Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 | Page 9

and outstripped the statutes. Till the fulness of time came,
woman was necessarily kept a slave to the spinning-wheel and the
needle; now higher work is ready, peace has brought invention to her
aid, and the mechanical means for her emancipation are ready also. No
use in releasing her, till man, with his strong arm, had worked out his
preliminary share in civilization. "Earth waits for her queen" was a
favorite motto of Margaret Fuller's; but it would be more correct to say
that the queen has waited for her earth, till it could be smoothed and
prepared for her occupancy. Now Cinderella may begin to think of
putting on her royal robes.
Everybody sees that the times are altering the whole material position
of woman; but most persons do not appear to see the inevitable social
and moral changes which are also involved. As has been already said,
the woman of ancient history was a slave to physical necessities, both
in war and peace. In war she could do too little, in peace she did too
much, under the material compulsions which controlled the world.
How could the Jews, for instance, elevate woman? They could not
spare her from the wool and the flax and the candle that goeth not out
by night. In Rome, when the bride first stepped across her threshold,
they did not ask her, Do you know the alphabet? they asked simply,
Can you spin? There was no higher epitaph than Queen
Amalasontha's,--_Domum servavit, lanam fecit_. In Boeotia, brides
were conducted home in vehicles whose wheels were burned at the
door, in token that they were never to leave the house again. Pythagoras
instituted at Crotona an annual festival for the distaff; Confucius, in
China, did the same for the spindle; and these celebrated not the
freedom, but the serfdom, of woman.
And even into modern days this same tyrannical necessity has lingered.
"Go spin, you jades! go spin!" was the only answer vouchsafed by the
Earl of Pembroke to the twice-banished nuns of Wilton. And even now,
travellers agree that throughout civilized Europe, with the partial
exception of England and France, the profound absorption of the mass
of women in household labors renders their general elevation
impossible. But with us Americans, and in this age, when all these vast
labors are being more and more transferred to arms of brass and
iron,--when Rochester grinds the flour, and Lowell weaves the cloth,

and the fire on the hearth has gone into black retirement and
mourning,--when the wiser a virgin is, the less she has to do with oil in
her lamp,--when the needle has made its last dying speech and
confession in the "Song of the Shirt," and the sewing-machine has
changed those doleful marches to delightful measures,--how is it
possible for the blindest to help seeing that a new era is begun, and that
the time has come for woman to learn the alphabet?
Nobody asks for any abolition of domestic labor for women, any more
than of outdoor labor for men. Of course, most women will still
continue to be mainly occupied with the indoor care of their families,
and most men with their external support. All that is desirable for either
sex is such an economy of labor, in this respect, as shall leave some
spare time, to be appropriated in other directions. The argument against
each new emancipation of woman is precisely that always made against
the liberation of serfs and the enfranchisement of plebeians,--that the
new position will take them from their legitimate business. "How can
he [or she] get wisdom that holdeth the plough, [or the broom,]--whose
talk is of bullocks [or of babies]?" Yet the American farmer has already
emancipated himself from these fancied incompatibilities, and so will
the farmer's wife. In a nation where there is no leisure-class and no
peasantry, this whole theory of exclusion is an absurdity. We all have a
little leisure, and we must all make the most of it. If we will confine
large interests and duties to those who have nothing else to do, we must
go back to monarchy at once; if otherwise, then the alphabet, and its
consequences, must be open to woman as to man. Jean Paul says nobly,
in his "Levana," that, "before and after being a mother, a woman is a
human being, and neither maternal nor conjugal relation can supersede
the human responsibility, but must become its means and instrument."
And it is good to read the manly speech, on this subject, of John
Quincy Adams, quoted at length by his recent venerable biographer,--in
which, after fully defending the political petitions of the women of
Plymouth, he declares that "the correct principle is, that women are not
only justified, but exhibit the most exalted virtue, when