\ ,' \ ., .. j "©yiiM H © KS E @K1 TIE Ml 0 ILLS 1 i ET 
Danaville,Livingston Co.,N.Y. AMERICAN WOMANHOOD: 
ITS 
|p tot liar it its mib llctrssitics. 
BY 
JAMES C. JACKSON, M. D., 
PnYSICIAN-IN-CniEF 
OF 
<1 pui\ j'foM.E ON THE jJ ILL-jS ID E," 
AND A UTHOR OF 
‘HOW to treat the sick without mebicine,” “consumption—HOW TO 
PREVENT ANB HOW TO CURE IT,” “THE SEXUAL ORGANISM ANB ITS 
HEALTHFUL MANAGEMENT,” ANB VARIOUS OTHER POPULAR 
BOOKS ON HEALTH. 
“ Give her of the fruit of her hands, 
And let her own works praise her in the gates.” 
Proverbs. 
AUSTIN, JACKSON & CO., PUBLISHERS, 
DANSVILLE, LIVINGSTON CO., N. T. 
MASON, BAKER & PRATT, 142 & 144 GRAND ST., NEW YORK. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by 
AUSTIN, JACKSON & CO., 
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States for the Northern 
District of New York. 
Edward O. Jbnkins, 
PRINTER AND STEREOTYPER, 
20 North William Street, N. Y. Jhilkatbn. 
Jo M.Y JelOVED ‘'jJlFE, 
Who, during the forty years of our marriage, 
Hath done me good and not evil; 
Who hath girded her loins with strength, 
And made strength and honor her clothing ; 
Who hath looked well to the ways of her household, 
And eaten not the bread of idleness; 
Who hath opened her mouth for the dumb, 
And reached forth her hands to the needy; 
Whose children rise up and call her blessed; 
And the crowning glory of whose life is, 
That, in her old age, she has come to be 
An advocate of Suffrage for Woman; 
X dedicate thia U3oob. 
JAMES C. JACKSON. 
Maple Beach, N. Y. 
April, 1870. CONTENTS. 
CHAPTER I. PAGE 
A Peculiar Type 7 
CHAPTER II. 
Physical Organization 12 
CHAPTER III. 
Unhealthy Foods 20 
CHAPTER IV. 
Unhealthy Drinks 25 
CHAPTER V. 
Unhealthy Dress 32 
CHAPTER VI. 
Constrained Locomotion 40 
CHAPTER VII. 
The Useful and Beautiful in Dress 52 
CHAPTER VIII. 
Life In-doors 62 
CHAPTER IX. 
; or, Women who Can and Do make Good 
Wives and Good Mothers 72 
5 6 
CONTENTS. 
CHAPTER X. 
Non-Maternity; or. Women who Can and Do make Good 
Wives, but do Not make Good Mothers 81 
CHAPTER XI. 
Women who do Not make Good Wives, but Do make 
Good Mothers 94 
CHAPTER XII. 
Women who, as Society goes, can Neither make Good 
Wives nor Mothers 105 
CHAPTER XIII. 
Competency of this Class of Women 123 
CHAPTER XIV. 
Their Business Capacities 140 
CHAPTER XV. 
The Ballot 150 AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
CHAPTER I. 
A PECULIAR TYPE. 
The American woman is a new or original type 
of womanhood. In no other country, nor in any other 
age, has the like of her ever been seen. Born and 
reared under nominally free institutions, her character- 
istics simulate largely those of Liberty. In the com- 
binations of her Yital Forces, therefore, she is widely 
separate from the woman of the ancient or moderli 
Asiatic or European civilization. Justice to her for- 
bids comparison with either of those types of woman- 
hood. Substantially, she stands alone ; and if brought 
alongside of them, it should be in the way of contrast, 
not of comparison. If she is to be measured in order 
to be made to take proper place in scale or rank, it 
must be done by reference to archetypal forms. 
As it is the tendency of Liberty, when dealing with 
Yital Organisms, to create original forms, and make 
them all the more beautiful, enduring, and productive, 
as they are developed under Freedom; so to the de- 
7 8 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
gree that the women of the Republic of the United 
States have been permitted to enjoy freedom have 
they been benefited thereby. On the other hand, to 
the degree that they have apparently enjoyed Liberty, 
while in reality they have been deprived of her sus- 
taining influence, have they been injured. 
Liberty is a constituent element in the nature of all 
beings, who are so organized by their Creator as to 
be able to become self-governed. To draw the line 
between those who are and those who are not thus 
organized, so as to discriminate with exactitude, one 
must go into the sphere of Organic Law, and make 
examination of first principles. What, then, always 
and everywhere enters into the constitution of creat- 
ures fitted for self-government % Clearly, this one 
quality—of being capable to understand Right from 
Wrong, and of choosing between them. Whoever has 
this Organic or constitutional faculty has a natural 
capability for Liberty, and thereby has a natural right 
to enjoy her. 
Much as American men have learned to prize Lib- 
erty for themselves, and have come to see and feel how 
vitally necessary to a well-developed manhood she is, 
in politics, in religion, in business, and in government, 
they have, as yet, failed to understand how much 
woman, in these regards, needs her presence and her 
power. As a consequence, they have only in small 
measure apprehended how much woman has suffered 
and does still suffer, in her innermost and outermost 
nature, from want of association and communion with A PECULIAR TYfE. 
9 
her. While they themselves, quite early in life in- 
stinctively, and later in life from reflection, come to 
feel that they can get on after the best manner in 
no direction unless inspired and sustained by Liberty, 
the placing of woman, in relation to the uses of her 
powers and the performance of her duties, where she 
may partake of Divine Inspirations and share in the 
great benignities and blessings of Liberty, seems to 
have commended itself to their judgments and their 
moral sense only in the dimmest manner. 
This is very derogatory to American civilization, 
whether viewed from the point of Christianity or 
of National Policy, and is highly censurable; for, to 
have Society and Government confessedly organized 
on principles of Liberty, and have them illustrated and 
enforced by a policy which permits to one half of the 
adult population only, the benefits which flow from 
their application, is very selfish and quite unmanly. 
This is all the truer because Liberty, of right, belongs 
equally to all persons: and if difference is to be ob- 
served as between them, it must grow out of, and for 
its justification depend on, their different degrees of 
aptness to make her of practical service to themselves 
individually. To recognise woman as personal, and 
hold her responsible to Law for her personal conduct, 
while she is in any direction deprived of her personal 
liberty in the shaping and fashioning of that conduct, 
injures her greatly; it both debases and degrades her. 
The ill effects of such a course are scarcely less deplora- 
ble in their reflex than in their direct bearings Man 10 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
is injured by it scarcely less than woman; for, since no 
human being can afford to deprive himself of freedom, 
he cannot afford to deprive others of it. 
The American woman is far removed from the an- 
cient Greek, Roman, and Jewish woman, as well as 
from the modern European woman, characteristically 
as follows: 
1. In the style of her physical organization, which 
physiologically demands for her the largest bodily 
freedom. 
2. In the organized combination of her intellectual 
faculties, which demand for her, thorough recognition 
of her personal worth, accomplished education, and 
full use of her powers for her personal benefit. 
3. In the quality and measure of her spiritual endow- 
ments, which demand for her, recognition of her per- 
sonal worthiness and intellectual force in the family, in 
society, in the Church, and in the State. 
Together, these make her so unlike the women of 
other times and of other countries, that to institute 
relations for her in any of the departments of active 
life, in view of what was good or is now good for them, 
is to do her gross injustice—in fact, is to outrage her 
nature. Standing by herself, she must be considered 
by herself; and her relations to life, both in the depart- 
ment of rights and duties, should be adjusted to what 
she is and to what she may be, and not in view of what 
other women have been or are. I can readily conceive 
that the Greek, the Roman, or the Jewish woman, of 
the age in which their respective Rationalities were at A PECULIAR TYPE. 
11 
their hight of power and splendor, considered from the 
point of development, was not ill considered or badly 
treated. The Greek matron was a brood-mare, the 
Homan matron a suckling she-wolf, the Jewish matron a 
human slave. They serve, however, as staple samples 
of the womanhood by which the American woman is 
habitually invited to adjust her own, and for not doing 
which she is severely criticised. Her critics make the 
mistake of supposing that the earth rolls from east to 
west, and knowledge is to be found in perfection only 
in the Past; whereas, whoever would make the great- 
est attainments in knowledge, and in liberty to use it, 
must, whether man or woman, fix eye on the Future. 
Better for the American woman to study the archety- 
pal woman than a Greek statue or the woman of His- 
tory, would she learn woman’s worth, find her sphere, 
or accomplish her destiny. CHAPTEE II. 
PHYSICAL ORGANIZATION. 
In considering her peculiarities and necessities, let 
us look at her physical organization—her bodily form. 
This seems to he needful, because, without doing so we 
cannot understand her character, and failing in this, 
we cannot define her appropriate sphere. The science 
of Human Life is as essentially inductive as any physi- 
cal science. To understand it properly, one must reason 
from facts to principles, from phenomena which are 
visible, to laws which are hidden, insomuch that it 
may be justly said that we cannot have a sound and 
reliable Psychology, or Science of Life, except as we 
have scientific Physiology, or true knowledge of the 
laws of the human body. 
To know how to deal with a human soul one must 
understand it, and to do this, one must know the pecu- 
liarities as well as general qualities of its physical 
organization. 
In what consists the peculiarities of the physical 
organization of the American woman, which make her 
unlike all preceding or contemporary types of woman- 
hood ? 
(a.) In the relative size of that portion of her brain 
in front of her ears to that portion bade of her eon's. 
12 PHYSICAL ORG ANIZATIOU". 
13 
Science lias determinately settled the fact that the 
cerebrum or frontal brain in the human creature is the 
seat of thought, botli perceptive and reflective. Man 
does not think with his liver, or liis stomach, his kid- 
neys, or his bowels, his hands or his feet, nor does he 
think with or by means of his cerebellum, or back 
brain. His thoughts originate in, because his mental 
faculties are located in, that portion of the large brain 
situated in the fore part of the skull. With his back 
brain, or that portion of the brain situated in the back 
of the head, low down, he feels and puts his feel- 
ings into forms of motion. Knock one on the back of 
his head and you may paralyze his legs so he cannot 
walk, wdiile he may think clearly and consecutively. 
Strike him a blow on his forehead and you may 
destroy all power of consecutive thought, and yet 
leave him able to walk firmly. As a matter of fact, 
therefore, in relation to active life and manifesta- 
tion of responsible character, other things being equal, 
two persons will show different styles or forms of bodily 
build and mental characteristics in the ratio of the dif- 
ference in size and manner of conformation of their 
frontal and back brain. Take two women : the ancient 
Greek and the American woman of to-day. Measure 
their heads minutely and you will find substantially the 
following differences: Around the head, from front to 
rear, in largest part, Greek 20-| inches; American 21f 
inches. From the orifice of the ear on one side over 
the skull just above the eyebrows to the orifice of the 
other ear, Greek inches; American inches. 14 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
From the orifice of one ear over the top of the head 
to the other orifice, Greek 14f-; American 16 inches. 
From the orifice of one ear on a line with the orifice 
backward round the head to the orifice on the other 
ear and on a line with it, Greek inches; American 
12 inches. These differences in size of their respective 
heads, considered each as a whole, and of the frontal 
brain of each to its back brain, make up for each, bod- 
ily and mental conformation and characteristics pecu- 
liar to itself, and widely different from the other; so 
much so, that it will not do to compare them. They 
can be justly examined only by contrast. Take man- 
kind from the Creation to the commencement of the 
Christian Era, and the Greek woman of the period of 
the highest Grecian civilization is not so far removed 
from the woman of the lowest savage or barbaric life, 
in any or all of her physical qualities or characteristics, 
as is the American woman of to-day removed from the 
Grecian woman of the period of the highest Greek civ- 
ilization. 
("b.) In the relative size of her brain-nervous system to 
that of her organic or nutritive-nervous system. 
I know of no Nationality whose women show so small 
a difference in measurement around the head, from front 
to rear — the tape passing just above the ears; and 
around the waist — the tape passing around the body, 
at the pit of the stomach — as do American women. It 
is not uncommon to find American women whose heads 
will measure 21£, 21f to 22 inches, whose waists will 
not measure more than 23 to 25 inches over the clothes. PHYSICAL ORGANIZATION. 
15 
Such persons, when in their ordinary health, often do 
not weigh more than 98 pounds, and only a few can be 
found who ever overgo 125 pounds. I have examined the 
heads of over 8,000 American women, resident in over 
twenty of the States of the Republic, and their average 
size of heads was 21i inches, their average size of waists, 
dressed, was 24J inches, their average weights 110 
pounds, their ages ranging from 19 to 52 years. I have 
examined the heads of thousands of foreign-horn women, 
and found only here and there one whose head would 
measure over 21 inches, while not one in a hundred 
could I find whose waist would not measure, dressed, 29 
inches. Allowing for the space taken up by the dress 
3 inches in each class, and the relative size of head 
around its largest part, and the body about the waist, 
was as follows: 
American woman—head 21£ inches, waist (3 inches 
being allowed for clothing) 21J inches; making the 
head \ inch larger round than the waist. 
Foreign-horn woman—head 21 inches, waist (3 inches 
being allowed for clothes) 26 inches, waist being larger 
than head 5 inches. These statistics have not been 
gathered to support a theory, but to arrive at facts, in 
whose light conclusions might be safely deduced, and 
scientific principles established. Thus collated, they go 
to show that the American woman has already come, or 
is rapidly coining to have defective or abnormal style of 
build, and is being organized into a new or original type 
— unlike any seen before her time, or now existing out 
of the United States of America. Bv means of the 16 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
influence over her of the civil, political, and religious 
institutions under which she is born, and which impose 
upon her and flx her conditions of life, she is developing 
into two varieties — the light-liaired, blue-eyed, thin- 
shinned, very pale-faced, under-sized, light-weighted, 
sprightly-acting, vivacious species; and the black-haired, 
black-eyed, thick-skinned, swarthy, broad-browed, large- 
faced class — the two absorbing the liazel-eyed, gray- 
eyed, brown-haired, ruddy-cheeked type. Outside of 
the foreign-born class, or their progeny, there are not 
to be found, in proportion to the whole number, one- 
fourth as many red-haired, dark brown-haired, red- 
clieeked young or middle-aged women, as could be 
found in this country forty years ago. Making all due 
allowance for climatic influences, and the effects of ali- 
ments used and beverages drunk, I am compelled to 
conclude that these peculiar developments are mainly to 
be attributed to the wide diffusion of knowledge whose 
general benefits the American woman gets, and to her 
deprivation in large degree of handicraft labor. I say 
deprivation, because while woman has had awarded to 
her the right, the privilege and the duty of domestic 
labor, she has never had accorded to her the right to 
select and follow mechanical pursuits. Society, through 
Public Opinion, and the State, through legislative en- 
actments in times past, have hedged up her way, so 
that she has had no natural outlet for her powers except 
in the narrowest and most confined manner. Inasmuch, 
however, as she must grow — and not having freedom 
to grow symmetrical — she has gradually developed a PHYSICAL ORGANIZATION. 
17 
form of body that is “ sui generis,” of tlie like of which 
neither Science nor History makes mention. 
Viewed in any light, it is greatly to he regretted that 
so powerful a drift has been already constitutionally 
given in a wrong direction to the exercise of Vital En- 
ergy in the American woman, because it will be hard 
work to recover right position. Do the very best we 
all may, it will take a long time to reconstruct the 
Womanhood of the hTation, so that its female progeny 
shall be what, in such a climate and country and under 
free institutions, women ought to be. If the best that 
might be done is not done, then it needs not the vision 
of a prophet to foresee that the children to be born of 
American women will have but little of which to boast, 
but much to mourn over in lack of constitutional power 
of endurance and of physical beauty. 
(<?.) In the relative size of her head to her whole body. 
It is a law of organic or structural physiology that the 
human body, to be made after its true model, must have 
a large cerebellum or back brain, and which dips down 
low into the nape of the neck, as it were. If this struc- 
tural formation is greatly lacking in any given subject, 
to the extent that it is, will the person lack organic or 
constitutional power to grow symmetrical and strong. 
If, in addition to this lack of size of back-brain, there is 
undue-size (relative to the size of the whole body) of the 
cerebrum, or front and top brain, the difficulty of normal 
development of the whole body is increased. In every 
such case, some of the following forms of deviation from 
the true anatomical or architectural line of build will be 
noticeable: 18 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
1st. In too long and too small neck. 
2nd. In low, stooping, slanting shoulders, with the 
shoulder-blades often standing out like wings. 
3rd. In flattened position of the breast-hone, or its 
opposite — the chicken-breasted formation. 
4th. In unduly developed mammary glands early in 
life, with almost entire disappearance of them in later 
years. 
5th. In very small, and therefore very feebly organ- 
ized, digestive organs, especially the stomach and lac- 
teals. 
6th. In feeble procreative capacity, or if otherwise, 
in feeble health consequent on child-bearing. 
7 th. In large bones and small muscles, or in small 
bones and excess of fatty tissue. 
8th. In legs too short for the trunk of the body, or in 
body too short for the legs. 
9th. In arms too long for the body or disproportion- 
ally short to the legs. 
10th. In hands large and fingers blunt at the ends 
and set wide apart. 
11th. In feet set on the legs so as to turn in, making 
their possessor pigeon-toed. 
12tli. In legs so set on to the body as to give to their 
owner when walking an eccentric movement, making 
the gait ungraceful, or, if graceful, wanting in power. 
How, putting together the facts which I have stated 
above, it is not difficult to see why American women— 
native born—are so keenly intellectual, so sharply intu- 
itional. so actively social, generally speaking so early PHYSICAL ORGANIZATION. 
19 
marriageable; why they have uniformly poor health, 
have their beauty rapidly fade, and why they die early; 
being in many respects unlike the foreign-born women 
of the republic, who, becoming residents here after 
adult growth, are benefited in many ways by the phys- 
ical and social changes to which they are introduced. 
It is quite pertinent, and may be profitable to inquire 
into the causes which have wrought so wide departure 
from their ancestral build, as the present generation of 
American women shows. Of physical causes may be 
mentioned: 
(a.) Unhealthy food. 
(5.) Unhealthy drinks. 
(c.) Unhealthy dress. 
(d.) Constrained locomotion. 
(<?.) Confinement in houses. 
if.) Too frequent child-bearing. 
I will consider them in order. CHAPTER III. 
UNHEALTHY FOODS. 
"With us, as a people, bread and meat constitute the 
staff of our life, being eminently the staples of our 
food. Of the grain used, wheat ranks all the other 
grains in quantity used, as it does all of them in nat- 
ural fitness. According to Liebig, Bousingault, and 
other chemists, 107 parts of wheat are equal to 111 
parts of rye, 117 of oats, 130 of barley, 138 of Indian 
corn, 177 of rice, 894 of potatoes and 1,335 of turnips. 
In making bread out of wheat after the form or man- 
ner which with us is almost universal, certainly quite 
common, we greatly deteriorate it, insomuch as to make 
it less nutritious than it might be ; but not only so, we 
make it noxious, thus disturbing those who eat it in 
many instances, by causing severe irritation of their 
gastric nerves. In preparing wheat for cooking, the 
uniform practice is to separate the bran from the flour. 
When this is done an analysis of these will show 
the harm of bolting. The principal solid constituents 
of the human body are fat, bone and muscle. I offer 
the following condensation of facts taken from a state- 
ment of a scientific gentleman, correspondent of one 
20 UNHEALTHY FOODS. 
21 
of the ablest and oldest papers in the State of New 
York* 
1. The fat.—Of this ingredient, 1000 lbs. of whole 
grain contribute 38 lbs.; fine flour 20 lbs.; bran, 60 
lbs. 
So that the bran is much richer in furnishing; the 
materials of fat than the interior portion of the grain, 
and the whole grain ground together is richer than the 
finer part of the flour, in proportion of nearly one-half. 
2. The Muscular Matter.—One thousand pounds of 
whole grain, and of the fine flour, contain of muscular 
matter respectively—whole grain, 156 lbs.; fine flour 
130 lbs. 
So that of the material out of which the animal muscle 
is to lie formed, the wliole-meal or grain of wheat con- 
tains one-fifth more than the finest flour. For main- 
taining muscular strength, therefore, it must he more 
valuable in an equal proportion. 
3. Bone material and Saline Matter.—One thousand 
pounds of bran, whole-meal and fine flour contain re- 
spectively—bran, 700 lbs.; wliole-meal 170 lbs.; fine 
flour, 69 lbs. 
So that in regard to this important part of our food, 
necessary to all living animals, but especially to the 
young during their growth, the whole meal is three 
times more nourishing than the fine flour. 
Taking the three essential elements of a nutritive 
food thus existing in wheat, and comparing their re- 
spective amounts in the whole-meal and in the flue 
flour, we find that, on the whole, the former is one-half 
more valuable for fulfilling all the purposes of nutrition 
than the fine flour. “ It will not be denied,” says Pro- 
* Country Gentleman, Albany, N. Y., Luther, Tucker & Co. 22 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
fessor Johnson, “ that it is for a wise purpose that the 
Deity lias so intimately associated in the grain the sev- 
eral substances which are necessary for the complete 
nutrition of animal bodies. The above considerations 
show how unwise we are in attempting to undo this 
natural collocation of materials. To please the eye and 
the palate, we sift out a less generally nutritive food ; 
and to make up for what we have removed, experience 
teaches us to have recourse to animal food of various 
descriptions. It is interesting to remark, even in ap- 
parently trivial things, how all nature is full of com- 
pensating processes. We give our servants household 
bread, while we live on the finest of the wheat our- 
selves. The mistress eats that which pleases the eye 
more—the maid, what sustains and nourishes the body 
better.” 
It has been found, by Majendie and others, that ani- 
mals died in a few weeks when fed only upon fine Hour, 
but lived long upon whole bread. Thus, the coarse 
bread given to prisoners is the best they could have ; 
for, being restricted from all other food, there would 
not be sufficient nutriment in fine white loaves to sus- 
tain life for any length of time. The nutritive proper- 
ties of bran are exhibited in its effects in fattening pigs 
and other animals; and thus, this apparently woody 
and useless material is found to produce valuable results. 
In eating starch, or fine flour bread in so large quan- 
tities as they do, American women construct defective 
bones, a worse thing than which, organically regarded, 
it would be difficult for them to do. In the formation 
of a model body, nature always pays close attention to 
the construction of bones. They are to the other parts 
what the hull is to a vessel complete. Masts, sails, rig- UNHEALTHY FOODS. 
23 
ging are little worth when the frame or body of a ship 
is defective in build. So with the human body, hfo 
woman, however full and round in muscle and smooth 
in outline, can have hardiness of body if she has brittle 
bones. They indicate lack of endurance. If under 
strain they break easily, whatever may be urged to 
the contrary, she, under heavy taxation, breaks down 
easily. Life’s trials wreck her. Strong bones cannot 
be made out of starch/ and superfine flour has more 
of this than of any other substance in it. Starch, when 
introduced into the stomach and from thence onward 
into the intestines, readily is converted into sugar, and 
thus serves an excellent purpose as lieat-forming food ; 
but sugar does not make bone, nor does starch nor su- 
gar make muscle, or sinew, or nerve. White, leavened, 
wheat bread never should be eaten as a staple food. 
Because it is, it can readily be discerned why so many 
cases of deformed bony structure exist. Of any num- 
ber of American girls over sixteen, and of American 
women over thirty years of age, a large percentage will 
be found to have the right shoulder lower than the left 
when measured with exactness; and whenever this is 
the case the ankle of the left leg will be found to be 
crooked. In not a few families this has come to be a 
transmitted deformity, the mothers carrying it over to 
their children. 
Of meats, it may be said, that they are eaten by 
American women far too freely. Were those who 
make use of them persons of lymphatic temperament, 
the ill effects would be less observable; or, being of 24 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
the temperaments which for the most part American 
women show, if they lived out of doors more, and 
had plenty of exercise in the sunshine and pure air, 
there would less injury accrue to their health and their 
organic forces than now takes place. As it is, the ani- 
mal food eaten by them does not make muscle in large 
amount, nor does it construct nerve in great measure; 
but it does make a quality of blood which excites the 
brain, heart, and lungs, increasing their activity, and 
thereby developing a large measure of power. If food 
has what some physiologists call “potential energy,” 
assuming that flesli-meats have this quality in them, 
they are not good food for American women when 
used by them as staples, because the conditions of 
living which are ordinary with them do not require 
this sort of energy. Situated as they are “ from cradle 
to cross, and from footstool to throne,” they have 
already too much innervation. They are always on 
the alert. They eat quickly, talk rapidly, walk too 
fast, read too much, sleep too little, pass girlhood too 
soon, and become old too early. A great many of 
them are constitutionally infecund, or, if not absolutely 
so, are only feebly procreative. They do not need 
stimulation, but do need sedation. Their vital energy 
ought not to be aroused and made to take on extraor- 
dinary vigor; but, instead, it should be quieted and 
kept below its ordinary level. Otherwise, in some 
shape, structural departure from the true order of 
bodily growth will show itself. CHAPTER IT. 
UNHEALTHY DEINKS. 
The only fluid fit to be habitually used as drink is 
living, soft water. It is “ God’s only beverage” for man. 
It only can answer absolutely the purposes for which 
a living human body wants a solvent. Compounded 
with anything else, it loses usefulness exactly in the 
ratio that this is done. Any other substance mingled 
with it, by infusion or solution, deteriorates it and les- 
sens its quality. All the mineral waters of America 
and Europe are unhealthy to drink. Ten thousand 
times as many persons have been injured by them as 
were ever helped. Here and there an invalid, made so 
by retention in the body of some earthy salt in excess, is 
made better by drinking water which holds in solution 
another earthy salt, having strong chemical affinity 
for the one in the invalid’s blood. So when these two 
come together and union takes place, a third or neu- 
tral salt is formed, which is innoxious, and relief is 
had, and the patient gets better. But no such result 
follows the use of mineral waters, in the great majority 
of cases where persons drink them. Nervous, excita- 
ble, irritable, irascible, extremely wakeful, super-active 
women should not use them. To the blood of such 
25 26 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
persons they are as destructive as “Munn’s Elixir,” 
though in quite a different way. 
If, then, waters which are called mineral are not 
good to drink, wrater which is called pure, yet has in it 
a solution of carbonate of lime, is also unfit to use 
habitually as a beverage or common drink. Almost 
all the water in the wells attached to dwelling-houses 
is hard. Such ought not to be used by women built 
after the physical structure common to American wo- 
men. Some of my readers may think me quite finical, 
but I am not. Vegetables and animals never thrive 
when compelled to use hard wrater as a drink (for vege- 
tables drink as truly as animals), as they do when they 
have soft water to satisfy their thirst. The leaves of 
the vegetable put on a sickly pale-green look, and the 
hair of the animal stands out staringly and dry. hTo 
human muscle is as elastic and enduring when the 
person wearing it uses hard, as when soft wrater is 
used; nor are the nerves as electrically or magnetically 
charged; the bones and sinews are not as strong; and 
the brain is never as healthy and enduringly vigorous. 
But the worst effects from its use are seen in the un- 
healthy action which the kidneys, bowels, and skin take 
on. Persons who habitually use hard water freely as a 
drink have constipated bowels, irritable bladders, and 
dry skins, with sweating feet. In instances not a 
few, have I seen the insensible perspiration conducted 
through the bottoms of the feet almost entirely, making 
the subject quite uncomfortable from their extreme 
moisture and the odor of them. In other instances I UNHEALTHY DRINKS. 
27 
have known persons to be made ill from the generally 
deranged action of the lymphatics, and these persons 
have been cured by the abandonment of hard, and the 
use of soft water in its stead as a drink. Yery few 
women know anything about the healthful effects of 
drinking freely of pure soft water. It washes the 
blood, making it clean; it helps to dissolve worn-out 
tissues, whether of bone, muscle, or nerve; it assists in 
the formation of new structure; it tones the stomach, 
keeps aperient the bowels, promotes healthy action of 
the kidneys, and innervates the skin. Even the brain 
of a liberal and habitual soft-water drinker is healthier, 
more normal, and will work steadier than it is possible 
for it to do under the use of any other fluid. Notwith- 
standing these great advantages from its use, nine- 
tenths of all the women in this country do not habitu- 
ally use it, and very few, comparatively speaking, use 
it exclusively. There are several orders, schools, and 
societies, large in numbers and strong in influence, 
existent in the United States, which have for their aim 
and object the disuse of alcoholic and other intoxi- 
cating drinks. In these associations are to be found 
large numbers of women who are intelligent, high- 
minded, and largely benevolent. For the most part, 
I doubt not, these are faithful to the vow they have 
taken ; but, for their own highest good, they have not 
gone far enough. To do the best for themselves they 
can, they need to do more than pledge themselves to 
the disuse of intoxicating drinks; they should assume 
a positive position, and affirm a positive principle; 28 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
they should pledge themselves to the free and liberal 
use of pure, soft water. The human body not only 
does not need intoxicating fluids, but it does need, and 
in large quantities too, good water. No persons except 
Health Reformers are pledged to the use of water; 
and the consequence is, that this fluid as a drink has 
largely gone into disuse. In every contrivable way 
substitutes have been got up, of which there is not one 
that is not infinitely below it in all the constituents 
and uses for which fluid as a drink is needed and de- 
manded by the human system. Not counting in the 
distilled, brewed, and vinous beverages, what other 
concoctions have we, in common use, whose influence 
has been extended and powerful in the production 
of the present abnormal, physical build of American 
women ? We have— 
In almost every house they are in use, whereas in 
every household, whose head and housekeeper as wife 
and mother, is a woman of sanguine-nervous, nervous- 
sanguine, or nervous-bilious temperament, they ought 
to be rigorously excluded. Their natural and legiti- 
mate effect on organisms thus constituted is to subject 
the nervous structures to excessive action and reaction, 
and so to destroy their integrity and stability. When 
this is done utter ruin stares the victim in the face; for 
what can a person do in a world like this, with such 
surroundings as American institutions give to Ainerican- 
born women, when her nerves are like untwisted flax 
TEA AND COFFEE. UNHEALTHY DRINKS. 
29 
fibres, and her brain is like a ball of phosphorus? 
Neither tea nor coffee has nutrient elements. Tho 
most their warmest advocates claim for them — and at 
the head of this school stands Liebig — is, that used in 
moderation they have staying power, i. e. they check 
the metamorphosis of the tissues, and so sustain the 
system. a A poor pretense and a feeble virtue, this ! ” 
For it so happens that where such sudden and often 
violent suspension of organic activity is induced as 
must be in the case supposed, the worst reactions are 
imposed on the nervous structures. When the lym- 
phatics, by reason of some unassimilated substance in the 
blood, are compelled to suspend action, and so excretion 
of waste matter ceases for the time being, where else 
shall the vis vitae be sent except to the nervous centers 
and to the brain ? ’ Tis this that makes alcohol intoxi- 
cating. If it were not for this disturbed vital action in 
the lympathics, induced by its presence in the circula- 
tion, I doubt whether alcohol could intoxicate. It is 
because it checks, or in many cases for a while com- 
pletely stops excretion, by causing change of tissue to 
stop by robbing it of its oxygen, that it makes him who 
takes it drunk. Were its presence in the blood, as this 
flows through the body, to cause no modification of 
vital action in any of the vital organs, or in any of the 
structures or elements of the body, no man could get 
intoxicated by its use. Just so is it with tea and coffee. 
The exhilarations they cause to the women who habit- 
ually use them are in the ratio of the disturbance of the 
vital force they cause. Both are nervines and seda- 30 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
lives. Both are sedatives and depressants, and neither 
a nervine nor a sedative nor a depressant can he a 
tonic. No person can extract tone out of tea or 
coffee. “ Tone, medically speaking, is the strength 
and activity of the organs from which proceed healthy 
functions.” These substances cannot impart strength, 
and when their presence in the blood induces activity 
or develops strength, it is always done at an ultimate 
loss. There is such a process as expending strength to 
be made the stronger thereby; but this always is done 
by adding to the actual or possible energy of the nutri- 
tive organs. Whosoever evokes strength from his 
body and gives nothing back, sooner or later brings on 
bankruptcy ; and this is what, in large numbers, 
American-born women have been and are doing. 
They are making themselves devoid of vital resources, 
and are adding to the calamity by giving to the chil- 
dren they bear very feeble constitutions. 
Not a few persons perhaps who may read what I 
have said of the tendencies of unhealthy drinks, as well 
as of their direct effects in producing the abnormal 
build common to American-born women, may think 
my reasoning far-fetched. If so, I differ from them, 
because from the closest observation and thoroughest 
reflection, I have come to believe that the constant nse 
of mineral waters, lime water, tea and coffee, or of 
brewed and vinous liquors, by our American - born 
women, has a great deal to do, in conjunction with 
their other abnormal habits of life, in producing their 
excessive development of nervous structure, and of UNHEALTHY DRINKS. 
31 
activity of sucli structure at the expense of the mus- 
cular and bony tissues of their bodies, and to their 
own personal loss in health, position, usefulness and 
character. 
Is it a small matter whether a woman shall be strong 
or weak, enduring or with little or no staying power of 
body ? whether she have good common sense or is greatly 
lacking in it ? whether she he capable of large and 
broad culture, or competent only to the comprehension 
and practical application of the ceremonies and con- 
ventions of life ? whether she prove competent to the 
duties of wife and mother, or not? When in the ad- 
vanced stage of this discussion it comes to be seen how 
large a proportion of American-born women has already 
developed radical unfitness for domestic life not only, 
but for every kind of life that involves the exercise of 
large reason, resolute will, continuity of purpose, and 
bodily vigor, my thought as to their peculiarities and 
necessities may appear more substantial. CHAPTER Y. 
UNHEALTHY DEESS. 
Of causes purely physical which have induced amongst 
American women a wide departure from their ances- 
tral ability, is the wearing from generation to genera- 
tion of an unphysiological dress. Yiewed in detail, it 
readily appears how bad the fashion is. 
First. They have uniformly worn their hair done up 
with combs, pins, or knots on the back of the head. 
This tends to produce, and in uncountable cases does 
produce, congestion of the cerebellum or back-brain. 
From this congested condition arises, in a great many 
instances, diseases of the organs of nutrition and excre- 
tion ; and when a woman becomes pregnant, it either in- 
duces or directly tends to induce modifications of the 
structural or organic conformation of the offspring. 
It is one of the laws of nature that where the habits or 
methods of life of the female are such as to induce func- 
tional disease on herself when she is not in a child- 
bearing state, such habits, when she is in such state, 
directly tend to produce organic or constitutional dis- 
ease in her offspring. Wearing the hair done up on 
the back of the head, therefore, has made American 
women give birth to a great many malformed as 'well 
32 UNHEALTHY DEE6S. 
33 
as a great many feebly-organized children. Since the 
practice of wearing waterfalls has come into fashion, 
this evil result to offspring is likely to be much in- 
creased. The only natural way of wearing the hair is 
in the flowing style, unless it be regarded also as natu- 
ral to cut it off. Under the present conditions of gen- 
eral life common to civilized peoples, it would be very 
inconvenient to wear it flowing over the shoulders; 
and out of this inconvenience has grown the practice 
or habit of doing it up on the back of the head. This, 
in effect, makes the hair short; so that as far as appear- 
ance from length is concerned it might as well be cut 
off; and so far as the question of health is worthy of 
consideration, it would be incalculably better that it 
should be worn short. 
Second. Women uniformly wear upon their heads 
unhealthy covering. Were they to go without any 
they would do a great deal better; for then nature 
would set herself to work to supply a sufficient amount 
of blood to the integuments of the head, and thereby 
increase and thicken up the natural covering—the hair. 
In truth, there is no better way whereby to increase the 
thickness of the hair by growth than to wear nothing 
on the head. If one, however, will wear covering on 
the head, it should be of such a nature as to secure as 
equal circulation as possible. Under the present 
habits of American women, however, with reference to 
head-covering, there is no such condition of the circu- 
lation insured; but on the contrary, and almost una- 
voidably, a disturbed condition is established; for such 34 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
is the power of Fashion over them, that in many in- 
stances they go, within a twelvemonth, two or three 
times between the extremes of wearing little or nothing 
and wearing thick covering on their heads. All this 
has very much to do with the magnetic or electrical 
condition of their nervous systems; and this has much 
to do, not only with their general bodily health, but 
with their intellectual vigor. 
Passing from the head, we come 
Thirdly, to the way in which women dress the ujpjper 
part of the body, or that portion usually denominated 
the chest. Herein they show a complete inappreciation 
of the value of the laws pertaining to life and health. 
As the lungs are vital organs, holding very high rank 
in the animal economy, and therefore entitled to great 
consideration if health and life are of much worth; to 
dress in such a way as seriously to interfere with them, 
is not only to outrage nature, but to insure sooner or 
later her uttermost penalties. In no direction, save 
one which I shall mention by and by, do women show 
themselves to be so entirely devoid of right perception, 
or of large appreciation of their needs, as in the fitting 
of their costumes to the chest. It is a law of nature 
that whenever, in the exercise of a vital function, inter- 
ference is had so as seriously to impede or disturb such 
function, substitutive efforts shall be made. To illus- 
trate : if from any cause the blood which goes through 
veins is interfered with by the cutting off and taking 
up a vein so as to break the connection, nature imme- 
diately forces the blood back to the heart through other UNHEALTHY DRESS. 
35 
channels, making good by a round-about way, as far as 
she can, tlie original condition. So it is in the direc- 
tion of action of the lungs. Whenever, from external 
pressure, arising from any cause, the circulation of the 
blood is impeded, nature forces it into the deep blood- 
vessels and piles it up there, impelling it along by 
increased action of the heart. The lungs, which are 
organized to hold great quantities of blood at a given 
time, are thus compelled, in order to meet the necessi- 
ties of the case, to dilate the coats of their blood-vessels, 
so as to hold at any given moment a much larger quan- 
tity of blood than would be necessary if the circulation 
were undisturbed throughout all parts of the body. 
When congestion ensues, oftentimes irritation, attended 
by cough, follows; and where this is not relieved, in- 
flammation is established, suppuration ensues, and so 
abscess is formed, thus creating pulmonary consump- 
tion. All pressure, therefore, upon the lungs, from 
whatever cause, is directly calculated to induce disease 
of these organs. In my practice I have probably had, 
first and last, not less than five thousand women who 
have come to be examined for diseases of the lungs, of 
whom quite a proportion were in such a state as to 
render it out of the question for me to do them any 
good, they being thoroughly incurable. Yet of them 
all I believe there were not a dozen who were not 
dressed so tightly about the lungs as in the course of 
time to insure pulmonary disease to any woman or 
man, however healthy, had such person been subjected 
to the constant wearing of just such a dress as these 36 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
poor creatures wore at the time they sought relief at my 
hands. 
Fourth. Another point in the way of wearing un- 
healthy dress' is that of wearing it tight around that 
part of the body commonly called the waist—the part 
wherein the stomach is enclosed. It is a curious fact, 
and very significant, that of all the persons who die of 
consumption of the lungs in this country, seven-eighths 
of them, probably, have the disease originate in de- 
rangement of the stomach. Dyspepsia is the forerun- 
ner of pulmonary disease. Of the fruitful causes of 
dyspepsia in its varied forms, perhaps none is more 
common than that arising from external pressure of 
clothing upon the stomach. Almost all American wo- 
men so dress as to have belts or girdles pass around the 
body right over the stomach, contracting it, and hin- 
dering it from any thing like natural motion. In order 
to digest food, the stomach has to contract and expand. 
If you contract it so that it cannot expand, you hin- 
der it from performing its natural office of dissolving 
food and preparing it to pass out of that receptacle into 
the organs further along the alimentary canal. Any 
external pressure which will in the least degree inter- 
fere with the office of the stomach in disintegrating and 
decomposing the food, tends directly to produce indi- 
gestion. A great many persons are made dyspeptics 
without understanding the cause. They have silently 
undergone permanent contraction of the stomach so 
that it is not competent to hold food enough to keep the 
system in conditions of health. A human stomach can UNHEALTHY DRESS. 
37 
be made to contract so that its natural capacity to hold 
food can be lessened from one-half to two-thirds. Add 
to this, that by such contraction its power to digest 
wThat it can hold is very sensibly and seriously dimin- 
ished, and you can get at the reason why there are so 
many persons suffering from dyspepsia. 'Where there 
is one man in this country suffering from dyspepsia, 
there are probably live women; and this, too, notwith- 
standing the general dietetic and drinking habits of 
men are much more unhygienic than those of women. 
This is attributable, amongst other causes, to the very 
bad practice common to American women of girting or 
belting their bodies so as to force the stomach to con- 
tract. Out of this condition of things one may get a 
glimpse of one of the reasons wdiy I advocate an un- 
belted or basquine style of dress for women. The con- 
traction of the stomach produced by girting the wTaist 
of the body is not the only evil which results there- 
from to the person who does it. Right behind the 
stomach lies a net-work of nerves, called by physiolo- 
gists the solar plexus; so named because in its con- 
formation it appears like the sun, the nerves radiating 
and passing off* in many directions as from a common 
centre. Pressure upon the stomach affects this net- 
work and produces irritation, which directly causes in 
many instances that nervous condition known as hyste- 
ria. Perhaps there is no more powerful cause for the 
production of this disease than organic nervous irrita- 
tion induced by tight dressing. Whoever has had to 
do with a woman suffering from hysteria knows wha t 38 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
a terrible infliction upon lier, and scarcely less upon all 
who have to do with her, the disease is. It is one of 
the most difficult to manage; puts on almost protean 
changes; controls will, sensibility, and physical action ; 
making the person suffering from it at all times unreli- 
able and in many instances unmanageable while the 
paroxysm lasts. 
Fifth. Wearing dresses, as most women do, tight 
about their waists, is a powerfully provoking cause of 
a class of diseases known in polite phrase as Female 
Ailments. Yery few American women can be found 
over twenty-five years of age, whether married or un- 
married, who are not suffering from some form or 
phase of uterine difficulty. The reason why the disease 
has come to be so common is, first, because of the con- 
stitutional feebleness of our women, and their want of 
general good health; and second, because of their styles 
of dress, which induce mechanical displacements of the 
organs contained in the abdomen and pelvic cavity. 
When a belt is habitually worn round a human body, 
over or just below the stomach, sufficiently tight 
to produce sensible pressure, the stomach not only 
shrinks and permanently contracts, as I have before 
said, malting the person smaller around the waist than 
she naturally would be, but the bowels also shrink to 
get away from the pressure. The abdominal muscles 
lose their contractility, and let the intestines si nit into 
the lower part of the abdomen. In their fall they 
press upon those organs which lie below them, and are 
situated in the pelvic cavity. UNHEALTHY DRESS. 
39 
A woman suffering from any one of these forms 
of mechanical displacement, becomes physically enfee- 
bled. She cannot walk, nor work, nor sit up straight, 
nor lift weights with any degree of comfort. Life be- 
comes an uncomfortable burden to her. CHAPTER VI. 
COITSTEAINED LOCOMOTION. 
The right so to use one’s body as to be able to move 
from place to place to the best advantage, is one of the 
most sacred rights of man. It may be regarded as a cen- 
tral right around which the entire group of rights revolve. 
Arrange a person’s relations to life in such way as that 
the right of locomotion is denied, and you have sub- 
stantially spoiled the intrinsic worth of all the other 
rights which may be said to belong to him. There can 
be no more degrading slavery to a human being than 
to have denied to him the free use of his bodily powers, 
whereby he shall pursue his own happiness after his 
own idea of it, without molestation or hindrance; ex- 
cept where it is manifestly clear that such person is dis- 
qualified by want of reason or want of purpose to use 
his rights within their own legitimate precincts. The 
day has been in the history of civilization when it could 
be said of woman that she was not competent to take 
care of herself, and therefore society and government 
were not only at liberty, but were bound to take care 
of her; but in the United States of America this can 
with no propriety be said. American women are so 
intelligent, so enlightened, so Christianized, and there- 
40 CONSTRAINED LOCOMOTION. 
41 
fore so civilized, that they are competent to maintain, 
and therefore to come into possession of, and enjoy, 
their own rights. If it be true that under European 
civilization and its governmental institutions, women 
are not sufficiently developed to be clothed with full 
franchise, and freedom of their own powers, it is not true 
of American women. Liberty has done her proper work 
for them as decidedly and as efficaciously as it has for 
American men, though not to the same extent; because 
society and government have not been whiling to allow 
to women the education that they have to men. nev- 
ertheless, the reflex influences of liberty on American 
women have been of so developing a nature that they 
are a great way in advance of any other nationality of 
women in the world. They therefore are entitled to all 
the protection society can give, to all the authority of cus- 
tom and the force of fashion in the way of freedom of 
use of their locomotive forces. They should be as free 
to go from place to place in the pursuit of their own 
happiness as American men are. They therefore 
should be entitled to dress themselves in such way as 
will enable them to do this to advantage rather than at 
disadvantage. To recognize them as citizens of the 
state — as members of a just social economy which has 
for its guidance and leadership the great spirit of liberty, 
and yet constantly to appear related to them as though 
they were mere serfs or slaves, is to do foul outrage to 
all the sensibilities of their natures, and to make just the 
severest criticism warranted by the facts of the case. I 
know it is said that the difference between men and 42 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
women is such as to'justify a difference in style of dress. 
Admitting the correctness of this view, it does not fol- 
low that in order to make the difference readily percep- 
tible, woman’s dress needs to he unphysiological; for 
all that would he necessary in the direction of difference 
in style, in order to make plain the difference in sex, 
would be the wearing of different badges; the men 
wearing something on their clothing which should iudi 
cate their sex, and the women wearing something in or 
upon their clothing which should indicate their sex. 
This might be done as readily by a breast-pin, by a hat 
or cap, by collar or cuff, as by skirts; so that it does not 
follow that in order to have sex recognized and acknowl- 
edged and properly protected, the apparel which women 
wear should be destructive of their physical powers, and 
of their health, and so of their character. When the 
right of the thing comes into issue, and discussion fol- 
lows, the result will have to be, that where men and 
women are substantially alike in organization, they shall 
be entitled substantially to the same’ uses of organiza- 
tion. A man’s eyes are no more his own for purposes 
of vision than are a woman’s her own. His hands are 
no more his than her hands are hers. Her right to 
maintain good health by the sustaining power of good 
food is as positive as his is. Wherever she has faculties 
like his in organization and order of use, she is as 
thoroughly and clearly entitled to their use, and to all 
the results which properly follow therefrom, as he is. 
How, in the structure of that portion of the human 
body usually termed the legs, women are built anatom i- CONSTRAINED LOCOMOTION. 
43 
call y and physiologically upon the same principles that 
men are. If a man wishes under the exercise of his 
organs of locomotion to move himself from one place to 
another, the means by which he puts his propelling 
powers at work, and the way in which they become 
actively efficient, are the same as those by which a 
woman must put hers whenever she attempts to go from 
one place to another. In this respect God has made the 
man and the woman alike; therefore their right to the 
use of their powers in this respect is alike. They may 
be said then to hold the right in common. Neither 
society, nor the church, nor the state is at liberty to 
impose restraint or restriction on the one more than on 
the other. When either does it, giving liberty to one 
and debarring liberty from the other, it commits an 
outrage on the person whom it restrains. It gives a 
monopoly of liberty and creates a special privilege for 
the one, and plays the despot to the other, and seeks to 
make her a slave. Ho community can, without com- 
mitting crime, trench upon the abstract right of any 
woman to the full enjoyment of her powers whenever 
by proper qualifications she shall be in natural relations 
to their use. It makes no difference what the right is 
which inheres in the person. It is complete as a posses- 
sory right, and it is complete in the person as an enjoy- 
able right, when she is competent in the development 
of her own powers to the use of it. 
The dress of the American woman is open to criticism 
and severe censure in the following respects. It is un- 
healthy, unhandy and unhandsome. The first point I 44 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
have already discussed. The dress of the American 
woman is unhandy in two ways: 1st, in the constraint 
it puts on the arms. This is observable in the fact that 
from the way the sleeves are set into the waistcoat, great 
restriction is imposed on the motion of the arms. They 
are, as it were, tied down. In certain directions one 
who wears a dress fitting the body tightly, as for the 
most part women do, and whose sleeves are set into the 
waistcoat low on the shoulders, cannot raise her hands 
and arms without difficulty and at great disadvantage. 
Free motion is impossible. Between her and a man 
who has free motion of his arms, there is wide differ- 
ence, and, of course, great distance, which, through 
life in all departments of labor requiring strength, 
activity and expertness for success, his freedom con- 
stantly increases, and which her restraint renders it 
impossible for her to overcome. This hindrance on 
her becomes all the more observable when one comes 
to study the various handicrafts followed by our Amer- 
can men, and notice how intimately connected skill of 
the hands is with free use of the arms. I have for 
years studied patiently this point, and I am satisfied 
that there are over two hundred kinds of work which 
men follow, and thrive thereby, that no woman can 
take up and successfully compete with them in, while 
she wears tight waists and sleeves set low on the should- 
Many of these arts can only be followed by per- 
sons who are skilled in the labor needful to be done, 
and this skill is obtainable only by great patience of 
effort, under which the will trains the muscles of the CONSTRAINED LOCOMOTION. 
45 
arms and fingers to the most delicate sensibilities. This 
training cannot be given where hindrance to free action 
exists. So absolutely true is this, that many mechanics 
are compelled to take off their out-of-door or outside 
clothing, whenever they begin work. An unreflecting 
person seeing one of them do this, would conclude that 
he did it to make himself more comfortable ; but the 
truth is, a necessity is on him. He must do it, or he 
either will fail to do what he does satisfactorily, or he 
will fail in the amount he ought to do. Skilled labor 
in America is coming to be supreme ruler. It is rising 
in dignity and, of consequence, in importance, yearly. 
I can remember when a farmer was despised, and a 
mechanic was a clodpate; when manual labor was de- 
grading, and “ the upper crust ” in society was the 
class of consumers. That day in this country went to 
its setting with American Slavery. It was a period, 
when it culminated, of great degradation, wherein 
labor suffered untold cruelties and honest industry 
underwent martyrdom ; for he who earned his bread 
was less respected than he who cheated for it. But 
liberty helped labor, and labor rewarded liberty; and 
now and for evermore in this Republic they travel 
hand in hand. If women are to be henceforth the 
representatives of labor, they must take service under 
liberty. If they are to become skillful in work, they 
must be free to work ; or else to them will be com- 
mitted the least important and least remunerative em- 
ployments. If, however, one may justly complain of 
their half manacled hands, what criticism or reproof 46 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
is too sharp or too severe on their voluntarily enfettered 
legs ? IIow can a creature so nobly endowed as woman 
is, thus willingly impose, or submit to have imposed, 
conditions upon her, that at the very outset take one 
half her worth away ? Can she not see that, take the 
world with its innumerable interests, demanding the 
use of vast resources under wisely directed intelli- 
gence, made available through a vast variety of forms 
of skilled labor, it would be utterly impossible for these 
interests to be properly cared for, and so successfully 
promoted, by those men now having them in charge, 
were they all to be compelled to put off pantaloons 
and put on petticoats % Business in ten thousand forms 
would have to come to a stand-still. The whole ma- 
chinery of modern civilization would have to be re- 
modeled, and if done, when done would represent 
weakness instead of power. Instability, irregularity 
and indetermination, would characterize all movements 
designed to secure and mark human progress. Given 
time enough to work out legitimate results, the prevail- 
ing aspect of the new regimen would be incapacity. 
IIow many centuries have rolled away during which 
millions on millions of laboring men, in order to reach 
present results, have been tasked to death because the 
manner and method of their work were crude and lack- 
ing in contrivance. How, however, a new day has 
come. Hever before was the genius of man so wrought 
upon to invent skillful instruments for the saving of 
human labor ; never was it so liberally rewarded with 
success. CONSTRAINED LOCOMOTION. 
47 
Put every man on earth into petticoats, and keep 
them on him, and God’s “ sunshine would go back on 
the world’s dial,” till the blackness of darkness would 
completely cover its face. By so much, then, as the 
world would recede in all that involves its present and 
future good, were its men-workers to become trammelled 
in the use of their bodily powers as women always 
have been and now are, by so much has it always been 
kept from progressing in having woman fettered as she 
now is. Because, take all the pursuits, avocations-, pro- 
fessions, and interests, which have their origin in, and 
their dependence upon human labor, examine them 
closely and classify them carefully, and it will be found 
that nine-tenths of them are as entirely within the 
natural physical competency of woman as of man to 
manage expertly. Then why does she not occupy and 
fill her full share of them ? For the reason that of her 
own free will she consents to be made, or makes her- 
self, physically incompetent. She deliberately consents 
to place her bodily powers where, in relation to use, 
they can be exercised only at disadvantage, while man 
as deliberately and no less strenuously asserts and main- 
tains his right to put his bodily powers to their best 
use at the greatest possible advantage. The moral 
effects of these different determinations on these re- 
spective parties, it is impossible fully to calculate. On 
woman it is enslaving, degrading, debasing. It weak- 
ens her body, makes her mind impracticable and her 
genius torpid. It makes her satisfied with show and 
sham, and unwilling to struggle for high realizations. 48 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
She is consent with business relations and duties that 
are monotonous, and is willing to commit to others 
her highest personal interests. To hold personal posi- 
tion, have accorded to her individuality, be recognized 
as self-supporting, does not come within her ambition. 
The construers of the Gospel; the interpreters of law; 
the expounders of constitutions; the organizers of pub- 
lic opinion, hitherto have conspired to make her be- 
lieve that in thus foreswearing her freedom, and fore- 
going all etforts to enjoy it, and in putting on and wear- 
ing everywhere, like an enforced convict, a dress that 
indicates unmistakably her apostasy from freedom and 
the dignity of labor, she is giving the clearest evidences 
of her true appreciation of womanhood. So long as 
she does, or can be made to believe this falsehood and 
act under it, man will be her superior and govern and 
control the world, though she were to vote a dozen bal- 
lots to his one. In America, opinion is the governing 
power, and opinion depends on intelligence, and this 
on knowledge how to do, quite as much as what to do. 
In matters of commerce, having a vote cannot tell a 
woman how to vote so as to promote commercial inter- 
ests. She must know; if she does not, she is depend- 
ent on the opinions of those who do know. If all the 
merchants are men, then in the sphere of commerce 
they are the masters, and the women are in that sphere 
their inferiors. As in commerce, so in every business, 
every art, every profession, every trade ; those who 
understand its laws and are masters of its details, in 
this country regulate and fix its conditions. If woman CONSTRAINED LOCOMOTION. 
49 
is to be the equal of man, slie must know as much as 
he does. In order to do this, she must be as free to 
acquire and apply knowledge as he is, and to do this 
she must remove all obstructions, overcome all obsta- 
cles, put away all hindrances not only, but she must 
rid herself of every symbol, emblem, type, and insignia 
indicative of her inferiority. 
I hold it to be philosophically impossible, and, there- 
fore, practically absurd to try, to elevate a class or por- 
tion of a people who have long held inferior conditions 
and positions, and have been compelled or induced to 
wear badges indicative of their inferiority, unless such 
symbols are put away. Forms have wonderful power. 
They incorporate, under certain circumstances, into 
themselves intense significance ; and if there be a neces- 
sity for changing conditions which the forms illustrate, 
represent, and make common to human consciousness, 
it is of fundamental importance that in attempting to 
change such conditions, the forms whereby these are 
represented should first be changed. Under the laws 
of progress, involving improvement and culture of 
human beings, it will be found to be a fact, that as all 
the relations of human life are made to take on impos- 
ing, substantial, permanent conditions by means of 
symbols or forms representing them, sets him- 
self up for a reformer will be under the necessity of 
instituting new forms in order to represent new ideas 
or new relations. Thus, when Christ came into the 
world and laid the axe at the root of the tree, amongst 
the very first things that He did in Ilis effort to sup- 50 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
plant Judaism by Christianity, was that of relieving 
His disciples from the obligations to fulfill Jewish 
ritualism. lie went so far in this respect as to exonerate 
them from one of the most important of all their reli- 
gious ceremonials—that of keeping the seventh day 
according to the Mosaic commandment. When He 
was taken to task therefor, He distinctly and clearly 
affirmed not only his right to do it, but the necessity 
for doing it in order to institute a new social regimen ; 
and for His justification of it He declared that the Son 
of man was Lord of the Sabbath day. I doubt very 
much whether Christianity could have been introduced 
amongst the Jews, if the forms of Jewish worship had 
been continued. The spirit of Christianity could not 
be confined within the limit of Judaistic formulas. 
Had He sought to do this He would have choked His 
philosophy to death in the very attempt to give it birth. 
So it is in other respects. Take our American civiliza- 
tion. We cannot keep it up in this country unless 
have forms of government to represent the idea. A 
democracy in idea could not exist on this continent for 
half a century under a monarehial form of government. 
The idea would perish by strangulation, under such 
form. Just so in our American life. An American 
citizen who has imbibed the spirit of liberty until the 
rights of man, as represented in his own person, have 
come to be very sacred with him—have come to hold 
in Ins view not merely a political, but a manly signifi- 
cance, could not consent to live, without earnest pro- 
test, under a government which sustained caste and CONSTRAINED LOCOMOTION. 
51 
class legislation. To be content, he must have citizen- 
ship, where the element of equality can constantly have 
ji his own life illustration of its power and worth. 
In America, society, which always forms opinion, 
and government, which seeks to enforce it, have done 
much to keep woman down. The rights which are hers 
they deny to her ; the privileges and immunities which 
as a human being belong to her are not accorded to her. 
In order that they may the more successfully keep her 
down, they agree to create and make forcible a public 
sentiment which shall forbid her, at the risk of her 
reputation, to wear any other style of dress than that 
which, in its very conformation, subjects her to do 
everything which she undertakes to do at great disad- 
vantage, and, therefore, which necessarily places her in 
the direction of the thing to be done in the condition 
of inferiority to man, who is not compelled to do the 
same thing or things at a disadvantage. As a conse- 
quence, her dress is the symbol or emblem whereby 
her inferiority is shown. It makes clear to everybody 
who sees it on her, or her in it, that she is in a state of 
vassalage ; that as yet she is not free ; that she is in a 
state of serfdom; that she is, after the fashion suited 
to the civilization of the nineteenth century, a serf— 
affixed to the soil; that her right to go from one place 
to another is not accorded to her. Will she always 
accept the situation? Time will tell. CHAPTER VII. 
THE USEFUL AND BEAUTIFUL IN DKESS. 
Dkess may properly be considered under two 
aspects—the Useful and the Beautiful. The major- 
ity of American women are so situated, that they 
ought first to consider the useful in dress. In failing 
to do this, and making the beautiful to take front 
rank, they do themselves great injury, and subject 
themselves to great injustice. They not only destroy 
their health, but they pervert taste. God has made 
the human soul to love beautiful things; it is one of 
its instincts to do so. From its exercise have grown 
the Fine Arts—poetry, painting, architecture, sculp- 
ture, and music. Of these, painting and sculpture 
have had the most to do with the development of 
styles and fashions of dress; because they have sought 
to give ideal representations of the human form, and so 
have had either to adopt for it the covering in vogue, 
or to rise into the sphere of the ideal, and invent or 
create styles. 
It is worthy of notice, that Art, through painting 
and sculpture—as far as it has made attempts to elab- 
orate styles of dress which it could defend on the score 
of beauty or utility, or both, has uniformly acted on 
52 TI-IE USEFUL AND BEAUTIFUL IN DRESS. 
53 
the theory that style should comprise the following 
points: 
1. It should always fit the form wearing it, or so ap- 
proximate thereto as to he decidedly suggestive, thus 
aiding the imagination to awaken consciousness to the 
facts of the case. 2. Necessarily, it should play a sub- 
ordinate part to the person wearing it. 3. It should 
be made of proper material. 
I readily admit that beauty in dress may lie in the 
illusions which it creates, as thoroughly as in the 
elaborations which it educes. The illusions, however, 
should be such only to the sense. The imagination 
should be able readily to penetrate the veil, and make 
good by its power what the eye fails to comprehend, or 
there can be no conception of beauty. Dress a human 
body so that the eye can form no judgment, and the 
imagination no conception of its shape, and at once all 
knowledge whether it is beautiful or not is at an end. 
Dress it so that the knowledge of its form shall be 
exact, or, the knowledge being deficient, the imagina- 
tion may exert itself to make the defect good, and 
ideas relating to beauty immediately arise in the mind. 
Thus fitness becomes an element of beauty; this prin- 
ciple obtains absolutely. To dress a horse as one would 
an ox, a dog as one would a monkey, to make an ass 
wear a lion’s skin, or a goose a peacock’s tail, would 
violate all sense of fitness in cultivated minds. In 
each case the organization asks for that aid, if rendered 
at all, which will by means of covering, whether natu- 
ral or artificial, bring into relief points in the structure 54 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD, 
which might otherwise he overlooked. Till attention 
is called by their absence, one does not know how inti- 
mately the tail and ears of a horse are related in devel- 
oping beauty in other portions of his body. To crop 
a horse’s ears is to deform him to that degree that 
nothing but the cropping of his tail also, can hide the 
deformity. To diverge from the law of structure of 
the horse in the ideal, so as to have him have large 
ears on a small head, and his tail set low down, is to 
diminish his beauty of form so much as to make it 
impossible for a good judge to pronounce him hand- 
some, though in other respects he is faultless. Ex- 
change the heads of the horse and ox, or their tails, 
and you will have spoiled the beauty of both. So in 
other things : give the ox the horse’s legs, or the horse 
the ox’s legs, and you have defeated the aim and end 
of the architect, not only as regards utility, but also as 
respects the sense of beauty in the human mind. 
As the beautiful in living organizations increases in 
delicacy as well as in strength, as these rise in the scale 
of being, it may be said to reach its highest degree in 
the Human. The body of man or woman is the most 
beautiful of living forms. It is vitalized in larger 
measure than any other, by the source of all life, and 
stands erect in the Divine presence, the master of them 
all. How ought, then, the human body to be dressed ? 
Most evidently in no way to deform it, nor to lead to 
misconceptions of its actual structure, nor to injure its 
power. As in the general outline the bodies of man 
and woman are alike, whoever argues that Art is but THE USEFUL AND BEAUTIFUL IN DRESS. 
55 
a method of conforming to Nature in an expression 
of her creations, can reasonably urge that the dress of 
the sexes may properly be similar in style. For 
instance: dress should as strictly conform to the body 
it covers in the case of woman as in that of man. 
It should show her general shape as it should his. It 
should develop her more artistic structure as truly as it 
should his. It should bring out her personal charms, 
should minister to her health and to personal comfort, as 
truly as to his. It should allow of displays of strength 
in her case as in his; and by all the laws of true taste 
and the rules of art, it needs to differ from his only 
suggestively, and, to meet the demands of the most 
fastidious, only sufficiently to avouch her sex. In 
adults, except in lands where women go veiled, this 
need not be done; for Nature has set her own signet 
on the face, proclaiming the difference of sex by the 
beard. When man shall rise above the contemptible 
farce and sorry effeminacy of shaving, for the purpose 
of distinguishing sex, full-grown men and women might 
dress alike. The beard, to say nothing of other differ- 
ences obvious to all close observers, would proclaim the 
line of separation. The voice in conversation, in sing- 
ing, or in elocution, would bespeak the difference. I 
do not thus call attention to these differences which 
delineate the sexes, for the purpose of urging that man 
and woman should dress alike, but to show that woman 
should so apparel herself as not to hide from view such 
outlines of her structure as are essential to the forma- 
tion of a just judgment of her personal appearance. 56 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
To dress her neck in as ill taste as man does would be 
very foolish. By collars and kerchiefs he makes his 
neck—which Nature, in her model-man, builds small 
and sets his head to elegantly—as large and bungling 
as possible. A very silly and very wicked habit it is, 
and not infrequently visited by serious consequences. 
Bor woman to array her person so that, when dressed, 
she should appear at the loins as large as at the shoul- 
ders, and around the stomach as large as at the breast, 
thus destroying the curves in her form on which much 
of her personal beauty depends, would be in bad taste. 
To do her hair up in a wad at the back of her head is 
very unartistic, to say nothing of its unhealthiness. 
To comb her hair over her ears is to create a deformity 
not less disgusting than that of the Chinese, who force 
their feet into the worst of ill shapes. It may be said 
in man’s praise, that whatever faultiness in style he has 
shown in dress, it lies in directions opposite to those 
which woman has usually shown. Men have never yet 
consented to adopt a fashion or style of dress that con- 
cealed their legs. They have consented to dress the 
trunk of the body and the head ungracefully, but the 
legs and arms, for the most part, they have ever so 
endued as to have them free for natural uses. Men 
have always known that the secondary sources of per- 
sonal beauty, suggested by attitudes, postures, move- 
ments, and manifestations of strength by the body, are 
dependent on the arms and legs. One’s admiration 
and respect for a person are measured very much by 
his .attitudes. We watch how such a man stands THE USEFUL AND BEAUTIFUL IN DRESS. 
57 
(that is, what is the relative position his legs hold to 
his body when he stands); what he does with his hands 
and arms when he sits; how he postures himself— 
whether with grace, and ease, and good-breeding, or 
with awkwardness; if the former, we speak in his 
praise, and say that he is a man of good-manners; if 
he is awkward, we pronounce him a boor. Our judg- 
ment forms our estimate of him by means of the way 
in which he puts to use his organs of prehension and of 
locomotion. 
It is, however, not only in the attitude of repose that 
we judge of personal beauty. It is quite as much by 
the motion of the body as by its repose, that we decide, 
and conclude. The poetry of life is its poetry of mo- 
tion. The gestures of the orator, the sylph-like move- 
ments of the dancer, the evolutions of power of the 
gymnast, the speed of the racer, the strength and vigor 
of the wrestler, the grace and ease of motion of the 
pedestrian, all aid us in determining the question of 
personal beauty. To show just what I mean, and to 
what extent by her present style of dress, which con- 
ceals her lower limbs, woman outrages the beautiful 
which God has wrapped up in her form, and which He 
put there expressly to be seen and so add to his glory, 
allow me to conduct you to a parade-ground. On it 
are five hundred men, dressed in military costume, but 
without glittering ornaments. The style is the modern, 
which quite nearly fits the body; the coat is single- 
breasted, with straight collar, so as to show the neck; 
has close sleeves, so as to give the outline of the arm; 58 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
fits tlie chest, so as to give to all the curves full expres- 
sion ; and leaves the legs and feet in full relief. Ar- 
range these men in single file ready for motion. Now 
take the same number of women, dressed as women 
usually dress and place them also in single file. At the 
words, “ Forward ! March ! ” set both bodies in motion 
and watch them as they deploy. In looking at the 
men as they pass by, you will find them elaborating for 
you almost every element of beauty of which the human 
body is the receptacle. The swing of the arms, the 
posture of the head, the movements of the legs, espe- 
cially from the knee downward, so that you get the 
bend of the knee at the time the leg is thrown forward ; 
the movement of the foot as the leg is lifted, and placed 
at rest; the ease and grace with which the legs support 
the body, and with which the body rests upon them; 
the evident subordination under which within the limits 
of motion, the will of each man holds his body; the 
concert of action among the whole number; all com- 
bine to make the whole company inspire one with de- 
light. But feelings and impressions of a far different 
kind are uppermost in the observer, at the sight of the 
women in motion. The two relate themselves to him 
differently. The men impress him with a sense of their 
personal qualities; the women with a sense of their 
personal clothing. The two, also, and this purely by 
their different styles of dress, require different stand- 
points for observation. A human being dressed so as 
to give one full view of the legs, suffers from no point 
of observation if his body is well formed; whereas, one THE USEFUL AND BEAUTIFUL IN DBESS. 
59 
dressed like women of the present day, cannot without 
loss, sustain other than a posterior view. "When a wo- 
man, dressed in long skirts, passes by a looker-on, or is 
seen coming toward him, her appearance is not pleasing. 
So true is this, that without effort, and only from an in- 
stinctive desire to get the most pleasure in the sight, 
men place themselves in the rear of women when they 
are walking. The face, hands, arms, legs, feet, in fact 
the whole body, confer grace when they are in motion. 
They all assist when in motion toward expression of 
power, and power after its kind is always character. 
I would have, therefore, the dress of women comprise, 
as essential characteristics, three qualities. First, the 
quality of use. Second, of beauty. Third of use and 
beauty combined. When dress is worn so as to com- 
bine both the useful and the beautiful, it should possess 
both strength and niceness; but in every case should be 
put on simply, that is, should be put on and worn by 
each person, so as to insure as far as possible a conceal- 
ment of defects of personal build, and heighten all per- 
sonal graces and charms. By so doing it would often 
happen that where a defect was concealed, a grace 
would be made prominent. To do this, one needs to 
invoke due attention to color, fabric and drapery. It 
is a matter of regret to me that many persons who are 
earnest in the advocacy of change in woman’s costume, 
are so strenuous in urging simpleness in dress. To wear 
short skirts and pantaloons, is with them the acme of 
reformation. This is a mistake, Failing to show deli- 
cacy and refinement in the arrangement of her clothing, 60 
A'MERIC AN WOMANHOOD. 
the Dress-Peformer fails to convince, and owing to the 
state of public opinion, can scarcely fail to outrage 
others. No earnestness nor devotion can compensate 
for this. Persons are not at liberty to be wanting in 
good taste, more than in good manners, because they 
love truth; and dress-reformers should not mistake 
simpleness which is weakness, or at best, want of power, 
for simplicity which is strength, or at least a means 
whereby to develop it. In the sphere of dress these 
two respectively type out failure and success. 
The dress usually worn by women is open to criticism, 
because it forbids displays of personal strength. Men un- 
derrate strength as an element of beauty in woman, 
foolish creatures that they are. They have educated 
themselves to a liking for its opposite. A hardy, vigor- 
ous, tough-muscled woman, in the estimation of most 
men, betokens the amazon. They suspect her, are jeal- 
ous of her, maybe are disgusted with her. The major- 
ity of men like women who have small hands, small 
feet, small heads, small wraists, and fail to remember 
that, as a rule, these are more apt than otherwise, to 
indicate small intellectual and spiritual capacities. 
Everything about women that is small, men for the 
most part like. They think they like smallness be- 
cause the aesthetic in them prompts to the liking ; 
whereas nothing else prompts to it but their desire to 
maintain superiority, and the delight they feel in 
having with them those who, by reason of feebleness, 
remind them of their superiority, and the need of its 
exercise. THE USEFUL AND BEAUTIFUL IN DKEPS. 
61 
It would be becoming in men to educate themselves 
to a philosophy different from this. They would be 
nobler if they were to regard physical strength in 
woman with favor, and to look upon it as one means 
of developing in her beauty of person. If this is ever 
to be done,- man must aid woman to form a public 
opinion which will justify her in clothing her body 
fitly. Physically she is now weak, and her dress 
symbolizes her condition. It may be said that it is a 
weak dress. Were man to adopt it, we would not say 
of him that he had become womanly; we should say 
of him that he had become unmanly. Man, therefore, 
should urge woman to change her dress — to wear one 
that represents ease, comfort, grace, fitness, so that 
these may become to her symbols of power. The free- 
dom she will then have will increase her strength, the 
strength she will then have will add to her confidence, 
and from these will upshoot beautiful character. CHAPTER VIII. 
LIFE IN-DOOES. 
“ May never House, misnamed of Industry, 
Make her a captive.” 
Domestic life with American women has a pretty 
ideal, but for the most part its realization with them is 
a drudgery. In the performance of its duties they vio- 
late nearly every law of Human Nature, and, as might 
be expected, serious ill consequences ensue. They lose 
health, vigor of mind, inspiration, genius, ambition, 
power to love. Their best qualities die for the want of 
culture, and from the same cause their worst qualities 
flourish. The soul is like the earth, only brambles, 
thistles and weeds grow therein spontaneously. Scien- 
tific tillage—Divine cultivation—is needed to produce 
good fruits. In this respect the American woman is 
sadly neglected, as I trust to be able to show most con- 
clusively, when I come to speak particularly as to her 
spiritual needs. 
It is susceptible of proof, I think, that on an average 
the American woman spends between birth and death 
seven-eighths of her time in-doors. Let us make a little 
62 LIFE IN-DOORS. 
63 
calculation about it. All night she stays in the house 
—whether her own or another’s—whether in hall, 
concert-room, church, or schoolroom, matters not. 
She is in-doors—say, then— 
For the darkness, 12 hours. 
For meals—3 each day—1 hour each, , 3 “ 
For work, if she works, or for visiting if she 
does not work, or for receiving visitors if 
she does not visit, .... 6 “ 
Total in each day, ... 21 hours. 
This estimate is not overrated when the average of a 
woman’s life is made up. For, during the years of 
childhood and growing girlhood, while she does not 
work she attends school, and her sessions are two of three 
hours each, or one of five hours in length. One need not 
be very wise nor far-sighted to draw conclusions as to 
the ill effects of such a condition of living on the health 
of those who are subjected to it, saying nothing just 
now of the effects on character. ISTo animal organiza- 
tion below that of man could withstand deterioration 
under such abnormal interposition. ISTor can woman’s. 
The process of change goes on till constitutional modi- 
fication takes place, and a new breed of human beings, 
born to suit the circumstances to which they are to be 
subjected,comes to exist. In this direction American 
civilization is false and must be changed, or organic de- 
terioration follows as night follows day. Follows, do I 
say ? It has already commenced; aye, has advanced 
to an alarming degree. 
The truth is, in attempting to apply the principles of 64 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
the Gospel of Christ to woman in America, and lift 
her from the sphere of a slave, in which in other coun- 
tries she was always and only a drudge, to a sphere 
where she should be a companion of man, we have as 
yet only permanently caused changes which have mod- 
ified and qualified her vassalage. The changes which 
she has undergone in respect to her own former condi- 
ditions have been so much only as has been conforma- 
ble to the changes which she has made in relation to 
man ; and these have kept striot bearing to those alter- 
ations which have been made in his relations to himself. 
As man has grown free, woman has grown free ; but in 
all that pertains to a full development of her powers 
she is as far behind him to-day as she was behind him 
at the introduction of Christianity. To the degree 
that he is yet a “ lord ” is she his “ vassal,” owing him 
by marriage feudatory rights, and enjoying thereby 
vassal immunities. To what extent feudality exists in 
America between married persons or between fathers 
and grown up unmarried daughters, I do not care here 
to show. Facts easy to be got at exist and can be col- 
lated and made available. All I wish to say now is, 
that to whatever extent man has accorded to himself 
special privileges, to such extent is woman yet unen- 
franchised. As an instande that woman is yet to be 
delivered from thraldom and let into the light and lib- 
erty of the Gospel, and so take her place by the side of 
man and be his help meet, I cite the fact that unlike 
him she lives in the house, while he lives out of doors. LIFE IN-DOORS. 
65 
“ Man can wander where he will, and breathe 
The freshness of the valleys ; he can let his blood 
Struggle with frosty air, and winter snows, 
And let the chartered wind that sweeps the heath 
Beat his dark locks against his manly face. 
He can be free of mountain solitudes, 
And have around him, whether heard or not, 
The pleasant melody of woodland birds. 
Where and when he will, he can sit down 
Beneath the trees, or on a grassy bank 
Of high wayside, and with the little birds 
Share his chance-gathered meal; and, finally, 
As in the Eye of Nature he has lived 
So in the Eye of Nature he can die.” 
Not so with woman. A great house is built for her, 
and she is put into it and is a prisoner. Her husband 
keeps her in it, lavishes his hard-earned wealth on her, 
spends for her gratification his inherited income, is de- 
voted to her with undoubted and most faithful passion; 
but keeps her a prisoner. 
“ To her there is no Nature. 
She has read of her in books, and dreamed 
Of her; has painted on her fancy, wild woodlands, 
And bright running streams, on whose green banks the deer 
And moose do gather to lie down and ruminate. 
She has heard of pigeons nesting in the tree-tops, 
Of swallows gathering in the spring time, 
From the far South, about the barn-eaves, 
And with a pleasant twitter and a fluttering wing 
Pairing themselves to build their homes anew. 
She sits within her room whose frescoed walls and ceiling 
Bespeak high art, and looks upon the thronged streets 
Of city, or of town, and wonders what the world 
May be which lies beyond her vision. Or, mayhap, 66 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
From out her window-opening she can see 
Far in the distance the green fields, and wooded dells, 
And winding gorges, to whose edge the farmer’s plough 
Has reached, and from whose skillful hand the rich grain 
Has dropped at seed-time, by and by to ripen to the harvest. 
But these are not for her. She is a child of Art; 
And Art with us ne’er handmaids Nature. 
When young she was a genius. God, 
The Mighty and the Wise, had filled her soul 
With yearnings after things imperishable. 
By day He spake to her in sun and cloud 
And changing sky. By night His voice 
Sweet, soft, and ho!y, reached the deepest recesses 
Of her soul, and tuned its chords to the divinest melodies. 
To her his love had come unstintingly, 
And many times, sleeping or waking, when alone, 
Her spirit had received from Him new inspirations.” 
To such a woman a house to be shut up in for life is 
not a home. In the true sense, Home is a free place, 
a spot where not only Love resides, but where Liberty 
dwells as well. But change the scene. The house is 
not large. It is a cottage, and its owner is poor. Hot 
the less is his wife a vassal and a prisoner. In the 
morning he rises and goes out to fill his lungs with air 
fresh and pure as that 
“ Which breezed through Eden.” 
His flagging powers take to themselves new vigor. 
Heart beats stronger, head feels clearer, limbs grow 
elastic, nerves begin to thrill, soul rises out of the dust 
and plumes itself for flight. The man advances into 
the foreground, the animal recedes into the datkness. 
To his body, to his soul, to his spirit, this stir at morn LIFE IN-DOORS. 
67 
mg dawn is like a new creation. Why should it not 
be ? Life begets life, and life is all around him. Birds 
are opening their throats, and bees have begun their 
hum. Boosters crow from their perches, and hens 
cackle as they fly down therefrom. Calves bleat for 
breakfast, and their mothers low from love of them. 
Horses whinny in their stalls for food, and caper as 
they are led out to the watering. Think you this joy- 
ous outbreathing has no influence on him ? Every 
nerve in his body feels it. It stimulates him, tones 
him, lifts him up to higher purposes, and makes of him 
a better and more competent man. 
How with his wife ? She dresses herself and washes 
her hands and face and begins her daily duties. 
First, to get the breakfast under way. 
Second, to dress the children. 
Third, to set the table with dishes. 
Fourth, to put the food on the table. 
Fifth, to blow the horn or ring the bell, and then set 
the chairs round the table. 
Sixth, seat the children, wait for the' blessing if the 
husband is pious, and then serve him and then serve 
them, and then herself. 
Seventh, after breakfast get the children off to 
school. 
Eighth, get the victuals in way of preparation for 
dinner. 
biinth, wash the dishes that were dirtied at breakfast. 
Tenth, look after the baking, the washing, or the 
ironing. 68 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
Eleventh, get dinner, serve her husband, and then 
herself. 
Twelfth, wash dishes. 
Thirteenth, churn. 
Fourteenth, see company. 
Fifteenth, get hot short-cake, butter, fruit-sauce and 
tea for them, or, if she has no company, mend clothes, 
darn stockings, and get supper for the family. 
Sixteenth, wash the dishes, get the children off to 
bed and sit down to knit. 
So the days go. One after another they pass, each 
coming in loaded with burdens which she has to lift 
and carry: each going out whispering as it goes,—“ To- 
morrow and yet to-morrow shall be even as I have 
been.” 
My readers will perceive that the work which the 
laboring woman has to do in the house and for the 
family, subjects her to it, not for one day nor for one 
week, but for her life ; and in doing so, enslaves her by 
degrading her to imprisonment. There is not a power 
nor faculty which does not undergo depreciation and 
deterioration by being subjected to long-continued ex- 
ercise under such narrow circumstances. Of the work 
done I make no complaint in the abstract; but against 
the manner of doing it I do protest, and charge that, in 
all essential particulars it is an involuntary servitude, 
whose wickedness consists in that it is imposed on the 
innocent in the name of love, and is not at all neces- 
sary to the maintenance of a well-ordered family. 
I cannot think of the conditions of living of my LIFE IN-DOORS. 
69 
countrywomen without' pity and indignation commin- 
gled. Pity for them, that marriage, which in a Chris- 
tian republic should be to them such a grand means of 
insuring happiness, serves largely no higher purpose 
than a lure, whereby they are in great numbers cheated 
of name, of fame, of home, of hope, of happiness, of 
health, of long life, and of well-developed character. 
Indignation I feel on their behalf, in that their hus- 
bands, fathers and brothers are stupider than unbroken 
donkeys, in respect to the terribly evil effects of such per- 
petual in-door confinement. There is no measurement 
of the evil attending it. Its hugeness defies calculation 
and well nigli awes opposition to silence. The passions 
of the worldly-minded and the prejudices of Christians 
are strong fortifications to the present family status, 
and he who proposes modifications or alterations or 
qualifications is likely to be looked upon as an innova- 
tor whose ulterior designs are destructive. 
Yet at the risk of misapprehension, if so it must be, 
I declare the domestic life of American women as it 
exists on an average, unpliysiological and so unhealthy, 
unpsychological and so immoral, unphilosophical and 
so wicked, and that every consideration which has in 
view the preservation of the family, its due develop- 
ment and the welfare of all its members, demands a 
thorough reformation in the conditions of living of 
women, so that they can have from childhood habitual 
life out of doors. 
God never made human beings to live in houses. 
Houses should serve them, therefore, only for shelter 70 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
and protection. Daily—not weekly nor tri-weekly— 
life in tlie open air, is necessary for health to every hu- 
man being. Man is so constituted, or organized, that 
he bears very essential relations to the planet on which 
he is born. He is of the earth—earthy. His physical 
conditions are better or worse as he bears a normal or 
abnormal relation to earth herself. Earth has her 
laws. These affect him whether lie will or not. Every 
twenty-four hours she turns on her axis—making day 
and night. During this period the nervous system— 
both cerebro-spinal and organic—has to undergo a 
change involving action or expenditure of vitality, and 
reaction or gathering up of vitality. By daylight the 
nervous system is naturally related to the use of vital 
force. By darkness it accretes it. 
Sleep is no more needful for man than it is for wo- 
man. Hor is sunlight less needful to woman than to 
man. She needs the appropriate agents whereby to 
give tone to her nervous system, while, under the 
activities of life, her strength is going out of her, as 
much as he does; and it is just as absurd to keep her 
shut up in a house and deprive her of sunlight, as it 
wrould be to keep man in the sunlight all the while and 
deprive him of sleep. 
In order, therefore, that woman may have a healthy 
body she must have a vigorous nervous system, and for 
this she must have light—full and unshaded, habitually 
brought into use. She may maintain a moderate de- 
gree of bodily health and yet dwell in shaded light, but 
she cannot forego sunshine as she does in America, and LIFE IN-DOORS. 
71 
not suffer in the vigor of her cerebral brain. Judged 
as to her intellectual and psychological capacity she 
must always rank lower, far lower in the scale of power, 
than she would were her opportunities for life out of 
doors four-fold what they are at present. The question 
is, then, how can she get them ? CHAPTER IX. 
MARRIAGE OR WOMEN WHO CAN AND DO MAKE GOOD 
WIVES AND GOOD MOTHERS. 
Native-born American women as contra-clistin- 
guished from women of foreign birth, may, with re- 
ference to their domestic relations, he classified as fol- 
lows : 
1st. Those who can and do make good wives and 
good mothers. 
2d. Those who can and do make good wives, but 
who cannot make good mothers. 
3d. Those who cannot make good wives, but do make 
good mothers. 
4th. Those wlio cannot make good wives nor good 
mothers. 
During twenty years of large and varied professional 
medical practice, in wliich I have had opportunities to 
observe and study the characteristics of many thousands 
of my countrywomen, I have come to the conclusion 
that the percentage of these classes rates substantially 
as follows; and I do not believe that any candid ob- 
server of the physiological and psychological conditions 
of native-born American women, is likely to come to 
conclusions widely different from mine. 
Of class 1st, I count, say 30 per cent. Of class 2d, 
72 MARRIAGE. 
73 
25 per cent. Of class 3d, 20 per cent. Of* class 4th, 
25 per cent. 
The first class comprises those who can and do 
make good wives and mothers. They combine in 
their physical organizations and in their intellectual 
and moral faculties, those qualities out of which the 
highest form of the domestic relations grows. It may 
be said that they possess the highest and best combina- 
tion of the organic forces that can belong to American 
women. Doubtless it is a misfortune to any woman 
that she is so constituted that she does not concentrate 
in herself the two very essential and important charac- 
teristics of good wifehood and motherhood. To be a 
good wife and a good mother, requires quite a peculiar 
and select order of forces. 
The first requires of her good physical health, good 
social qualities, fair intellectual capacity, and large 
spirituality. The woman who is in feeble health can- 
not make as good a wife as though her health were 
good. .Nor can she fulfill the duties of the wifely state 
with acceptance, if she is defective in her social forces. 
There are a great many women who in this respect are 
faulty; and it is a great fault. In this country it is 
coming to be a remarkable defect. Fortunately, how- 
ever, the percentage of those who are competent to be 
good mothers only, is the smallest percentage with our 
native-born American women. The nature of our in- 
stitutions demands of woman that she shall have the 
social characteristics largely developed. As things ex- 
ist at present, the man is expected to occupy the more 74 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
actively laborious, and the more largely diversified 
sphere of operations. His business relations by and 
through which the family support is to he insured, are 
required to be much more extended and varied and 
complicated, than those of the wife. 
As business goes with our people, of whatever kind 
it may be, success can only attend it when the person 
performing it gives it his personal oversight and per- 
sonal interest. lie needs to be absorbed in it, to de- 
vote himself to its performance and advancement assid- 
uously, individualizing himself, and in a measure de- 
socializing himself. He cannot give very much of liis 
time nor of his personal consideration, to the evolvement 
and growth in him of those qualities which are social. 
If these are made to take on any proper development 
they must be drawn out. Influences must be set at 
work and brought to bear upon him which, without 
any particular effort of his own, draw them to the sur- 
face and give them activity and new spring. Other- 
wise, in the very nature of the case the social forces in 
him lie dormant, and gradually become weakened, and 
sometimes ruinously decay. 
It may be said that it is not right for any man to he 
so related to business as to find no opportunity to culti- 
vate his social nature. I think this is so, but while the 
practice exists, it requires in woman peculiar character- 
istics to make her a good wife ; and in no direction is 
the possession more important than in that of active 
and large social qualities. If she lacks these she can- 
not, under the present condition of things, make a good MARRIAGE. 
75 
wife, because to be sucli, she must make home a pleas- 
ant and desirable place for her husband. 
To be a good mother, a woman needs to have not 
only what may be termed good physical health, but to 
have also a good physical constitution and a good phy- 
sical organization. Good motherhood demands of wo- 
man that she shall have large nutritive forces. She 
must be of that build which wTill give abundant vitality 
to her offspring during the formative processes and up 
to birth, and to give it abundant nutriment of the 
healthiest kind after its birth. She needs, also, to 
infuse into it after, as well as previous to its birth, 
healthy magnetism, this passing out of her own body 
into it by means of those various physical and corpo- 
real contacts, into which a mother and child so fre- 
quently and necessarily come. 
She needs, also, in order to good motherhood, to have 
such a mental and spiritual organization as will enable 
her to fulfill all the duties of a wife without weakening 
her duties and obligations as a mother. She needs, 
also, to possess in her bodily organization what may be 
termed the quality of tenacity to physical life, or in 
other words, the quality of longevity. Unless she pos- 
sesses this, even though the father may possess it, their 
child cannot have it to the degree that the father pos- 
sesses it. Thus, for the want of this quality in herself, 
though the father may have it, their offspring becomes 
related to them in the descending scale, and such a lack 
vitiates her qualities of good motherhood in a very emi- 
nent degree. 
O 76 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
1 have said of the native-born women in this country 
who are competent to make, and who after marriage 
do make, good wives and mothers, there are only thirty 
in a hundred. Sincerely, I think this a very liberal 
percentage, and if my estimate presents the truth, the 
condition of our women is very deplorable. Because 
under our civilization as it stands, and under any modi- 
fications of it which are likely to be made for a long 
time, the. highest state of life for women ought to be 
the married state. 
A great change for the better might be made in this 
country. Girl children, who have yet to grow up from 
childhood, or from young girlhood to womanhood, not- 
withstanding constitutional defects in their physical 
organizations, and like defects in their mental and 
moral organizations, might be so changed by proper 
training and education, as to fit them to be good wives 
and good mothers, whereas under the continuance of 
the present existing forms of education, they are sure 
to grow up to add to the numbers of those classes out 
of which good wives and mothers cannot be chosen. 
If the fathers and mothers of such girls could be so 
interested in Psycho-Hygiene, as to be willing to place 
them under influences which are actively and efficiently 
operative long enough to make constitutional changes, 
and would reorganize their own households, establish- 
ing them on the psycho-hygienic basis, and train their 
children under proper physiological and psychological 
regimen, they would see their daughters growing up in 
very different relations to the family state to what they MARRIAGE. 
77 
now can hope to see. I know this to be true because 
of the abundant evidences which are before me of its 
truth. 
I know a great many young women who, when they 
were little children, showed such a combination of 
traits of character as, had they been developed into 
full womanhood, would have rendered it impossible for 
them to make good wives and good mothers ; who have 
been so altered and reconstructed as to grow up to their 
present adult age and become women well fitted to 
enter upon, and fulfill successfully, the great combined 
relations of wife and mother. 
It is no assertion at random, it is no hap-liazard state- 
ment that I make. It is strictly true that a child in- 
heriting from her parents, and through them from a long 
line of ancestors, a physical organization which, devel- 
oped after a certain order, will render her unfit to sus- 
tain properly and fitly the wifely and motherly rela- 
tions, can be taken in childhood and so remodeled, so 
reorganized and reconstructed as to grow up thoroughly 
qualified in all the elements of her nature and charac- 
ter to sustain both these relations wisely and well. 
What is needed is to have the knowledge how to do it, 
the courage to undertake to do it, and the liberty of 
action to insure the doing of it. On this point I may 
have something further to say when I come to talk of 
the training of girls. At present I pass to the eonsider- 
tion of another class. 
Class 2. Those who can and do make good wives, 
but cannot make good motheks. The question is not 78 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
an unimportant one whether a woman who is disquali- 
fied from becoming a good mother, may rightly become 
a wife. To this I make answer in the affirmative. 
Were a woman to know that she could bear no chil- 
dren, it should be no rightful bar to her marriage. 
True, in such a case, the man whom she was to marry 
should know the fact, so that if he saw fit on that 
account to decline to make her his wife, the right and 
the privilege would be accorded to him. But if he 
chose to take her, knowing that she would prove impo- 
tent, there is nothing in the institution of marriage that 
would rightfully forbid their becoming husband and 
wife. For the institution of marriage contemplates the 
relation of wife as of primary, and, therefore, of higher 
significance than it does that of mother. A married 
woman, therefore, should always hold her relations to 
her husband, provided his relations to her are right, as 
more important and more sacred than any relations she 
can hold to her children. She should love her husband 
better than she loves her children. She should devote 
herself to his welfare with more assiduity and more 
self-sacrifice, and with more comprehensive and endur- 
ing affection, than she should to her children. 
It is a sad state of things which has come to exist in 
this country, that wives who are mothers frequently 
substitute affection for their husbands by affection for 
their children. The evil is a great one, and demands 
rectification. The woman who has feeble physical 
frame and large frontal and coronal brain, with small 
digestive and blood-making organs, and with small back MARRIAGE. 
79 
brain, who is of, or perhaps under, medium height, with 
flat chest, little or no breasts, small arms, tapering fin- 
gers, and small legs, may be competent to perform the 
duties of a wife with fidelity and satisfaction to her 
husband and benefit to herself, though she is totally 
unfit to become a mother. Unfit, because she cannot 
bear a child without devitalizing herself. Nor can she 
give to the child constitutional stamina, nor can she 
give it nutriment enough for its brain to make it hardy. 
She is, therefore, disqualified for becoming a mother, 
though if she be left free from the labor and duty of 
maternity she can be a faithful wife. 
There are of this class of American women twenty- 
five in every hundred. Of those who are married, a 
large share bear children, though they are organically 
incompetent and unfit, and, as a consequence, die early, 
while the majority of their children never get by mid- 
die life. To avoid the ruin caused by the premature 
deaths of those wives and mothers and children, there 
are but two available remedies at present. One is, for 
such women to refuse to get married. The other is, 
for their husbands to refuse to make them bear chil- 
dren. 
To the women themselves, as society goes, the remedy 
of living unmarried is as bad, if not worse, than the 
disease. Woman in this country is so barricaded by 
custom, etiquette and fashion, and is so circumscribed 
in her efforts for self-support, by what are termed right 
ideas in regard to her appropriate sphere, as to render 
it almost absolutely necessary for her to marry in order 80 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
to live. Only in the relation of wife can she with cer- 
tainty look forward to any more than a hare subsistence. 
The delights and comforts of home, the pleasures of 
well-ordered society and sureties for fair cultivation, 
and social and well-developed growth, are hers only 
when she is married. She, therefore, is more likely 
than not to feel that it is better for her to live a few 
years and have the blessings of a happy social life, and 
then die, than it would be to live many more years 
without much sympathy, with only the most constrained 
expression of affection from others, and in her advanc- 
ing years particularly, to find herself quite isolated and 
alone. So far as she is concerned, the fact that she is 
not fit to be a mother, though she is well fitted to be a 
wife is not likely to induce her to abstain from mar- 
riage ; though the result shall be that by child-bearing 
she will kill herself, and leave behind her children who 
cannot live to be of any substantial use on earth. 
But this need not be the case if the husbands of such 
women would meet their cases fairly. CHAPTER X. 
NON - MATERNITY OR WOMEN WHO CAN AND DO MAKE 
GOOD WIVES, BUT DO NOT MAKE GOOD MOTHERS. 
If so large a proportion of married and marriageable 
women in the United States — foreign-born women not 
included — as twenty-five in a hundred are so constitu- 
tionally organized, and functionally developed, as to 
render them incompetent to give to offspring healthy 
bodies and proper combinations of mental and moral 
faculties, it follows, of necessity it seems to me, that 
they are not competent to the task of child-bearing and 
child-rearing without great injury to themselves. 
If this be so, the question arises and at once assumes 
a moral aspect, whether they are at liberty to become 
mothers at all. Could they give birth to healthy chil- 
dren, though they did it to their own loss of health and 
life, the moral aspect of the case might be changed; 
but to become mothers of children who, in all probabil- 
ity under present customs and habits of training and 
rearing children in America, can never have good 
health, though they may live to adult age — while in so 
doing they make themselves sick and essentially shorten 
their own lives, does not seem to present in its behalf a 
right-minded morality. On the other hand, it wears 
decidedly the appearance of a transaction originating 
81 82 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
in heedlessness of consequences, and productive of very 
ill and very sad results. Justly therefore it may be 
characterized as immoral, criminal and wicked, for a 
man and woman to beget and bear children, where the 
woman is so constitutionally feeble as to forbid the 
reasonable expectation that during the period of preg- 
nancy, nursing and early rearing, she will be able to 
give to her offspring, robust constitutions and vigorous 
functional activities. If to do so be not immoral, it 
would seem difficult to make any act in one’s life such. 
It is conceded on all sides, that to train a child wrong is 
wrong. If so, what is the nature and character of the 
act which begets and conceives a child so that when 
born it goes wrong by the force of ante-natal impulses 
— goes wrong because all its predispositions and ten- 
dencies are wrong ? Writers on moral philosophy agree 
in saying that whoever makes a fundamental falsehood 
take the place of a fundamental truth, as though it were 
a truth, commits a more grievous wrong upon mankind 
by far, than though he should make a wrong applica- 
tion of a fundamental truth in his conduct in life. For, 
in the one case he poisons the fountain, and so poisons 
all who drink, while in the latter he poisons perhaps 
only himself. 
If a feeble, sickly, mal-organized woman only injured 
herself by acts of conception, the evil would be of com- 
paratively small account, though bad enough at that, 
but when to the injury she receives is added that of 
giving birth — as all of this class of women does — to 
children who are’either still-born, or if born alive, die NON-MATEBNITY. 
83 
early, or if able to live long into fullness of years, never 
see a single day when existence to them is not a burden, 
the immorality of such conduct is not doubtful. To any 
candid mind, at once it becomes clear and conclusive. 
The law of the case governs the fact of the case, and 
science determines its character, declaring in precise 
terms, that women who cannot bear healthy and well- 
disposed children should not have any, and if they do 
bear children they commit moral wrong. 
It is a curious but very significant fact, that the 
vicious portions of our population have their starting or 
originating point in families or in parentage, much more 
moral than themselves. Especially is this true of native- 
born Americans. I have visited jails, penitentiaries, 
state prisons, houses of correction, poor-houses and 
lunatic asylums, and made minute and general in- 
quiries, and I could not find five per cent of the whole 
number of American-born inmates, who could date 
back two generations to knavish, vicious ancestors. 
The great majority was made op of persons whose 
parents were conventionally or morally respectable. 
TIow then came they to be adepts in crime or victims 
to it. I answer, largely by reason in the first place of 
constitutional proclivities to mental and moral abnor- 
malism, instituted and induced through the ill-health 
of their mothers, producing mental and moral perver- 
sities which their children inherited as predispositions ; 
and in the second place, by reason of the want of such 
healthful early training and moral instruction as every 
child must have if in after life he is to keep in the light 84 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
way, and which a sickly, peevish, fretful, fault-finding, 
half-drugged to death mother is quite incompetent to 
give. 
One of the laws of human nature is that physical 
conditions, or states of body, find their correspondents 
in mental and moral conditions, or states of mind and 
heart. Thus if one wants a sound mind he should ex- 
pect to find it in a sound body more surely than in an 
unsound one, and a healthy, well-balanced state of the 
affections in a healthy body rather than in a sickly one. 
The reason for such expectation is, that body and mind 
reciprocally influence each other, and that where the 
ordinary, habitual, or constitutional conditions of body 
are unhealthy, there must exist in greater or less degree 
correspondingly unhealthy conditions of mind. These 
as they exist in the mother may be simply a functional 
derangement and so be only temporary, or they may 
be constitutional and so ever-present. Whichever it 
be, if she is under their influence at conception, and 
during foetal life, and during the period of nursing, 
and during the subsequent period of her child’s life in 
which Nature designs she should be his teacher, guide, 
inspirer and supporter, he can no more resist their 
morbid sway than once in the current of Niagara river 
he could resist going over its “Falls.” If then she be 
in all her structural relations, physical, mental and 
spiritual, abnormally organized — say feeble in body, 
morbid in mind and extremely vibratory in spiritual 
impulses, she is by every law that involves moral con- 
siderations enjoined not to have children. Nevertheless NON-MATERNITY. 
85 
such women keep on having them, and they die, and 
the mothers weep, and the fathers mourn, and solemn 
funerals are had, and pious platitudes are uttered, and 
God’s providence is admitted to be mysterious, and 
resignation to the Divine will is invoked — all this 
while God’s will having been that such children should 
not be born, their deaths resulting not by a mysterious 
Providence but strictly in accordance with Law. There 
are tens of thousands of fathers and mothers in the Re- 
public, who every year are called to mourn over the 
deaths of little ones whom they dearly love, who ought 
to repent in sackcloth and ashes for the sin of having 
given them birth only to have them die. In God’s 
plan of human existence Heaven is not the natural 
home for infants, but earth is. Children born to the 
earth, ought of right to themselves and to society and 
to mankind at large to have life force enough — con- 
ditions of living being favorable — to remain here, 
grow up, mature and die only of old age, when, if they 
have lived for Humanity and loved God, they will be 
prepared for Heaven. It is a sin huge enough, for 
parents to have children who are sufficiently hardy in 
constitution to live under fair auspices, but who have to 
die because their parents and the doctors whom they 
employ do not know enough to keep them alive; but it 
is in my view a much more enormous sin to give to 
children so feeble T''tality that they cannot live. This 
is in its inception and in its conclusion so heartless a 
transaction, as to demand the severest censure. Did it 
not generally originate in desires quite selfish and in 86 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
gratifications mainly lustful, one miglit pity the ignor- 
ance that produces such dire results; but as it is, when 
children are begotten under promptings of mere animal 
passion, and born so feeble that they must die, or if 
they live, suffer death twice told, one does not feel 
much like pitying, but more like rejoicing that God is 
true to the great law of the “ Fitness of things.” 
In the pursuit of this censurable course, it is a fair 
matter for inquiry, which of the two parties—the hus- 
band or the wife—is the guiltier ? Or, are they both 
substantially alike guilty? In the view which facts 
compel me to take, I think the husband is much more 
to blame, because no woman likes to be sick. * 
If upon being married and becoming a mother, she 
is made sick thereby, and kept sick for a long time 
thereafter, insomuch that it is evident to her and to 
others, that she cannot endure conditions of maternity 
without great enfeeblement, she will forego any tem- 
porary conjugal enjoyment—if left free to act—rather 
than be made permanently ill therefrom. She may 
suffer once from want of knowledge or of personal ex- 
perience, hut not the second time. For of all sicknesses, 
debilities, ailments, illnesses and enfeeblements to which 
a woman as such, or as a human being, is liable, none 
so prostrates the higher faculties as child-bed diseases. 
Once they take on the prolonged form, the subject sinks 
to the lowest level of responsible personality. Her 
babe in the cradle is scarcely more characterless than 
she is. Her body is relaxed in every fibre. If moved, 
others have to do it. Her mind is veak to a degree NON-MATERNITY. 
87 
that forbids the exercise of judgment or good sense in 
matters pertaining to household duties, family cares, 
nursing, and management of her child, or manifesta- 
tion of love for her husband. She is entirely disso- 
ciated from general society, and takes no interest in 
matters of public concern. Around her are hired 
nurses, or her own mother, or her husband’s mother; 
in front of her at special seasons is her doctor; on either 
side are bottles, and vials, and little plates, and pow- 
ders and tinctures and stimulants, and anodynes, alto- 
gether making her sick room smell like an apothecary’s 
shop. The windows are blinded and placards are on 
the door, the whole bespeaking anything but health, and 
its natural concomitant, happiness. Life to such wo- 
man in such condition, has no rose-colored hue. Its 
vapor is murky—not ultra-marine. She cannot bear it, 
and ever imagine it possible for her to be in an ecstacy. 
Natural maternity contra-indicates all such surround- 
ings. The hearty woman who can give birth to a 
healthy child, sits up in a couple of days, dresses and 
nurses her babe unhelped in a week, and in three weeks 
is overseeing her household and rejoicing with her hus- 
band over the crib of their infant. Women of robust 
bodies and good constitutions may desire and be will- 
ing to have children. It is right that they should and 
is well that they do, but in all my professional expe- 
rience I have never known a married woman to whom 
child-birth was dangerous and child-nursing debilitating, 
both uniting to destroy her health, who wTas willing or 
desirous to have children. 88 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
Because, strong as may be the maternal instinct of 
women in this class, it is true of them, as of every other 
class, that the desire to have children is hounded and 
regulated by the hope and expectation of being per- 
mitted to nurse their offspring. As an abstract pro- 
position I do not believe that one woman in a hun- 
dred who is American born, would choose to become a 
mother, if it were definitely settled that after the birth 
of her child her health would forhid her suckling it. 
Women do not like to become mothers by their own 
act or choice, to be compelled to become unmaternal 
thereby. Maternity includes the caring for and nour- 
ishing a child quite as much—I think, very much more 
—as the having it. No woman can feel toward her 
unborn babe as she should feel toward it, when, nest- 
ling in her bosom, she looks down on it and sees it liv- 
ing on her. To expect her to be willing, intelligently 
and deliberately to join her husband in giving exist- 
ence to a babe, when she knows beforehand that to give 
it birth is to render her unfit to do wifely duties not 
only, but to make it impossible for her to fulfill the 
natural relations of a mother, is to expect her to con- 
sent to be a monster. Such women do become mothers, 
I know, but it is because they are ignorant. Such 
women become mothers, I know, who are not ignorant, 
but it is because they are married to men who are 
thoughtless, and their wives and the children they bear 
are their victims. 
Nature, who abhors all misrule and seeks to axaid 
its issue, in many instances creates such violent reac- N ON-MATERNITY. 
89 
tions to the outrages imposed by this class of men on 
their wives, as to render it impossible for their wives 
to bear living children. She debilitates their procrea- 
tive powers to such a measure that they only act rudi- 
ment ally. They fail in vigor at a certain point, and 
miscarriage follows. Many women miscarry at six 
weeks, many more at twelve weeks, as many more at 
twenty weeks, and a good many at twenty-eight weeks. 
If in the early stages all the better, if in the advanced 
stages still better than to go nearly to full time, and 
then give birth to a still-born child, or to one so pre- 
maturely born as to leave its mother with all the perils 
of full child-birth on her, while the child itself must die. 
Of late public attention has been called by certain 
physicians, editors and clergymen to the crime of abor- 
tion. They claim that the practice of procuring loss 
of embryo is quite common amongst American born 
women who are married. This practice they charac- 
terize as highly immoral, and they appeal to the moral 
sense of such women as indulge in it, henceforth to 
cease from it. With them, I recognize the looseness 
of morals which allows the prospective mother to com- 
mit the act of foeticide. With them, also, I feel the 
need of putting a stop to it. But I confess my aston- 
ishment that men eminent in their knowledge of phil- 
osophy, of morals and casuistry, should have concluded 
that all that is needful to cure an evil already so wide- 
spread and rapidly on the increase, is to call public 
attention to it, and make fervid appeals to those coni' 
mitting it to abstain from it. 90 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
Is nothing else demanded ? Let us see. A pretty, 
delicate, good-looldng woman is married to a hale, 
hearty, robust man. He finds her to possess eminently 
those qualities which he desires in a wife. She has 
defects, however. She has little constitutional stamina 
and very feeble functional force. She, therefore, can- 
not become a mother without, first, impairing her 
health; or, second, perhaps without killing her; or, 
third, if she lives, without giving birth to a very feeble, 
sickly, pimping baby, and becoming totally unable to 
fulfill toward her child, the duties and responsibilities 
of a mother. How, these relations of hers to child- 
bearing all could have been readily and with strictest 
propriety ascertained by the man seeking to make her 
his wife, before marriage, notwithstanding these 
fundamental defects in her physical organization, he 
courted and married her. If h<? did not know these 
peculiarities of hers before, who but himself is to 
blame ? Would a farmer buy a horse for breeding, 
without satisfying himself that she could answer his 
ends ? Or, if desiring any particular end to be secured, 
would he take his risks blindly ? Why should a man 
play the foolish in the most important act of his life, 
and take to himself a woman whom he wants to fulfill 
the double duty of wife and mother, when she cannot 
take on herself the latter relation without jeopardy to 
her life ? In the case supposed, howmver, he has done 
it, and the question arises whether in the exercise of 
his love or of his authority, he may impose gestation 
upon her, thus putting her life in peril, without him* NON-MATERNITY. 
91 
self incurring blame ? For a man living in any neigh- 
borhood in our country to be known as habitually ex- 
posing his wife to conditions that would place her life 
in imminent hazard, would be to strip him of all respect, 
if it did not subject him to punishment. Yet there 
are such men as I have supposed, thousands and tens 
of thousands of them—yes, as many as there are wo- 
men who produce abortions on themselves—who do 
this very meanness, this great wickedness of exposing 
their wives to death, by making them take on maternal 
conditions. The gentlemen who have written on the 
subject of the criminality of abortion, have not thought 
it worth while to make any allusion to this horrible 
crime of enforced pregnancy. In the case supposed, 
this frail, feeble woman, finding herself prolific, and 
fearing the result of going to full birth, ponders it long 
and anxiously. Some friend tells her she can be freed 
from all her troubles without risk, if miscarriage is pro- 
cured in the earlier months of gestation, and so it is 
done. Poor creature! with death staring her in the 
face if she does not produce it, her conscience-keepers 
tell her she must submit, and take her chances of living 
through child-labor. They may tell her so, and tell her 
the truth ; but as long as “ is the first 
law of nature,” she will most likely heed her instincts 
rather than any conscientious scruples they may awaken. 
If this evil is ever to be cured, writers other than 
those who can only see one side of it must engage in its 
discussion and cure. Men must be made intelligent 
and moral as well as women. If the latter are to be 92 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
taught that abortion cannot be superinduced without 
the commission of a crime, the former must be made to 
feel that heedless and selfish cohabitation resulting in 
propagation of young, is in itself and all its succeedants 
and consequences a great immorality. If men will love 
their wives as their own bodies, when these are sicldy 
or feeble in health, or lacking in constitutional stamina, 
or unwilling to bear children, they will live continently 
with them; in which case their wives will have no 
motives to commit abortion. For it follows quite of 
necessity that if a woman is not made pregnant, she 
cannot miscarry her young. If they will not do this, 
but will use their wives, as many men now-a-days do, for 
purposes of lust, then, however much may be written or 
said on the subject, miscarriages whether arising in the 
main from sexual debility, or from the use of mechanical 
or vitally reactionary causes, will continue to increase 
in the ratio of the illness or the morbid sensibilities of 
the parties involved. 
It may be thought that for husbands who have wives 
who are so feeble as to be unable to bear children with- 
out great peril to their lives, to forego all conjugal enjoy- 
ment except such as is consistent with the entire freedom 
of their wives from maternity, must in its very nature 
be quite difficult. Possibly it may be to those of them 
who prefer their own pleasure to the health and lives of 
their wives, but to such of them as love and honor their 
companions it is not at all difficult, nor need it involve 
great self-denial. If however it were a matter involv- 
ing large resolution and great self-abnegation, it would NON-M ATEEN IT Y. 
93 
none the less be their duty, for the Christian law for 
the husband is that he love his wife as himself. 
If moralists and casuists would meet these evils, let 
them induce the husbands of feeble wives, or of wives 
unwilling to have children, to respect their preferences, 
and the cure for abortion will be immediate and effec- 
tual. CHAPTER XI. 
WOMEN WHO DO NOT MAKE GOOD WIVES, BUT DO MAKE 
GOOD MOTHERS. 
Of this class, in my estimate, I count only twenty per 
cent, the smallest proportion of the various classes into 
which I have divided native-born American women. 
While it is true that the best woman, as such, is she, 
who, to all other qualifications, can show those which 
fit her to be a good wife and mother, and while it is 
true that she, who although she cannot make a good 
mother, can make a good wife, is a very needful consti- 
tuent in American society as it stands at present, it is 
not a whit less true that American society can find 
good use and good place for those women who though 
they cannot make good wives do make good mothers. 
In saying this, I must not be understood as saying or 
inferring that such women may become mothers outside 
the marriage pale, but that constituted as they are, 
there are plenty of men in the Republic who might 
well become their husbands for the purpose of starting 
new families or breeds, which should have in them 
better strains of blood than either of the parents has. 
Let me make a case, and see how it might work. 
Here are two persons, man and woman. The man 
94 WOMEN WIIO MAKE GOOD MOTHERS. 
95 
is below medium height — say 5 feet 2 inches to 5 feet 
4 inches, weighing about 120 to 125 pounds. He is 
most evidently in the descending scale of his ancestors. 
They were large, broad-shouldered, big-boned, stout- 
sinewed men. They had big necks and large back 
brains dipping down deep into their napes. Their 
ear holes were three-fourths of an inch below the outer 
angle of the eyelids. They had foreheads which were 
protuberant just above the eyes, but which higher up 
sloped back, making them remarkable for their powers 
of observation and for their knowledge of matters of 
life in detail, while for their abstract powers — or their 
capacities for reflective thought — they were not re- 
markable. Their temperaments were bilious, or ner- 
vous-bilious, and if they sickened and died they were 
naturally much more likely to do so from inflammatory 
diseases, than from those which originate in nervous 
exhaustion. 
Their descendant is quite unlike them. He has a 
small neck, is of small bone, has a great hollow in the 
nape of the neck, is of sanguine or nervous-sanguine 
temperament, has a receding forehead just above the 
eye and a jutting forehead higher up, has the orifice of 
his ears and the outer angle of his eyes about on a level, 
and around the largest part of his head, measured from 
front to rear, is as large within two to two and a half 
inches as he is around his body at the pit of his 
stomach. 
How take the woman. She is of bilious tempera- 
ment, of dark skin, dark hair, and dark eyes, above 96 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
medium height, round in limb but not fat, strong in 
muscle and compact and stout in bone. She is broad- 
chested, with large breasts, able to give abundant food 
to her children when she comes to bearing. She is 
capacious in the abdomen, has large stomach making 
her a good eater, has large liver, very large organic 
nerves, giving her blood-making organs great capacity 
and great activity. Her head is set on a large, short, 
stout neck, and while she has or is likely to have men- 
tal powers of a vigorous and very creditable cast, she 
is sure to have them run in a very maternal groove. 
The love of life is very strong in her, and so her likings 
for the means whereby to make it comfortable and 
prosperous are also abundant. She is of the earth, 
earthy. Hot mean, not basely selfish, not niggardly, 
not miserly. Neither is she ungenerous nor unsuscep- 
tible to humane motives. But self-love, which is always 
the basis of self-respect, is a predominant quality in her 
moral constitution, and whoever takes her for a wife 
should know this, and be aware that Nature has 
organized her for the special purpose of bearing and 
rearing children. Bring these two persons together as 
husband and wife, and the man whose 
race, breed or family is in his own person pretty much 
extinct, and who, were he to marry a woman whose 
superior qualities are in her wifely and not in her 
motherly nature, could not hope to reconstruct and 
reorganize his family, will, by the marriage supposed, 
do it and save his name from perishing. She will make 
a first-class breeder of children, who will take on all that WOMEN WHO MAKE GOOD MOTIIEKS. 
97 
is good and desirable in botli parents, leaving unorgan- 
ized and so dead what in either or both is undesirable. 
Thus the man, though small, will have large children, 
who will have plenty of nutritive-nervous force in com- 
bination with good intellectual and moral faculties, and 
who -will be able to endure persistent and close applica- 
tion to study as well as to work. 
When a boy, I knew a case exactly in point. There 
lived not more than a mile from my father’s house a 
man who was below medium size — a little fellow, what 
among the Dutch farmers is called a titmcm. His wife 
was a woman of the class which does not make good 
wives but makes good mothers. She bore him in a course 
of years six sons, not one of whom weighed nine pounds 
at birth, but every one of "whom weighed over two 
hundred pounds before he was twenty-five. I recollect 
often to have heard my parents talk over the matter 
with our neighbors, and interpret it as some freak of 
nature ; but since coming myself to a study of the laws 
of development of human beings, I have seen that it 
was no show of chance, but was in that case only a 
marked instance of nature’s constant efforts to make 
good the losses which the ignorance or the inconsiderate- 
ness of mankind is introducing. In looking about me 
to gather up statistics, I have been greatly interested to 
find so many married persons living together and hav- 
ing children after this order. 
In the case I have supposed, if the man marries the 
woman, lie cannot expect her to be a wife of the first 
quality as well as a mother of the first class, because she 98 
AMERICANS' WOMANHOOD. 
lias not tlie mental and moral organization to make her 
such; and if his first and primary thought in marrying 
is to get a wife, and his after thought is to have chil- 
dren, he should not marry her ; fur she will disappoint 
him. But if his first thought—as in his case it should 
be—is to save his name and race from extinction, and 
his second thought is the wifely relations, then he may 
marry and live happily with her ; for all such women 
as have in them largely predominant the motherly in- 
stincts, make good housekeepers and lovable compan- 
ions, thrifty, watchful, sagacious, economical, and moral 
if well educated, unless their maternal love is inter- 
fered with. Then they become unloving and some- 
times uncomfortable to live with. INTo such woman 
ever can love her husband as well as she loves her chil- 
dren ; for she generally loves him in the main because 
he is the father of her children. For these she lives 
and must live. Their welfare .is the theme of her 
thought and her talk day after day. And her husband 
is of value as he aids her in promoting their happiness. 
I have seen a goodly number of men married to such 
women and living unhappily with them. They were 
men who in order to make them happy in the married 
state needed women each of whom should think her 
husband unsurpassed, who should love him therefore 
better than any or than all other human beings. There 
are women, plenty of them, who can and do thus love 
their husbands, but they belong to the class who make 
good wives but not good mothers. They do not be- 
long to the class now under consideration. These men WOMEN WIIO MAKE GOOD MOTHERS. 
99 
made mistakes in choosing suck women as they did. 
They acted ignorantly I know, but in all the depart- 
ments of social life there is none other where such sad 
results flow from ignorance as from ill-assorted mar- 
riages. In making their choice these men were gov- 
erned by their fancies, or by their impressions of the 
characteristics which the women of their choice respec- 
tively possessed. Perhaps they were drawn to a decis- 
ion by the physical qualities of their wives quite as 
much as by any imagined intellectual and moral fitness 
they had. A fine-looking, sprightly-acting, good man- 
nered girl of fair intelligence and with plenty of animal 
spirits, when brought into familiar social intercourse 
with a man who is looking for a wife, is quite likely, 
unconsciously to herself, to make deep magnetic im- 
pressions on him. lie gets his head distracted and 
thinks himself deeply in love with her, when in fact he 
is not in love with her at all. He is only mesmerized, 
while her nature is unstirred. If, however, he imag- 
ines himself to be so far attached to her as to make it a 
matter of great importance to him that she become his 
wife, he will not be likely to find her rejecting him at 
last, provided she makes up her mind that he will make 
a kind husband, giving her a home of comfort and 
plenty, and is likely to make a loving father to her 
children. The depths of her nature he cannot sound— 
no man can. He may play the gallant, may court her 
with the finest and tenderest address, may lay his for- 
tune at her feet, may plead eloquently, may pour out 
his soul in love; she will not, because she cannot, love 100 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
him first, last and only; and never will she come so 
closely to genuine expression of love for him—her hus- 
band, as when she can lay a baby in his lap and truly 
call him its father. 
Much and not infrequently severe criticism is passed 
upon this class of women, because they do not love 
their husbands better. They are not to blame. They 
cannot control their affections any more than other 
classes of persons can, and all persons of large and 
varied experience know that they cannot love, or cease 
to love at a word. Love is a compound sentiment, 
made up of large esteem and strong desire, but the con- 
stituent elements are in different proportions in differ- 
ent persons. In this class of women the desire is the 
larger moiety. It is with them as it was with the Jew- 
ish women, who had a passion for child-bearing and to 
whom sterility was the greatest affliction and mortifica- 
tion they could suffer. A girl of this class can not en- 
dure the thought of living a maiden all her life. She 
will run any risk rather than remain unmarried. So 
prominent is this feeling in her that it influences her 
social intercourse in a marked manner oftentimes. She 
thinks of it from puberty onward wherever she goes. 
Were it the custom of the country as it was in many 
of the more secluded towns in “the North country” of 
England fifty years ago, for girls who did not get hus- 
bands to have children outside the marriage pale and 
lose no caste thereby, failing marriage, she would have 
children independent of its sanction. As it is, however, 
she sets all her arts at work to get a husband and a WOMEN WHO MAKE GOOD MOTHERS. 
101 
home, that these may serve the purpose of gratifying 
her desire to have children. The women of this class 
are seldom seen living single lives. Where you find 
one of them thus living, }tou will find ten of the class 
who are not fit to make either good wives or good 
mothers. Nor do they furnish in any sensible measure 
recruits to our houses of ill-fame. They are not organ- 
ized to live as demireps, and are seen only sparely on 
our city pavements or as frequenters of houses of assig- 
nation. 
Constituted as American society is, they form an ele- 
mental force for its improvement of the highest import- 
ance, because there is amongst American men as large 
a proportion to the whole number, as they make of the 
whole number of women, who need to marry them to 
redeem their family state from destruction. If one 
want is needed more than another to be supplied with 
us, it is that of vigorous, robust, hardy, enduring girls, 
who can work as our grandmothers when girls worked, 
who can live as they lived, in the main free from sick- 
ness, and bear as they bore, large families of children 
—say from six to twelve in number, and die as they 
did from old age. Now, our American-born girls when 
grown and married cannot bear between the ages of 
eighteen and forty-five more than three or four chil- 
dren on an average, while our foreign-born women on 
an average bear from seven to eight children. The 
class of women of whom I am now speaking, however, 
can keep pace with the strongest and hardiest German, 
Irish and Swedish women. They can stand as much 102 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
pressure from gestation, can give asmucli suck, are bet- 
ter nursers and care-takers of their young while they are 
helpless, and generally are much better educators. In- 
heriting as they do their predispositions to thought and 
to conduct in life from American progenitors, they are 
progressive, intuitive and liberal-minded. They reach 
forward to the future rather than cling to the past, and 
are sure to imbue their children with ideas and notions, 
with principles and preferences for things that are new. 
In the hundreds of them with whom I have been made 
personally acquainted, I have never yet found a con- 
servative. This is all natural enough. Living as they 
do for their children, they have to look ahead. Their 
instincts not only but their observation tells them this. 
Their self-abnegation makes them sagacious. Forget- 
ful of what belongs to their own welfare exclusively, 
and wakeful and apprehensive for what may serve their 
children’s interests, they see through what changes 
American society passes in a generation, and must con- 
tinue to pass for many, many generations to come. 
Clearly they see that what answers to their own satis- 
faction will not satisfy their children, for more likely 
than not it will have to give way to something new, 
and therefore their children cannot rest on it durably. 
They have to impress them then with the feeling that 
this age is one of growth, and that other things being 
equal, who grows the fastest and at the same time most 
symmetrically takes front rank. 
Where such persons marry as in the given case I 
have supposed, I have noticed that the transmission of WOMEN WHO MAKE GOOD MOTHERS. 
103 
qualities of the parents usually takes place in the follow- 
ing’ order : To a hoy the mother gives her locomotive and 
nutritive organization and her passional and moral qual- 
ities, while the father gives the respiratory and bony 
structure,with the intellectual qualities. To a girl she 
gives the respiratory and bony structure with her intel- 
lectual organization, while the father gives the locomo- 
tive and nutritive structure with the passional and 
moral faculties. If I am right, and I think I am, for I 
have observed thousands of such cases — then the fact 
is that by such marriages male children are more direct- 
ly and immediately improved in their constitutional 
conditions than female children are, inasmuch as they 
get more of physical stamina from their mothers than 
girls do — the law of the case being that fathers should 
convey their qualities good and bad in larger measure 
to girls, and mothers to boys, unless by intermingling 
the two strains of blood, check of transmission of qual- 
ities is introduced, or some new organization of forces 
heretofore unknown on either side is established. 
If then, as a general thing, the constitutional and 
functional vigor of boys is more directly increased by 
such marriages than that of girls is, Nature sends the 
processes of revitalization of the girls one generation 
farther on. To enable them to have girl-children as 
strong, enduring and intellectual as their own brothers 
were, these girls when grown should marry, not such 
men as their fathers were, but as their brothers are — 
men who are an improvement on tlieir fathers; thus 
whatever be the relations to size, endurance and Ion- 104 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
gevity of the boys they may bear — if they should have 
any — their girls will be sure to grow up large, capacious 
and competent to become mothers in the better sense of 
the word. CHAP TEE XII. 
WOMEN WHO, AS SOCIETY GOES, CAN NEITHER MAKE GOOD 
WIVES NOR MOTHERS. 
I now come to tlie consideration of a class of women 
who, in all their elements of character, are to me more 
interesting than any class which America produces. 
They are so: 
First, because of the peculiarities of their organiza- 
tions. 
Second, because of the intrinsic human strength 
which they possess. 
Third, because of their great necessities for peculiar 
development by reason of their peculiar organizations. 
In my division of American-born women into classes, 
my readers who have followed me hitherto in the dis- 
cussion of the subject, will recollect that I estimate this 
class in our republic as high as twenty-five in each 
hundred. I feel sure that I have not over-rated them. 
They are to be found in every neighborhood and city 
in our land. They are wives, though as society goes 
they ought not to be, having married for homes. Many 
of those who are married are mothers, because they 
became wives; though as society goes they should not 
be mothers. They are teachers in schools, seamstresses 
in tailors’ and mantua-makers’ shops, sewers on bonnets 
105 106 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
and gew-gaw finery. They are shoe-binders to whole- 
sale merchants; girls working in kitchens and in fac- 
tories ; and here and there one may be found as a clerk 
in a store, a compositor in a printing office, a sender of 
telegrams in a telegraph-room, a physician, a merchant, 
a minister of the Gospel, a public lecturer, or a student 
at school. But wherever they are seen — outside of a 
few callings, for the filling of which they always get 
compensation inferior to men, though they do their work 
quite as well and in many instances better than men — 
for every step of progress they make they have to 
struggle and contend with society, with the church, and 
with civil government, as though the point at issue was 
one of life or death to both parties. 
It is greatly to the credit of American institutions 
that such and so large a class of women exists therein. 
They are not to be found in any such proportion of the 
whole women population in any other nation on the 
globe. Only amongst peoples nominally Christian are 
they to be found at all; and outside of America in any 
nation only rarely. With us, if I am not mistaken in 
my conclusions, they will soon constitute the more 
numerous and dominant class; and if I am right, that 
they will do so will be owing to our political institu- 
tions. Essentially they are the product of Freedom; 
and though they have not yet been permitted to enjoy 
in absolute fullness the blessings which liberty protect- 
ed by law legitimately confers on all to whom she does 
justice, they have felt these in a measure, and so have 
come up to be worthy of the notice and admiration and NEITHER GOOD WIVES NOR MOTHERS. 
107 
liigli regard of all persons wlio are glad to see human 
nature manifested in new and original forms. Think- 
ing men are not astonished to see new developments of 
human nature within the masculine sphere; for this, 
especially under free or partially free institutions has 
come to he quite common. It creates no surprise to 
learn that this man or that indicates genius in directions 
heretofore unknown. We admire such manifestation 
and development of the human soul, and regard with 
graciousness the individual who thus opens our eyes to 
new and fresh possibilities of human growth. ' But we 
have been accustomed to look upon woman as develop- 
ing human nature in her own person after long estab- 
lished and ordinary forms only. When therefore atten- 
tion is challenged to the exhibition of character new and 
peculiar, showing such combination of reason and 
spiritual impulse and moral consciousness as to make 
the woman having them put on individuality or person- 
ality, approximating closely in strength, in positiveness 
and efficiency to that which belongs to, and which we 
usually see in the higher aud better class of men, we 
are so surprised as to be shocked by it, and to feel that 
the exhibition is eccentric, abnormal or quite undesir- 
able. In America we have to get over this; for there 
is no help for it. Such womanhood is the outgrowth of 
the principles of liberty applied to individual life ; and 
if there be in the class now under consideration any 
abnormal or unsymmetrical show of character, it is not 
to be accounted for nor charged to essential defect in 
the nature of the institutions under which it has come to 108 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
life, nor to the depravity of human nature, hut to the 
imperfect application of the principles underlying our 
institutions to human nature. What this class of wo- 
men wants to the perfection of their characters is full 
enjoyment of the rights of personality, and the privi- 
leges and immunities which justice confers thereupon. 
In time any little eccentricities which they now show 
will give way to the advancing spirit of justice and 
liberty as this touches them in their personal and social 
relations to life. 
I have said this class of women belongs to no other 
class in America so as to be absorbed into it and repre- 
sented by it. It is a class standing by itself; for since 
Adam’s day there has never been seen on the Earth till 
now, any such class in any such numbers among any 
people. True, at every epoch and in every era of 
human civilization women have appeared who have 
been set apart from the mass of women of their day by 
marked diversities; but generally their characteristics 
have been undesirable for women to possess—have been 
deviations from, instead of approximations to, model 
human nature. In their cases it could not have well 
been otherwise, inasmuch as the social, civil, military 
and religious polity under which they were born, reared 
and educated, was in itself very defective. At no time 
however in the past has any people shown amongst its 
women sufficient numbers of persons who were possessed 
of characteristics so diverse from those which belong 
generally to the mass, as to be regarded and denomin- 
ated peculiar, and thus thought worthy to have a pecm NEITHER GOOD WIVES NOR MOTHERS. 
109 
liar nomenclature ; but with us such a class has so far 
made for itself already an original position, as to have 
accredited to it a classification, and thus be known 
through the Republic as the “ strong-minded” class. 
I have said that this class of American-born women is 
very interesting to me for several reasons. Let me 
repeat these in order, and somewhat elucidate them : 
First, because of the peculiarities of their organiza- 
tions. 
Ho close observer can come into the presence of one 
of these women without being led to remark how differ- 
ently she is made up on the whole from what women 
ordinarily are. Her very physical formation is pecu- 
liar when considered in comparison with that of the 
average style* of build of American women. She has 
what they have not, a very large frontal brain, showing 
that she possesses large intellectual faculties. Iler power 
of observation is great. She shows this in the exercise 
of all her special senses. She is quick to see, acute to 
hear, sensitive to touch, of acute sense of smell, and 
particularly susceptible to the impressions of taste. Her 
discerning power's therefore are always active when she 
is conscious, and, without any special education to that 
end, she comes to a knowledge of things in detail, which 
separates her from the generality of women around her 
and classifies her distinctly. If she is permitted to 
grow up without proper education and training, this 
super-activity of her perceptive powers is likely to 
develop in her marked faults, and give to her an un- 
pleasant notoriousness in society as a busybody, always 110 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
peering and prying into other people’s affairs. If, how- 
ever, proper development of these powers takes place, 
then, in whatever social relation she is found, she will 
show great intuition, great power of management, great 
capability of comprehending and understanding busi- 
ness affairs, and whether married or unmarried, a com- 
petency to take part in the direction of interests involv- 
ing human welfare, that oftentimes quite surprises men 
who think that woman is made only to hold social or 
public relations to life quite subordinate and inferior to 
man. It is not only however in her powers of observa- 
tion that she is remarkable. Her reflective organs indi- 
cate faculties of a high order for abstract or philosophic 
thought. She is more likely than not to be a good rea- 
soner, being able to lay down premises a*nd draw con- 
clusions correctly, dealing with principles in their own 
nature, as distinct from the effects which their applica- 
tion or employment produces; understanding well, there- 
fore, the causes of things, and quite as competent—other 
things being equal—as man is, to establish a legitimate 
chain of connection between causes and effects, and to 
deduce right conclusions and establish right judgment 
thereon. Some of the very best reasoners which Amer- 
ica has produced, or is producing, are to be found among 
this class. Hot that they reason as comprehensively 
about public affairs as men do who are in public life, 
but the difference between them and such men is not a 
whit greater than that which exists between men them- 
selves, who are in public and who are in private 
life. The power to reason about any great principle or NEITHER GOOD WIVES NOR MOTHERS. 
111 
interest, affecting the welfare of an individual or of 
a people, is largely dependent upon knowledge 
of the conditions of such person or people, which 
knowledge comes by study and by experience, often- 
times under obligations imposed, or responsibilities or 
duties to be performed. It is said that practice makes 
perfect, and it is so in the province of abstract reason- 
ing as truly as in that of practical reasoning. Ho per- 
son can therefore be equal in the power of applying 
principles or in the elucidation of facts, who has little or 
no opportunity to study the nature of these principles 
as applied to the facts, with him who has such oppor- 
tunities. Give to the women for whom I claim the 
possession of equal natural powers with men, the same 
education as to our great men, and they will become as 
great. I say so by parity of reasoning, for wherever 
they are permitted to take the same positions as men, 
they show as great competency as men. While this 
is true, however, of the class of women under considera- 
tion, it is not true of the majority of other classes of 
women. These do not show so large reason because they 
have small reasoning faculties, and they represent the 
average level of American men. But this class of wo- 
men for whom I claim equality in reasoning powers 
with our great men, shows the possibilities of human 
nature, and this, too, not in abnormal but in approxi- 
mately natural forms. 
Pardon this digression, however, and let me pass to 
a still further examination of their peculiar qualities. 
They bear, physiologically considered, marks of a pecu- 112 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
liar organization. Generally speaking, tlie more highly 
and fully developed of them will show great tendency 
to longevity, great power to resist disease, great power 
of physical endurance with only a moderate quantity 
of food. These, as compared with the physiologically 
organic elements of character shown by masses of 
American-born women, are decided peculiarities. Look 
and see if it is not so. Our women generally are not 
long-lived, nor are they capable of living healthfully 
under unfavorable circumstances, nor can they labor 
hard, nor can they live upon little food. The exhibi- 
tions are all the other way. They eat frequently and 
inordinately. They are sick or ailing half the time. 
They cannot work hard. They die early. 
Second, because of the intrinsic human strength 
which they possess. 
Men are disposed to consider the nature of woman 
to be radically or generically different from that of man, 
whereas it is only specifically different. The things 
which men and women hold in common are far more 
numerous and more important to their respective as 
well as to their collective welfare, than the things which 
they hold in difference. Thus, notwithstanding the dif- 
ference in sex, the human nature in them both is more 
influential, and, therefore, more worthy of considera- 
tion than their sexual natures can possibly be. It is a 
great mistake, therefore, as well as a great wrong which 
society, the church and civil government have commit- 
ted against woman, to institute for her and establish 
and impose upon her positions, relations, responsibili- NEITHER GOOD WIVES NOR MOTHERS. 
113 
ties and obligations in life, having their origin mainly 
and therefore their significance chiefly in considerations 
pertaining to her gender. God always legislates on 
general principles, or if He does specifically legislate, it 
is done with reference to the supremacy and establish- 
ment of general principles ; certainly it is so as far as 
his legislation in Nature is concerned. He manifests 
himself in highest attitudes of affection and regard for 
man, at the point wherein all human beings have things 
in common, and not where they have as numerous di- 
versities as they have distinct personalities. If, there- 
fore, we take the Divine idea of the relations to life, 
liberty and the pursuit of happiness which woman right- 
fully holds, and work these up into such human asso- 
ciation and enforcement as the necessities of her nature 
demand, we must come to a recognition of the fact, that 
wherever she holds powers, faculties, qualities, passions, 
propensities, instincts, impulses like to those which man 
holds, she is to have protection in their use, enjoyment, 
development, education, and in the results which flow 
therefrom, as fully as he has. To make her essentially 
human and incidentally female, and yet to treat her es- 
sentially as female and incidentally as human, is to per- 
vert the work of God, to debase her nature, to degrade 
the nature of man himself, and to establish therefore 
essentially false relations between God, man and her. 
Out of such falsity what can be expected in the justice 
of the case or in the nature of things but ill-results, 
and such as are witnessable in every society, commu- 
nity, nation and people under the whole heaven. Only 
% 114 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
in America are they less tlian in any other nation, be- 
cause so far as our political institutions are concerned, 
these are organically based on liberty, and so on justice 
to women ; and as far as they have had opportunity to 
be made practical, they have touched her to her bene- 
fit, and so have developed in her, within the class now 
under consideration, those elements of character which 
are natural and fit for woman to hold. If, under any 
philosophic view of the case, woman, therefore, can 
approach the natural, the right, the proper and the true 
position, then the sexual in her takes a subordinate, 
aud the human in her takes a superior place. Noth- 
ing has encouraged me so much in looking into and 
contemplating the possibilities of the future of our 
great republic, as to see a class of women rising up in 
whom the sexual is made to take a subordinate place, 
and to keep it, as specific qualities of character always 
should be kept. I like very much to see strong-minded 
women—women who can think, reason, feel and act as 
men do, not because men act as human beings of the 
male gender, but because being in the enjoyment of a 
large liberty in this country to act naturally, they do 
not act in view of their sex, but in view of the grand 
and sublime elements that belong to them as human 
beings. To see women, therefore, approximating to 
men because men are human, is to give great joy to 
my heart—a joy as great when she thus acts, as my 
grief is great when I see her sacrificing all the digni- 
ties of her humanity, to the clamorous demands of her 
sexual nature, walking, talking, dressing, eating, drink- NEITHER GOOD WIVES NOR MOTHERS. 
115 
ing, thinking, acting, feeling on all occasions, under all 
circumstances and in all places as though the other ele- 
ments in her nature to he respected by her?elf, or by 
men, or to be honored by God, must be subordinate to 
her gender. 
It is for the reason that in this class of women in 
our country the human controls so thoroughly the sex- 
ual, that, as society is constituted and government 
operates, they are unfitted to become wives and moth- 
ers. A wife in American society is expected to hold 
relations to her husband mainly from the point of her 
sex. A mother is expected to hold relations to her 
husband and her children from the point of her sex; 
and these in every direction. The women who possess 
so much intrinsic human strength as the women of the 
class now under consideration do, should not, as society 
at present regards women, become wives or mothers, 
because they cannot without doing positive outrage to 
themselves, bury up all their instincts, their intelligence 
and their moral sensibilities in the fulfillment of two 
specific relations, which, however important in them- 
selves, are not, nor were they ever intended by God to 
be, relations of the foremost character. I therefore am 
glad that these women are determined, notwithstand- 
ing the pressure of society, the criticisms of the church, 
and the injustice of government, to claim for them- 
selves and maintain for themselves the rights of person 
and of property ; the privileges of citizenship, and a full 
enjoyment of all the advantages to growth and culture 
which birth and education in a free country proffer. 116 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
Third, because of their great necessity for peculiar de- 
velopment, by reason of their peculiar organizations. 
Gradually, intelligent persons are coming to see, and 
pretty thoroughly to understand, that the leading traits 
or characteristics which human beings show, are in large 
measure owing to their peculiar physical or bodily de- 
velopments. By and by, it will be much better under- 
stood and comprehended than now, that no system of 
psychology or moral or spiritual science can be estab- 
lished and depended upon, which does not have its 
basis in physiological science or in qualities of phy- 
sical organization. There is not only the intellectual 
and moral difference which one readily sees between 
the well-educated Anglo-Saxon and the New Zealander, 
but there is also as wide and palpable difference in their 
physical structures. I hold that this latter difference 
necessarily would render, other things being equal, a 
like development of character between two such per- 
sons impossible. The difference in the shape of the 
head, in the organization of the heart, in the size of 
the lungs, in the size and vigor of the organic nerves, 
in the make-up of the bones and muscles, is such that 
no intellectual training, nor moral opportunities, nor 
religious culture, nor social advantages—though these 
were the same—would make aNew Zealander and an 
Englishman substantially alike in individual character- 
istics. Under very favorable conditions, both might 
become well-trained, well-educated, and finely-cultured 
men ; but the Englishman would have greatly the ad- 
vantage at the start, and hence, would much more NEITHER GOOD WIVES NOR MOTHERS. 
117 
readily apprehend and comprehend truths of high 
order, than the New Zealander could. The only way, 
then, to make a New Zealander equal to an English- 
man or Frenchman, German or American, must, in my 
view, necessarily consist in changing the form of his 
physical organization. What is true in the case sup- 
posed, is proportionally true as between all persons 
who have widely varying physical structures. It so 
happens that the class of women whose qualities are 
just now under consideration, are remarkable for their 
peculiar physical forms. As a necessary consequence, 
they are as remarkable for their peculiar intellectual and 
moral organizations. 
No one can reason correctly about them from any 
basis, which would be correct with reference to Ameri- 
can women in general. From the mass of our women 
this class is separated by as wide distinctions and as 
marked diversities of physical organization, as the 
highest grade of Englishmen is from a New Zealander. 
No one in discussing the abstract rights to life, liberty, 
and the pursuit of happiness, would determine the ques- 
tion in any practical way, in view of the necessities of 
a New Zealander. No one would think of making 
civil government or civilized society assume formal and 
fixed conditions, in view of what New Zealanders might 
need. The Chinese are coming into the United States, 
it is said, in large numbers. It is not proposed by any 
one, so far as I know, that society with us, whether it 
involves personal or political rights and advantages, 
shall so modify itself, or be modified, as to conform to 118 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
tlie present aims, purposes, and aspirations of tliis new 
class of population. On the other hand, it is asserted, 
and, I think with great pertinence, that the Chinese 
shall he given to understand that if they are to live 
•with us and become constituent elements of American 
society, wherever they may dwell, they must become 
Americans. We cannot become Chinese. They repre- 
sent the lower, the less favorable forms of human life, 
of human civilization, and of human culture. They 
are below us in the knowledge of the arts and sciences. 
They are not up to our level in their moral compre- 
hension and spiritual enlightenment. We cannot go 
down to them. Our duty lies in taking away from 
their path all existing obstructions, so that they may 
more readily, if possible, come up to our acknowledged 
and average position. Just so is it with reference to 
this class of women. They are the more advanced 
portion of womanhood in our country. They have 
larger, broader, nobler, and more extended views than 
the mass of American women have. They represent 
larger capabilities, more thorough practical capacities, 
and much greater intellectual competence ; and in tak- 
ing account of what society or civil government ought, 
in view of their advanced positions, to do, it becomes 
needful that arrangements should he made to suit them; 
that instead of insisting that they shall do violence to 
their organic forces, and so debase and degrade them- 
selves by assuming conditions of ignorance, inefficiency, 
incompetency, and spiritual inertia; or that they shall 
keep within those conditions of life which at present NEITHER GOOD WIVES NOR MOTHERS. 
119 
are supposed to constitute woman’s apropriate sphere, 
we should insist upon legislation being so modified, 
custom and etiquette in society and public opinion so 
changed, that they may find the largest possible liberty 
for growth, and the largest freedom possible for making 
their growth practically useful, not only to themselves 
individually, but to the commonwealth of which they 
are constituents. 
The men of our generation, and the women in large 
measure, as yet have failed to see how great a propor- 
tion of the whole number of women in the Republic 
this class composes. They have also failed to see almost 
entirely as yet, how lavishly endowed with intellect, 
vigor and moral virtue the women of this class are. 
I do not speak at random, nor do I say this to make a 
point. I say it because I am sure it is an actual fact, 
and one which all persons, having fair measure of re- 
gard for the advancement of humanity, for the promo- 
tion of the public good, and the progress of liberty, 
must be glad to have substantiated. For many years 
I have observed and sought to make myself familiar 
with the leading qualities and characteristic powers of 
American women, determining to settle, for myself at 
least, the question as to what may be called their sphere, 
and their rights therein, from the point of their natural 
and acquired capacities. My investigations led me to 
make the divisions which I have made, but I had no idea 
that I was to find so large a portion of the whole number 
of women marked by the great diversities which this 
class so extensively and illustriously exhibits. 120 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
When I awoke, in part, to comprehend that a fourth 
part of our native-born women is organized after an 
order and built up after a method which involves phy- 
sical, intellectual and moral forces, quite as great as 
those which an equal number of the better class of our 
men shows, I confess to having been greatly astonished. 
Immediately I set to work to see whether these wo- 
men are as widely distinguished in their individual 
characteristics from each other as they are from the 
other classes of American women, and this I found to 
be true. I yielded, therefore, to the impression that 
the exhibition is an original manifestation of nature, 
and that they are not a species of mankind consanguin- 
eously related, and constituting a peculiar family; but 
that they are a new development, showing not a devia- 
tion from the normal line of development; but on the 
other hand, rather an approximation to it, being an im- 
provement on all styles and forms of womanly organi- 
zation which the world has ever before seen. 
Wherever, therefore, I have heard of or seen a wo- 
man who, in her personal or social life, has shown quali- 
ties of character so unlike those which women ordina- 
rily show, as to render her conspicuous, or as to give her 
marked position, I have sought to make her personal 
acquaintance, or else to gather up such a mass of facts 
with reference to her, as to be able to generalize safely 
with regard to her characteristics, and to classify her. 
Tl has been very interesting to me to find that wherever 
I have come to know such a woman, or such a girl, 
whether in her teens, or as yet not having arrived at NEITHER GOOD WIVES NOR MOTHERS. 
121 
puberty, such woman or girl shows an idiosyncrasy or 
order of qualities which makes her strongly individual, 
and gives to her an air and bearing which stamp her 
as belonging to herself, no other woman or child being 
like her. Thus, as I investigated and reflected, as I 
gathered facts and generalized, as I referred to first prin- 
ciples and classified, I found that every such woman 
seemed to have an intellectual and moral organization 
that marked and qualified her, as distinctly as did her 
own features, from any other woman. This, to me, 
was something very novel and quite startling, until I 
became accustomed to see it, and was familiar with it. 
For, taking American women as they run, they are as 
much alike in their general aims and purposes and 
plans in life, as all the peas are in a half bushel of 
them. They are so gregarious, that what one does, if 
she does it first, the next ninety-nine will do. They 
live in herds; they are molded, guided, shaped and 
trained by Fashion. What a half dozen women in 
any community do, the next half dozen will do, whether 
this be the wearing of a style of dress, or the setting 
of a table ; the furnishing of a house ; the going to a 
concert; the giving of a party; the schooling of chil- 
dren, or the going to church. Fashion forces them, 
because their qualities of individual character and their 
elements of personality are alike, and in manner of 
expression so much below the social elements which 
make them up, that they have but little power of re- 
sistance to the latter. Thus they are modified in mass, 
and molded after a common pattern. 122 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
Tlie women, liowevei, of the class of which I am now 
talking, do nothing after this sort. What each one thinks 
is best for her to do she does, whatever society or pub- 
lic opinion may say. To ridicule her for this strength, 
to sneer at her, to bring public opinion to bear with 
obtrusive force upon her, in the hope of weakening her 
courage, destroying her faith and circumscribing her 
liberty, is one of the meanest things that any human 
being, or set of human beings, can do. It is so : 
1. Because the peculiarities which such women show 
are greatly to the credit of human nature, and greater 
to the credit of liberty. 
2. Because, being essential characteristics in their 
natures, these women cannot help themselves. 
3. Because the womanhood of our country needs 
this kind of womanly manifestation to save it from 
rapid rottenness and ruin. CITAPTEE XIII. 
COMPETENCY OF THIS CLASS OF WOMEN. 
Underlying the general prejudice which exists largely 
with men of the American republic, in respect to what 
may be fairly considered right and proper for woman 
to do, there is an instinct, or intuition, which is con- 
stantly at work, forcing them in a measure at least, to 
do her justice. The evidence of the existence of this 
intellectual or moral conviction, is seen in the opening 
up of opportunities and facilities for her thorough edu- 
cation. This will, if one is old enough, revive by con- 
trast his recollections of the comparative advantages 
for intellectual training and comprehensive education 
for boys and girls, for young men and young women in 
our country twenty-five or thirty years since ; and he 
can readily comprehend how much that difference has 
been diminished. Then, to girls was given a fair Eng- 
lish education. They were only taught rudimentally the 
higher branches of learning. They were supposed to be 
naturally incompetent to understand mathematics. They 
were never instructed in the elements of logic. To be 
able to read fairly, to write so that possibly one could 
decipher their chirography, to understand arithmetic as 
far as the rule of three, to spell somewhat correctly, 
123 124 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
to know a little in many other directions, but not so 
much as to be of practical service, was the extent to 
which their scholastic education was carried. The more 
favored, perhaps, advanced somewhat beyond this point. 
Generally, however, a thoroughly educated girl, or a 
well-informed, highly cultured and accomplished wo- 
man, was rare. Boys and girls went to school together 
until puberty. From that time, where advantages could 
be given to the former, they were in almost every in- 
stance concentrated upon them, greatly to the disad- 
vantage and injury of the girls in the family. In no 
part of our country was there a single school to be 
found, where instruction was given to girls so thoroughly 
that they became sufficiently learned to justify the be- 
stowment of diplomas. Collegiate courses of instruc- 
tion did not exist for them in any institution. 
How is it nowT ? There are very fine schools, incor- 
porated under charters of the State, in many States in 
the Union, where young girls can go and remain until 
they are well educated in all branches of learning; 
where also they can thoroughly study the classics and 
the languages of other peoples ; where they can go 
through thorough discipline in mathematics; where sci- 
ence opens her libraries and permits them to become 
familiar with her secrets, so that if they desire, they 
can make themselves as close students and as accom- 
plished graduates as the young men of our country 
can, and in many instances do. Besides these schools 
which are kept exclusively for young women, there are 
very fine educational advantages offered them in many COMl’ETENCY OF THIS CLASS OF WOMEN. 
125 
academies, and in some collegiate institutions, at wliich 
young men are students, and from which they, like the 
young men, can become graduates. Upon observation, 
it will be found that the young women of our land who 
have accepted these very fine advantages for education 
in common with young men, uniformly, and, I may say, 
almost universally, belong to the class of our population 
whose characteristics, rights, aims and purposes I am 
now considering, and who in the language of the day 
are called u strong-minded.” As all causes, when ac- 
tive, produce results, and conduct, when determinate, 
involves consequences good or bad, the question is a 
fair one to ask, and society, the church and civil gov- 
ernment, are bound to give answer—What is to be 
done with this class of women when they'become thor- 
oughly educated ? 
It is to be borne in mind that some of them are physi- 
cally as well as mentally unfit for motherhood. To in- 
duce these to enter the marriage relation with the view 
of becoming mothers as well as wives, is to induce 
them to.kill themselves, or to be killed. Child-bearing 
they cannot stand. The wifely relations they might 
bear, could they be found by men who would under- 
stand and appreciate their intellectual tendencies and 
their spiritual proclivities. But no matter how well 
these women might be loved and honored, cherished 
and cared for by their husbands, some of them surely 
could not live were they to bear children. Their physi- 
cal structures contra-indicate motherhood. 
It is unsafe always to subject a woman to the process 126 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
of child-bearing, whose head around its largest part 
measures as much within an inch or an inch and a-half 
as her body around the waist, or around the region of 
the stomach. Where women have large heads and 
small stomachs, the organic relation indicates the ne- 
cessity of freedom from child-bearing. Such a person 
has not constitutional vigor—what we call stamina • 
what maybe termed staying power; what sometimes 
is called organic vitality—to endure the kind of taxa- 
tion common to women consequent on maternity. To 
subject such person to the tax of bringing forth young 
under conditions unfavorable to health, is to derange 
all her functional activity and her constitutional force, 
to break down her physical health and destroy her life. 
Until a better knowledge exists with men and women 
how to live together as husbands and wives, without 
having children; the women who are organized as I 
have described, have no right to marry, for the very 
good and sufficient reason that no human being has the 
right to commit suicide, however slow the process may 
be. Child-bearing with such women, is wife-murder 
of such women. There is no getting away from this 
statement. Facts are hard things to tight. Every day 
the close observer notices, or may notice, the deaths of 
such women. They are to be found in every neighbor- 
hood. They die early ; die immediately, or soon after, 
or at no distant period after child-bearing. This kills 
them. If they may not marry, because they may not 
consent to kill themselves nor to be killed ; what shall 
they do for a living ? They are physical creatures, and COMPETENCY OF TTTIS CLASS OF WOMEN. 
127 
have physical wants. These wants have been increased 
in number, and their sensibilities intensified by reason 
of development and culture of their higher powers and 
faculties. Every educated woman—other things being 
equal—is likely to have, and is entitled to have, more 
wants than a barbarian, or a savage woman. One’s 
needs are in proportion to his capacities and practical 
uses of them. The more comprehensive one becomes 
in his power of thought, the more extended becomes 
his power of practical application of such thought. 
Logically, then, he needs more tools to work with ; 
and his wants oftentimes serve, or should serve, the 
purposes of aids to him in accomplishing desired ends. 
To educate women of naturally large and comprehen- 
sive minds, so that they shall be well disciplined and 
highly cultured, and then to say that they shall have 
no work in the world to do,—is to place them where, 
of all classes of persons, they necessarily must become 
the most miserable. What can be worse for a human 
being, whether man or woman, than to be consciously 
fitted for great endeavors, and then to be deprived of 
all opportunities for putting them forth \ jSTo failure 
of which a man well can form conception, can be worse 
in contemplation than this. All consciousness, in order 
to induce satisfaction and happiness, must have room 
and place for exercise. A woman thus educated must 
have a sphere comportable with her capacities. She 
cannot occupy a sphere suited to a woman of few ideas 
and with no ambition. She has not been educated to 
fill it; but she has been trained to an entirely different 128 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
sphere; and unless by general consent and public ap- 
proval, she is to be permitted to occupy it, and take 
equal chances for success with others, whether men or 
women, in any field of labor she may choose, she should 
not have been educated. To my mind it follows logi- 
cally, that thorough education of women must enlarge 
their spheres of private action. They cannot be kept 
to the routine of the old regimen. They would not 
stay there if they wrere placed there. It would be im- 
possible for them to do it. They must have opportu- 
nities equal to their abilities; otherwise the whole ac- 
tion of our people in giving them large education is 
intrinsically wrong and practically ruinous. 
I put the question fairly for an answer, and ask every 
one to whom it may come, to answer it to him, or to 
herself, what is to be done with our educated women 
in this country ? It is no answer to say that they 
should get married. 
1. Because they cannot get married until men ask 
them to do it ? If they could get married, some of 
them would not live happily. This can be determined 
a priori, or before marriage, just as well as afterward. 
2. If they were to get married, some of them would 
not live ; marriage would kill them. 
3. Others of them, not unlikely, would prove so ill- 
fitted to its relations and duties, that they would ruin 
their own children, and spoil the happiness and com- 
fort of their husbands. 
What, then, shall be done with them ? It is no in- 
dication of large foresight to unfetter their minds, and COMPETENCY OF THIS CLASS OF WOMEN. 
129 
bind their hands and feet. It is not philosophical to 
educate them, and throw them into prison. It is not 
the exhibition of Christian sentiment to train them to 
take care of themselves, and then insist that they shall 
not do it, but shall be cared for by their fathers, bro- 
thers, husbands, society, or government. If they are 
educated to knowledge, why should they not be per- 
mitted to make practical use of it ? If they do well, 
it is well; if ill, they are the losers. Give them free- 
dom, and then hold them responsible for the use or 
abuse of it, in the same way and manner as other citi- 
zens are held. Let them be regarded, treated, dealt 
with precisely the same as men are. They ask this ; 
it is right and just that they should have it. 
The rights of men should be accorded to them; the 
privileges and immunities and opportunities which men 
have by custom and the authority of law, should also 
be theirs. They should enter into the fields of effort 
always waiting for laborers to their harvests, to succeed 
or fail, as their fitness should determine. If because 
of their being women they are incompetent to succeed, 
it is just as well for their fathers, their brothers, their 
husbands, society, or the government, to take care of 
them, feed, clothe, and house them after they have 
proved that they cannot take care of themselves, as it 
is before they have made the effort to do so. In my 
judgment, it is much better. For now, in every com- 
munity, can be found women who have to be taken 
care of, eking out a precarious sort of support by their 
fettered labor; fathers, husbands, brothers, men-friends 130 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
helping them to put clothes on their hacks and shoes 
on their feet, giving them houses to dwell in, fires to 
warm them, and victuals to satisfy their hunger; who, 
were they under the protection of public opinion and 
the power of equal laws, and at liberty to do for them- 
selves just wThat their faculties render them competent 
to do, would not only support themselves, but would 
acquire property with wonderful facility, and hold it 
with most remarkable tenacity. Almost all the women 
whom I have met, who, as society goes, are not fit to 
become either wives or mothers, are women who, were 
they free to put their powers out according to their 
natural bent, would show such comprehension in busi- 
ness affairs, and would readily acquire such aptness in 
managing them in detail, as to make a very great 
change in all the business relations now monopolized 
by the business men of our country. So confident am I 
that this view is correct, that I venture this statement 
for consideration and trial. Go into any school in the 
land, pick out ten or fifty boys; choose as many girls ; 
select them at random, or with equal care ; let them be 
under puberty, and put them on equal footing to the 
doing of anything, or of various things. Give them 
opportunity to be practically expert, and whatever may 
be the work, I am sure the girls will show as much 
aptness to learn, as much knowledge to apply their 
learning to practical use, as will the boys. 
Still further than this. Take any equal number of 
young men and young women of the same ages, and 
the same scholastic advantages—because abstract knowl- COMPETENCY OF THIS CLASS OF WOMEN. 
131 
edge is a great aid to the acquirement of expert ness in 
doing anything—put these to work where neither of the 
classes has had opportunities to know ; it may he in 
any mechanic’s shop, in any artist’s studio, in any school 
of design, in any agricultural work, at any calling or 
in any pursuit, and it will be found that no greater 
number of girls than of boys, will prove incompetent. 
The idea—if it is to be so termed, it is hardly fit to be 
called such, for it is only a notion or a prejudice—that 
girls are less competent than boys, or women than 
men, to general and varied pursuits, has no basis in 
physiological truth. Whatever difference may exist, 
and I grant a wide one does exist, is owing to just such 
causes as have made, and always will make, intelligent 
and educated persons the superiors of ignorant persons. 
Education, however, does not consist simply in the 
acquisition of knowledge, but in the putting such 
knowledge to use as well. Who learns how a thing 
ought to be done, and yet is not taught how to do it, is 
only half-tauglit. The education which men have re- 
ceived hitherto under free institutions, has contemplated 
for them the accomplishment of both these kinds of 
knowledge. With women, up to this time, it has con- 
templated only the attainment of the former. To fit 
them for life’s duties, they must not only be taught how 
things should be, but how things are done. Not only 
how they should be, and are done, but how, themselves, 
to do them. For this purpose they must have freedom ; 
and freedom never was and never will be anything else 
than personal liberty protected by law. Tie who has 132 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
liis liberty of person acknowledged by public opinion 
only, may be a free man to-day, but lie may be a slave 
to-morrow. Only can be be a freeman, whose liberty 
is assured, and no assurance can come to him until the 
public sentiment or opinion of the people amongst 
whom he dwells as a citizen, is transformed into statu- 
tory authority, which they themselves cannot alter ex- 
cept by well recognized forms of procedure. The wo- 
men of our country lack in many respects the protec- 
tion of their liberty by law. They, therefore, are not free 
even under the most liberal construction which can be 
given to their position. They are enjoying liberty by 
sufferance; but for any appeal that they would be able 
to take in any show of public sentiment toward them, 
they are powerless, Ho court of justice would recog- 
nize their appeal. Does any one want an illustration 
to show the truth of what I assert ? Let him take this, 
then, which is an actual case. I know an unmarried 
woman, who nineteen years ago left her father’s house 
to get an education. By great economy, a good deal 
of self-denial, considerable hardship, and the exercise 
of a vast amount of sagacity—what I call genius— 
she succeeded. Then she sought an honest living for 
herself. By patient labor, and the exercise of very fine 
intellectual abilities directing her industries, in the 
lapse of years she acquired property. She is now in 
possession of a competence. How she shall dispose of 
this property is not for her to say. The law of the 
State in which she lives, as an abstract proposition, 
recognizes her citizenship, and thereupon it proceeds COMPETENCY OF THIS CLASS OF WOMEN. 
133 
to hold lier responsible to the obligations and duties 
due from a citizen to the State. It binds her to respect 
the rights of others, while it refuses to respect her own 
rights. It holds her amenable to justice, while it commits 
injustice upon her. It affixes a penalty to every act of 
hers which traverses that line of conduct which is 
marked out for her guidance, while it makes void her 
most essential right of personality, by denying to her 
an equal voice with others in deciding the uses to which 
the results of her own industry shall be put. By her 
side sits a brother, who, like herself, has labored and 
acquired property. Every year the government comes 
to the man and says : “ IIow will you be taxed ? To 
what extent will you allow my officials to take your 
property for public use, giving you my protection as 
compensation therefor ? It needs for the maintenance 
of its own machinery a large sum of money and many 
public servants. These must live. That they may live 
it needs money. How, how much of your money are 
you willing to give, in order that the government may 
be efficiently represented through a class of officials 
who will see that its aims and purposes are fairly car- 
ried out Vy The man says, “ I will answer that ques- 
tion, where all public questions should be answered, 
at the ballot box. Give me time to consider the pro- 
position. Let me read, converse with others, and re- 
tiect, and then I will act, and my decision shall be 
made known publicly when the time comes for the set- 
tlement of public questions.” 
To the woman, the government or the law says: 134 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
u Yo i have earned money, the government wants it. 
The government proposes to take what it wants, whether 
you consent or not. As you have no husband, you can- 
not refer the question to him. As you are a woman 
over twenty-one years of age, it cannot be referred to 
your father or your brother. The government will not 
refer it to you ; it, therefore, proposes to ask itself 
what it will do.” 
All through the years of the war tin’s woman was 
taxed hard and heavy. Yot a great while ago the gov- 
ernment sent its officers to her, to peer into her property 
affairs, to see whether she had paid its demands to the 
last cent; asking no liberty of her, but coming into her 
presence with authority, and demanding that she sur- 
render all evidences of property for its inspection and 
examination. Can any one tell what difference there 
is, morally, between this outrage of the government 
toward one of its loyal and law-abiding citizens or sub- 
jects, and that of a robber who should meet a woman 
at the cross-roads in the night, and say to her, “ Your 
money or your life ?” Our government says to this 
woman, “ Your money or your liberty !” 
A very eminent Irish orator once speaking for one 
of his countrymen, said : “ Liberty is not life, but con- 
ditions of living.” AVith such conditions of life as this 
woman is in, can she be said to have any assured liberty ? 
It is absurd to assert that she has. An eminent Ameri- 
can has said, u Give me liberty, or give me death!” 
This woman is in not only an abstract or philosophical 
sense, but in a practical sense, a slave. Suppose the COMPETENCY OF THIS CLASS OF WOMEN. 
135 
government saw fit to carry out its plan of taxing lier 
without lier consent, until it took from her all her pro- 
perty. Then the means of her living would be de- 
stroyed ; then her locomotion, or right to go from place 
to place, would be substantially taken away. Then she 
would be helpless, for when one has been robbed of the 
means of livelihood already gathered up, and at the same 
time told that if she earns more, that, too, if the govern- 
ment sees fit to demand it, she must surrender peaceably, 
or it will take it by force, and at the same time imprison 
her, what resources has she at disposal for self-support ? 
Not any. No despotism was able ever to exert a more 
powerful weapon for the destruction of individual life, 
liberty and the pursuit of happiness, than that of rob- 
bing a subject of the material resources whereby only, 
can one live, be free, and happy. It matters not 
whether man or woman, whoever is thus treated by 
the government within whose precincts he or she lives, 
is a slave. 
After my calculation one-fourth part of the woman- 
hood of the republic belongs to the property-acquiring 
class. It represents independent personality—if I may 
say so by way of distinction—shown by large intellec- 
tual capacity, moral competence and physical fitness. 
It therefore demands acknowledgment in our social 
life, and protection at the hands of civil government. 
Law should come to its support, and in order to be 
just, should give to it the right and power to say what 
the nature and character of the law shall be, and what 
the kind and power of its application. Self-govern- 136 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
ment is God’s plan of government for human beings. 
He intends that this should lie at the foundation of all 
their conditions of living. There may be persons who 
need to be wards of the government, or, in other words, 
to be under its tutelage. If there are such, let the gov- 
ernment recognize them directly, and thus make pal- 
pable and notable distinction between them and those 
who are competent to take care of themselves. When- 
ever a person says she is competent to take care of her- 
self, let the law stand back and give her equal chances 
with any other person who says he is competent to take 
care of himself. If she proves incompetent, the fact 
will show itself. Whenever it does so, and the gov- 
ernment takes possession of her liberty, and holds it in 
trust for her, let it be just to her, by relieving her from 
an amount of responsibility for acts committed, equal 
to the amount of liberty of which it deprives her. 
Whoever is sufficiently intelligent to understand the 
bearings, and meet the responsibilities of a statute in 
law, is equal to all that primary action which is needful 
to say what that statute shall be. To know how so to 
comprehend a law as to be able to obey it in spirit and 
in letter, is to be amply fitted to know how to assist in 
making law-makers. Whenever, therefore, government 
sees fit in its wisdom to deprive any person of the power 
of acting conjointly with others in its own organization 
and administration, to be just, it should relieve such 
person from all corresponding obligations to be taxed 
to meet its ordinary or extraordinary expenses; for 
taxation without representation is tyranny.” Obedi- COMPETENCY OF THIS CLASS OF WOMEN. 
137 
ence to law can only be predicated on duty, and this 
on obligation, this on rights, and these on liberty. 
There is no sophistry here, but only the sternest 
logic. Largely, I think, the adult woman-population 
of our country are amply qualified to take voice and 
exercise primary action in the organization and man- 
agement of all governmental matters which affect their 
own interests. It appears so foolish, ridiculous and ab- 
surd to me, to hear persons object to the enlargement 
of woman’s sphere of action, because of her unfitness 
therefor, when it is obvious that like all other rational 
intelligences, she is to be fitted for any duty, by hav- 
ing opportunity to know what the duty is, and to be- 
come expert in the doing of it, by trials at doing it. 
Teaching a boy to swim on dry land, is an easy feat, 
compared to the effort which society, the church and 
civil government in this country are making to create 
good citizens out of our Amorican women, by depriv- 
ing them entirely of all opportunity to do the duty ot 
citizens. Citizenship, in the best contemplation of it, 
consists in understanding the relations which constitute 
it, and in the performance of the duties which those rela- 
tions impose. She can never have very much interest 
in the administration of a government, who has nothing 
to say as to the nature of its organization or the man- 
ner of its administration. Since woman has faculties 
of perception and reflection, is capable of training, 
education and development, she can only be respon- 
sible to herself, to society, to mankind and to God, for 
doing well what she has had liberty to learn how to do. 138 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
As many women in this country have but little liberty, 
they, therefore, can be responsible only in a very nar- 
row sphere for doing well what they do. Many of them 
are shut up to so narrow limits of action, as to have 
their time hang heavy on their hands. As they cannot 
spend it profitably in the consideration of great interests, 
because in the management of these they have nothing 
to do, they seek relief from their pent-up sensibilities 
by turning their attention to little things. These, they 
come to be familiar with, and in a measure interest 
themselves in them. Group a number of them to- 
gether of an afternoon, and they talk of “ sleeves, 
bonnets, caps, bills registered and expectations sure.” 
Usually, they spoil their practical life, because society, 
the church, and civil government have despoiled their 
abstract life. Whoever is to be practically good fbr 
anything, must, as a condition precedent, possess an 
abstract right to liberty; and liberty consists in the 
use of all one’s powers and faculties, undisturbed by 
anybody, so long as in their use such person disturbs 
nobody. Such liberty I claim for my countrywomen, 
one and all, who are not lacking in natural capacity nor 
ability to take care of themselves, and will make good 
and useful citizens so soon as they obtain the consent 
of society and of the church, and the protection of civil 
government. If society and the church become stupidly 
and obstinately recusant in the matter, then all the 
more do they need the assistance of government. This 
assistance I do not ask to be rendered in the shape of 
special privileges, or immunities granted to them. I COMPETENCY OF THIS CLASS OE WOMEN. 
139 
solicit no monopolies in their favor, but simply and 
earnestly urge that under the constitution of their 
country and of the States wherein they live, they be 
authorized by law to exercise the same franchises and 
enjoy the same legal privileges and immunities that 
men do. This is all they should ask; with this they 
should be content; with nothing else, in my opinion, 
should they be. True Democracy demands this. True 
Republicanism clamors for it. 
It is high time the political parties in our country 
representing Democracy and Republicanism, should be 
willing to put away injustice, and enthrone justice in 
her stead. CHAPTER XIV. 
THEIK BUSINESS CAPACITIES. 
I have said that the women in our country com- 
posing a class not fit, as society goes, to become either 
wives or mothers, have as large natural capacities for 
varied business pursuits, and as comprehensive powers 
to understand and succeed in such pursuits, as any 
equal number of business men of our country. 
This statement I believe to be literally true. My 
reason for believing it is, that just to the degree that 
these women have opportunities furnished to show their 
abilities, they prove to be possessors of them. I could 
count not less than a hundred women, pursuing the 
avocations of business men, with just as much success 
as men obtain who follow them. This, as far as it goes, 
substantiates my statement. But every day brings 
additional proof of the truth of my view in the person 
i)f some woman who has broken ground in a new field 
of labor, and is rapidly winning success therein. 
We now have women-doctors, women-editors, women 
short-hand reporters, correspondents of newspapers, 
druggists, dry-goods merchants, lawyers, printers, tele- 
graph operators, cashiers in business firms, book-keepers, 
teachers in academies, and professors in colleges, teach 
140 THEIR BUSINESS CAPACITIES. 
141 
ers of l.iorticulture, editors and reporters of tlie cattle- 
stock markets for public journals, brokers and stock 
operators in tlie exchange market, breeders of fancy 
fowls, keepers of bees, milliners, mantua-makers, clerks 
in hardware stores, justices of tlie peace, grand jurors, 
engrossing clerks in legislatures, theatrical actors, public 
dancers, lecturers before lyceums, ordained preachers of 
the gospel and settled pastors over churches, eloquent 
orators, pomologists, botanists, teachers of elocution, 
painters, sculptors, architects, and successful operators 
in various other avocations and pursuits, not needful to 
mention here. In looking up the histories of these 
business women, I have, as yet, found not one who has 
failed, sooner or later, to win prosperity and reputation. 
I account for their uniform success, because of their 
natural giftedness for management of business affairs in 
detail. Without exception almost, have the women 
with whose business relations I have become familiar, 
shown aptness of observation, and quickness of power 
of reflection, and of comprehending all that was needful 
to know in order to prosper in their professions or pur- 
suits. 
With men, failures in business often arise from want 
of power to connect the various departments of their 
business, so as to make each sustain all the others, 
and thus aowregate and increase the sum total of effort 
which they put forth. If a close observer fixes his 
attention on the movements of any kind of business 
man who seems outwardly to be doing well, but really 
is struggling hard to keep from failure, he will find that 142 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
between tlie various departments of liis business there 
are links wanting; so that, while in some of them he 
succeeds, the benefits of such success are not reflected 
upon the other departments ; and for want of this re- 
flection the whole business goes down. If a merchant 
in any department of trade, it may be that he buys 
goods carefully and sells them profitably, but he does 
not get his pay; or he buys carefully and gets his pay 
for what he sells, but is a poor salesman ; or if he buys 
raw material, purchasing it economically, he manufac- 
tures it expensively and sells it for little profit and on 
credit, and so loses quite a percentage, and makes 
nothing. There is a want of capacity for business in 
some direction almost always existing, and, if closely 
looked after, to be foimd with men who fail in business 
pursuits. 
With women of this class this is much less likely to 
be a prominent fact. Very few of them fail in what they 
undertake, if they are left so untrammelled that they can 
act freely. Large caution belongs to them. A dispo- 
sition to understand minutely whatever they undertake 
to do, is a peculiar quality of theirs. They therefore 
have less proclivities to run risks or make ventures than 
men have, and are safer in the way of developing 
power. 
Almost all men who have been large operators in 
any business pursuits, and who have had good wives to 
whom they have made known their business operations, 
will testify to the benefits received, not infrequently, 
from the counsels which their wives have given them, THEIR BUSINESS CAPACITIES. 
143 
urging them lo do or to abstain from doing certain 
things, because in the one or in the other case, was suc- 
cess or failure. I cannot now think of any single ele- 
ment that could be thrown into the business operations 
of our country, that would be likely, or sure, to have a 
more salutary effect, than to have a large number of 
women educated to fill various pursuits, and let them 
act with the same freedom and want of constraint in 
their business relations that men do. In this way an 
infusion of fresh force would be added, quite vigorous 
from its intellectual, and even more so from its moral 
point of view. It may not be to the credit of human 
nature as represented by man, to say-that the moralities 
of business would be enhanced, broadened, deepened, 
and heightened by having women educated to business, 
and made to take their proper places in its various de- 
partments. There can be little doubt, however, that 
such would be the result. Several reasons might be 
offered going to show the probable correctness of this 
view. But one only will I mention, which is, that 
monopolists always become unconscionable as they are 
released from the influence of competition, and are per- 
mitted to hold their positions without dispute. 
Their reason and their moral sense become inactive, 
and they are less disposed to take into consideration 
the right or the wrong of what they are doing, than 
they would be were they subject to the watchfulness 
and the criticism of others who would thrive upon their 
mistakes or their lapses from integrity, were they to 
make them. It has always been a sad failing in the 144 
AMEEICAN WOMANHOOD. 
life of the American people, republican or democratic, 
as it if?, whether civil, religions or political, to place the 
entire business interests of the whole people in the ex- 
clusive charge of the men of the republic. This I am 
sure would never have been the case, had we had no 
system of servitude in the land. Now that is abolished 
and democracy is free, the truth can have a chance to 
flourish. The business arrangements of society will 
have to undergo organic modification. There will have 
to be a reconstruction of the whole social fabric, begin- 
ning with the family, extending into business concerns, 
affecting the church, and culminating in change of 
governmental management. This alteration will take 
place by means of the active development of the inher- 
ent force of the womanhood of the country, and its in- 
fusion into all the departments of society and govern- 
ment. It is not needful to have very large foresight 
to understand what must be the effects of causes which 
are all the while at work under the direction of Liberty. 
Living as all the people of the United States now do 
under institutions whose legitimate influence enlarges 
personality, gives scope to individual action, and con- 
stantly tends to make each and all equal before the 
law, it appears to me that whatever existing relations, 
whether household, generally social, political or reli- 
gious, are so conservative as to be antagonistic or act- 
ively opposed to the pursuit by woman of any calling 
or business which man honorably follows, will have to 
give way to the genius which originally inspired our 
fathers to organize our republic, and which has since so THEIR BUSINESS CAPACITIES. 
145 
wonderfully preserved and prospered ns as a people. 
Why should it not be so ? If woman has a soul of her 
own, and is therefore a person, necessarily she must 
have attaching to, or rather inhering in her, the 
rights of person. Amongst these rights are those “ of 
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To secure 
these rights to her, that is, for her good, as well as for 
the general good, and not for the general good as 
against her good, is government instituted in this coun- 
try. Its appropriate and particular function is to se- 
cure to her and maintain for her (as for any and every 
person) her right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of her 
own happiness. That she may be thus protected and 
made free, all constitutional inhibitions, or legislative 
enactments, or social customs, or any kind of etiquette, 
or relations to any church of which she may he a mem- 
ber, or conditions of living in any family of which she 
may be a constituent, must give way, wherever they 
operate so as to constrain her freedom. If they forbid 
her to pursue her happiness, to maintain her liberty, 
to insure her life, they must he modified; because life 
is an inalienable right, and liberty is its own offspring ; 
and out of the union of life and liberty is produced the 
right to pursue her own happiness in her own way, 
without constraint, without hindrance, without detri- 
ment, without intervention from any body or bodies of 
persons, so long as she accords to others the respect, and 
maintains for others the same rights which she claims 
for herself. It is not a difficult thing to arrange family 
relations, and relations of ordinary society, and rela- 146 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
tions in tlie clinrcli organization, and relations of the 
body politic, so that each individual member of any of 
these communities or corporations shall have all that 
belongs naturally to him or to her. There is no sort of 
necessity for giving up rights, in some directions, that 
rights in other directions may be secured. What a man 
or a woman cannot do, without committing a wrong in 
the doing of it, neither of them ever had or can have 
a right to do. Society in the United States is not 
founded upon the basis of giving up some of one’s nat- 
ural rights, in order that the rest may be protected. 
This is the perverse form of statement of those old 
sophists who held that society was a compact, that gov- 
ernment was the outgrowth of an agreement between 
the several individuals making it up. A better philos- 
ophy is, that society is a necessity of human nature, 
and government is the natural result of the demands of 
human nature, and of the aggregate necessities of man- 
kind ; that therefore, in the organization and adminis- 
tration of society and government, there is no giving 
up of what belongs to the individual. There is only 
the mutual acknowledgment, on the part of all, of the 
rights of each, and a recognition of an obligation on the 
part of all to protect each in what legitimately belongs 
to him. When society shall come to recognize the per- 
sonality of woman, and seek to protect her in its asser- 
tion, and in the maintenance of her liberty, legislation, 
whether constitutional or statutory, will take its proper 
place. 
Until that time we are to have conflicts and strug- THEIR BUSINESS CAPACITIES. 
147 
gles. Divisions and dissensions in families and in 
neighborhoods, in churches and in political jmrties and 
in go vernmental organizations, will exist; and it is well 
that they should; for the Master of all government 
came into this world not to send peace, but a sword, 
until government be established on no other basis than 
that of absolute righteousness. God never builds on 
quicksand. lie lays his fabric always on a rock, even 
so that when the rains descend, and the winds blow, and 
storms beat upon what he builds, it stands. It is the 
nature of truth to stand ; it is the nature of error to 
topple down and fall headlong, and burst its own 
bowels, and die foolishly and everlastingly. 
In this country, by the blessing of Divine Providence, 
the organizers of our government and moulders of its 
political fabric, and shapers and fashioners of its reli- 
gious institutions, and managers of its social establish- 
ment, struck absolute truth at the very outset, and let it 
gush up to the surface as Moses’ rod let out the waters 
from their hollow in the rock. They made a declaration 
which can never be improved upon, as an utterance of 
organic truth : “We hold these truths to be self-evi- 
dent, that all men are created equal, and are endowed 
by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, amongst 
which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness : 
that to secure these rights, governments are instituted 
amongst men, deriving their right to govern, from the 
just consent of the governed.” Is there a man or a 
woman in all this republic, uncursed by selfishness, un- 
prejudiced in mind, and clear in spiritual perception, 148 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
who in candor will say, that it is his or her belief that 
the individuals who signed that declaration, and pledged 
to its maintenance “ their lives, their fortunes, and their 
sacred honor,” intended to convey the idea that the 
rights therein mentioned belong only to human beings 
of the masculine gender ? Out of the promptings of an 
honest heart, or the upswellings of inspiration, or the 
deductions of reason candidly applied, it seems to me 
no man will make such a statement. On the other 
hand, every honest, untainted, uncorrupted person will 
admit that by the term men, the signers meant persons 
of the feminine, as truly as of the masculine gender. 
If this be so, there is no escape for our people from the 
application of these principles to the womanhood, as 
truly as to the manhood of the country, except in and 
through the most outrageous and wicked apostasy. The 
history of our country does not favor the conclusion that 
such will be the ultimate shape which this republic, un- 
der the suggestions of liberty, will take. During the 
time that we have existed as a government, every con- 
flict into which, as a people, we have entered, at the 
behests or dictation of Freedom, has ended in our be- 
coming more liberal. There has been no step backward 
from the day the nation was born to the present hour. 
Steadily we have gone into, and have come out of 
struggles that tried our patience, our pecuniary resour- 
ces, our virtue, our courage, our competency to con- 
quer ; and from every one which has been noteworthy, 
we have emerged in better conditions of sentiment and 
intellectual toleration of practical liberty than existed THEJLR BUSINESS CAPACITIES. 
149 
when the conflict opened. This being the historic fact, 
who needs to have the gift of prophesy to enable him 
to draw just conclusions in respect to the result of the 
efforts now being put forth to give to the women of this 
country the acknowledged right to a voice in the gov- 
ernment, and in the management of all affairs and 
legitimate interests which they hold in common with 
the men of the republic ? The more the question is dis- 
cussed, the better will woman’s conditions be. When 
discussion has produced knowledge, and knowledge has 
induced reflection, then will come right action, and 
woman will be free. Once free, the next thing to be 
done will be to protect her in her freedom, and for this 
purpose she must have the ballot. That is the sword 
whereby, under Liberty, she alone can conquer, and it is 
clearly within her “ appropriate sphere ” to claim the 
use of such a magnificent moral weapon. CHAPTER XY. 
THE BALLOT. 
Lsr the United States the ballot is the highest possible 
representative of power that any human being can have. 
It is symbol, badge, emblem, and type, at one and the 
same time. It declares personality, pronounces liberty, 
asserts individuality, maintains equality, and protects 
property. Uo other instruments or agents compare 
with it, or rank it, for all these it absorbs into itself. 
Considered in the light of the philosophy of free insti- 
tutions, it is bread to the hungry, clothes to the naked, 
shelter to the homeless. It is reputation, position, 
power. It is law, society, and government. It is all 
these, because with it and through it, and by it, all 
these are possible, and without it not one of them is 
sure. 
If the distinctive feature of humanity is personality, 
represented by appropriate exterior organization and 
outward surroundings of life, then it is clear that its 
maintenance is of the highest importance to all creatures 
possessing it. Individually, each person has the deepest 
interest in preserving in full measure of action all those 
constituents which go to make up his personality, what- 
ever these may be. As these elements or attributes of his 
150 THE BALLOT. 
151 
own are exactly the same in kind and quality as are 
those of each and every other human being, his right to 
them is just as good, and no better, than is the right of 
any other or every other person to his own. It follows, 
therefore, that he can have no sound interest in depri- 
ving any other person of having the full measure of per- 
sonality belonging to him accorded, because to invade 
or weaken or destroy such person’s right thereto would 
be seriously to invade and aid in the destruction of his 
own ; since it cannot possibly happen that, of two per- 
sons holding an equal and common, right to a thing, one 
can injure his fellow’s right without injuring his own. 
The most important thing, then, for a human being 
to do, or to have done for him, is to obtain a public 
recognition of his personality ; by which I mean a re- 
cognition of those qualities or faculties, attributes or 
powers, which he holds distinctively from all living or- 
ganisms dwelling on the earth. Whatever these may 
be, taken together, he is to have them publicly recog- 
nized as his own, to be put to service for his benefit, and 
not to be claimed by any other person as rightfully to 
be put to use for such other person’s benefit to any de- 
gree, or in any manner differently from that which such 
person is bound to reciprocate. The obligation is equal 
and mutual, or does not exist at all. Count these attri- 
butes what you please; say they are reason, conscience, 
will. Thus, in order to be ayj>erson in contradistinction 
from a thing, a living being must have in him faculties 
which, when drawn out and properly put to use, will en- 
able him, (1,) to think; (2,) to think rightly; (3,) to act 152 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
in view of his right thought. Say these are needful, 
amongst other qualities, to make a person; then the 
first and most important thing, I repeat, to be done, is 
to get a public recognition of them. How is this to be 
done in this country ? Once done, the feet of the per- 
son on whose behalf it is done, touch solid ground. Till 
done he treads on quaking bog, “ beneath whose skim 
of earth dread ruin lies.” It is to be done by the adop- 
tion of any rules which are most convenient, whereby 
the consent of all is pledged to the recognition and pro- 
tection of each, because each one thus pledged is equal, 
and only equal in power and right to pledge, to any 
other one. Under our form of government the pledge 
is a written constitution or fundamental law, of which 
the ballot is the public exponent. Whoever, therefore, 
has such pledge without its corresponding factor, the 
ballot, has imperfect security in behalf of his person- 
ality, unless he is at the same time freed from all 
responsibility to others for the exercise of his personality. 
For, if he have no voice in determining what his obli- 
gations to others shall be, others should have no voice 
in determining what his duties to them, shall be. To 
deprive one by organic or constitutional law of the right 
to protect himself, demands that, by the same law, he 
be relieved of all duty to protect others. In other 
words, to say that a person shall have no voice in making 
the laws, justly draws in the correlative statement that' 
he is to have no duties in obeying the laws. For it is 
morally certain that whoever knows enough to obey 
a law, knows enough to have an elementary power in 
the making of it. THE BALLOT. 
153 
As rights of person and property in this country can 
only he secure under the protection of law, so law can 
only be said to be fairly just when those in whom both 
of these classes of rights inhere, have a voice in deter- 
mining what the nature and character of the laws 
shall be. And as rights of person and property absorb 
into themselves all other rights, so a sure protection 
and defense of these become safe-guards to all others. 
Take care of one’s personal rights, and property rights 
spring up immediately; take care of both, and all his 
relative rights are looked after. The only way, then, 
to take care of them all, is to legislate and enforce the 
laws in behalf of the rights of person; and the only 
Avay to legislate rightly with reference thereto is for 
the person to have a voice in choosing the legislators. 
Said I not rightly, then, when I said that the ballot is 
the most comprehensive representative power known to 
the American people ? Its moral significance is in 
proportion to the worth of the interests it represents, 
and the value of these interests is to be measured by 
the intrinsic worth of human nature, What this is 
worth let each individual decide for himself. I am not 
afraid of his underrating it while his estimate of it is 
confined to himself. It is only when a person under- 
takes to settle a matter of this kind for another, that 
his moral sense passes under a cloud. Put the question 
to an individual man, What is personal liberty worth 
to you ? and he will not underestimate it. I used to 
say twenty years ago, when advocating the anti-slavery 
cause, that I could change any man’s views of the pro- 154 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
slavery character of the Declaration of Independence 
by placing him under its ban. Only construe it so as 
to make him one of the proscribed class to \t nom the 
benefit of its great doctrine of liberty should not apply, 
and he would reject it or your construction of it in- 
stantly. The ballot is to such person of high regard. 
It is his talisman, his charm with which he keeps off 
devilish transformations. Taken from him by force or 
guile, or lost to him by public indifference, and, in 
his view, his manhood would not survive the casualty 
a day. The thought of disfranchisement makes his 
flesh crawl. Going through a graveyard at twelve 
o’clock at night is nothing to it. What! have his 
rights, his privileges and immunities, his personal lib- 
erty, his social security, his property, his protection of 
his family, his right to worship God, to follow what 
pursuit he may choose—one, all, placed at the dispo- 
sition of his fellows without his having an acknowl- 
edged, and recognized and well-guarded right to ex- 
press an ultimate decision for or against such disposi- 
tion ? Call you this freedom % The dullest clod of a 
man to be found would know that to place him thus 
would be to do to him the unfair thing, and his stu- 
pid soul would rebel and keep rebelling against the 
outrage. Only a Thing could take this cooly and with 
satisfaction. God in man always gives manly utterance 
when he speaks at all, and hence the human instincts 
are made always to tend upward. The human spirit 
loves liberty, longs for her; and as liberty always soars, 
so the soul of man aspires. THE BALLOT. 
155 
Whence, then, come the terrible degradations we 
see ? How do they get birth and rearing ? Sad enough 
is the story, humiliating enough is the solution. They 
come by persons denying to others what they claim for 
themselves. Out of such selfishness nothing hut degra- 
dation, both to wrong-doer and to wronged, can come. 
For men to prate of the value of liberty, and while se- 
curing it to themselves deny it to woman ; to talk with 
pompous enthusiasm of the moral significance of the 
ballot and its essential importance in the maintenance 
of free government, whilst all the women in the repub- 
lic are disfranchised, is to mount hypocrisy on stilts as 
if one were stalking deer over moorlands. The ballot 
is worthy of men’s regard, because they are persons, 
and not from any quality of gender, which, by the way, 
they hold in common with brutes. The ballot is a 
moral power pre-eminently, representing moral nature, 
moral consciousness, moral responsibility, the force of 
mind and indestructible rights. It floats by its specific 
gravity in an atmosphere into which qualities of gen- 
der cannot come. God does not legislate downward 
for man, but always upward. The lower and the lesser 
He designs should give way to the higher and the no- 
bler. Sex is a specific quality, having precise sphere 
and prescribed limits ; important, significant and valu- 
able in its orbit, which is narrow and easily defined. 
But the moral nature of man, the earth is its develop- 
ing place, the universe the sphere of its action. To 
look after, promote, protect, progress; to strengthen, 
to culture, refine and make beautiful the moral man, 156 
AMEKICAN WOMANHOOD. 
which, in the contemplation of the Creator, knows no 
gender, is the grand mission of the ballot. It symbol- 
izes labor and types ont schools. It emblematizes lib- 
erty and shadows forth the law. It gathers these to- 
gether and denominates them power, and it makes this 
bow its knees in the presence of the Human. 
How, whether woman in this country should have 
the ballot depends on two things. 
1. Whether she is a person. 
2. If she is, wdiether she possesses such a degree of 
natural capacity as when fairly developed by education 
under free institutions, will render her lit and equal to 
take care of herself. 
That she is a person I shall assume to be true, be- 
cause to me it is self-evident; and I am not disposed 
to seek' to demonstrate that which, being self-evident, 
lies beyond the reach of argumentative demonstration. 
It would be a poor task that I should set myself, wrere 
I to undertake it. 
If man is a person, most certainly woman is. The 
qualities of personality which belong to him, belong 
also to her. They rest in her intellectual and moral 
constitution, as truly as in his. The difference in 
their physical organizations can have no effect what- 
ever in modifying, qualifying, or organically effecting 
* 
them. 
It will have to be admitted by and by that women 
are as well qualified to use the ballot as men are, when 
it is understood that its use has as much to do with 
looking after, protecting, caring for, improving and ele- THE BALLOT. 
157 
vating the conditions of domestic life, as it has with 
other conditions of life common to our people. 
Our theory of government is based upon the view 
that society precedes government, and the family pre- 
cedes general society. If this be a correct view, the 
foundation, or bottom principle of government in this 
country, is the organization and maintenance of the 
family institution. To look after foundation rights, is 
quite as necessary and important a duty as falls to the 
lot of careftil, cautious, and foresighted persons. Do- 
mestic life in this country needs its safeguards, and 
these need to be protected by legislation. Who in 
reality is the directing, controlling, managing spirit of 
any well-ordered family ? Is it not the woman rather 
than the man ? Abstractly, he may be considered the 
head of the family, and the law may so regard him, 
and the religious etiquette of the age or the community 
in which he lives, may so denominate him; but the 
moving spirit, the controlling soul of the family organi- 
zation, is woman. Of all high and important inter- 
ests, at present demanding careful consideration, just 
dealing, and liberal legislation, none can more fairly 
claim public attention than the household interests of 
the people of our country. In determining what shall 
be the relations of wife to husband, of mother to chil- 
dren, of woman to property, of woman as a person to, 
personality and liberty, in settling what shall be her 
social status, why should she have no political action ? 
Can there be any reason for it ? Besides, taking in 
that class of women in our country whose interests I 158 
AMERICAN WOMANHOOD. 
have discussed, who are not wives, nor mothers, nor, 
as society goes, I say, are fitted to become such, yet 
who nevertheless are active, energetic, comprehensive, 
large-minded, far-sighted, resolute women; who know 
how to reason abstractly yet profoundly, and apply 
their reason to practical things expertly and with great 
sagacity, shrewdness and success; who, therefore, are 
naturally competent for business, and, under free insti- 
tutions and the advancing spirit of toleration, are already 
acquiring property, and in the future are to be much 
more successful in its acquisition, why should they not 
have the ballot ? If human personality is good for any- 
thing, they should have it, for they are persons. If 
liberty to the human being be worth while, they should 
have it, for they are human. If property is worth pro- 
tection, they should have it, for they hold property. 
If the well-being of society needs protection, they 
should have it, for they are members of society. If 
the family organization needs to be cared for and in- 
sured, they should have the ballot as a weapon of de- 
fence, for they are members of families. If business 
occupations and interests are to be looked after and 
sheltered, they should have the ballot, for they do busi- 
ness. If the rights of minors are to be considered and 
made sure, they should have the ballot, for they are 
often wives and mothers, though, as society goes, I 
think they ought not to be. 
In God’s name, in man’s name, in the name of liberty, 
justice, truth and right, I call for the ballot for woman. 
Given to her, it will do much to save her from the friv. THE BALLOT. 
159 
olities, falsities and fallacies, which now everywhere 
attend her walk in life. It will open up new avenues 
of thought for her, develop genius, work up to the sur- 
face hidden power, reconstruct and reconstitutionalize 
her, and make for her, along with her men fellow-citi- 
zens, a “ new heaven and a new earth wherein dwell- 
eth righteousness.” Give the ballot to the women of 
our country, and our Republic will live and thrive 
gloriously. 
THE END. THE LAWS OF LIFE 
AND 
Mermans f)£all|j fuunral 
Is an original paper, published monthly, in quarto form of sixteen pages, 
on fine paper, with tinted covers. 
Edited by MISS HARRIET N. AUSTIN, M. I)., 
ASSISTED BY 
JAMES C. JACKSON, M. D., Physician-in-Ghief of our Home, 
And an able Corps of Assistants and Contributors. 
The Journal treats of all subjects relating to Life and Health, and em- 
bodies the experience of twenty years’ practice by its editors, at the head of 
the Largest Hygienic Institution in America. 
The aim of this Journal is to advocate, and commend to the people im- 
proved ways of living by which individual, family and general social life 
may be made to put on more beneficial, satisfactory and beautiful forms 
than at present prevail. It teaches how to live healthfully and to make 
health the basis for the growth and development of symmetrical charac- 
ter. Some of the leading topics are: 
Care of the Sick Room, 
Nursing the Sick, 
Food and Baths for the Sick, 
Care of Children, 
Dress of Children, 
Flower Gardening, 
Fruit Growing, 
Dress, 
Sleep, 
Ventilation, 
Answers to Questions from Corre- 
spondents, 
Letters, 
Special Diseases and their Treat- 
ment without Medicine, 
Continued Stories, 
The best kinds of Food and how to 
Prepare Them, 
Lectures on General Principles, 
Punning accounts of Life on the 
Hillside, 
Building of Houses. 
Furnishing of Houses, 
Natural History, 
Woman’s Rights and Responsibili- 
ties, etc. 
Each number of the Laws of Life for 1870, will contain a lecture from 
Dr. James C. Jackson on the 
TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 
Also a Chapter from the same writer of “Incidents and Reminiscences in 
My Life,” of which one of our public Journals says: These are very in- 
teresting to those who care to learn how our great Reformers are made. 
Terms—One dollar per year in advance. Most liberal and valuable 
Premiums given to agents for clubs. 
Specimen Copies sent free on receipt of stamp to pay postage, 
Send for a copy, and circular of our Health Publications. 
Address, AUSTIN, JACKSON & CO., 
Dansville, Livingston Co., N. Y. Hew t© freat ii© Sick 
WITHOUT MEDICINE. 
A NEW WORK, 
j3y James p. Jackson, JA. p., 
Author of “ Consumption: How to Prevent it and How to Cure it,” “ The Sexual 
Organism, and its’Healthful Management,” and numerous popular Health 
Tracts. Also Physiciun-in-Cmef of u Our Home on the Hillside,” 
at Dansville, Livingston Co., N. Y., the largest Hygienic 
Water Cure in the World. 
The book contains 520 pages and has a fine likeness of the Author and a beau- 
tiful and correct engraving of the Institution over which he presides ; is nicely 
printed and bound in first-class style. 
Chap. I.—My Method of Treating 
Disease. 
II.—What is Disease ? 
III. The True Materia Medica. 
IV. Air. 
V.—Food. 
VI.—Water. 
VII.—Time for Taking Baths. 
VIII.—Sunlight. 
IX.—Dress. 
X.—Exercise. [tions. 
XI.—Sleep and its Becupera- 
XII.—The Sick Chamber and its 
Surroundings. 
XIII. Children and their Dis- 
eases. 
XIV. —Teething, Teething Diar- 
rhoea, bummer Complaint. 
XV.—Tetter, Eruptions, Scald 
Head, Common Itch. 
XVI.—Measles. 
XVII.—Croup. 
XVIII.—Diphtheria. 
XIX.- Scarlet Fever, Whooping 
Cough. 
XX.—Summer Complaint, Dysen- 
tery. 
XXI.—Diseases of Grown Persons, 
Baldness, Deafness, 
Blindness, Inflamma- 
tion of the Eyes. 
XXII.—Nasal Catarrh, Nose-Bleed. 
XXIII.—Apoplexy, Inflammation of 
the Brain, Hydrocephalus, 
or Dropsy of the Brain. 
XXIV.—Paralysis. 
XXV.—Epilepsy. 
XXVI.—Insanity. 
XXVII.—Drunkenness. 
XXVIII.—Hysteria. 
XXIX.—St. Vitus’ Dance. 
XXX.—Pulmonary Consumption 
Mumps, Salivation. 
XXXI.—Quinsy, Bronchitis, Inflam- 
mation of the Lungs. 
CONTENTS. 
XXXII.—Pleurisy, Spitting of Blood 
or Hemorrahge of the Lungs. 
XXIII.—The Heart audits Diseases. 
XXXIV.—Dyspepsia. 
XXXV.--Colic. [the Stomach. 
XXXVI.—Cancerous Conditions of 
XXXVH.—Diseases of the Spleen. 
XXXVIII.—Diseases of the Liver. 
XXXIX.—Calculi, Jaundice. 
XL.—Diseases of the Intestines, 
Duodenitis Bowel Colic. 
XLI.—Inflammation of the Bow- 
els, Peritonitis. 
XLII.—Dropsy of the Peritoneum. 
XLIII.—Lead Colic. 
XLIV.—Inflammation of the Mesen- 
teric Glands. 
XLV. Diseases of the Kidneys, 
Congestion, Inflamma- 
Gravel. 
XLVI.—Bright’s Diseases of the 
Kidneys, Urinary Disease. 
XLVII.—Neuralgia of the Bladder, 
Paralysis of the Bladder, 
Inflammation of the Coats 
of the Bladder. 
XL VIII.—Worms. 
XLIX.—Piles. 
L.—Sexual Organs. 
LI.—Rheumatism. 
LII.—Remittent Fever, or Fever 
and Ague. 
LOT.—Intermittent Fever, Con- 
gestive Chills 
LIV.—Typhus and Typhoid Fe- 
vers. 
LV.—Erysipelas, or St. An- 
thony’s Fire, Purpura 
Hemorrhagica, Acne. 
LVI.—Ulcers, Boils, and Carbun- 
cles. 
LVIL—Burns and Scalds, Goitre. 
LVOT.—Varicose Veins. 
LIX.—Baths, and How to Take 
them. 
We wish to engage agents, all over the country, to sell this work. Here is a 
new field for Book Agents, and one into which they may enter with good prospect 
of abundant success. We give liberal terms. Price, $2.25 by mail, postage paid. 
Address, AUSTIN, JACKSON & CO., 
“OUR HOME,” Dansville, Livingston Co., N. Y. Our Home on the Hillside, 
DANSVILLE, LIVINGSTON CO., N. Y. 
This Institution is the largest Hygienic Water-Cure at present existing m the 
World. It is presided over hy, and is under die medical management of, Dr. 
fames C. Jackson, who is the discoverer of the Psyeho-Hygienic method of 
treating the sick, and under the application of which he has treated nearly 30,000 
persons in the last twenty years, with most eminent success, and without ever 
(jiving any of them any medicine. 
The Psycho-hygienic philosophy of treating the sick, no matter what their 
age, sex, or disease, consists in the use of those means only as remedial agencies 
whose ordinary or legitimate effect on the human living body when taken into or 
up, lied to it is to preserve its health. The fallacy of giving poisonous medi- 
cines to Invalids has been abundantly shown in “ Our Home ” in the results of 
our treatment. 
Our Institution is large enough to accommodate 250 guests, is, after the plan 
adopted by us, complete in all its appointments, having worthy and intelligent 
helpers in all its departments of labor, and who give their proportion of sym- 
pathy and influence to the creation and maintenance of a sentiment and opinion 
cheering to the invalid, and, therefore, decidedly therapeutic in its effects. The 
scenery about the Establishment is very beautiful, the air is dry and very salu- 
brious, we have plenty of sunshine, and pure soft living water in great abun- 
dance. Besides all these, and which we prize as one of the highest privileges and 
health-giving opportunities our guests could possibly have, we live ourselves, and 
so can enable them to live, free from Fashion and her expensive and ruinous 
ways. Life with us is simple, not sybaritic, is true, not hollow and false, and so 
of itself tends to its own perpetuation, and, of course, to health. A great many 
of our guests who have for years been great sufferers, growing steadily more and 
more sickly, begin to get well, and go on getting well in such silent yet sure, in 
such imperceptible yet certain ways, as never to be conscious how it was brought 
about. The means used seem so utterly incommensurate to the results pro- 
duced, that it seems marvelous. So true is it that in Nature 
“ God’s mightiest things 
Are Ilis simplest things,” 
and that to understand how things are done, one needs to cultivate a teachable 
spirit, and to cherish a reverence for Law. To teach those who come to us for 
treatment what the laws of life are, and to awaken in them the desire to obey 
these laws, is to establish a most favorable condition-precedent to their recovery. 
Sick ones, whoever you are, or wherever you are, do you want to get well ? and 
to learn how to keep your health, having got well ? Come to “ Our Homo ” il 
you can, and once here learn the all-important lesson, that 
“ Nature as a mistress is gentle and hoiy, 
And to obey her is to live.” 
Circulars of the Institution or any information in regard to it may be obtainec 
by addressing either James C. Jackson, M.D., Miss Hairiet N. Austin, M.D., or 
Dr. James II. Jackson. These Physicians may also he consulted by letter by the 
sick who are unable to attend the establishment. Fee for home prescription $5. 
AUSTIN, JACKSON & CO., 
Harriet N. Austin, 
James H. Jackson, 
Lucretia E. Jackson. 
Proprietors. THE SEXUAL ORGANISM, 
AND ITS HEALTHFUL MANAGEMENT. 
JAMES C. JACKSON, M.D. 
PRIOR BY MAIL, - TWO DOLLARS. 
This is one of the most valuable books ever written. It should be read by 
every married man and woman in the land. Every clergyman who takes an 
interest in the health and happiness and present as well as future well-being of 
his l'ellow-creatures, should read it. He may rest assured he will preach better 
sermons for having read it. Every young man contemplating marriage should 
read it. Every school-boy should carefully and studiously read it. Every young 
woman should read it. She will And in it nothing offensive to modesty, nothing 
that should make her blush, but much that will instruct her how to protect her 
rights and personal immunities so as forever to secure her from having cause to 
blush. 
This Book is by far the ablest ever written on the subject. It embodies the 
experience of one of the ablest physicians living, and whose opportunities for 
thinking and studying the Laws of the Human Organism in this special depart- 
ment have in our judgment never been equalled, certainly never excelled. If the 
tens of thousands of young men in our land suffering from debilities arising from 
their want of knowledge of the Laws of the Sexual System, could each have a 
volume of this work placed in his hands, what a blessing it would be to him. 
The Publishers are not unmindful that on the subject of Sex, the people of the 
United States hold a conservative position. The Publishers are happy to be able 
to say, that they hold the same position. Neither “ for love nor money ” could 
they be induced to publish anything that might serve to weaken in the minds of 
the people—especially the rising generation—the regard which they cherish and 
are taught to cherish for the Social and Family relations. This hook contains no 
subtle sophistries, no cunningly concocted falsehoods made to look like truths, 
which once read shall seem to poison the mind and debase the moral sense of 
him or her who reads it. It sets no snares, and digs no pitfalls for the young and 
the unwary. 
The Author is a Christian gentleman, a philanthropist and a man of science, 
who, having won by his great talents and very large professional practice, an 
eminent position as a Physician, has turned his great knowledge to account, in 
writing on a special theme, and it is no small meed of praise to him that we can 
say, out of the ten thousand volumes of the work already sold in the United 
States, neither from press nor private individual has there ever come to oui 
knowledge an unfavorable criticism. 
Buy the hook, then, and read it. Having read it yourself lend it to your neigh- 
bor. You can do nothing better with the same amount of money. The violation 
of the Laws of Life in the department of the Sexual Structure is very great ano 
knowledge should he had. Read, digest, do, and live. 
Address, 
AUSTIN, JACKSON & CO., 
Damville, Livingston. Co., Jf. T- Are You of Consumptive Family? 
If so, do you wish to know ow to avoid having Consumption yourself, 
If you have already got it in its first or second stages, how to cure it ? Then send 
to Austin, Jackson & Co., and purchase Dr. Jackson’s Book, entitled: 
Consumption: How to Treat It, and How to Prevent It. 
In this hook you will find the information you need. Dr. Jackson is the only 
t’hysician who, having treated this disease successfully without the use of Drugs 
ind Medicines, has placed his ideas at the service of unprofessional readers. 
The Book is written in a clear style, is free from technical terms, and full of val 
uable instruction. Thousands of volumes of it are in circulation, and tens of 
thousands of human lives have been saved by reading it and following its in- 
structions. 
The work has two very valuable points: 
1st. It elaborates and makes plain the methods and ways of overcoming 
hereditary tendencies and constitutional predispositions to the development of 
the disease, so that those who have them may escape, and, if children, may over- 
come them, and grow up robust and live to good Old Age. 
The instruction on this point contained in the Book is great, and ought to b« 
in possession and use by every father and mother who have Scrofulous children. 
Consumption in the United States and in Canada, is almost always induced under 
bad conditions of living operating on persons of Scrofulous constitutions. Where 
this is the case it is a pity that those who get it and die from it, could not know 
how to stop its development. “ An ounce of Prevention is worth a pound of 
Cure,” and that the advice of Dr. Jackson is ample to produce this result, the 
testimony of thousands of persons proves beyond cavil. 
2nd. The Book tells the reader not only how to understand the Consumptive 
constitution, and how to avoid and overcome its active development, but it 
instructs the reader how to treat curatively those persons who are curable, with- 
out the use of drugs and medicines and poisonous nostrums. This is of itself 
most valuable information. Reader, have you ever thought what a drug-poisoned 
people we of the United States are ? everybody, almost, taking when sick, stuff 
to cure them which, were they well, would surely make them sick. So blind are 
the People, and so deadened their instincts, that from the child of a span long to 
the man of mature age, dosing with poisons is the remedy for every human ail- 
ment. So common is this practice and so destructive to life is it, that the wisest 
observers do not hesitate to say that War, Pestilence and Famine, have not killed 
as many persons since the Creation of Man as Drug-medication has. Of all the 
diseases to which the Human Organism is subject, none have proved so incurable 
under Drug-medication as Pulmonary Consumption, while of them all none has 
proved more curable under Psycho-hygienic treatment than it. 
Now, as there are in the United States thousands and tens of thousands of 
Consumptive persons who are curable, and tens and hundreds of thousands who, 
though not having Consumption as yet, are sure to have it under the ordinary 
course of things, we take pleasure in telling them that they can be intelligently 
instructed how to get well, or how to keep from having the disease. The Book 
is nearly 400 pages octavo, has been extensively noticed by the Press and always 
with favor, and is so ably written that one of the most scientific men in our 
country has said that ,l Were the Author never to write more, this book of itself 
in less than fifty years will place his name high in the temple of Fame, as one of 
the farthest-seeing men of his day and as a benefactor to mankind.” Address, 
AUSTIN, JACKSON & CO., Dansville, Livingston Co., N. Y., who will send 
the work, post-paid, for $2 50. HEALTH TRACTS, 
PUBLISHED BY 
AUSTIN, JACKSON &, CO., 
Dansville, Livingston Co., N. Y. 
Singly. Per doz. 
1. How to Rear Beautiful Children, - - 8 cents. CO 
2. How to Cure Drunkards, - - - 8 cents. GO 
3. How to take Baths, - - - - 8 cents. 60 
4. Tobacco, and its Effects upon the Health and 
Character of those who use it, - - 15 cents. 1 50 
5. Diphtheria ; its Causes, Treatment and Cure, 8 cents. 60 
6. The American Costume , or Woman’s Right 
to Good Health, - - - - 8 cents. 60 
7. Flesh as Food ; or How to Live without Meat, 8 cents. 60 
8. Dyspepsia ; or How to have a Sound Stomach, 8 cents. 60 
9. Student Life; or How to Work the Brain 
without Over-Working the Body, - 8 cents. 60 
10. The Curse-Lifted ; or Maternity Made Easy, 8 cents. 60 
11. Piles and their Treatment, - - - 8 cents. 60 
12. The Gluttony Plague, - - - 8 cents. 60 
13. Wife Killing, - - - - - 8 cents. 60 
14. Shall our Girls Live or Die ? - - - 8 cents. 60 
15. How to Nurse the Sick. - - - 8 cents. 60 
16. How to Get Well and How to Keep Well, - 8 cents. 60 
17. The Four Drunkards, - - - - 6 cents. 45 
18. Dancing ; its Evils and its Benefits, - - 10 cents. 75 
19. The Weak Backs of American Women, - 8 cents. 60 
20. Clergymen ; What they Owe to Themselves, 
to their Wives and to Society, - - 8 cents. 60 
21. Papers on Alcohol, - - - - 8 cents. 60 
Sets containing one of each, $1.30. 
These will he sent prepaid by mail to any address in the 
United States upon receipt of the above prices.