Part 7
Above all, let us cease here all sorts of petty criticism. The club should be so charged with the atmosphere of kindliness and good-will that those who come to it shall receive a new baptism of love for their fellow-creatures. Have you ever belonged to a club where the very spirit of things was so charged with wrangling and petty criticism and smothering hatred that you have gone home feeling that nothing but a Turkish bath and an old-fashioned revival prayer-meeting could ever get you clean again, body and soul? Alas, that there are such clubs and women enough in them to keep them alive. But if you or I belong to such an one, it is our duty first to try to improve matters, and failing in that, to resign membership in it. We owe it to our immortal souls not to smirch them with hatred and wrangling and ill-temper, whenever we can help it; and we usually can.
It is so easy to see the faults or the ridiculous side of other people. In the average club, the actual working force is seldom over ten per cent. of the membership. The thinking for the club is done by a few, while the remainder come in to reap the results of what has been prepared, often by actual “sweat of the brow” and almost the life-blood of that small remnant which constitutes the working force and is rewarded only by having its several names recorded as a committee. Would it not seem, then, that the least we could do—those of us who leave the work to others—is to be lenient to the shortcomings of the committee, if there seem to be any? It is so easy to criticise. The duty of extracting motes from other people’s eyes is very attractive, but there is excellent advice on the subject of neglecting the beam in our own eye which the average woman may well read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
If the club is not making us better women in every way, broader-minded and more liberal in our judgment towards the rest of the world, more tolerant of other people’s views, more fond of our home and more interesting to those who have to live with us in it, more hopeful of the future and less satisfied with our present mental and spiritual acquirements, more interested in the uplifting of humanity, yet less willing to cut off our home ties, more loving in our relations with each other, more tolerant of the failings of our fellow-members and more intolerant of gossip pertaining thereto; if the club does not mean all these things and more, then we would better give up our membership and take up the duties of home exclusively.
If we are not the more attractive at home for the broadening and developing influence of the club, then are we failing to grasp the significance of what the club should mean. If a woman comes home fresh and smiling from a club meeting, full of interest in matters outside the four walls of her home and ideas regarding them, she can do so much more for her family. The woman who was heard to say that she was saving her money to go and hear a performance of Mozart’s Twelfth Mass because that was the regiment her husband enlisted in, was not a club woman and had lacked the opportunities which the club affords for picking up knowledge on subjects which her previous education had lacked. We need more perfectly rounded and thoroughly developed characters, and that is exactly what the club should mean to us as individuals.
They say women have no sense of humor. At least, they—and, of course, it was a masculine “they”—said it in former times. How would it work to put more humor into our meetings? Say, have a funny programme once in a month or a winter? Look at the year books, for instance. The subjects in some are appallingly heavy: “Slavery—Its Rise and Extinction,” “Rise of Political Parties,” “Evils That Menace a Republic.” Two-thirds of the women attending come from homes where there is constant care and worry. They need lightening and heartening. They need a hearty laugh. On the contrary, everything is planned to “stimulate thought” and improve the mind. Why not have one afternoon a month devoted to everyone telling the very funniest thing she ever read, saw, or heard? Or have one member relate some mirth-provoking story? There will surely be some one who, like Artemus Ward, was so “patriotic as to sacrifice all his wife’s relations to the cause of liberty”; and the funniest things that happen are not always told. Sometimes because there is no one to appreciate them. Somebody suggests that “if any sedate member object to such levity she could have the next meeting of a grim character and discuss ‘Whether the increase of cremation would affect the price of pottery’ or ‘Should a funeral be held in the morning or the afternoon?’ Women’s clubs are a good thing and their price is above rubies, but put a few pickles and salads in your solid repast, and let the drawn lines of thought relax over a little bit of nonsense.”
Anyone who has appeared on the platform before women’s audiences, with a strain of humor showing through the talk, can appreciate their plaint that we do not respond quickly to satire or to mild “hits.” Wit must be sharp to catch the average woman. Why is it that we do not laugh more, and laugh more heartily? “Have we gotten the idea in some cobwebbed corner of our brains that it is wicked to be merry,” says one club-woman on this subject, “or are we indeed the ‘serious sex,’ so called, and hopelessly so; or is our humor, as Mr. Harry Thurston Peck says it is, ‘entirely superficial’—that is, put on for the occasion? No one questions that there is plenty of laughter, at least of smile, among women, but it lacks sincerity; it has not the earnest ring of genuine merriment. If we stop to question the reason why, and if we are scientifically inclined we cannot fail to do so, as a lack of humor assigns a race to a lower order of development, we find the answer to be one of two causes. First, women, as a whole, look at life in all its relations from an intensely personal standpoint. For example, if you ask one to admire a gown, a carpet or a picture, she will do so, and then add (as a rule) either that she has or did have one almost exactly like it. If you tell her of some personal experience, she usually grows impatient with the desire to relate a corresponding one of her own. She does not seem to be able to put herself out of the equation. For this reason, when anything genuinely ludicrous occurs, she must first think of her own relation to it, whether by any possibility the laugh can be turned against herself, and by this time the spontaneity of the laughter, its genuineness, has vanished. This, I find to be one cause. Another is her persistent clinging to the small burdens of life. Men, most of them, seem able to drop even very heavy business cares when they enter the home life; but woman too often carries these everywhere—in her pleasure excursions, to her afternoon teas; even, and perhaps more often than anywhere else, to her couch. One woman told me that she arranged all her plans and all her meals for the next day after she was in her bed at night. How, then, can women help being serious, when the mind is always heavily burdened, when it carries about with it an unconscious, but real, weight, which it never discards, and which never leaves it free and open to impressions?”
Once in a while you find a woman who does not, like the snail, carry her house on her back. The ability to cast it off is certainly an accomplishment which every one should cultivate, and the more she gets interested in outside affairs—world interests—the less likely she is to become narrowed. That there are still clubs which devote themselves to the pursuit of culture as obtained from encyclopædias and who take their mental pabulum from the mouths of babes and sucklings, and that there are still women who make a fetish of their clubs, erecting false standards of life until their homes are left unto them desolate, must be admitted. It is a significant fact, however, that women are being called upon to consider problems, civic and social, which require a broader training than it was possible for them to obtain a generation or more ago. This training the woman’s college and the woman’s club, when properly conducted, supply, the latter, especially, giving to women who have missed a college training the opportunity of keeping up intellectual life and of putting newly acquired knowledge to practical use in some line of economic endeavor or social service, for the day has not yet passed when the woman’s club may be styled the “middle-aged woman’s university.”
No; let us have our clubs and work in them together, for so shall we gain new ideas and a more thorough understanding of the real sisterhood of our sex. We shall renew our strength as the eagles, and our belief in each other as actual living factors in the world’s work. And if the club has an altruistic basis, if it has a clause in its constitution about being the means of “elevating this community,” if it is really working for some actual barriers, then let the public know it by every possible means. One of the hopeful signs of club-work is that there are few clubs left that consider their papers and discussions too sacred to be shared with common folk.
Of course, there is danger of running to the opposite extreme. Those clubs whose most laborious efforts seem to lie in serving tea once a month and providing a literary programme that is indeed milk for babes are too often inclined to rush into print with elaborated accounts of table decorations and good gowns, but even that shows a hospitable spirit, does it not? At least, they are setting a good example to clubs whose discussions and papers, if accurately reported, would be of immense value to younger clubs and to the outside world of women who cannot attend the meetings. For even the occasional woman who boasts that she never belonged to a club reads the club column in her favorite newspaper.
Exclusiveness, after all, is only another name for selfishness. And selfishness is utterly and thoroughly incompatible with the idea of women’s clubs. The club motif is helpfulness, and that is a quality diametrically opposed to selfishness. We might go further and say that the sensitiveness which so many of us plead is only another phase of selfishness—and none of us have a right to plead that. Why is it that some words we roll as a sweet morsel under our tongues, while their definitions we abhor?
Let us, as club-women, make some good resolutions and then keep them.
Whereas, we are all human and therefore love gossip, let us resolve:
That we will cultivate a spirit of love and patience for every woman in the club.
That if we hear a single word of criticism on her words or actions or dress or face or figure, we will not repeat it.
That we will not answer such criticisms, except to say something good of the assailed.
That we will make the club a place where helpfulness and kindliness go hand in hand with inspiration.
That the Golden Rule is just as good a guide to club life as to home life.
And that we will adopt it and practice it.
And let us reflect that if the club movement were not a good thing we would not find a million of the best women in our country in it.
I have seen many club mottoes and club platforms in my day and generation, but the following seems to me the best. It originated with the Lincoln (Neb.) club-women:
“Ours is an inclusive, departmental club. Since its object is to help and be helped, the following women are invited to become members:—
1. The university graduate.
2. The woman of common school education.
3. The self-educated woman.
4. The woman who belongs to other clubs.
5. The non-club woman.
6. The woman who does not believe in clubs.
7. The woman who does not wish to join a department.
8. The woman who wants to attend the club meetings but twice a year.
9. The woman who wants to be a member for the name of it.
10. The tired woman, full of domestic responsibilities, who wants to be a sponge, fold her hands, take in what the bright free woman who needs an audience, has learned, and then go home refreshed to her treadmill.
11. The woman without companionship.
12. The young woman and the young-old woman.”
XII
ON THE ETHICS OF CLOTHES
This is not a chapter on “What to wear and how to wear it.” It is not a question altogether of becoming and fashionable attire. It is, rather, of our clothes and their relation to the rest of the world that I would speak. We talk a great deal about art; is it not just as desirable in dress as anywhere? God meant women to be attractive just as He meant flowers to be lovely and birds to sing. Why, then, should women of earnest purpose think it advances their work to make frumps of themselves?
Is there a shy, poorly dressed woman coming to your church, always taking a back seat and slipping off like a frightened lamb when the service is over? Hunt her out and say something pleasant to her. And remember, especially if you can afford gorgeous raiment yourself, that that very woman may have something for you. Try it and see. I have often been asked if I do not consider it wrong for a rich woman to wear better clothes to her club than the average member can afford. I say No. As long as women are women half the pleasure of going out anywhere, even to church, lies in the opportunity it gives for seeing what other women wear. And it does not follow, because we cannot wear rich clothing ourselves, that we are unable to bear the sight of it displayed on the person of another woman without that secret stirring of pride and all uncharitableness of which Saint Paul speaks so eloquently. On the contrary, most of us delight in beautiful things, and it is a pleasure to see fine clothes, even if we cannot behold them under our own roof-tree and in our own wardrobes. Another thing. No woman likes to feel that she is being dressed down to, or that some other woman is pitying her because her raiment is not costly. If the choice lies between feeling that some other woman can wear better things than I do, or the consciousness that this other woman feels that she can and is trying to dress down to the limits of my purse, give me the former; I will try to bear the sight of her fine clothes with patience and to believe that my soul is above the glitter of outside adornment. For a woman’s a woman for a’ that.
The time is coming—we see it already around the corner—when clothes do not make the woman. The plain little woman whose garb is just about as noticeable as the feathers of a little brown sparrow is quite as apt to be the leading spirit in her club or town or State, as the one with reception gowns from Felix and tailor suits from Redfern. And yet why should anybody speak or think disparagingly of a woman because she follows Shakespeare’s advice, “Costly thy raiment as thy purse can buy”? May there not be just as much uncharitableness among women in this direction as in the other? Possibly a woman is abundantly able to wear a tailor gown that costs a hundred dollars or more, and her husband is more than particular about her dress. Some husbands are. Is it her duty to wear a cheaper gown because some of her sisters must?
Here is a nice question in club ethics. One’s husband may count his money by the hundred thousands or even the millions; both he and the children may be strenuous about the mother’s clothes. What is her duty? Shall she go against the wishes of her own family, not to mention her personal taste in the matter, and studiously avoid wearing good gowns when she goes to the club—simply because there are women there whose husbands can scarcely afford the “ready-made tailor” or the home-seamstress-made silk which they are wearing?
And as some woman has already said, should it be inconsistent with the Federation idea for the woman who can afford it, and who has always dressed well, to appear elegantly gowned at the conventions? Inconsistency would lie in the discarding of her usual apparel for the time being, and the substitution of plainer garments, and by so doing she would prove conclusively that she was not really democratic.
Should Robert of Lincoln’s Quaker wife—pretty and sensible and plain and brown—wish to change the brilliant plumage of the oriole when she flits into her range of vision? I think not; it would not be natural or fair or kind. And is it necessary in order to be effective in social service, in order to be consistent, in order to reach fulness of power, that we be so serious about it all? I like the expression which one of our ablest women used when she spoke of working “in gay self-forgetfulness.” My mother used to tell me that the best-dressed women were those who, having donned their pretty clothes and satisfied themselves that they were all right, thought no more about them, but went out into company with other women with no more consciousness of clothes than the flowers and birds seem to have of their colors and music. It is true that we should work hard for what is most dear to us, but not so seriously that we cannot see God’s beautiful sunshine and brilliant coloring of sky and field.
And so I contend, from a purely æsthetic standpoint, for the continuation of the wearing of pretty gowns and rare jewels by the possessors of them. Sidney Lanier, in “My Springs,” one of the poems addressed to his wife, after speaking of the “loves” she held for everything in the great world, says:
“And loves for all that God and man In art and nature make or plan, And lady-loves for spidery lace And broideries and supple grace.
“And diamonds and the whole sweet round Of littles that large life compound, And love for God and God’s bare truth, And loves for Magdalen and Ruth.”
“We are all living in a kindergarten for the blind,” said a prominent divine at Mr. Anagnos’ beautiful institution in Boston. “Having eyes, perhaps we do not see that best and highest life of the divine which awaits us just beyond our ken.”
The French gown and gorgeous hat which we envy, or at best admire, may cover a nature full of courage and healing for our secret woes, if we were not so blind we could not see; and in our turn we might supply some stimulus which she lacks. And the woman in the ill-fitting, home-made gown in the corner might, possibly, bring positive blessing to both of us and others. We each have something for the other. Have we given our share?
“Why don’t you bring some of your fine gowns up here with you?” asked the country relatives of a rich woman. “We like to see them even if our meeting-house and rag-carpeted sitting-rooms don’t seem just the place for them.” A great many women feel the same way. They like to see pretty clothes, even if they cannot wear them. So let us not worry over this matter of dress. It will right itself. If the woman who is apt to overdress—to whom dress is the main object in life—comes into contact with higher-minded women, she will soon absorb a higher ideal and come to feel that there are greater purposes than are covered by the Paris fashion plates, and worthier subjects of contemplation and discussion than whether to ruffle or not to ruffle the skirt. And do these not need such help just as much as those that dwell in low places and perhaps long ago learned to combine high thinking with plain living?
Oh, sisters, we none of us realize one another’s needs. How do we know that she whom we have been envying as possessing everything heart could wish, is not the most miserable of women? How do we know that the quiet, insignificant woman in sparrow-like raiment has not exactly the help which we are silently craving? Let us come out of our shells and see. Let us make of life something more than a series of good times, when we have gone forth arrayed in gorgeous attire and in search of amusement only. Have we been of those who shirk duty by leaving it to those who like to work, while we have acted as sponges to soak up the waters of gladness set running by the untiring efforts of others?
Or have we, through unselfish and self-forgetting labor for the advancement of all, grown up to a broader outlook on life, a more tolerant eye for the shortcomings of others and a wider charity for humanity everywhere? Only by losing ourselves do we find our best selves. There are so many things we can do to brighten the life-path for others, and almost without effort on our part. A kind word, a helpful suggestion, a pleasant smile in answer to a cross look; these cost nothing, and if we cultivate the habit we shall carry them unconsciously wherever we go; and they often mean so much.
There is the sister who comes from a home where the most rigid economy must be practiced, or where the children, dear as they are, wear on overworked nerves and brain; where death has brought havoc and desolation; where the husband is surly and penurious; where scandal or disgrace has been, or where sorrows worse than death have brought darkness and continual heartache. Do you think it does not matter to such whether you give them cordial greeting, whether your presence is like the blessed sunlight, whether your life of un-self-conscious faith and hope beams across their way, even for a half hour? How seldom it occurs to any of us to ask ourselves what is our real, unconscious influence among our sisters.
Somebody has said that to be warped unconsciously by the magnetic influence of all around is the destiny of even the greatest souls. If this is true, how much more is it likely that we common souls shall be swayed by outside spiritual forces. Let us see to it that we are not like Hosea Bigelow’s character who
“Might be a marvel of easy delightfulness If he would not sometimes leave the r out of sprightfulness.”
Let us, also, recall Dorothea’s motto in “Middlemarch”:
“I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me, that by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we do not know what it is, and cannot do what we would, we are a part of the divine power against evil, widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”
A good motto for us all, isn’t it?