Women and the Alphabet | Page 8

with
which, he avers, the tender princess was wont to pierce the hearts of her
opponents, while careering through the battle. And there are abundant
instances in which women have fought side by side with men, and on
equal terms. The ancient British women mingled in the wars of their
husbands, and their princesses were trained to the use of arms in the
Maiden's Castle at Edinburgh, in the Isle of Skye. The Moorish wives
and maidens fought in defence of their European peninsula; and the
Portuguese women fought on the same soil, against the armies of Philip
II. The king of Siam has, at present, a body-guard of four hundred
women: they are armed with lance and rifle, are admirably disciplined,
and their commander (appointed after saving the king's life at a
tiger-hunt) ranks as one of the royal family, and has ten elephants at her
service. When the all-conquering Dahomian army marched upon
Abbeokuta, in 1851, they numbered ten thousand men and six thousand
women. The women were, as usual, placed foremost in the assault, as
being most reliable; and of the eighteen hundred bodies left dead before
the walls, the vast majority were of women. The Hospital of the
Invalides, in Paris, has sheltered, for half a century, a fine specimen of
a female soldier, "Lieutenant Madame Bulan," who lived to be more
than eighty years old, had been decorated by Napoleon's own hand with
the cross of the Legion of Honor, and was credited on the hospital
books with "seven years' service, seven campaigns, three wounds,
several times distinguished, especially in Corsica, in defending a fort

against the English." But these cases, though interesting to the historian,
are still exceptional; and the instinctive repugnance they inspire is a
condemnation, not of women, but of war.
The reason, then, for the long subjection of woman has been simply
that humanity was passing through its first epoch, and her full career
was to be reserved for the second. As the different races of man have
appeared successively upon the stage of history, so there has been an
order of succession of the sexes. Woman's appointed era, like that of
the Teutonic races, was delayed, but not omitted. It is not merely true
that the empire of the past has belonged to man, but that it has properly
belonged to him; for it was an empire of the muscles, enlisting, at best,
but the lower powers of the understanding. There can be no question
that the present epoch is initiating an empire of the higher reason, of
arts, affections, aspirations; and for that epoch the genius of woman has
been reserved. The spirit of the age has always kept pace with the facts,
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 Ossoli; 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 people 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. Even now,
travellers agree that throughout civilized