University of Virginia Library

Gorren, Aline. "Womanliness as a Profession."
Scribner's Magazine 15 (May 1894): 610-615.

THE question here discussed was one sure to arise, among us, in America, sooner or later; and one, among the thoughtful, and those who watch the signs of the future, also sure to arouse interest of a special and peculiar kind. With the increasing facilities for the higher intellectual development now offered to the American woman, along with her sisters the world over—only in greater degree, and more generally, to the American woman than to any other—the effect which such development would have upon her essential womanliness was bound to become a matter of anxious observation. It is so become, in many quarters, now. People are trying to find out how the "higher education" affects the women of other countries, and seeking to compare the notes and suggestions thus gathered up with what is to be seen here. Whether the higher education shall be given the sex is no longer at all the affair considered. It is conceded that the thing must be done; the experiment is made; the point now is to observe what will come next. For, certainly, unless we were very short-sighted, we were prepared for the fact that something would come next. One subjects nothing organic to a changed environment with any sane impression that it will remain exactly as it was before the change.

At this present moment those who, with us, are giving attention to this problem are divided into two camps. The first camp gives forth an utterance already grown familiar in a short space of time. Its tone is laudatory. It testifies that women are daily gaining in self-reliance; that the methodical training their minds receive to fit them for professions and for business positions, tends to render them, even in general matters, more accurate in conception, more precise in execution, less under the dominion of the sudden impulse and instinct, more capable of reasoning, and of judging of things as reason, unimpassionedly, presents them. All these consequences of woman's higher intellectual activities are pronounced to be unquestioned. The praise rises here and there to the key of enthusiasm. If women have, in this brief span, accomplished so much, what, it is asked, will they not yet accomplish? There is a joyful clamor in the air. But there is the second camp; the second view. And it is to be remarked that there are some authoritative voices in this other and quieter chorus; and that from thence there comes a vision which seems to reach a little farther and deeper, which appears to have an intuition for the substance and drift of things, rather than for the temporary show of them. In this second group of observers are men who have had university training; men whose occupations are literary, intellectual, artistic; and men of science; physicians notably. These men do not say so much about the new roads that women are travelling; but they think more. And it is beginning to be borne in upon us that their thinking is touched with a doubt, a delicate apprehension. The man whose own intellectual faculties

have the ripeness and the flexible play that the largest culture gives, is beginning to ask himself whether the intellectualized American womanhood promises to be as interesting as womanhood always should be on this earth. If he happen to have studied the young girls who leave our women's colleges, the young women who act as professors in the same, the youthful doctresses in our large cities, he is conscious, on the whole, of a faint, chill misgiving. It is not that these exponents of the new feminine ambition have not many most admirable results to show in justification of that ambition. It is that, with all these admirable qualities, there is a lack of quality, precisely; of the quality; the womanly quality. Now, when such a man as has been described recognizes this, he is apt to turn cold, and to ask himself whether there be not something amiss in a scheme of education which brings together all the elements of influence, and then leaves out altogether the one magic ingredient which shall set the forces of that influence free. The physician, on his part, does not concern himself with womanly magic; or with the high spiritual and aesthetic uses of influence at all. His view goes to the roots of life. But what he assures us that he sees there, and the opinions which he derives from what he sees, are not more encouraging. The strain of the higher education, he says, the preparation for collegiate courses, undermines, in American girls, the bases of physical health. Women whose constitution has been subjected to this mental strain at a time when it was unfit for divided labor, go through after-life, all too often, as sufferers, incapable of fulfilling adequately the essential functions of womanhood, of gaining or giving happiness as wife or mother. Moreover, the physician attributes, not directly to too much intellectual knowledge, certainly, but indirectly to the restlessness, the desire for personal freedom, instilled in women by all the fresh departures taken by their sex, that disinclination to assume the graver sacrifices of marriage, that tendency to look upon its deeper significance as a cross, now characterizing an increasingly large number of young wives, whose interests are social rather than mental. With the first contention of our physician it is not in the purpose of these remarks to deal; excepting in so far as to mention that knowledge of the lives of European girls, who have gone through a course of study as exacting as any demanded here, discloses no such examples of invalidism as the medical man would point to among our women. With the second contention—that the modern American woman, of the most cultivated classes, and in the largest cities, cares less and less to be a mother, cares even perhaps less and less to be a wife, these remarks have, however, to deal; for the imputation meets the disappointment of the university man, of the American of culture, on the same ground, and the conclusions of both agree as to the same fact—the absence, namely, of the womanly in the representative American woman of the moment.

At this juncture it may be well to look a little more closely at what is understood by womanliness. Here we are confronted at once by the perception that a different meaning would be attached to the word, according as it would be used by the peoples of the Latin extraction and by ourselves. To those peoples, who have the collective-social ideal, in opposition to our Anglo-Saxon individualist ideal, the value, the preciousness, and the intrinsic efficacy of all things must lie in the greater or less degree of thoroughness and perfection with which they evolve into visible act and function the principle of diversity, of specialization, inherent in their being. The ideal of the social races has been defined as "the ideal of the equality of individuals in a graduated order of functions;" and our own individualist ideal as "the ideal of the equality of individuals in a general equality of functions." For a Frenchman, an Italian, a Spaniard, then, womanliness in a woman means personification, in every individual case, of those abstract conceptions which the feminine principle eternally typifies. On the one hand, womanliness will consist, therefore, in a constant, passive charm, the human expression, as it were,

of the silent allurement which nature has made, throughout all her orders, the typical attitude of the feminine. This, so to put it, is the physical characteristic. On the other hand, womanliness will mean divination of mysteries not seen by sight, nor apprehended by reason, but conveyed to woman, instinctively, by her closer contact with the most sacred and occult operations of nature, and reacting from her upon man in the form of an ethereal stimulant to finer endeavor, a vague, high promise of divine rewards. This is the spiritual characteristic. The Latin is, to both this physical and this spiritual characteristic of womanliness, more sensitive than the Anglo-Saxon. Wherefore it happens that he respects women both less and more than the Anglo-Saxon. The notion of womanliness of the Englishman, the American, is more neutral, has less of either extreme. The element of allurement, of charm, does not count so much for him—whereby it chances that, from certain aspects, his civilization is the cleaner. The spiritual characteristic predominates over the physical in his ideal. The womanly woman is the good mother, the devoted wife, the gentle sister, the quiet guardian of the hearth-fire. Yet she is not so much the holder of those mysteries of which we spoke, and thus her position, while never so low, perhaps, as it is possible for it to become with the Latin peoples, is never, either, in some senses, so high. If the best definition of womanliness that one can arrive at be, in brief, that it is the consciousness in women of their difference from men—and there is none, so far as one can see, more adequate, one is inclined to acknowledge that the idea of the Latin is at least the fuller, the more complete. It was to the most happy fusion of the charm on the one side, and of the spiritual influence on the other, to which were due some of those Frenchwomen of the eighteenth century, which, even to the Anglo-Saxon, seem a type of attractive, of womanly women. But, be this as it may, the Frenchman, the Italian, holds fast to his belief in specialization, in the separate, the "graduated order of functions." For him to conceive of any plan of training or influence which should make women more like men in the essential attributes of character—which should do away, at a blow, with the subtlest and deepest distinction in nature—would be to go counter to the direction of his entire civilization. Our individualist civilization, with its equality of individuals "in an equality of functions," its pervading feeling that what one man can do another man can do also—and, ergo, that what one man can do a woman can likewise—tends, on the contrary, in every way to efface, instead of emphasizing, the difference in the social and mental attributes of the sexes. In America, where Anglo-Saxon individualism has reached its supreme expression, there is also found most strongly the trend of equalization between women and men. All this, in substance, has been said before. But what has not been sufficiently noted is the present want of logic in referring to advanced education, a lack of womanliness in American women, when the deficiency, if it exist, is the result of the combined elements of our social life.

The thoughtful man who has misgivings looks over to France, and asks what the outcome of advanced feminine education is there; whether women there, under its effect, tend to become less womanly, less wifely, less motherly, less capable of the domesticities, and less interested in them. His query may, so far, be rapidly answered in the negative. Moreover, it is the least likely of things that it ever will be answered otherwise. M. Jules Simon, than whom no one in France has done more for the cause of the higher instruction of women, recently wrote of his experience in obtaining a minor decoration for a certain young woman, whose deserts such official recognition seemed to be, in terms which in their entirety one would like to reproduce on this page. After pronouncing himself as averse to the idea of decorating women, on the plea that, not the act of conferring the decoration, but the desire for that public distinction in the woman herself, offended some instinct in him, he owns that he finally yielded to the pressure brought upon him by the

young woman's friends, and ended by becoming as keen about the project as they were, and, putting into play such official machinery as he could control, by obtaining the coveted order, which, executed in the best manner by the jeweller a la mode, was duly placed beneath the candidate's napkin at dinner. During the little function that followed innocent enthusiasm ran high, and tears lay close to smiles. But, on the morrow, a knock at the door of M. Simon ushered in the young woman, who, a little shy, a little deprecating, deposited the order on his desk. She had decided not to accept it. Unqualified resentment on the part of her sponsor, who sees himself made ridiculous, the fruit of all his official efforts thrown back upon him without ceremony. But the young woman was saying gently, appealingly: " Mon parrain, have we many greater painters than Rosa Bonheur?" "No." "Have there been greater instances of heroism on the battle-field than have been displayed by some of our Sisters of Charity, our hospital nurses? Then, until the great orders—the greatest orders, the men's orders, go to them, I must leave this here." And, detecting the softening in her old friend's eye, she tapped him prettily on the arm with her glove. "I saw, my sponsor," smiling, "the daintiest of little bracelets in a shop-window. If you were to buy me that, instead?"

Our own women of progressive ideas may not think well of this charming anecdote, perhaps. But it is a little story, perfectly illustrative of the woman of the Latin races, who, to-day, has entered the advanced movement. It defines the attitude with which she holds herself there. You meet, in Paris, a girl who has taken the highest degrees that the Republic confers. You find her like any other jeune fille; unassuming, saying little, home-loving; and, you hear, very thoroughly drilled in household duties. There is no restlessness in her, no straining, apparently, after new social conditions. She fits into the framework of her surroundings quite, it would seem, as she would have done before the higher instruction was thought of. There are traces of a state of things more familiar to us, in Italian and French life, to be sure. But they are to be met in the great social world, where Anglomania prevails, bringing with it the mannish brusquerie and emancipation of the modern woman who aims to be a "good fellow." And this is not the woman whose influence is deepest upon the national life anywhere.

Nor should one make the mistake of supposing that if advanced education does not, in the Latin countries, impair the womanliness of the mass of women who enjoy its benefits, while here, in America, that undesirable result appears to be achieved, the reason is to be sought in the different courses of instruction which may be pursued in the two cases. There are such distinctions, and they have their effect. But the real cause lies in the two different civilizations, the two different environments. No amount of instruction for them, unless the whole national spirit of France should be changed, will ever, it is to be surmised, lessen in Frenchwomen the keen instinct of a special function—social, spiritual, emotional. One may a priori suppose that wider knowledge, and a firmer grasp of facts, may indeed broaden and deepen, and philosophize, this instinct, so that it might be deemed possible that the first contributions to those sociological studies which, in the natural distribution of labor, will eventually fall to the share of women, and for which they are especially fitted, will come from the highly trained and intellectual woman of the Latin race, rather than from her Anglo-Saxon cousin, be she, on her side, ever so highly trained, and intellectual likewise. If the latter shall be found to have taken a false departure, to be on the wrong track, to be wasting time in seeking to establish an impossible "equality of functions" between herself and the other sex, we shall be manifestly unjust in placing the whole brunt of the evil on the new development of her brain powers. Education only intensifies the predispositions implanted by the racial ideal. If, in America, it should make women less womanly, it is that our American life fosters germs that tend to that result from the initial stages of growth.

The first effect of our American plan of coeducation, and of the large liberty of intercourse not only allowed to our girls and boys, but thrust upon them, is to do away, so far as may be, with the feeling of separateness. There is nothing in the callow love-making that springs from this juvenile association that is likely to make a girl deeply conscious of her womanhood. She is, in the tone of her thought and life, not very different from the young boys to whom she either does, or does not, multitudinously engage herself. This is what we prefer. We think it saner, healthier. That point is not here discussed. But it is certain that we cannot eat our cake and have it too. Furthermore, if the manner of the girl's relations with the other sex, at the beginning of her career, is not such as would be calculated to develop the sense of her difference from men, which we are agreed is the essence of the quality of womanliness, neither are the later conditions that surround her in society to make good the deficiency. Practically, we have, in America, no social intercourse between men and women. After the unripe boy-and-girl period has been passed, and both sexes have entered into consciousness of themselves, each goes very much its own way. The woman of the new fashion meets men in business offices, in the varied exercise of her new avocations, but it is as one good comrade meets another. The married woman, among the large mass of Americans, has, for masculine society, her husband. This, again, is as we wish it to be. But it may be that an unnecessary alarm, a false Puritanism, too much seek, with us, to prevent the natural, mutually improving intercourse of mature men and women. Those attractive and womanly women of the French salons were what they were because the men of their time made them so. They stocked their wits, not from books, but from the talk of the men who gathered about them to enjoy an interchange of ideas. They learned HOW TO LIVE from life itself. They had the subtle intuition of the relative values and positions of things that is the fruit of the highest feminine culture; the connaissances generales, which a French author pronounces indispensable to any womanly effectiveness. Americans rest too exclusively in the fact that some of these women were not morally irreproachable. Others were, and these wielded equal influence, equal charm. To-day, in France, the meeting of men and women in society, for the interchange of ideas, is said to be less easy and prevalent than in days gone by. A recent writer grieves over "the malicious wind that seems to scatter and disperse" those groups which people would like to form for the purpose of rational and agreeable talk. But enough of this facility of meeting remains to educate the Frenchwoman in the consciousness of herself; in the understanding of her weak and her strong points; enough to form her, in short, in the profession of womanliness; that profession which is, at the end of the ends, the one absolutely essential, the one which, unmastered, makes all others go for naught.

Obviously, with the conditions for it thus failing, this profession will not be brought to the same perfect pitch with us; and not even according to the Anglo-Saxon ideal of womanliness, which we have seen to be a less complex one than the Latin, one more quiet, more intimate. For there are social conditions, or, more precisely, emotional conditions—here we have the great word!—that make women womanly, and keep them even so in the American conception of the guardian of the hearth-fire, and the gentle and steadfast helpmate. If these be sufficiently strong, the highest stimulus that will be given to woman's brains can, in all safety, be trusted never to make her wish to wander very far astray from her initial missions. But they are, as it appears, not sufficiently strong in America. And of this American men cannot rightfully complain, since what they are now beginning to see about them, and to deprecate, is first the consequence of their own mode of life, which they could alter if they chose, and second, the consequence of their national temperament, which, of course, they cannot alter. For the average American male is a cold creature, outside of his business and his politics; one who courts

and marries, by instinct, but in whom apprehension of the heights and depths of these delicate matters is as yet in the rudimentary stage. This lack of the emotional in the atmosphere with which he surrounds himself reacts perceptibly on the American woman. He glories in it himself. But there are times when he does not love its results so well. It has been deplored that the American girl should show so un-American a fancy for marrying into foreign nobilities. Titles are supposed to be the word of the incantation, in all these cases. It is soothing to the American to tell himself this; but it is not a conclusion borne out by the facts. Any knowledge at all thorough of these international marriages discloses too many instances in which the affections are involved, as well as the ambitions. The American girl may smile at the prospect of the name and the blazon, and the bridegroom consider carefully the settlements that will come with the bride. And still this does not shut out the fact that the two young people may be very much in love with each other. Some of these marriages are unhappy. So are some marriages among Americans. But it would be foolish to refuse to recognize the many times when they are, on the contrary, extremely happy. As a lover, the European has several points in his favor beyond the American; and the American girl has never been slow to find this out.

An Italian, a man of wide and generous culture, was given, some time since, several of the novels of Mr. Howells to read. After absorbing them attentively he inquired if the women therein portrayed would, by Americans, be considered representative. He was told that, taking the average American woman the land through, they might so be considered. " Che tipi!—What curious types;" was his thoughtful comment, in a moment. "It must be in some part the fault of your American men. Your women do not seem to have received the higher cultivation of the sentiments, of the emotions." What he felt was the lack of measure and harmony, and the presence of that which was either hysterical and crude, or bald and partly sexless, in the feminine nature dissected by Mr. Howells's pen.

For there is a culture of the emotions. And so long as nature persists in developing the centre part of women's brain less than that of men, and the back part more, there will be some good reason why this culture should be an important matter. Nothing is brought to our consciousness more clearly, in these last years of the century, than the sense that the study of the emotions must indeed soon descend from the vague and cloudy regions which hitherto have been its abode, into its rightful place under the light of modern experimental knowledge. The latest drift of physiology, of psychiatry, points steadily in this direction. We are beginning to divine that the passions have their laws and their hygiene; even as the delicate problems of the will may some day be solved with scientific exactitude. Upon these matters—never second, in life, to the importance of the pure idea—we look, with the advancement of the mental differentiation of the sexes to see the women of the future throw the clearest illumination. Already those whom we feel to be typical in the best way, have intuitions here transcending those of men. Meanwhile, if the Anglo-Saxon woman make the mistake of supposing that the most extreme development possible to her along the lines of the intellect can free her from the claims which look to her from the emotional side of life, it is perhaps not a fatal one. It is by way of intellectual knowledge that many women, after some uncertain stumbling, may enter, in the fullest sense, into the right comprehension of the great law of specialization.