Part 6
“To be joyous in my work, moderate in my pleasures, chary in my confidences, faithful in my friendships; to be energetic but not excitable, enthusiastic but not fanatical; loyal to the truth, as I see it, but ever open-minded to the newer light; to abhor gush as I would profanity, and hate cant as I would a lie; to be careful in my promises, punctual in my engagements, candid with myself and frank with others; to discourage shams and rejoice in all that is beautiful and true; to do my work and live my life so that neither shall require defence or apology; to honor no one simply because rich or famous, and despise no one because humble or poor; to be gentle and considerate toward the weak; respectful yet self-respecting toward the great, courteous to all, obsequious to none; to seek wisdom from great books and inspiration from good men; to invigorate my mind with noble thoughts, as I do my body with sunshine and fresh air; to prize all sweet human friendships and seek to make at least one home happy; to have charity for the erring, sympathy for the sorrowing, cheer for the despondent; to leave the world a little better off because of me; and to leave it, when I must, bravely and cheerfully, with faith in God and good will to all my fellow-men; this shall be my endeavor during the coming year.”
When a woman learns to turn her back upon the common, the regular, the accepted, and prove for herself the blessedness of solitude, she learns to find her mental balance.
“The love or hatred of solitude,” says Schopenhauer, “does not depend on the good or evil disposition of the heart, but on the natural wealth or poverty of the mind.” Let us go farther and say it depends also upon the amount of mental discipline and the habit of standing upon one’s own intellectual feet. We need to love the silence of the stars and the blackness of midnight. We need the courage to face ourselves in the blessedness of solitude. What the crowd gives is only an average, a commonplace goodness; let us be strong enough to seek acquaintanceship with the highest by the only legitimate path, which is marked “Solitude,” and be thankful if it be not hedged about by thorns and thick darkness.
To the woman who would be individual, who wants to be an inspiration and a beneficence, there is but one message: Be not afraid of yourself; get acquainted with the deeps of your own nature; face the shortcomings of your own spirit. Go into the open country alone if you can; if not, take a little time out of every twenty-four hours to think. Just as the observance of the Sabbath is a wise thing from a physiological standpoint, so are self-communion and its breathing spaces a blessing to the individual.
As I have said before and say often, it rests with the woman herself whether she will be like a rose tree, full of brightness and fragrance, a help, a comfort and an inspiration; or whether she will degenerate into a mere replica of other women who wear good clothes, do and say the conventional, commonplace thing and are as uninteresting as a sunset without a flush of color. Are we “building ourselves fairy palaces proof against all adversity?” Are we learning the continuous habit of serious consecutive thought and clearing our minds from the loose-fibred accumulations of generations?
If girls could be left to themselves as boys are, and allowed to know from childhood the blessed privilege of unconscious self-companionship, and the solitary communion of earth and air and sky, would not the other side of their natures be developed? Would not they learn to form their own opinions, and hold independent ideas, just as naturally as boys? To those occasional seasons when a woman seems to have lost her hold on life is owing some of the most helpful work ever given to the world. Take the case of Helen Hunt. What poet has ever given us more real heart-lifting words, more soulful encouragement and inspiration than she? And yet, not until after grief and bereavement had swept in a perfect storm over her life and left her prostrate, not till after she had for months blankly faced the problem of a seemingly blasted life, did she begin to realize the object of her existence—the message of help for the world which must come through bitter pain and trial. Not until after she knew the blessedness of solitude, and had wrestled alone with her angel of renunciation did she see the lesson of life and experience the strength that comes after drinking the cup of disenchantment.
There is no such thing as standing face to face with our inmost selves, of divesting ourselves of all pretense and sham while in the company of others, even the most intimate friend. “We do not speak our deepest feelings—our inmost thoughts have no revealings.” A certain sensitiveness debars us, even when we would do so, from showing either our best or our worst qualities. We even keep them veiled from ourselves, except when some exigency of sorrow or surprise reveals them momentarily, or we face ourselves alone in the blackness of night. It is then that real thought begins, that independence of intellect is generated, that the power of concentrated, serious mentality begins. A prominent woman writer, in an account of her travels in Scotland, tells of a half-hour in which she was left behind in a rough climb, by her companions. “To see the falls was of small account,” says she. “But just once in a lifetime to have a few blessed moments all to one’s self in those sweet, wild Highland solitudes, would not that be worth the having?” That half-hour was worth more than a whole week of castle-seeing in company with a crowd of tourists. A good digestion is as necessary to a hearty dinner as the viands composing it. And there are plenty of thoughtful women who can say with truth, “I should die if I could not sometimes be alone.” We may love our friends never so well, but there are times when we must face ourselves and “take account of stock” intellectually and morally.
There is a delight beyond expression in the realization of mental and spiritual individuality. To know and to feel that one is an independent, thinking being with the divine right to judge for herself, and the capability for sustained mental work, is an inheritance which woman is now coming into with deep and holy joy.
The world needs strong women more than ever before; it needs them as the established rule, not as the exception. What have you and I to do about it? Let us have less “gabble” and more real gain; less noise and flurry and more of the benefits of heart-stillness.
Be still; the crown of life is silentness. Give thou a quiet hour to each long day. Too much of time we spend in profitless And foolish talk—too little do we say.
If thou wouldst gather words that shall avail, Learning a wisdom worthy to express, Leave for a while thy chat and empty tale— Study the golden speech of silentness.
XI
ON WOMEN’S CLUBS
It has been the fashion, and is still with a certain class of people, to disparage the woman’s club. They say the club is a place where gossip and backbiting flourish, and the virtues of love and charity and tolerance are chiefly conspicuous by their absence. I have even known a brilliant lecturer, who depends for her audiences on these same women’s clubs, to refuse to lend a hand in any active work, saying she “did not believe in women’s clubs, because the members are selfish, self-seeking and trivial; because the club women are all envious and uncharitable.”
Now, isn’t this sweeping accusation rather unjust? When we look about and see what women have accomplished for their own sex since the clubs were established; when we look about and see what the clubs are really doing to-day for their communities; when we count up the libraries, the improved sanitary conditions of towns and cities, the increased educational advantages; when we realize the increased average intelligence of the average woman who belongs to current events classes and literary clubs; when, in short, we note the broadening of character in the average individual club woman, is this a fair statement?
To be sure, there are narrow-minded, envious women in clubs. Alas! we all know them. One such woman is enough to injure seriously the work of a small club; half a dozen of her can give a large club a bad name—a reputation for backbiting and all uncharitableness. Half a dozen such women can keep a club in a chronic quarrelsome state, and by spreading evil reports outside can destroy all its usefulness in a community. But in the most notorious of such affairs the trouble is caused by a mere handful of narrow-minded women, while nine-tenths of the membership sit sadly by in shamed silence. Shall they be condemned because of the quarrelsome few?
But in the vast majority of clubs the spirit of petty rivalry and self-seeking which is sometimes noticeable in individual cases is fast disappearing, or has never materialized. There is such a great and splendid work for the women’s clubs to do that the earnest, noble, unselfish woman becomes absorbed in something beyond self-seeking. She ceases to care whether her name stands first on the list of committees, or, indeed, whether it is there at all. She ceases to mind if she is left off the list of after-dinner speakers at the annual banquet. She ceases to suffer an envious pang because her enemy is asked to write the club poem, for the simple reason that she has ceased to be conscious of an enemy.
She has ceased to feel the slights which may have grieved her in the past, because she has ceased to “wear a chip on her shoulder.” She has come to rejoice and be glad in any good thing that may befall any good woman because she has grown broad-minded enough to recognize that honor and glory falling to one woman mean honor and glory for the cause of all women; that in these days the advancement of woman and the glory of womanhood comes to all and for all and through all of us. For such is the real sisterhood of woman. The club movement was never more serious, perhaps never so earnest as it is to-day. It may be because women are finding how much better it is to do than to talk, to be than to vainly imagine. As one bright woman said: “It doesn’t always mean that a woman is growing because she talks a great deal.”
The ordinary club woman who is a busy wife and mother seeks her club as a rest and a change from the activities of home; the friendships she forms there make an added interest to her life and help to get her out of the treadmill of her daily existence. The ordinary wife and mother has plenty to do in her own family, to be sure, but she can do that plenty ten times as well for the change that is afforded by an hour or two at the club each week; for there she is transported to a different environment, sees through another pair of eyes and comes in contact with another set of minds. She goes home rested, refreshed and stimulated through her club friendships. She has not belittled herself with club gossip, but she has enlarged her sympathies and taken a fresh outlook on life.
If this is true of the woman who has her days crowded full with home ties and home interests, how much more is it true of the woman who has no home ties; and unfortunately we have hundreds, yes, thousands of such women in this country. In the club memberships there are not only many unmarried women, but there are widows who have been bereft of their families, and a goodly proportion of comfortable matrons whose children have grown up and left home, either to establish nests of their own or to go into business for themselves. The club has been the salvation of all these women and has prevented their growing old before their time. “There are no old women nowadays,” says some one, and it is largely because we have women’s clubs, where women keep young without thinking about it.
There is nothing that develops a woman better, or that broadens her character more than a club life. Give her something to think about, something to take away with her when she comes into the club; she will soon be willing to do her share of the work, and then she will begin to grow. Many a fine president of to-day can recall the time when she was afraid of her own voice, when she accepted her first bit of committee work with fear and trembling. And she knows that the years between have been years of growth and helpfulness and work for others. For, after all, that is the true secret of the good club woman—helpfulness to others. She who goes on to committees and works her way through the lower offices and up to the president’s chair simply from personal ambition and self-seeking pride, is not the good club woman, nor the really successful one. For in these modern days personal ambition is more plainly discerned than it used to be, and the woman who climbs into the presidential chair merely for personal glorification is not destined to sit there long.
There must be a higher, a more altruistic purpose. The best president is she who is so full of plans for the elevation of the club and the development of every member that she forgets herself. And so she becomes at once the servant and the queen of clubs. In short, the club movement is to-day one of the greatest factors in the world’s progress; and he or she who proclaims a disbelief in it because of the shortcomings of some few club acquaintances lacks the faculty of a comprehensive perception of the things of to-day as well as of prophetic insight into the future.
But when your club begins to be a bore, it is time to leave it. It is a mistake to hold that by staying in it with a sense of resignation you are discharging any sort of a duty to yourself or anybody. The fault is either with you or the club, of course. If it is the former, you can drop your connection with it without formality, with the understanding with yourself that it is to be taken up again after a little; if it is the latter, you would do better to go to work so to change the aspect of the club that it will hold all of its old interest for you. But if you do take a vacation in this fashion yourself, you need not be afraid of losing interest altogether. The certain result will be only a feeling of being outside everything and alien in interest to that of your friends, and the end so brought about will be the one you want. You will go back to your club with a new appreciation and be of new service to it. When a club gets to be an unpleasant duty its best function is missing. The self-seeking, ambitious woman, the woman who uses the club merely as a pedestal on which to pose before an admiring world, or as a stepping-stone to get into a higher grade of society than she has previously known, having only her own selfish aims at heart, has only a short-lived success, and appears with less frequency every season. The club does not want and will not keep such women as leaders. To-day the club leader must have a higher aim and a broader culture, and, added unto these, a genuine desire to help humanity to better things than the superficial woman who “must stand in the full glare of the footlights at any cost.”
More than that, the woman who sees in the club movement of to-day nothing beyond that very primitive stage when women wrote papers from encyclopediac notes, or when they begged or hired some other person to write them, has not passed the a b c class of the women’s clubs. It is a beautiful idea, isn’t it? that to-day women are reaching hands across mountains and plains and establishing hearty, whole-souled friendships in every part of this great country. What would our grandmothers have said at the very idea of corresponding freely and intimately with women of whose ancestors they knew nothing and whose names, even, they had not heard a few months before? It is one of the beauties of the club movement of to-day, that we are opening our hearts to each other in this way: that our ideas of helpfulness make us forget the old conventionalities and that the broader outlook which belongs to the woman of to-day is contagious. For it is impossible to get drawn into this larger view of club life and remain contented with a narrow horizon. We are bound to grow and to throw off the shackles of prejudice and pettiness. We cannot help it.
Of course, there are certain dangers connected with club life. Our activities multiply and we are in danger of being drawn into a vortex that will threaten to swallow us. When the club season begins some of us will venture into the outer edge of a whirlpool that, unless we can manage to hold ourselves steady and keep our mental poise, will suck us under, and we shall go on and on in the concentric circles until we are wrecked, nerves and mind. There is little doubt that overwork in so-called “club-duty” has reduced more than one woman to nervous prostration. This is a gloomy view of the case, I know, and I shall be blamed for giving utterance to it; but is it not the truth? Are we not too apt to take ourselves too seriously? If we are individually of “greater value than many sparrows,” are we not individually of greater value, to ourselves and our families at least, than many clubs?
Not but what the club stands for a serious part of our life-work; not but what we should be willing to bring to it the best of ourselves and most earnest labors and affection. But what I deprecate is the mistaken view of club work which we are in imminent danger of taking. When we allow ourselves to be drawn into the whirling vortex made up of club classes, too many clubs with the varying interests, too great a multiplicity of club committees, receptions and club teas by the score, until the very name of them nauseates us, the scramble for office (either for ourselves or our friends) and the numerous petty trials and tribulations that follow in the wake of all these things; then we are not getting the best results from club work ourselves, nor giving them to others, either. “There is but one way to become a perfect, all-round club woman, and that is by being a perfect all-round woman.” And the first essential for that is, to find and keep our mental poise—to make ourselves something more than a social chatterbox or a bundle of nerves.
Those writers who are fond of descanting on the injury to the home that attends club membership seldom understand their subject. As one woman, responding to a toast on “The Club Husband,” puts it:
“The unwritten law of the ideal women’s club is: This club exists for the happiness of the whole family. When that ceases, the club’s reason for existence will cease. So long as we are thus considerate, never allowing our club life to absorb the attention that belongs to our home life, just so long may our club husband snap his fingers at the people who try to pity him. Let the critics carp. They are like the young girl who walked through her uncle’s chair-factory, and gazed at the rows upon rows of chairs, saying, ‘Why, uncle, what can you ever do with all these chairs?’
“‘Don’t you fret, Maria, settin’-down ain’t goin’ out o’ fashion!’
“The making of homes and cherishing those in them is not going out of fashion, and the club husband would be the first to agree to it.”
The club is meant, primarily, for all classes of women. The constitution of about every club in the land will tell you that it is banded together for the elevation of women in its own community and for the purpose of bringing them together for moral and social advancement—or words to that effect. If this means anything, it means that the butcher’s wife and the baker’s wife and the candlestick-maker’s wife are on a level in the club with the wives and daughters of millionaires, should the latter condescend to become members; though, for that matter, in these latter days some of our greatest millionaires are butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers, dignified by the names of pork-packers, biscuit producers and silver manufacturers. And yet in our clubs are a great many women who find it hard to make both ends meet. Many of these are quite as well educated as any member of the club to which they belong; others are not; but in any case the club idea places all on an equality, and it is in every club member’s power to contribute something to the permanent happiness of all the others.
There are some women to whom the club brings all of social life they ever know; indeed, in these days of hurry and worry this is coming to be more and more true of all of us. Therefore let us give out all the sunshine on club days that we possibly can. Let us then radiate sweetness and light, and cease from taking our pleasures too sadly or too seriously. And the paragrapher who looks to women’s clubs for material for his never-satisfied hopper, finds here the same attitude and converts it into cause for mirth. We should take life seriously, because it is a solemn thing; but on the other hand there is no need of letting our Puritanic inheritances of mind and training tinge all existence with gloom. When we set out to have a good time, let us have it. And let us have it all the time. Happiness is more a habit of the mind than anything else. If we keep ourselves in that mental frame, admitting nothing but the sunlight of existence, sunshine will become such a habit with us that we can no more help shedding sunlight around us than we can help breathing. Isn’t that worth while? And the club, where we come to meet our sisters who have the same kind of trials and difficulties as we do, is one of the places where we should not only seek to gather up sunshine, but to scatter it. For we cannot reap what we do not sow, nor reflect what is not in the soul.