From a Girls Point of View | Page 9

of necessity, love laces and ruffled petticoats,
and high heels, and rosettes. Otherwise I question her possession of a
soul.

WOMAN'S RIGHTS IN LOVE
"She has laughed as softly as if she sighed! She has counted six and
over, Of a purse well filled and a heart well tried-- Oh, each a worthy
lover! They 'give her time' for her soul must slip When the world has
set the grooving; She will lie to none with her fair red lip-- But love
seeks truer loving.
* * * * *
"Unless you can muse in a crowd all day On the absent face that fixed
you; Unless you can love as the angels may, With the breadth of
heaven betwixt you; Unless you can dream that his faith is fast,
Through behooving and unbehooving; Unless you can DIE when the
dream is past-- Oh, never call it loving!"
In love a woman's first right is to be protected from her friends while
she considers the man whom she contemplates loving. The well-meant
blundering of vitally interested friends has spoiled many a promising
love affair, which might have resulted in a marriage so much above the
ordinary that it could be termed satisfactory even by the most captious.
At no time in a girl's life has she a greater right to work out her own
salvation in fear and trembling than during the period known among
girls as "making up her mind." If she is the right kind of a girl, honest
and delicate minded, it is nerve-racking to be talked about, and

sacrilege to be talked to. Then the bloom is on the grape, which a rude
touch mars forever.
Yet these kind friends never think of the delicate, touch-me-not
influences at work in the girl's soul, or that the instinct to hide her real
interest in the man precludes the possibility of her daring to ask to be
let alone. So they, in their over-zeal and ambition, either make the path
of love so easy and inevitable that all the zest is taken out of it for both
(for lovers never want somebody to go ahead and baste the problem for
them; they want to blind-stitch it for themselves as they go along), or
else, by critical nagging, and balancing the eligibility of one suitor
against another, these friends so harass and upset the poor girl that she
doesn't know which man she wants, and so turns her back upon all.
In point of fact, when a man is in love, and a girl does not yet know her
own mind; when she is weighing out their adaptability, and balancing
his love for football against her passion for Browning; during the
delicate, tentative period, when the most affectionate solicitude from
friends is an irritation, there ought to be a law banishing the interested
couple to an island peopled with strangers, who would not discover the
delicacy of the situation until it was too late to spoil it.
"Woman's rights." I certainly agree with the men who think that those
words have a masculine, assertive, belligerent sound. "Equal suffrage"
is much more lady-like, and we are by way of getting all we wish of the
men on any subject, under the gentlest title by which it may be called.
Strange, how, with strong men, force never avails, but the softest
methods are the surest and swiftest.
However, equal suffrage, wide as it is, is not all that I wish. It does well
enough, but it does not cover the entire ground. I never clamored very
much for women to be recognized as the equals of men, either in
politics or in love, because, if I had clamored at all, I should have
clamored for infinitely more than that. I should have clamored for men
to recognize us as their superiors, and not for equal rights with
themselves, but for more, many more rights than they ever dreamed of
possessing. 'Tis not justice I crave, but mercy. 'Tis not equality, but
chivalry.
In the whole history of the world, from nineteenth-century Public
Opinion clear back to the age of chivalry, men never have been inclined
to deal out justice to women. It is their watchword with each other, but

with women it always is either injustice or mercy. And in spite of all
wrongs and all abuses, I say, Heaven bless the men that this is so.
Human nature is more fundamental than customs, and what would
become of women if we only got our exact deserts, or had absolute
justice dealt to us, either by men or other women or on the Judgment
Day?
In these latter days of this progressive, woman's century, however, the
most thoughtful men are valiant enough to re-adjust themselves to the
idea of woman's development, and