ac- quisition of "solid sense and sound wisdom" was free of the shibbo- lsths of traditional reasoning: ' It is . . . high time that vomen should be con- sidered less as pretty, and more as rational, and immortal beings: and that so far as the cir- cunstances of parents will permit, their minds should be early led to the attainment of solid sense and sound wisdom. 34 Dwight belabored this argument from many vantage grounds, particu- larly stressing his disgust with the type of romantic reading deemed suitable for female ccnsunpticn. He expressed the earnest wish ". . . that are long . . . women of this country, who, so far as they possess advantages, appear in no respect to be behind the other sex either in capacity of disposition to improve, may no longer be precluded from the best education by the negligence of men." 35 lith the examination of theviews on the nature of woman of Dwight and Charles Brockden Brown, we have balanced the attitudes expressed by such influential individuals as Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton in the period before 1800. While far from 34. Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, II, 475. 35. Ibid., 476. 31 definitive these are suggestive of native conceptual trends. Sim- plified, perhaps too broadly, the ideas would appear to fall into quite distinctive groupings. The most prevalent of them appeared superficially as variations of the standard prejudice against the sex. The distinctions were not at all in the fundamental premise, but merely those of conditional accomodations to contemporary in- fluences. Inviolate remained the idea that specific attributes, concomitant with the sexual nature of woman and peculiarly conducive to her subordination, were manifested by ‘39 her inherent mental, moral, and physical dis- abilities , or by ‘ b) her inherent moral supremacy and her mental and physical disabilities, or by 0) her inherent mental and moral equality and her physical disabilities. The end result in life for woman, by any of these assumptions, left her precisely where she always had been—-a social and political ex- communicant. The other concepts of the period, were those typified by the attitude of Charles Brockden Brown, unique and held only-by the most advanced, and that of Alexander Hamilton, entirely a calcula- tive product of a pragmatic philosophy. By the former, the idea of woman's nature was such that her privileges were equated exactly with man's, particularly on the mo- ral and intellectual plane; by the latter, the idea of woman's na- ture was equated with man's solely by the lowest common denominator of economic opportunism, without the slightest regard for her men- tal and spiritual endoments. These last concepts, so ethically disparate at the end of the eighteenth century, would be fused, by the historical compulsions of the nineteenth, into an irrefutable dialectic of militant feminism. Very tangible factors in the coun- try's nationalist expansion contributed to this unforseen develop- ment. Hamilton's perspicacity, in advising the employment of women in the stabilisation of an industrial economy was borne out start- lingly by 1845, when the female wage-earners in Amsrican textile industries exceeded the males by almost twenty thousand:36 One critic thus summarizes the long-range effects of this sociological phenomenon: "The crust of prejudice and customs, which rested upon woman's economic inferiority, was being pen- etrated by a new force-economic independence-- which at first gave no inkling that it was friendly to the advancement of woman's welfare." 37 The machinations of the concept of woman's inherent inferior- 'ity, by which she was rewarded for her factory work at a lower rate of pay than that given man for the same tasks, also contributed to- ward the hastening of her self-conscious maturity. In 1834, a group of New England mill workers openly banded together to protest the threatened lowering of their pay. In a dominant they issued , they bluntly stated that "The price of female labor is already too low, and the amount of labor that females have to perform too great . . ." 38 36. Thomas Woody, A History of Women's Education in the United States, II, 9. 37. Ernest R. Groves, The American Woman, 131. 38. Quoted from the periodical The Man, March 8, 1845, in A History of Women's Education in the United States, II, 30. 33 In 1845, the year in which the employment of women in the factories, exceeded that of men by the thousands, the former gathered in New York City to arouse public disapproval of the wretched conditions under which they labored. In a manifesto,39 signed by seven hun- dret of them, they protested their inadequate wages, and dedicated themselves to “the task of asserting their rights against unjust and.mercenary'employers-- The boon we ask is founded upon Eight, alone!" The italics are mine. More important far, than the overt act of protest, was the rationale by which it was justified. The key to the transformation in women's attitude toward her own worth in the secular scheme-— and the key to her final escape from.the prison of an ideological degradation-dwas to be found in her reliance, not upon special pleading for her sex, but upon the demand for her human rights. 0n planes other than the economic, indomitable feminist self- awareness developed out of the attritions of the abolition move- ment. The woman who, through her good fortune or through her own obduracy, had been educated during the first quarter of the nine- teenth century, reached maturity in the perilous hours of the na- tion's moral indecision. Social disorders, long-ignored, were mag- nified by the brooding antagonisms of economic sectionalism. By 1830, the nation's conscience was in the grip of what Merle Curti 4O termed an "ideology of reform." The only cure for conscience 39. Quoted from.the periodical The Nbrkingman's Advocate, March 8, 1845, in.a History of Wbmen's’Education in the United States, II,23. 40. Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought, 373. 34 and for moral ills, was in the practical fulfillment of the phil- osophies of the Enlightenment, of Utilitarianism and of Romanticimm. Out of her piety, woman early became a crusader against slavery. The opportunity to serve the cause of a class whose social and civil status appeared vastly inferior to her own was a heady one for the sex. Not satisfied with selfless efforts in the ranks of the cru- sade against evil, woman discovered sound reasons for initiating re- forms on her own. By the end of the century she had taken for her evangelistic province the whole range of social conduct. The ulti- mate program of the Wbman's Christian Temperance Union gives some idea of the extremes to which the sex rentin the period of its ear- liest moral independence. The WCTU, by the '80's, had taken on the correction or improvement of such problems as "Anti-Narcotics, Child Welfare, Christian Citi- senship . . . Franchise, Health and Heredity, . . . Kindergarten Legislation . . . Litera- ture . . . Medical Temperance. . . Parliament- ary Usage . . . Peace and International Arbi- tration, Penal and Reformatory‘Wbrk, the Press, Sabbath Observance . . . School Savings Banks, Sunday School . . . Worszmong Colored People, Wbrszmong Foreigners, work Among Indians, Ibrk Among Lumbermen . . . Wbrk.Among Railroad Employees, Wbrk:Among Soldiers and Sailors O O O" 41 Admittedly semi-farcical and transitory, these were the least con- sequential expressions of woman's intoxicating apprenticeship to that Great First Cause of all reforms--the anti-slavery movement. In sober fact, the abolitionary effort of the sex brough to reso- lution long-dormant and long-overdue urgencies for a re-evaluation 41. I. H. Irwin, Angels and.Amazons, 210. 35 of its own place in the scheme of American life; for what woman suddenly apprehended in the plight of the Negro made of her own a profound and witless travesty. How indigenously this awareness materialized, as an impender- able of the anti-slavery philosophy, may be seen in the following passage from Angelina Grimke's answer to the attack made upon her agitational work in behalf of the Negro: The investigation of the rights of the slaves has led me to a better understanding of my own. I have found the anti-slavery cause to be the school in which Human-rights are more fully investigated. H379 a great fundamental prin- ciple is uplifted and illuminated. Hanan be- ings have rights because they are moral beings; the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men have the same moral na- ture, they have essentially the same rights . . . My doctrine then is that whatever is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do . . . I believe it is woman's right to have a voice in all the laws and regulations by which she is governed, whe- ther in Church or State; and that the present arrangements of society, on these points, are a violation of human rights . . . 42 To the best of my knowledge, this simple and epochal declaration of a devout young Quakeress, in 1837, is the first consideration of the idea of the nature of woman made without reference to fac- tors of time, place, custom, or of physiology. That the publica- tion of this doctrine had an electrifying effect on the more aware women at the forefront of the abolition movement has been obscured for the historian of Arnerican thought by the subsequent militancy 42. Angelina E. Grimke’, Letters to Catherine E. Beecher, 114. of organised feminism. Around the Grimke’ sisters“? there rallied the most forthright and the most intellectual of the anti-slavery crusaders: Wendell Phillips, Lucretia Mott, Theodore Weld, who be- came the husband of Angelina, John Greenleaf Whittier, and eaten-- md’ others whose names have become legendary. The crisis into which the Grimke’s drew the cohorts of the most advanced liberal thought in America has never received the attention it deserves in accounts of the abolitionary era. Not only was ec- clesiastical orthodoxy thrown into panic by the idea of woman's rights interpreted as M 23112; but the very vanguard of the anti-slavery cause split over the question. What Angelina Grilke/ . . V: 2611444 really had effected was a complete M the evasive vocab- ulary of pro-feminist doctrine. 45" the terminology of natural WW6 mm- rhrpafzun'olhv—rl rights nopera ive theoryhe—ahmte-FW of political action, MW. Within a de- cade of Angelina Grimhei's enunciation of her creed and after her retirement from public life, her philosophy implemented a “Declar- ation of Sentiments ,"44 issued in 1848 by the First Woman's Rights Convention. 80 closely did it follow the spirit of the 61-1ka Letters that it might have served as an epilogue to them. But 43. Associated with Angelina Grimke’ in all of her activities was an older sister, Sarah, equally firm in heretical nqtions on woman, but more reserved in character. Sarah Grimke wrote a series of articles, published under the title Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman, 838. 44. History of Woman Suffrage, ed, by E. C. Stanton, 8. B. Anthony, H. J. Gage, 1’ 0. . 37 ethically, as well as in the explicitness of its indictnent of a masculine-designed society, the "Declaration of Sentiments" is in a more ancient tradition; like the De Nobilitate. . . Sexus Decla- gggé£_of.Agrippa three centuries earlier, it stands as a monumental landmark in the history of rational thought. II Included in the followidzaiggvgnssages from.aarly and.modern English and continental works. These substantiate my'assumpticn and/or seriously affected American attitudes. The inclusions are selective: a catholic sampling of recorded expressions from.areas as varied as those of literature, politics, theology, personal cor- respondence, diaries, and editorials. No examination was made of early'periodicals. The passages are arranged chronologically according to the earliest date of their expression. 38 Before 1600 l. The Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landgy, compiled for the In- struction of his Daughters, 1371; ed. from the MS in the British.Museum by Thomas Wright, Early English Text Society, No. 33, London, 1868. And therfor here is a good ensaumple to amesure [sic] in this meters bothe herte and thought. Also, a woman ought not to striue with her husbonde . . . as dede onis a woman that dede ansuere her husbonde afore straungers like a ramps . . . And he, that was angri of her gouernaunce, smote her with his fists downs to the erthe; and thanne with hys fote he stroke her with in the uisage and brake her nose, and oils her lyff after she had her nose croked . . . that she might not for shame shows her snails and gret langage, that she was wont to saie to her husbonde. .And therfcr the wiff ought to suffre and lets the husbonde haue the wordes, and to be maister, for that is her worshippe . . . -25 2. Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, 1509-10; ed. by Horace Bridges, Chi- cago, Pascal Covici, 1925. But because it seemed expedient that man, who was born for the transaction of business, would have so much wisdom as should fit and capacitate him for the discharge of his duty herein, and yet lest such a measure as is requisite for this purpose might prove too dangerous and fatal, I was advised with for an antidote, who prescribed this infallible recipe of taking a wife, a creature so harmless and silly, and yet so useful and convenient, as might nollify and make pliable the stiffness and morose humour of man . . . a sex so unal- terably simple, that for any of them to thrust forward, and reach at the name wise, is but to make themselves the more remarkable fools, such as endeavour being but a swimming a- gainst the stream, nay, the turning the course of nature . . . for as it is a proverb among the Greeks, that anggpe wdll be an ape, though clad in_pnrple; so a woman will be a woman, i.e., a fool, whatever disguise she takes up. -27 The idea of the nature of woman held by Erasmus is important in this survey because we have evidence that the writings of this humanist thinker ‘were included in the libraries of the early colonial Puritans (Literagy Culture in Ear-11 New England 1520-1739; T.G. Wright, 1920). It might 39 repay scholarly effort to discover how much the change in Erasmus' at- titude toward the sex, as demonstrated in In Praise of Folly and in the Colloquies, might have been related to his acquaintanceship with the training Thomas More gave his daughters and the intellectual achieve- ments of those young women. For other expressions see under Nos. 4 a. 5, 3. Sir Thomas More, Utopia, 1516; ed. by J'. Churton Collins, Oxford Clarendon Press, 1936. Husbandrye is a scyencs common to than all in-generall, both men and wanen, wherin they be all experts and ctmnynge . . . Besides hysbandry . . . euery one of them learneth one or other seuerall and particular science, as hys owns proper crafts . . . the women, as the weaker sorts, be put to the easere craftes. They works wull and flaxe. The other more laborsome sciences be camnitted to the me -59 For yt ya a solsmpne customs there, to haue lectures daylye earlye in the morning . . . bothe men and which, goe to hears lectures . . . -61 The wyfes bee ministers to theyr husbandes, the chyldren to theyr parents, and, to bee shorts, the younger to theyr elders. ~67 . . . so men that be wyllyngs to accompanys their husbandes in times of wares be not prohybyted or stopped. Yes, they provoke and exhorte them to yt wyth prayses. ~11? The pryestes, onles they be wanen (for that kynd is not ex- cluded fran pryesthode; howbeit few be chosen, and none but widdowss and old women) 4.32 . . . in the holly dayes that be the lasts days of the monethes and yeares, before they come to the churche, the wiffes fall downs prostrat before their husbandes feete at home . . . - ' -135 For other expressions see under No. 6. 4. Erasmus, Cglloguies, 2 vols., 1519; trans. by N. Bailey from the Latin text of P. Scriver's edition, 1643, and ed. by E. Johnson, London, Reevers at Turner, 1878. In the dialogue "The Lying-In Woman" Eutrapslus, an older man, is 40 discussing the merits of the sexes with sixteen-year old Fabula, who has Just borne her first child, a son: Fa. Eu. Fa . Eu. Fe. Fe. Eu. Fl. I believe you judge, that a male is naturally more ex- cellent and strong than a Woman. I believe they are. That is Mons opinion. But are Men any Thing longer- liv'd/than Women? Are they free fran Distempers? No, but in the general they are stronger. But then they themselves are excell'd by Camels in Strengthe/ O O O O O O O O 0 0 How comes it about then, that when there is but one Head, it/shculd not be common to all the Members of Christ ? And/besides that, since God made Inn in his own Image, whether/did he express this Image in the Shape of his body, or the/endowments of his Mind? In the Endowments of his Mind. Well, and I pray what have Men in these more excel- lent than we have? -I, 441-464 3. Erasmus, Collguies, 2 vols., 1519; trans. by N. Bailey fran the Latin text of P. Scrivsr's edition, 1643, and ed. by E. Johnson, London, Reevers at Turner, 1878. Antronius, the priest, is calling upon Magdalia, a wife who prides herself upon her intellectuality and, who might be tamed a sixteenth cen- tury "feminist." Ant. Mag. Ant. Mag. Ant. Mag. The Abbot and the Learned Woman . . . here's Books lying about everywhere. What have you liv'd to this Age, and are both an Abbot and a Courtier, and never saw arw books in a Lady's Apartment? Yes, I have seen Books, but they were French; but here I see Greek and Latin ones . . . Women have nothing to do with Wisdom. Pleasure is Ladies Business. . . . But why does this Household-Stuff displease you? Because a Spinning-Wheel is a Woman's Weapon. Books destroy Women's Brains, who have little enough of them- selves. . . ..As for myself, let me have never so little, I had rather spend them in Study, than in Prayers mumbled over 'without the Heart going along with them, or sitting whole nights in quaffing off Bumpers. 41 Ant. Bookishinsss makes Folks mad . . . By my Faith, I would not have a learned wife. 6. Sir Thomas more, Correspondence, ed. by Elizabeth F. Rogers, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1947; the letter quoted below was originally in Latin and is included in the Rogers edition; it ap- pears in an English translation in Foster Watson, Vives and the Rena- scsnce Education of Women, 175-176. Letter, 1521, to Gonell, Tutor to More's Daughters . . . neither is there any difference in harvest time, whether he was man or woman, that sowed first the corn; for both of them bear name of a reasonable creature equal- 1y, whose nature reason only doth distinguish from brute beasts, and there I do not see why learning in like manner may not equally agree with both sexes . . . I am.of epin- ion, therefore, that a woman's wit is the more diligently by good instruction and learning mannered, to the end, the defect of nature may be redresssd by industry. -Rogers, 12-123 -Watson, 175-176 For other expressions see under No. 3. 7. Beroher, William, The Nobilfgy of Women, 1559; with Introduction and Notes by R. Warwick Bond, London, Privately Printed for presentation to the members of the Roxburgh Club, 1904. News to go further I says that all vertue of men and wymen concyststh in the bodye and the mynds/and yt it is well kncwen that the:myndss be equally . . . in bothe/so that speaking indyfferently/thear is no dyffersnce betwixt man and woman concernengs the mynde/ That is not so (qd Iohn burghsse) for Aristotle saythe that thear is little dyffer- snce betwene wymen and beastes/and Maghom affirmethe that wymsn.have no sowlss but dueths w'th the body as other cres- turss voids of reason/ ~113 8. Richard Hooker, Works, 2 vols., 1593; ed. by the Rev. W.S. Dobson, London, 1825. Of the Laws onEcclesiastical Polity . . . since the replenishing first of earth with blessed inhabitants . . . did depend upon conjunction of'man and woman . . . So that woman being created for men's sake to 42 be his helper, in regard to the end before-mentioned; name- ly and having and bringing up of children, whereunto it was not possible they could concur, unless there were subalter- nation between them, which subalternation is naturally grounded upon inequality, because things equal in every re- spect are never willingly directed one by another: woman therefore was even in her first estate framed by Nature, not only after in time, but inferior in excellency also un- to man, howebit it so due and sweet proportion, as being presented before our eyes, might be sooner perceived than defined . . . As for the delivering of woman either by her father or by some other, we must note that in ancient times all wanen, which had not husbands or fathers to govern them, had their tutors, without whose authority there was no act which they did warrantable; and for this cause, they were in marriage delivered unto their husbands by others. ”Which custcm retained hath still this use, that it putteth wanen in mind of a duty whereunto the very imbecility of their na- ture and sex doth bind them; namely, to be always directed, guided, and ordered by others. -II, 62-63 1600-1650 9. Sir Thomas Overbury, The Wife, 1613; in the Overburian Characters, "A passiue understanding to conceiue, And Judgnent to discerne, I wish to find, Beyond that, all as hazardous I leaue, learning and pregnant wit in Woman-kind What it findes malleable maketh fraile, And doth not adde more ballaste, but more saile. Bookes are a part of man's prerogatiue . . ." a -482 10. Samuel Rowlands, The Bride, reprinted for the First Time from a Copy of the Original Edition of 1617; ed. by Alfred C. Potter, Boston, 1905. As was are bound by law of God and nature, Yealding true harts affection vnto men, Ordain'd to rule and gouerne euery. creature: Why then of all on earth that liue and moue, We should degenerate and monster proue -B 2 43 To take good wayes, and so become good wiues, Ile teach you certaine rules to leads your lines. The first is that she haue domestique cares, 0f priuate businesse for the house vvithin Leaning her husband vnto his affaires, 0f things abroad that out of doores haue bin: Nor intsnmdeddling as a number will, 0f foolish gossips, such as doe neeglect, The things which doe concern them, and too ill, Presume in matters vnto no effect: Beyond their element, when they should looks, To what is done in Kitchen by the Cooks. -D 6 ll. William.Wood, New-England's Prospect, 1635; select passages ed. by C.E. Stedman and E.M. Hutchinson, A Library;of.American.Literature,'Vol. I, 161-164. To satisfy the curious eye of women readers, who otherwise might think their sex forgotten, or not worthy a record, let them peruse these few lines, wherein they'may see their own happiness, if weighed in the woman's balance of these ruder Indians, who scorn the tutorings of their wives, or to admit them as their equals; tho' their qualities and industrious deeervings may justly claim.the preeminence, . . . their per- sons and features being every way correspondent, their qual- ifications more excellent, being more loving, pitiful, and modest, mild, provident, and laborious, than their lazy hus- bands. Their employments are many: building of houses . . . planting of corn . . . summer processions to get lobsters for their husbands . . . they gather flags, of which they make mats for'houses . . . hemp and rushes . . . In winter they are their husbands' caterers, trudging to the clam banks . . . their porters to lug home their venison . . . sew their hus- bands' shoes . . . weave coats . . . 0000...... . . . an aspsrsion, which I have often heard men cast upon the English there, as if they should learn of the Indians to use their wives in the like manner, and to bring them to the same subjection, as to sit on the lower hand . . . I do as- sure you, . . . that there is no such.matter; but the women find there . . . love, respect, and ease, as here in Old Eng- land . . . -I, 162. 12. John Winthrop, Journal, 1630-1649, 2 vols.; ed. by James K. Hos- mer, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908. Winthrop recorded the questions "debated and resolved" on the Anne Hutchinson problem, which was the chief concern of the assembly at its meeting in September. 1637: That though women might meet (sane few together) to pray and edify one another; yet such a set assembly, (as was then in practice at Boston,) where sixty or more did meet every week, and one woman (in a prophetical way, by resolving questions of doctrine, and expounding scripture) took upon her the whole exercise, was agreed to be disorderly, and without rule. -I, 234 For other expressions see under N0. 15. . 13. Captain John Underhill, News from America or a Late and Experi- mental Discovery of New-England, 1638; select passages ed. by 0.1:. Stedman and ESPY. Hutchins, A Lfi) rary of American Literature, 701.51. Captain Underhill describes his miraculous escape from death during an encounter with warlike Indians: Myself received an arrow through my coat-sleeve, a second against my helmet on the forehead; so as if God in his prow- idence had not moved the heart of my wife to persuade ms to carry it along with me (which I was unwilling to do,) I had been slain. Give me leave to observe two things hence: first, when the hour of death is not yet cane, you see God useth weak means to keep his purpose unviolated; secondly, let no man despise advice and counsel of his wife, though she be a wanan. It were strange to nature to think a man should be bound to fulfil the humor of a woman, what ems he should carry; but you see God will have it so, that a wanan should overcane a man. What with Delilah's flattery, and with her mournful tears, they must and will have their desire, when the hand of God goes along in the matter; and this is to ac- canplish his own will. Therefore, let the clamor be quenched I daily hear in my ears, that New-England men usurp over their wives, and keep them in servile subjection . . . If they be so courteous to their wives, as to take their advice in warlike matters, how much more kind is the tender affectionate hus- band to honor his wife as the weaker vessel! -I, 175-6 c't' 45 14. Anne Bradstreet, ”Queen Elizabeth," 1643; in Works, ed. by John H. Ellis, reprinted from the edition of 1867, New York, Peter Snith, 1932. She hath wip'd off th' aspersion of her Sex, That women wisdoms lack to play the Rex: But can you Doctors now this point dispute, She's Argument enough to make you mute. Now say, have women worth? or have they none? Or had they sane, but with out Queen is't gone? Nay Masculines, you have thus text us long, But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong. let such as say our Sex is void of Reason, Know 'tis a Slander now, but once was Treason. -359-361 A note following this poem reads ”This is dated 1643 in the first edi- tion,“ (Works, 362). Mrs. Bradstreet rendered a quite conventional tribute to the memory of Queen Elizabeth, but a line, here and there, such as I quote above, indicates that the Puritan poetess recognized the unfairness of the universal disparagement of her sex. For other expressions see under No mar, 15. John Winthrop, Journal, 2 vols., 1630-1649; ed. by James K. Hos- Naw York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908. April 13, 1645 Mr. Hopkins, the governor of Hartford upon Connecticut, came to Boston, and brought his wife with him, (a godly young wo- man, and of special parts,) who we fallen into a sad infirm- ity, the loss of her understanding and reason, which had been growing upon her divers years, by occasion of her giving her- self wholly to reading and writing, and had written many books. Her husband, being very loving and tender of her, was loath to grieve her; but he saw his error, when it was too late. For if she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men whose minds are stronger, etc., she had kept her wits, and might have improved then usefully and honorably in the place God had set her. .11, 225 For other expressions see under N0. 12. 46 16. Thomas Shepard, Memoir of His Own Life, 1647; select passages ed. by C.E. Stedman and E.M. Hutchins, A Library of American Literature, 701., I. This is the Thomas Shepard who, according to John Winthmp (Journal, I, 160) arrived in Massachussets Bay in 1635. The Lord hath not been wont to let me live long without some affliction or other . . . therefore, April the 2d, 1646, as he gave me another son, John, so he took away my most dear, precious, meek, and loving wife in child- bed . . . She was a woman of incomparable meekness of spirit, toward myself especially, and very loving; and of great prudence to take care for and order my family affairs, being neither too lavish nor sordid in am living thing, so that I knew not what was under her hands . . . -I, 219-220 1650-1700 17. John Cotton, Singing of Psalms a Gospel-Ordinance, 1650; select passages ed. by 0.1:. Stedman and E.M. Hutchins, A Library of American Lit- erature, 701., I. From that section of the Cotton commentary entitled "Concerning the Singers: Whether Women, Pagans, And Profane and Carnal Persons:" The second scruple about Singers is 'Whether women may sing as well as men . . . It is apparent by the scope and context of . . . Scriptures that a woman is not permitted to speak in tMChurch in two cases: 1. By way of teaching, whether in expounding or ap- plying Scripture. For this the Apostle accounteth an act of authority which is unlawful for a wonan to usurp over the man. II . . . And besides the wanan is more subject to er- ror than a man . . . and therefore might soon prove a se- ducer if she become a teacher. 2. It is not permitted to a wanan to speak in the Church by way of propounding questions . . . but rather it is required she should ask her husband at home . . . Nevertheless in two other cases, it is clear a wanan is allowed to speak in the Church: 1. In a way of subjection when she is to give ac- count of her offence. 2. In my of singing forth the praise of the Lord together with the rest of the Congregation . . . -I, 2664 47 18. Jeremy Taylor, A.Course of Sermons for All the Sundays in the Year, 1651; revised and corrected by the Reverend Charles P. Eden, Lon- don, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmas, London, 1850. From The Marriage Ring; or, The mysteriousness and Duties of Mar- riage: Marriage was ordained by God, instituted in Paradise, was the relief of a natural necessity and the first blessing from the Lord; He gave to man not a friend, but a wife, that is, a friend and a wife too; for a good woman is in her soul and the same that a man is, and she is a women only in her body; that she may have the excellency of the one, and the usefulness of the other . . . of their goods . . . the man hath the dispensation of all and-may keep it from.his wife, Just as the governor of a town.may keep it from the right owner; he hath the power, but no right to do so. -210-218 A husband's power over his wife is paterna1.and friendly, not magesterial and despotic . . . the power a man hath is founded in understanding, not in the will or force; it is not the power of coercion . . . the dominion of a man over his wife is no other than as the soul rules the body, . . . so is the authority of the wife then most conspicuous, when she is separate and in her proper sphere . . . in the nurs- ery and offices of domestic employment; but when she is in conjunction with the sun her brother, that is, in that place and employment in which his care and proper offices are . . . her light is not seen, her authority has no pr0per business. -219-222 19. Edward Holyoke, The Doctrine of Life, or of Man's Redemption, 1658; select passages ed. by C.E. Stedman and E.M. Hutchins, A Library of American Literature, Vol., I. The fable belOW‘WES entitled "How Tirzana Beguiled the King.” It tells of Solomon's fall "by the temptations of his idolatrous wives to the ruin of his Kingdoms and posterity, in granting them the liberty of conscience for the practice of their idolatrous Rites, framed by way of Dialoque between King Solomon and Tirzana the Queen." The story of our first parents must be conferred. When our first father was persuaded by his Wife with herself to break the commandment -- it should seem she persuaded him, for it is said: 'Because thou hearkenest to the voice of thy wife.’ And ever since women are weak to be seduced, but strong, even Satan's engine, to seduce the man with her enchantments . . . And if a woman be active, she will corrupt other women, and 'Vol. 48 after a little while men follow their wives, and corrup- tions gangrenate quickly and spread far. This the Apostle foretold, which came to pass afterward, but especially con- cerning Mahomet and in the Papacy . . . -I, 357 20. Samuel Sewall, Letter-Book, Massachussets Historical Society, 1, Sixth Series, Boston, 1186. The letter below is identified as a'Copy of Ea: Letter Eornj at Cambridge [illegible] paper (33011:) to Daniel Gookin (7-1" It is dated 1671. Ll Your Unkle, and Aunt Woodman desire kindly to be Remembered to you; as also little Betty. She can Read, and Spin pas- sing well; Things (Me saltem Judice) very desirable in a Woman. She read through one Volume of the Book of Martyrs, in three Months space; improving only leisure times at Night. -I, 19 17 00-17 50 21. Increase Mather, The Order of the Gospel, 1700. Quoted in The Puritan Oligarchy by T.J. Wertenbaker. that The Opinion of Increase Mather on the occasion that it was proposed all who were taxed to pay the minister's salary should have the privilege of voting in his election. Mott It would be simoniacal to affirm that this scared privi- 1ege may be purchased with money. If all that contribute have power to vote . . . then many women must have that privilege . . . to give or rather to sell that privilege away to all that will contribute must needs be displeasing With the Lome -60-61 22. Benjamin Franklin, Representative Selections, ed. by Frank L. and C.E. Jorgenson, New York, American Book 00., 1936. Do Good Papers, No. 7 From Monday, May 21, to Monday May 28, 1722 I find it a very difficult Matter to reprove Women separate 49 from the Men; for what Vice is there in which the Men have not as great a Share as the Women? . . . And now for the Ignorance and Folly which he [man] reproaches us with, let us see (if we are Fools and Ignoramus's) whose is the Fault, the Men's or our's. -102-105 22. Virginia Gazette, 1736. Quoted in Eggtomof Women's Education in the United States, 2 vols., by Thomas Woody, New York, The Science Press, 1929. October, 15-22, 1736 Then Equal Laws let Custan find, And neither sex oppress; More freedom give to Womankind, Or give to mankind less. -II, 254 23. Woman Not Inferior to Man or a short and modest Vindication of the Natural Right of the Fair Sex to a perfect Equality of Power, Dignity and Esteem with the Men, 1739 , by Sophie; second edition, London, John Ihwkins , 1739. There is no more difference to be discern'd between the souls of a dunes, and a man of wit, or of an illiterate person and an experienced one, than between a boy of four and a man of forty years. And since there is not at most any greater difference between the souls of Women and Men, there can be no real diversity contracted from the body; All the diversity then must come fran education, exercise and the impressions of those external objects which sur- round us in different Circumstances. -23 For answer to this essay see under N0. 24. 24. Man Superior to Woman: Or A Vindication of Man' s Natural Right of Sovereign Authority over the Woman . . . a plain Confutation of the fallacious Arguments of Sophia . . ., 1739, by A Gentleman, London. ‘I cannot see the Reason why they women are to be considered on a Level with the Men they bring forth, any more than the Mould in a Garden is to be equally valued with the Fruits it produces . . . Let Women then give up their Claim to an Equal- ity with the Men, and be content with the humble Station which Heaven has alloted them . . . since neither their Capacity of Head nor their Dispositions of Heart can lift them to emulate us, let them apply their little Talents at least to imitate us 50 . . . Let them remember that Man holds his Superiority over them by a Charter from Nature in his very Produc- tion . . . -l7-73 For essay to which this is an answer see under N0. 23. 25. Baptist Association.(Philadelphia), Minutes, 1746. Quoted in History of'Women's Education in the United States, Vol. II, by Thomas WOody, New York, The Science Press, 1929. Query: Whether women.may or ought to have their votes in the church in such matters as the church shall agree to be decided by votes? Solution: .As that in I Corinthdans xiv: 34-35, and other parallel texts, are urged against their votes, as a rule, and ought, therefore, to be maturely considered. If then, the silence enjoined on woman be taken so absolute, as that they must keep entire silence in all respects whatever; yet, notwithstanding, it is hoped that they may have as members of the body of the church, liberty to give a mute voice, by standing or lifting up of the hands, or the contrary, to signify assent or dissent to the thing preposed, and so aug- ment the number on the one or the both sides of the question. -II, 366 26. William.Livingston, Philosophic Solitude, 1747; select passages ed. by C.E. Stedman and £1.11. Hutchins, A Library of American Literature, Vol. II, 1889. "The Wife” Relate, inspiring muse: where shall I find A bloaning virgin with an angel mind? . . . supernal grace and purity divine: Sublime her reason, and her native wit Uhstrained with pedantry, and low conceit: Her fancy lively, and her judgment free From female prejudice and bigotry . . . -II, 450-2 1750-1800 27. Benjamin Franklin, Educational Views, ed. by Thomas Woody, New York, McGraw Hill Book 00., 1931. To Debby, "Dear Child,” 1758 You are very prudent not to engage in party disputes. Women 51 never should meddle with them except in endeavors to reconcile their husbands, brothers, and friends, who happen to be of contrary sides. If your sex can keep cool, you may be a means of cooling ours the sooner, and restoring more speedily that social harmony among fellow-citizens, that is so desirable after long and bitter disssnsions. -132 28. Ezra Stiles, Literary DiaryJ 3 vols., ed. by Franklin Bowditch Dexter, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901. March, 16-28, 1770 Mrs. Osborn &.ths Sorority of her Meeting are violently engaged and had great Influence. They & the 2 Deacons & Two Thirds of Ch. were warmly engaged for Mr. Hopkins . . . -1, 22 Stiles made this entry while his first wife lay dying. May 26, 1775 . . . she has lived a Life of rational, steady &.substan- tial Virtue e e e -1, 565 To appreciate the significance of the first entry which implies no adverse criticism of feminine agitational activities in support of a dis- puted ministerial position, one must compare it with John Winthrop's re- ports of the Puritan attitude toward Anne Hutchsnson's meetings (see under N0. 12) and with the view Of Increase Mather on the right of women to vote in the election of‘a minister (see under No.21). Nowhere in the reflec- tions of Ezra Stiles is there a more specific declaration of’a conscious attitude on the nature of'wmman. None is needed; the pervasive sympathy of this morally and intellectually civilized individual toward all facets of life highlights his concept of the innate dignity and privileges of woman. For other expressions see under Nos. 36 &,40. 52 29. Thomas Paine, Complete Writings, 2 vols., ed. by Philip S. Fonsr, New York, Citadel Press, 1945. While good evidence (F. Smith, "The Authorship of An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex, American Literature, II, N0v., 1930, 277-280) exists as to Paine's not having been the author of this essay long cred- ited to him, it is included in his m, because, appearing unsigned in the Pennsylyania Magazine (August, 1775), while Paine was editor, it in- dicates his partisanship. According to Mr. Fonsr, it even indicates the stylistic devices of Pains in certain passages that he probably revised. If we take a survey of ages and of countries, we shall find the women almost -- without exception -- at all times and in all places, adored and oppressed. Man, who has never neglected an opportunity of exerting his power,in paying homage to their beauty, has always availed himself of their weakness. He has been at once their tyrant and their slave . . . Society, instead of alleviating their condition, is to them.the source of miseries . . . Even in countries where they'may be es- teemed most happy, constrained in their desires, in the disposal of their goods, robbed of freedom of will by the laws, the slaves of opinion, which rules them with absolute sway, and construss the slightest appearance into guilt; surrounded on all sides by judges, who are at once tyrants and their ssducers . . . over three- quarters of the globe nature has placed them between contempt and misery . . . If woman were to defend the cause of her sex, she might address him.[man in the following manner: ' . . . If we have an squa right with you to virtue, why should we not have an equal right to praise? The public esteem ought to wait upon merit. Our duties are different from yours, but they are not therefore less difficult to fulfil, or of less consequence to society . . . More feeble in ourselves, we have perhaps more trials to encounter. Nature as- sails us with sorrow, law'and custom press us with con- straint'. . . ' -II, 34-40 30. Abigail Snith Adams, Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife, 1776-1784; ed. by Charles F..Adams, New York, Hurd.& Roughton, 1876. Mrs. Adams from Braintrss, Mass., to John Adams who was working in Philadelphia with the Continental Congress, 1776: 53 I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I sup- pose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you 'would remember the ladies and be more generous and fav- orable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such un- lhmited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all.nen would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not apid to the ladies, we are de- termined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold our- selves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation . . . That your sex are naturally tyran- nical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute; but such of you as wish to be happy wil- lingly give up the title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend. Why, then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us 'with cruelty and indignity with impunity? -l49-150 For attitude of John Adams see under Nos. 31 & 32. The remarkable factor about the passage above is that it was writ- ten by a colonial housewife fifteen years prior to the publication of Mary Wellstonscraft's'Vindication of the Rights of Women (1791). The tendency has been to dismiss, as no more than.the inconsequential chatter of a gen- teel lady, these well-considered ideas of Mrs. Adams. It is time that scholars evaluated the influence of the wife of John.Adams, upon his chang- ing philos0phy during that critical period in which he developed his ma- ture political bias. There is an abundance of evidence that Abigail Smith Adams played no minor, nor timid, role in her husband's intellectual devel- onnent. Her letters are marked by a sober consideration of the theories of Locke, Hobbes and Newton, and she argued with characteristic indepen- dence, in support of her own views. 31. John Adams, Works with a Life of ths.Author, by Charles Frances Adams, Boston, Charles C. little &.James Brown, 1851. To James Sullivan Philadelphia, 26 May, 1776 It is certain, in theory, that the only moral foundation of government is, the consent of the people . . . But to 54 what an extent shall we carry this principle? Shall we say that every individual of the community, old and young, male and female, as well as rich and poor, must consent, express- ly to every act of legislation? No, you will say, that is impossible. How, then does the right arise in the majority to govern the minority, against their will? Whence arises the right of men to govern the women, without their consent? Whence arises the right of the majority to govern, and the obligation of the minority to obey? . . . But why exclude ‘women? 'You will say, because their delicacy renders them un- fit for practice and experience in the great businesses of life, and the hardy enterprises of war, as well as the ar- duous cares of state. Besides their attention is so much engaged with the necessary nurture of their children, that nature has made them fittest for domestic cares . . . The same reasoning which will induce you to admit all.men who have no property, to vote, with those who have, . . . will prove that you ought to admit women and children; for, gen- erally speaking, women and children have as good judgments, and as independent minds, as those men who are wholly des- titute of property; these last being to all intents and pur- poses as much dependent upon others, who will please to feed clothe, and employ them, as wonen are upon their husbands, or children on their parents . . . -IX, 375-377 Fbr further expressions by Adams see under N0. 32. 32. John.Adams, Works, with a Life of the Author, by Charles Frances Adams, Boston, Charles C. Little &.James Brown, 1851. Entry in.Adams' Diary, 1778, while he was in France, commenting upon the national immorality of the nation, which he believed implicit in the laxity of feminine morals: From all that I had read of history and government, of human life and manners, I had drawn this conclusion, that the manners of women were the most infallible barometer to ascertain the degree of morality and virtue in a nation. .All that I have since read, and all the observations I have made in different nations have confirmed me in this opin- ion. The manners of women are the surest criterion by which to determine whether a republican government is prac- ticable in a nation or not. The Jews, the Greeks, the Re- mans, the Dutch, all lost their public spirit, their repub- lican principles and habits, and their republican forms of government, when they lost the modesty and domestic virtues of their women. . . . The foundations of nationa1.morality must be laid in private families . . . The mothers are the earliest and most important instructors of youth. -III, 171 For further expressions of Adams see under N0. 31. 33. William Alexander, M.D., The History of Women, From the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present Time, 2 vols., 1779, Dublin, Printed by J.A. This work is one of the more important bibliographical references listed in the History of WOman Suffrage (I, 29), which.probably indicates its popularity during the early period of feminist agitation. . . . we lay it down as a general rule, that to the differ- ences of education, and the different manner of living which the sexes have adopted, is owing a great part of their cor- poreal difference, as well as the difference of their intel- lectual faculties and feelings; and we persuade ourselves, that nature, in forming the bodies and minds of both sexes, has been nearly alike liberal to each; that any apparent dif- ference in the exertions of the 'strength of the one or the reasonings of the other, are much more the work of art than or nature.' 34. Hannathore, Essays on Various Subjects Principally Designed for ‘Young Ladies, Philadelphia, Young, Stewart &.McCulloch, 1786. . . . each sex has its respective, appropriate qualifica- tions . . . Nature, propriety, and custom have prescribed certain bounds to each . . . Women therfore never under- stand their own interests so little, as when they affect those qualities and accomplishments, from the want of which they derive their highest merit . . . Men . . . are formed for the more public Ixhibitions on the great theatre of human life. -1-2 By 1800 the reputation of Miss Hannah.More was as glorified by the American public as it had become in England. For other expressions see under 35. John Ledyard, The Life and Travels, 1787-88; select passages ed. Iu‘C.E. Stedman and E.M. Hutchins,.A Library of.American Literature, V01. III. .A sub-title to this passage in the Library of American Literature states that John Ledyard wrote.his account "at'Yakutsk, Siberia, 1787- 1788:' The Life and Travels was published in 1828. I have observed among all nations that the women ornament themselves, more than the men; that, wherever found, they are the same kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender beings; that they are ever inclined to be gay and cheerful, timer- one and modest. They do not hesitate, like men, to per- form a hospitable or generous action; not haughty, nor ar- rogant, nor supercilious, but full of courtesy and fond of society; industrious, economical, ingenuous; more liable in general, to err, than men, but in general, also, more virtuous, and performing more good actions than he. I never addressed myself, in the language of decency and friendship, to a woman, whether cilivized or'eavage, without receiving a decent and friendly answer. With.man it has often been otherwise . . . -III, 422 36. Ezra Stiles, Literary Diary, 3 vols., ed. by Franklin Bowditch Dexter, New'York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901. ‘April 22, 1788 This day my Wife [his second] finished Readg translatingl& parsing the first Psalm Alphabet &.Grammar . . . It is about 3 weeks since she first took the Hebrew'Alphabet &.Grammar in hand. And she has accurately parsed and resolved every word. 0 0 -III, 315 For other expressions see underVNos. 28 & 40. 37. Neah Webster, Woman's Education in the Last Century, 1790; select passages ed. by C.E. Stedman.and E.M. Hutchins,.A Library ofJMnerican Lit- erature, Vol. IV. In all nations a good education is that which renders the ladies correct in their manners, respectable in their fam- ilies, and agreeable in society. That education is always wrong, which raises a woman above the duties of her station. . . . Some knowledge of arithmetic is necessary for every lady. Geography should never be neglected. Belles-lettes learning seems to correspond with the dispositions of most females. .A taste for poetry and fine writing should be cultivated; for we expect the most delicate sentiments from the pens of that sex, which is possessed of the finest feel- ingS. .A course of reading can hardly be prescribed for all 1a- dies. But it should be remarked, that this sex cannot be too well acquainted with the writers upon human life and man- ners . . . Young people, especially females, should not see the vicious part of mankind. . . -IV, 148-149 57 38. Alexander Hamilton, Works, 9 vols., ed. by Henry Cabot Lodge, New York, G.P. Putnamis Sons, 1885-1886. From Report on Manufactures, December 5, 1791: . . . In places where those institutions [British examples of cottonmills,.employing women and children} prevail, be- sides the persons regularly engaged in them, they afford oc- casional and extra employment to industrious individuals and families, who are willing to devote the leisure resulting from the intermissions of their ordinary pursuits to collat- eral labors . . . The husbandman himself experiences a new source of profit and support from the increased industry of his wife and daughters . . . It is worthy of particular re- mark that in general, wanen and children are rendered more useful, and the latter.more early useful, by manufacturing establishments, than they would otherwise be. -III, 111-112 39. Alexander Hamilton, Warrenquams Letters, 2 vols., 1743-1777, 1778-1814: Massachussets Historical Society, 1925. To Marcy Warren, upon receiving a volume of her writing, Hamilton wrote with a traditional gallantry, alien to the cold objectivity of his attitude toward the sex as shown in his Report on Manufactures (see above) , . . the sex will find a new occasion of triumph. Not being a poet myself, I am in the less danger of feeling mortification at the idea, that in the career of drama- tic composition at least, female genius in the united States has outstripped the male . . . 40. Ezra Stiles, Literary Diary, 3 vols., ed. by Franklin Bowditch Dexter, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901. August 20, 1793 Reading Mrs. Mary Wollstonecraft Rights of Women. -III, 502-3 During the period in which Stiles was reading the controversial Rights of Women, it is indicative of his absolutely open attitude toward all human thought, that he makes no more biased comment on the contents of the book than the disinterested entry above. He does, however, chat- tily note that Joel Barlow and another friend had met Mary Wollstonecraft 58 and of their pleasant reaction to her. For further expressions see under Nos. 28 & 36. 41. Hannah.More's Interest in.Education and Government, by Luther Weeks Courtney, Unpublished Manuscript, University of Iowa, 1925. 1: From a letter Miss More wrote to Horace Walpole, quoted from.Memoirs 2£:the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, wm. Roberts, II, 372. I have been much pestered to read the 'Rights of WOmen,' but I am invincibly resolved not to do it. Of all jargon, I hate metaphysical jargon; besides there is something fantastic and absurd in the very title ... . I am sure I have as much 11- berty as I can make good use of . . . -41 42. Timothy Dwight, Travels in New-Englandgand NewfiYork, 4 vols., 1795; New Haven, 1821. Because of ill health, Timothy Dwight, President of‘Yale College, trav- eled during the years 1795 and 1797. He kept a journal of his observations, which was not published until 1821. The great doctrines of physical and moral science are as in- telligible by the mind of a female, as by that of a male; and, were they made somewhat less technical, and stripped so far of some of their unnecessary accompaniments as to wear in a greater degree the aspect of common sense, might be in- troduced with advantage into every female academy where the instructor was competent to teach them. It is evidently high time that women should be considered less as pretty, and more as rational, and immortal beings; and that so far as the circumstances of parents will permit, their minds should be early led to the attainment of solid sense and sound wisdom. The instructions, which are, or ought to be, given by mothers, are of more importance to the well-being of children, than any which are, or can be, given by fathers. To give these instructions, they ought as far as may be, to be thoroughly qualified, even if we were to act on selfish principles only..... It is earnestly to be hoped, that are long . . . women of this country, who, so far as they possess advantages, appear in no respect to be behind the other sex either in capacity of disposition to improve, may no longer be precluded from the best education by the negligence of men. -II, 475 59 43. Charles Brockden Brown, Alcuin, 1797: in.Memoirs of Charles Brockden Brown with selections from his Original Letters and Miscellan- eous Writings, ed. by William.Dunlap, London, 1822. The excerpt below is from "Paradise of Women," the only extant sec- tion of Alcuin, which appears in the Memoirs. Here a male citizen of the ”Paradise” is explaining the attitude there on complete sexual equality. There is no possible ground for difference. Nourish- ment is imparted and received in the same way. Their organs and secretion are the same. There is one diet, one regimen, one mode and degree of exercise, best adapted to unfold the powers of the human body . . . Who has taught you . . . that each sex must have pe- culiar employments? . . . One would imagine, that a- mong you, one had more arms, or legs, or senses, than the other. Among us, there is no such inequality . . . -269-274 44. Charles Brockden Brown, Ormond, or, The Secret Witness, 1799, ed. by Ernest Marchand, New York, American Book Co., 1937. Women are generally limited to what is sensual and orn- amental. Music and painting, and the Italian and French languages, are bounds which they seldom pass . . . The education of Constantia had been regulated by the pe- culiar views of her father, who sought to make her not alluring and voluptuous, but eloquent and wise. He therefore limited her studies to Latin and English. In- stead of familiarizing her with.the amorous effusions of Petrarchia and Racine, he made her thoroughly conversant with.Tacitus and Milton . . . he conducted her to the school of Newton and Hartley, unveiled to her the math, ematical properties and power of the senses, and dis- cussed with her the principles and progress of human society. -27 45. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Meryyn, or Memories of the'Year 1793, 2 vols., 1799; Philadelphia, David McKay Publisher, 1887. Eliza Hadwin is beseeching the man she loves to permit her*teaccompany him on his travels, if not as his wife, as his friend: Have I not the same claims to be wise, and active, and courageous, as you? If I am ignorant and weak, do I not owe it to the same cause that has made you so? and will not the same means which promote your improvement be 60 likewise useful to me? . . . Me, you think poor, weak, and contemptible; fit for nothing but to spin and churn. Provided I exist, am screened from the weather, have enough to eat and drink, you are satisfied. As to strengthening my mind and enlarging my knowledge, these things are valuable to you, but on me they are thrown away. I deserve not the gift . . . -II, 80-82 .Arthur Mervyn reviews his attitude toward feminine nature: I was surprised and disconcerted. In my previous reason- ings I had certainly considered her sex as utterly unfit- ting her for these scenes and pursuits to which I had des- tined myself . . . but now my belief was shaken, though it was not subverted. I could not deny that human ignorance was curable by the same means in one sex as in the other; that fortitude and skill were of no less value to one than to the other. -II, 80-82 There no longer is a question of Brown's standing as one of the earl- iest of our professional novelists and as the innovator of fictional hero- ines of an almost fierce independence and of a determined intellectuality. Too readily, however, critics have dismissed Brown's feminist bias as the "hangover” of an adolescent apprenticeship to "Godwinism with its Wollstone- craft corollary of woman's rights . . . ' (Fred Lewis Pattee, Wieland, xi). To these influences another authority (Ernest Marchand, Ormond,) has added that of Condorcet's fll'AMission des femmes au droit de 011-5. The as- sumption that Brown's radical idea of the nature of woman was solely the product of an.immature enthusiasm for continental doctrines ignores entirely the highly probable influence upon him of some extraordinarily advanced ex- periments in the higher education of the sex, which were taking place immed- iately around Brown in Philadelphia, prior to and coincidental with the pub- lications abroad that are credited with ferming his attitude. As a working journalist who moved between the intellectually aware groups of New York Gity and his native Philadelphia, Brown.must have known of the establishment in the latter community of a Female Academy as early as 1784 (Woody,.A History 61 flomen's Education in the United States, I, 365). It isn't likely that he would not have known also of the unprecedented lectures on chemistry and natural philosophy which were delivered to a class of wanen in Philadelphia by Dr. Benjamen Rush in 1987 (Benscn, Women in Eighteenth-Century America, 139). And he must have been aware that Dr. Rush, during the same period, read his "Thoughts Upon Female Education" at the exercises of a girls' school -- "the best known paper on femin- ine training given in America before 1790" (Benson, Op. cit., 137). As a practicing journalist, if not as a reformer, Brown would have been cog- nizant of the publication in 1794 of James A. Neal's An Essay on the Educa- tion and Genius of the Female Sex, in connect ion with a proposal to hold a lottery in order to raise funds for another girls' academy in Philadel- phia (Bensm, op. cit., 143) The chronology of the foregoing may prove of inestimeble weight in the establishment of the primary source of Brown's rejection of the tra- ditional idea of the nature of wonan. The element of timing of the Amer- ican expressions becomes of critical importance in relation to the pub- lication dates of European material commonly accepted as fostering Brown's major emphasis; Condorcet's essay appeared in 1790; Godwin's Concerning Political Justice in 1793 and his Caleb Williams the following year; Well- stonecraft's Rights of Women in 1791. The challenging factor of these dates is not their contemporaneousness with like expressions in America, but the fact that some of the European theory on woman's potential intel- lectual equality already had been put in practice in Philadelphia prior to gapublicat ion on the continent. Such evidence should make questionable the traditional appraisal of Brown's ideological indebtedness; it calls for serious investigation of the extent to which Brown knew of and was respon- sive to revolutionary trends in the advance of feminine status in his own country. 62 Correlative with this unexplored facet of Brown's intellectual his- tory would be a more thorough understanding of the effect upon him of his Quaker training. Except for'desultory cliches, such as the attributing of a ”mystical of soul, meditative, noncombative" temperament to Brownie Quak- erism (Fred Lewis Pattee, Wieland, x-ix), there has been no serious analysis of the influence of the theological factor in molding his attitudes. Now long over-due is a questioning, perceptive study of this provocative Amer- ican writer. 46. William Ellery Channing, The Life, 1880; by W.H. Channing, Boston, American Unitarian Association, 1904. From a letter, which Channing's nephew, his biographer, dates as hav- ing been written sometime between his eighteenth and twentieth years, be- tween 1798-1800: I have lately read Mrs. Wellstonecraft's posthumous works. Her letters toward the end of the first volume are the best I ever read . . . I consider that woman as the greatest of her age. Her 'Rights of Woman' is a masculine performance, and ought to be studied by the sex . . . Her principles re- specting marriage would prove fatal to society . . . These 1 cannot recommend. But on other subjects her sentiments are noble, generous, and sublime. She possessed a mascu- line mind, but in her letters you may discover a heart as soft and feeling as was ever placed in the breast of a .- man. -56 For further expressions see under No. 55. 1800-1850 47. Frances Wright, Views of Society and.Manners in America, in a Ser- ies of Letters from that country to a friend in England, 1818-1820; Lon- don, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme &.Brown, 1821. I often lament, that in the rearing of women, so little attention should be commonly paid to the exercise of the bodily organs; to invigorate the body is to invigorate the mind . . . The lords of creation receive innumerable, 63 incalculable advantages from the hands of nature . . . There is something so flattering to human vanity in the consciousness of superiority,that it is little surprising if men husband with jealousy that which nature has en- abled them to usurp over the daughters of Eve. -426-427 48. Thomas Jefferson, The Writings, 10 vols., ed. by Paul Leicester Ford, New York, G.P. Putnamfls Sons, 1899. Monticello, Sept. 5, 1816 To Samuel Kercheval . . . Were our State a pure democracy, in which all its in- habitants should meet together to transact all their business, there would yet be excluded from their deliberations, 1. In- fants, until arrived at years of discretion. 2. WOmen, who, to prevent depravation of morals and ambiguity of issue, could not mix promiscuously in the public meetings of men. 3 Slaves, from whom the unfortunate state of things with us takes away the right of will and property . . . -X, 45-46 For other expressions by Jefferson see under N0. 50. 49. Hannah Crocker, Observations on the Rights of Women, with their appropriate duties agreeable to Scripture, reason, and common sense, 1818; quoted in the History of Woman Suffrage, ed. by Elizabeth C. Stanton, Su- san B. Anthony75MatiIda J. Gage, Ida Harper, 6 vols., Rochester, 1881-1920, Vol. III. The wise author of Nature has endowed the female mind with equal powers and faculties, and given them.the same right of judging and acting for themselves as he gave the male sex 0 O C C O O O O O O O O O 0 According to Scripture, woman was the first to transgress and thus forfeited her original right of equality, and for a time was under the yoke of bondage, till the birth of our blessed Savior, when she was restored to her equality with man. . . . We shall strictly adhere to the principle of the impropriety of females ever trespassing on masculine grounds, as it is morally incorrect, and physically impossible. -III, 303 While I have found frequent mention of thiszhem, I have not found it available for examination. The editors of the History of Woman.Suffrage claim that the book was "the first publication of its kind in Massachusetts, if not in.America.” The feminists of the late nineteenth century deplored 64 the inconsistency with which Mrs. Crocker's second assertion practically obviates the radicalism of the first. Mrs. Crocker was the grand-daughter of Cotton Mather. 50. Thomas Jefferson, The'Writingg, 10 vols., ed. by Paul Leicester Ford, New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899. I have extracted the expression below from a long and rambling let- ter written in answer to a request for a plan of education for girls. For other expressions see under N0. 48. Monticello, March 14, 1818 To Nathaniel Burwell . . .4A plan of female education has never been a subject of systematic contemplation with me. It has occupied my attention so far only as the education of my own daughters occasionally required. Considering they would be . . . in a country . . . where little aid could be obtained from a- broad, . . . essential to give them a solid education, which might enable them, when they become mothers, to educate their own daughters, and even to direct the course for sons, should their fathers be lost . . . A.great obstacle . . . is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels . . . this poi- son infects the mind ‘~C . Pepe, Dryden, Thompson, Shakespeare, and of the French, Moliere, Racine, the Corneilles, may be read with pleasure and improvement.. . . The French language . . . is an indispensable part of education for both sexes . . . for a female . . . dancing, drawing, and music . . . household economy . . . The order and economy of a house are as honorable to the mistress as those of the farm to thexnas- ter... 9X, 104-106 51. washington Irving, Werks, 15 vols., ed. by Peter F. Collier, New York, 1897. Lines below are quoted frcm.The Broken Heart, a short story written in 1819. Man is the creature of interest and ambition. His nature leads him forth into the struggle and bustle of the world. Love is but the embellishment of his early life, or a song piped in the intervals of the acts. He seeks for fame, for fortune, for space in the world's thought, and dominion 65 over his fellow men. But a woman's whole life is a his- tory of the affections. The heart is her world; it is there her ambition strives for empire -- it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole soul in the trafic of affection; and if shipwrecked, her case is hepeless -- for it is a bankruptcy of the heart . . . Woman's is comparatively a fixed, a secluded and a medi- tat 1V6 lifee -I, 114 52. James Madison, Letters and Other Writings, 4 vols., 1816-1828, Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott &.Co., 1867. To Albert Picket and others September, 1821 Gentlemen, -- I have received your letter . . . . asking my opinion as to the establishment of a female college, and a proper course of instruction in it. The importance of both these questions, and the novelty of the first, would require more consideration than is al- lowed by other demands on my time, if I were better quali- fied for the task, or than is permitted indeed, by the tenor of your request, which.has for its object an early answer. The capacity of the female mind for studies of the high- est order cannot be doubted, having been sufficiently illus- trated by its works of genius, of erudition, and of science. That it merits an improved system of education, comprising a due reference to the condition and duties of female life, as distinguished tron those of the other sex, must be as readily admitted. How far a collection of female students into a public seminary would be the best of plans for edu- cating them, is a point on which different opinions may be expected to arise. ‘Yours, as the result of much observa- tion on the youthful minds of females, and of long engage- ment in tutoring them, is entitled to great respect; and as experiment alone can fully decide the interesting problem, it is a justifiable wish that it may be made; and it could not, as would appear, be made under better auspices than such as yours 0 -III, 232 53. North.American Review, XVII (1823), Anonymous review of Lectures on Physiology,gZoology, and the Natural History of Man, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons, by William Lawrence, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery to the College . . . London, 1822. The reviewer sharply criticized the author of the Lectures for pro- mulgating suchqopinions" as the following, which are quoted in the review: 66 'These organs [those within the skull] begin to be ex- ercised as soon as the child is born; and a faint glim- mer of mind is dimly perceived . . . the cerebral jelly becomes firmer, the mind gradually strengthens . . . be- comes adult . . . it is male or female according to the bOdy e e 0' -Article II, 13-32 54. Nerth.American Review, XVII, (1823), Anonymous review of The WOrks of maria Edgeworth in a new edition. The reviewer deplored the sterile influence of Miss Edgeworth's fa- ther on her talent and the domestic cares he inflicted upon her. The social tyranny which exacts of every female a certain portion of female littlenesses, is so strong, that even the possession of sovereign power and kingly talents to sway it, was not enough to emancipate Queen Elizabeth from the neces- sity of putting on some ladylike coquetries and airs . . . We will not engage in so difficult a speculation as that, whether there be a native difference between the intellect of men and women . . . In mawof the most important affairs of life the men have taken for granted that there is a marked inferiority on the part of the women, and have accordingly de- nied them a few small privileges, such as exercising of po- litical franchises and inheriting real estate . . . Where- ever nevertheless, women are called to administer affairs us- ually intrusted to men, it does not appear that they are apt to fail in masculine powers. -Article XII, 388 55. William Ellery Channing, The Life, 1880; by W.H. Channing, Boston, American Unitarian Association, 1904. lie. From a letter written by William.E11ery Channing to Mrs. Joanna Bail- For other expressions see under'No. 46. Boston, June 2, 1828 Your letter gives me reason to think that you accord with me . . . in the conviction, that Christianity is often injured by narrow and degrading modes of exhibiting it, and that its generous . . . ennobling influences are very imperfectly un- derstood. Allow me to say, that I take the more pleasure in making these inferences as to your state of mind, because your sex, with all their merits, -- and these are above praise, -- have had their full share in fixing the present low stan- dard of religion by the ease with which they have given up their minds to be awed and formed by vulgar and menacing tea- chers. I do hail the makers of intellectual freedom and mor- al courage in your sex with peculiar hope; for woman, through her’maternal and social influences, must always act on the 67 religion of a community with great power . . . -429-430 56. North American Review, XLII (1836), Anonymous essay, "The Social Condition of Woman,” Boston, 1836. It may seem to be an anamoly [sic] of Christian institu- tions, that while wanen are admitted by inheritance to the highest of all political stations, in hereditary monarchies, that of the throne, they are excluded from equal participa- tion with.men in the ordinary political privileges. They do not vote in elections; they do not sit in legislative bodies even where the right of enjoying them is hereditary . . . And whether the story of the Amazons be authentic history, or only . . . a fable, it presents at all events a poor picture of what society would become, if our councils were filled and our armies manned with women, and they rather than.man, or equally with men, discharged the external and political du- ties of society; doing so at the sacrifice of all that deli- cacy and maternal tenderness, which are among the most ap- propriate and the highest charms of Women. Here he the do- main of the moral affections, the empire of the heart, the co- equal sovereignty of intellect, taste, and social refinement; leave the rude commerce of camps and the soul-hardening strug- gles of political power to the harsher spirit of man, that he may still look up to her as a purer and brighter being, an.em- anation of some better world, irradiating like a rainbow of hope, the stormy elements of life. -489-513 For items in earlier editions of North American Review see under N0. 53. 57. H.B. Sprague, D.D., Letters on Practical Subjects to a Daughter, New York, John P. Haven, 1831. The object of education than is two-fold, to develop the facul- ties, and to direct them . . . In other words it is to render you useful to the extent of your ability . . . In the education of females, even this fundamental has too often been overlooked . . . Especially has this capitol error been committed in substi- tuting what is called an ornamental for a solid education. -27-28 58. Robert Dale Owen, Marriage Compact, 1832. Quoted in History of We- man Suffrage, ed. by Elizabeth C. Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda J. Gage, Ida Harper, 6 vols., Rochester, 1881-1920, Vol. I. New York, April 12, 1832 This afternoon I enter into a matrimonial engagement with.Mary Jane Robinson . . . We have selected the simplest ceremony which the laws of this State recognize . . . Of the unjust rights which in virtue of this ceremony an in- inquitous law tacitly gives me over the person and property of another, I can not legally, but I can morally divest my- self. And I hereby distinctly and emphatically declare that I consider myself, and earnestly desire to be considered by others, as utterly divested, now and during the rest of my life, of any such rights, the barbarous relics of a feudal, despotic system, soon, destined, in the onward course of im- provement, to be wholly swept away; and the existence of which is a tacit insult to the good sense and good feeling of this comparatively civilized age. 'I, 294s Robert Dale Owen composed thernarriage agreement from which I quote above, on the occasion of his marriage with Mary Jane Robinson. The cer- emony was performed in the presence of a Justice of the Peace, with only immediate faudly as witnesses and the compact signed by both parties of the union. 59. Mary Lyon, Prospectus, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, 1835; quoted in Pioneers of Women's Education in the United States, ed. by Willystine Goodsell, New'York,.McGraw-Hill Co., 1931. All her [the prospective woman student's] duties, of what- ever kind, are in an important sense social and domestic. They are retired and private and not public, like those of the other sex. Whatever she does beyond her own family should be but another application and illustration of social and domestic excellence. She may occupy the place of an im- portant teacher, but her most vigorous labors should be modest and undbtrusive. She may go on a foreign mission, there find a retired spot, whereeway from the public gaze, she may wear out or laygdown a valuable life. She may pronote the interests of the Sabbath school, or be an angel of mercy to the poor and af- flicted; she may seek in various ways to increase the spirit of benevolence and the zeal for the cause of missions; and she may labor for the salvation of souls; but her work is to be done by the whisper of her still and gentle voice, by the silent step of her unwearied feet, and by the power of her uniform and con- sistent examply. -290 60. De Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in.mmerica, 2 vols., 1835-1840; Translated by Henry Reeve, ed. by Henry S. Commager, New'York, Oxford Un- iversity Press, 1947. ,I have shown how democracy destroys or modifies the different inequalities which originate in society; but is this all? or does it not ultimately affect that great inequality of 69 man and woman which has seemed, up to the present day, to be eternally based in human nature? I believe that the social changes which bring nearer to the same level the father and son, the master and servant, the super- iors and inferiors generally speaking, will raise woman and make her’more and more the equal of man. There are people in Europe who, confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes, would make of man and woman beings not only equal but alike. They would game to both the same rights; impose on both the same duties, and grant to both the same rights . . . It hey readily be conceived that by thus attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded . . . It is not thus that the Americans understand that species of democratic equality which may be established between the sexes. They admit that as Nature has appointed such wide differences between the physical and moral consti- tution of man and woman, her manifest design was to give a distinct employment to their various faculties . . . -II, 401 If a reason were needed for including this pertinent treatise in a survey of ideas on the nature of woman in America, it might be found in the frequent mention of its title in polemical discussions by native writers, after its publication. As an example, Catherine E. Beecher, in her Qggestig_Economy, devoted to De Tocqueville's thoughts on American women almost six full pages of direct quotation. 61. Catherine E. Beecher, An Essay on Slavery and Abolition with ref- erence to the Duty of American Females, 1837, Philadelphia. It is Christianity that has given to woman her true place in society . . . A.msn may act on society by the collision of intellect, in public debates; . . . and he does not out- step the boundaries of his sphere. But all the power, and all the conquests that are lawful to woman, are those only which appeal to the kindly, generous, peaceful and benevo- lent principles . . . to be all accomplished in the domes- tic and social circle . . . then the fathers, the husbands, and the sons will find an influence thrown around them, to which they will yield not only willingly but proudly. -100-10l 7O 62. Catherine E. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the use of Young Ladies.At Heme and.At School, 1842; revised edition, New York, Harper &.Bros., 1852. . . . it is needful that certain relations be sustained, which involve the duties of subordination. There must be the magis- trate and the subject, one of whom is the superior, and the other the inferior. There must be the relations of husband and wife, parent and child . . . each involving the relative duties of subordination. . . . Society could never go forward, harmoniously, nor could any craft or profession be successfully pursued, unless these . . . relations be instituted and sus- tained . . . In this Country, it is established, both by epin- ion and by practice, that woman has an equal interest in all social and civil concerns; and that no domestic, civil, or po- litical institution, is right, which sacrifices her interest to promote that of the other sex. But in order to secure her the more firmly in all these privileges, it is decided, that, in the domestic relation, she take a subordinate station, and that, in civil and political concerns, her interests be in- trusted to the other sex, without her taking any part in vo- ting, or in.making and administering laws . . . The result of this order of things has been fairly tested . . . -26-28 63. Angelina Grimke, Letters to Catherine E. Beecher, in reply to an essay on Slavery and Abolitionism.addressed to A.E. GrimkE, 1837; revised by the author, Boston, 1838. The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own. I have found the.Anti-Slavery cause to be the school of morale in our land -- the school in which human rights are more fully investigated. Here a great and fundamental principle is uplifted and illuminated. Human beings have rights because they are moral beings; the rights of 211 men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men gave the same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights. When human beings are regarded as moral beings, sex, instead of being enthroned upon the summit, administering upon rights and responsibilities, sinks into insignificance . . . My doc- trine then is, that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it isnorally right for woman to do. Our duties originate not from differences of sex, but fran diversity of our relations in life, the various gifts and talents committed to our care . . . -114 Now, I believe it is woman's right to hanve a voice in all the laws and regulations by which she is to be governed, whether in Church or State; and that the present arrangements of society, on these points, are a violation of human rights a rank usurpa- tion of power, a violent seizure and confiscation of what is sscredly and inalienably hers . . . If Ecclesiastical and Civil 71 Governments are ordained of God, then I contend that woman has just as much right to sit in solemn counsel in Con- ventions, Conferences, Associations and General Assemblies as man 0 e e -118 64. Pastoral letter, 1837 Congregational (Orthodox) Association of Massachusetts. Quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, ed.,byi,Elizabeth C. Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda J. Gage, Ida Harper, 6 vols., Roches- ter, 1881-1920, Vol. I. The statement below is from that document which the Congregational Churches sent out to members, 1837, in an effort to discourage the de- termined Grimke/ sisters fron their public appearances in behalf of the slaves. III. We invite your attention to the dangers which at pre- sent seem to threaten the female character with wide-spread and permanent injury. The appropriate duties and influence of woman are clearly stated in the New Testament. These duties and that influence are unobtrusive and private, but the source of’mightypower. When the mild, dependent, softening influence of woman upon the sterness of'man's opinions is fully exercised, society feels the effects of it in a thousand forms. The power of wonan is her dependence, flowing from the consciousness of that weak- ness which God had given her for her protection, and which keeps her in those departments of life that form.the charac- ter of individuals, and of the nation . . . when.she assunes the place and tone of man as a public reformer, our care and protection of her seem unnecessary; we put ourselves in self- defence against her; she yields the power which God has given her for her protection, and her character becomes unnatural . . . We can not, herefore, but regret the mistaken conduct of those who encourage females to bear an obtrusive and os- tentatious part in measures of reform, and countenance any of that sex who so far forget themselves as to itinerate in the character of public lecturers and teachers. -I, 81-82 65. John Greenleaf Whittier, frcm a letter reprinted in The Grimke’ Sisters, by Catherine H. Birney, New‘York, Lee &.Shepard, 1885. This is fron the letter which provoked the response fron Angelina ./ Grimke (see under'No. 66.) Ass Office N.Y.C. / 14th of 8 mo. 1837 To the Grhmke Sisters In regard to another subject 'the rights of’woman.‘ ‘Your '72 lectures to crowded and promiscuous audiences are a sub- ject.manifestly, in many of its aspects, political, inter- woven with the framework of the government, are practical and powerful assertions of the right and the duty of woman to labor side by side with her brother for the welfare and redemption of the world. Why, then, let me ask, is it ne-u cessary for you to enter the lists as controversial writers in this question? .Doee it not look, dear sisters, like a- bandoning in some degree the cause of the poor and miser- able slave . . . for the purpose of arguing and disputing about some trifling oppressions, political or social, which we may ourselves suffer? Is it not forgetting the great and dreadful wrongs of the slave in a selfish crusade against some paltry grievance of our own? . . . -203-205 66. Angelina Grimke’, Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld,Angelina Grimke/ Weld and Sarah Grimke’ 1822-1844; ed. by 0.11. Barnes and D.L. Dumond, 2 vols., New York, D. Appleton-Century 00., 1934. While the letter from which I quote below is signed by Angelina and her sister Sarah, it identifies Angelina as the author. To John Greenleaf Whittier and Theodore Dwight Weld Brookline (Mass.) 8 MO. 20-1937 And can you not see that women could do, and would do a hundred times more for the slave if she were not fettered? . . . we are gravely told that we are out of our sphere even ‘when'we circulate petitions; out of our ”appropriate sphere" when we speak to women only; and out of them.when we sing in the churches. Silence is our'province, submission our duty. . . . If I know my own heart, I am NOT actuated by any selfish considerations (but I do sincerely thank our dear brother J. G. W. for the suggestion) but we are actuated by the full con- viction that if we are to do any good in the Anti-Slavery cause, our rigpt tto labor in it must be firmly established; not on the ground of Quakerism, but on the only firm.bases of human rights, the Bible . . . I contend . . . that this is not Quaker doctrine, it is no more like their doctrine on Women than our Anti-Slavery is like their Abolition, just about the same difference. I will explain.myse1f. Women are regarded as equal to men on the ground of spiritual gifts, 2.91 on the broad ground of humanity. Women may preach; this is a gift; but wonan must lot-make the disci- pline by which she herself is to be governed . . . .1, 426-27 For Whittier's letter see under No. 65. For'Weld's under Nos. 69 &.70. 73 67. Sarah Grimke’, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Con- dition of Woman, Boston, 1838. These are the letters which originally appeared in The §pectator, 1837, an Anti-Slavery journal, and led to the criticisms of John Green- Whittier and Theodore D. Weld, as an unnecessary confusion of issues with the cause of the Negro (see under Nos. 65, 69, at 70 .) ,- The content of these Letters, in many instances, is a paraphrase of Angelina Grimkel's Letters to Catherine E. Beecher. As Sarah was a sensitive and profound individual in her own right, it cannot be assuned that she echoed the younger wonan's ideas; as in many of their expressions, individual atti- tudes expressed mutual convictions. God created us equal; -- he created us free agents; -- he is our Lawgiver, our King and our Judge, and to him alone is woman bound to be in subjection, and to him alone is she ac- countable for the use of those talents which her Heavenly has entrusted her. -8 68. Sarah Grimke,, Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Gr!an_kj_e__I Weld and Sarah Grimke, 1822-1844, ed. by G.H. Barnes and D.L. Dumond, 2 vols., New York, D. Appleton-Century Co., 1934. To Henry C. Wright Groton Enaesg 8/12/37 I cannot consent to make my Quakerism as excuse for my exercising of the rights and performing the duties of a rational and responsible being, because I claim nothing in virtue of my connection with the Society of Friends; all I claim is as woman and for any woman whom God qual- ifies and commands to preach his blessed Gospel. I claim the Bible not Quakerism as my sanction . . . -I, 420 69. Theodore D. Weld, Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke/ Weld and Sarah Grimke, 1822-1844, 2 vols., ed. by G.H. Barnes and D.L. Du- mond, New York, D. Appleton-Century Co., 1934. To Angelina Grimke,, New York, NeYe JW 2203?. Why: folks talk about women's preaching as tho' it was next to highway robbery -- eyes esters and mouth agape. Pity '74 women were not born with a split stick on their tongues: Ghostly dictums have fairly beaten it into the heads of the whole world save a fraction that mind is sexed, and Human rigts are sex'd, morals sex'd . . . -I, 411 70. Theodore D. Weld, Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke’, Weld, and Sarah GrimkgL 1822-1844, 2 vols., ed. by G.H. Barnes and D.L. Du- mond, New York, D. Appleton-Century Co., 1934. To Angelina and Sarah Grimke, . New York, August 15.37. 1. As to the rights and wrongs of wonen, it is an old theme with me. It was the first subject I ever discus- §_9_d_. In a little debating society when a boy, I took the ground that p93; neither qualified nor disqualified for the discharge of any function mental, moral or spir- itual; that there is no reason why woman should not make laws, administer justice, sit in the chair of state, plead at the bar or in the pulpit, if she has the qualifications, just as much as tho' she belonged to the other sex. . . I advocate now, that woman in EVERY particular shares equally with man rights and responsibilities . . . Weld was an energetic, disinterested and utterly fearless crusader in the vanguard of the reformist movements of the nineteenth century. He was inspired by Finney and Garrison, a leader of the "Lane Rebels," an intimate of Whittier, the Motts, and the adviser, friend and, later, the husband of I Angelina Grimke. 71. Horace Mann, Life and Works, 5 vols., Boston, Lee 8:. Shepard, 1891. From an address "Special Preparation A Prerequisite to Teaching,” 1838: . . . I wish it to be considered more deeply than it has ever yet been, whether there be not, in truth, a divinely appointed ministry for the performance of the earlier services in the sacred temple of education. Is there not an obvious, consti- tutional difference of temperament between the sexes, indicative of pre-arranged fitness and adaptation, and making known to us, as by a heaven-imparted sign, that wonen, by her livelier sensi- bility and her quicker sympathies, is the fore-chosen guide and guardian of children of a tender age? After a child's mind has acquired some toughness and induration, by exposure for a few years to the world's hardening processes, then let it be subjected to the firmer grasp, to the more forcible, subdm'ing power of 75 masculine hands, . . . why should woman, lured by a false ambition to shine . . in courts or to mingle in the clash- ing tumults of men, ever disdain this sacred and peaceful ministry? Why, renouncing this serene and blessed sphere of duty, should she ever lift up her voice in the thronged market-places of society, higgling and huckstering to bar- ter away that divine and acknowledged superiority i2 sen- timent, which belong to her own sex, to extort confessions from the other, of a mere equality in reason? -II, 99-100 72. Horace Mann, Life and Works, 5 vols., Boston, Lee &.Shepard, 1891. _ And how without books, as the grand means of intellectual cultivation, are the daughters of the State to obtain that knowledge on a thousand subjects, which is so desirable in the character of a female, as well as so essential to the discharge of the duties to which she is destined? . . . the sphere of females is domestic. Their life is compara- tively secluded. The proper delicacy of the sex forbids them appearing in the promiscuous marts of business, and even from.ningling . . . in those less boisterous arenas, where mind is the acting agent . . . -III, 37 From the.Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board of'Education of Massachussets, 1839; Horace Mann's arguments to subtantiate clahn for es- tablishment of state libraries. From 1827 to 1837 mann.was a member of the Massachusetts Legislature and, during the last year, secretary of the state board of education. In 1853 Horace Mann became president of Antioch Col- lege. For other expressions see under Nos. 71 & 90. 73. Daniel Webster, Works, 6 vols., 17th edition, Boston, Little, Brown, &.Co., 1877. From an address to a gathering of ladies who had been his hostesses in Richmond, Virginia, during one of Webster's tours, October 5, 1840. . . . The rough contests of the political.world are not suited to the dignity and the delicacy of your sex; but you possess the intelligence to know how much of that happiness which you are entitled to hope for, both for yourselves and for your children, depends on the right administration of government, and a proper tone of public morals. That is a subject on which 76 the moral perceptions of woman are both quicker and Juster than those of the other sex. I do not speak of that admin- istration of government whose object is merely the protec- tion of industry, the preservation of civil liberty, and the securing to enterprise of its due reward. -II, 105-106 74. Harriet Martineau, Society in America, 2 vols., New York, Saunders & Otley, 1837. . . . on the whole, the scanty reward of female labour in America remains the reproach to the country which its phil- anthropists have for some years proclaimed it to be. I hope they will persevere in their proclamation, though spec- ial methods of charity will not avail to cure the evil. It lies deep; it lies in the subordination of the sex; and up- on this the exposures and remonstrances of philanthropists may ultimately succeed in fixing the attention of society; particularly of women. The progression or emancipation of any class usually, if not always, takes place through the efforts of individuals of that class: and so it must be here. All wanen should inform themselves of the condition of their sex, and of their own position. . . . is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Inde- pendence bear no relation to half of the human race? If so, what is the ground of limitation? If no so, how is the re- stricted and