Women and Woman

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

ABOUT the use of such phrases as “ Women’s Executive Board ” and “ Woman’s Executive Board.” a magazine ¹ published in New York lately cited Miss Thomas of Bryn Mawr and the superintendent of schools of New York in support of “woman’s” or “women’s;” Professor Carpenter of Columbia and Miss Wylie of Vassar, for “women’s;” the president of Smith College, and an authoritative teacher at Harvard, for “woman’s;” the Encyclopædia Britannica, for “women’s;” the chief American dictionary, for “ woman’s; ” actually, twenty-five organizations in New York using “woman’s"and fifteen “women’s.”

Conditions lying behind and leading to different usages in this country and in England no one seems to have noticed, — conditions possibly indicating the interesting psychical variation between ourselves and our English relatives. Let us turn back a moment.

In earlier English times the word “women ” was common. Later on, say during the first part of the eighteenth century, coarseness and vulgarities in everyday language found literary expression, and our ancestors came to speakof women as “females,” — the term selectively referring to the female of the human species, and not to a hen, a cow, or a mare. The noun “ female ” to men of the day connoted a woman; “females,” women. You constantly find this emphasis of sex in much of the literature of the time. The usage prevailed in England, and also in America.

The children and grandchildren of English and American forefathers of ours, however, when movement toward the amelioration of the lives of their countrywomen set in in the early decades of the nineteenth century, — those peoples, when speaking formally of one half of humanity, spoke of “woman.” How and why had the change come about ? First “women; ” then almost universally “females;” then, at the opening of the nineteenth century, “woman.”

To-day, in the twentieth century, Englishmen use the term “women’s.” The English of our day concrete their mental operation and expression. With the Yankee, on the other hand, “woman’s,” the abstract term, still has vogue. With the Yankee, abstraction and theory have been, and still are, bread and meat. Originally the Yankee was an Englishman. But he sailed from England in pursuit of an idea, — at a time when the English more commonly than now dealt in abstractions. Upon these western shores he lived under a dominating idea, and stamped upon others the spirit this living of his created. Idealism was his greatest and most profitable product, as we have just said it is to-day. We, his descendants, and much of the rest of the world, are living by its results still.

Through generations this American drank abstractions with his mother-milk. His old-time catechism contained the nearest approaches of child mind to the abstract which pitiless elders have ever planned. His verse, both within the catechism and without, was often abstract. His chiefest theme — theology — was abstract. The theocrats to whom he entrusted direction of his course in this world and problematic fate in the world to come taught abstractly duties to abstractions more often than duties to concrete humanity. It was only in their grip upon him that he realized how concrete life might be. And at last, after generations of such life, his simple, uplifted spirit, — like the white spire of his meeting-house piercing a pure and fine ether, — his enthusiasm fought at last for the mighty abstraction of democracy, to which he gave the best material expression possible to his day.

A few years after his great victory and blood-bought establishment of popular rights upon our soil, the French developed their Revolution. During the cataclysm our American forbears evinced democratic heartiness by offering hands of fellowship to the great bourgeoisie fighting over the sea for “the rights of man,”— the French sequent to our Declaration of the Fourth of July, 1776. But an inevitable corollary of the “rights of man” was the “rights of woman.”

Living for a time among the struggling French was an Irish-English woman whom we know as Mary Wollstonecraft. Gifted with fervor and independence, Mary wrote a book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It was published in 1792, and doubtless owed its existence at that moment to the author’s sympathies with the people of France, with their struggle for the “rights of man,” and of woman. Its very dedication was to a Frenchman,—the monstrous Talleyrand, over whose factitious morality the lady’s Irish heart had for the moment warmed.

This book — much read and much talked of , both at the time it appeared and later—had great influence upon English-speaking advocates of broader interests for women. The “ Rights of Woman ” part of its title appealed to the American public, and especially to that part of our people emotionally touched by the limitations of women of the day. They adopted and continued the phrase, “Rights of Woman.”

This was in the early part of the nineteenth century, as we have said above. Foreworkers of the American women’s party were then coming into the world. Susan B. Anthony, than whom it would be difficult to find a purer idealist, was a little girl when the early reforms in laws enlarging the liberties of women were undertaking. So also Mrs. Stone, Mrs. Stanton, and other protagonists. What so natural as that these agitators should continue the abstract, and say “ woman ” ? Tradition as to abstractions, and usage from Mary’s title, were all before them. Moreover, these foreworkers may have been conscious that to abstract would serve to veil the seeming hideousness of their demands, would put more remotely to unsympathetic minds the conditions for which they labored. The abstract term certainly connoted an object different from the unwaged cook, washer, ironer, and cleaner who spent her days in labor at her husband’s house and rested in his church pew on Sabbaths. As we said, the abstract did not so readily offend the conservative and those opposed to broader opportunities for the “sphered,” “protected”“woman-folks.” By its use hearers might not be alienated at the outset.

So the word “woman ”—as descriptive of one half of our race — was distributed in our country. The current phrase was “ woman’s “suffrage and “ woman’s ” rights. Some Englishman — probably John Stuart Mill, but exactly I do not readily recall — touched the disabilities of our American use of the abstract term when he said that the reason the women’s party had made less progress in the United States than in England was owing to the abstracting of the being for whom amelioration was sought, and the use of the abstract term upon the party’s banners.

Upon the English mind the French Revolution left the conviction that the status of women must change. The term “woman” is in commonest use in English writings of the period. So far as we have records, that Englishman most profoundly affected and exalted by the Revolution’s radical ideas was Shelley. Shelley had very considerable admiration for Mary Wollstonecraft, whose daughter he married.

In Shelley’s aerial verse we find the same ideas about women that led to Mary Wollstonecraft’s book, — and we find invariably the philosophic form woman : —

About thirty years after Shelley wrote The Revolt of Islam, from which these lines are quoted, Alfred Tennyson was composing The Princess, a poem which is really a conservative expression of the larger view of women that moved the English mind during those years, — the view which was impelling the English Parliament to enactments granting women greater liberties. Laws which seem to us, sixty years later, as the barest justice were opposed, and debated, and at last passed, in the fifth decade of the nineteenth century. It is undoubted that these debates incited Tennyson to The Princess. But “ woman ” stood for “ women ” in the poem.

Tennyson’s epic was published in 1847. Between that date and 1869, the year of the publication of John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women, we find the word “women ” superseding “woman.” How had this change come about? Sense of expediency, values of concrete reference, and especially the long debates in Parliament about the acts affecting women, had educated the people’s ear to the plural form. The inventor of the word “utilitarianism” had strongest sense of the value of the concrete, and he emphasized its value, led to it, he says, by his wife, —“the properly human element came from her.” Since Mill’s Subjection of Women was published, the word “woman” — used as an abstract — has almost disappeared from English use.

But the ear of our American public was educated to the old phrase, and we continue it. When recognition of women’s identity and helpful work came to our American Protestant churches, the singular noun of Mary Wollstonecraft;’s French radicalism stood at hand, and the churches adopted it. Therefore, constantly we meet with something like the “Woman’s Board” in ecclesiastical organizations. Many another women’s association is dubbed with the abstract “ woman,” whose members—fortunately, perhaps, for their prepossessions — are unconscious of the history by which the term came to them. The abstract “ woman ” was the only decent descriptive term in use when the first associations of women were formed in this country.

What was radical is now conservative, — in this little evolution, as in more extended happenings. Present-day women, in turning their brains to philanthropic and other public-spirited works, know that they never hear of a “Man’s Board,” but rather of “Men’s,”and possibly this fact, coupled with the faith that men have more experience in practical affairs, is at the root of the inquiry and publication of opinions referred to in the foregoing first paragraph.

Then, moreover, the concreting of the word among us at this juncture is doubtless due to the awakening in women of the feeling of sisterhood, of a broad democracy which is fast spreading among women,— a consciousness of the unity of humanity, and women’s existence as a factor in that unity. This is a sentiment — a mental and moral stimulation — in which women, from their secluded, solitary, less educated, more restricted lives have been lacking. Yet it is abroad now as a lively contagion, and coupled with the conviction of the right of individual development, which also women have not heretofore actively realized.

But not to forecast is better. At this moment we know that women are dropping the abstract term “woman,” — the name of a figment, a term belonging to days which in ignorance and prejudice proclaimed a “sphere” and proscribed the usefulness and beauty of the human back of the figment, — and are seeking to enroll themselves under a term which implies that they are human beings, — thinking, active beings with human sympathies, that they are co-learners of human life and co-workers with men, identified with the advancement of our race and the progress of the world in this great vineyard of our earth, — that they are one half of humanity. All these things they have been, in halting and sometimes reversionary fashion, since our remotest beginnings. But it is only now that women as a body are coming to the consciousness of their work and its dignity.

The abstract term which Mary Wollstonecraft and our ancestors adopted from the French philosophers had vast uses, and served as a rallying cry for vast good. But with us at this hour the word “ women ” is more significant, and a more legitimate expression of the spirit and growth of our times.