Maude by Christina Rossetti, On Sisterhoods and A Woman's Thoughts About Women By Dinah Mulock Craik

Christina Rossetti

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315478036
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Literary Criticism

"Maude" was written when Christina Rossetti was 19 and examines the heroine's struggle to resist the notion that modesty and domesticity constitute the duties of women. "On Sisterhoods" by Dinah Mulock Craik advocates the encouragement of Anglican sisterhoods.

A Woman’s Thoughts

About Women

‘He that good thinketh, good may do,

And God will help him thereunto:

For was never good work wrought

Without beginning of good thought.’

PREFACE

These Thoughts,’ a portion of which originally appeared in ‘Chambers’ Journal,’ are, I wish distinctly to state, only Thoughts. They do not pretend to solve any problems, to lay down any laws, to decide out of one life’s experience and within the limits of one volume, any of those great questions which have puzzled generations, and will probably puzzle generations more. They lift the banner of no party; and assert the opinions of no clique. They do not even attempt an originality, which, in treating of a subject like the present, would be either dangerous or impossible.

In this book, therefore, many women will find simply the expression of what they have themselves, consciously or unconsciously, oftentimes thought; and the more deeply, perhaps, because it has never come to the surface in words or writing. Those who do the most, often talk – sometimes think – the least: yet thinkers, talkers, and doers, being in earnest, achieve their appointed end. The thinkers put wisdom into the mouth of the speakers, and both strive together to animate and counsel the doers. Thus all work harmoniously together; and verily

‘Was never good work wrought,

Without beginning of good thought.’

In the motto which I have chosen for its title-page, lies at once the purpose and preface of this my book. Had it not been planned and completed, honestly, carefully, solemnly, even fearfully, with a keen sense of all it might do, or leave undone; and did not I believe it to be in some degree a good book, likely to effect some good, I would never have written or published it. How much good it may do, or how little, is not mine either to know, to speculate, or to decide.

I have written it, I hope, as humbly as conscientiously; and thus I leave it.

A WOMAN’S THOUGHTS
ABOUT WOMEN

CHAPTER I

SOMETHING TO DO

I premise that these thoughts do not concern married women, for whom there are always plenty to think, and who have generally quite enough to think of for themselves and those belonging to them. They have cast their lot for good or ill, have realised in greater or less degree the natural destiny of our sex. They must find out its comforts, cares, and responsibilities, and make the best of all. It is the single women, belonging to those supernumerary ranks, which, political economists tell us, are yearly increasing, who most need thinking about.

First, in their early estate, when they have so much in their possession – youth, bloom, and health giving them that temporary influence over the other sex which may result, and is meant to result, in a permanent one. Secondly, when this sovereignty is passing away, the chance of marriage lessening, or wholly ended, or voluntarily set aside, and the individual making up her mind to that which, respect for Grandfather Adam and Grandmother Eve must compel us to admit, is an unnatural condition of being.

Why this undue proportion of single women should almost always result from over-civilisation, and whether, since society’s advance is usually indicated by the advance, morally and intellectually, of its women – this progress, by raising women’s ideal standard of the ‘holy estate,’ will not necessarily cause a decline in the very unholy estate which it is most frequently made – are questions too wide to be entered upon here. We have only to deal with facts – with a certain acknowledged state of things, perhaps incapable of remedy, but by no means incapable of amelioration.

But, granted these facts, and leaving to wiser heads the explanation of them – if indeed there be any – it seems advisable, or at least allowable, that any woman who has thought a good deal about the matter, should not fear to express in word – or deed, which is better, – any conclusions, which out of her own observation and experience she may have arrived at. And looking around upon the middle classes, which form the staple stock of the community, it appears to me that the chief canker at the root of women’s lives is the want of something to do.¹

Herein I refer, as this chapter must be understood especially to refer, not to those whom ill or good fortune – query, is it not often the latter? – has forced to earn their bread; but ‘to young ladies,’ who have never been brought up to do anything. Tom, Dick, and Harry, their brothers, has each had it knocked into him from school-days that he is to do something, to be somebody. Counting-house, shop, or college, afford him a clear future on which to concentrate all his energies and aims. He has got the grand pabulum² of the human soul – occupation. If any inherent want in his character, any unlucky combination of circumstances, nullifies this, what a poor creature the man becomes! – what a dawdling, moping, sitting-over-the-fire, thumb-twiddling, lazy, ill-tempered animal! And why? ‘Oh, poor fellow! ‘tis because he has got nothing to do!’

Yet this is precisely the condition of women for a third, a half, often the whole of their existence.

That Providence ordained it so – made men to work, and women to be idle – is a doctrine that few will be bold enough to assert openly. Tacitly they do, when they preach up lovely uselessness, fascinating frivolity, delicious helplessness – all those polite impertinences and poetical degradations to which the foolish, lazy, or selfish of our sex are prone to incline an ear, but which any woman of common-sense must repudiate as insulting not only her womanhood but her Creator.

Equally blasphemous, and perhaps even more harmful, is the outcry about ‘the equality of the sexes;’ the frantic attempt to force women, many of whom are either ignorant of or unequal for their own duties – into the position and duties of men. A pretty state of matters would ensue! Who that ever listened for two hours to the verbose confused inanities of a ladies’ committee, would immediately go and give his vote for a female House of Commons?³ or who, on the receipt of a lady’s letter of business – I speak of the average – would henceforth desire to have our courts of justice stocked with matronly lawyers, and our colleges thronged by

‘Sweet girl-graduates with their golden hair?’⁴

As for finance, in its various branches – if you pause to consider the extreme difficulty there always is in balancing Mrs Smith’s housekeeping-book, or Miss Smith’s quarterly allowance, I think, my dear Paternal Smith, you need not be much afraid lest this loud acclaim for ‘women’s rights’ should ever end in pushing you from your stools, in counting-house, college, or elsewhere.

No; equality of the sexes is not in the nature of things. Man and woman were made for, and not like one another. One only ‘right’ we have to assert in common with mankind – and that is as much in our own hands as theirs – the right of having something to do.

That both sexes were meant to labour, one ‘by the sweat of his brow,’ the other ‘in sorrow to bring forth’ – and bring up – ‘children’⁵ – cannot, I fancy, be questioned. Nor, when the gradual changes of the civilised world, or some special destiny, chosen or compelled, have prevented that first, highest, and in earlier times almost universal lot, does this accidental fate in any way abrogate the necessity, moral, physical, and mental, for a woman to have occupation in other forms.

But how few parents ever consider this? Tom, Dick, and Harry, aforesaid, leave school and plunge into life; ‘the girls’ likewise finish their education, come home, and stay at home. That is enough. Nobody thinks it needful to waste a care upon them. Bless them, pretty dears, how sweet they are! papa’s nosegay of beauty to adorn his drawing-room. He delights to give them all they can desire – clothes, amusements, society; he and mamma together take every domestic care off their hands; they have abundance of time and nothing to occupy it; plenty of money, and little use for it; pleasure without end, but not one definite object of interest or employment; flattery and flummery enough, but no solid food whatever to satisfy mind or heart – if they happen to possess either – at the very emptiest and most craving season of both. They have literally nothing whatever to do, except to fall in love; which they accordingly do, the most of them, as fast as ever they can.

‘Many think they are in love, when in fact they are only idle’⁶ – is one of the truest sayings of that great wise bore, Imlac, in Rasselas, and it has been proved by many a shipwrecked life, of girls especially. This ‘falling in love’ being usually a mere delusion of the fancy, and not the real thing at all, the object is generally unattainable or unworthy. Papa is displeased., mamma somewhat shocked and scandalised; it is a ‘foolish affair,’ and no matrimonial results ensue. There only ensues – what?

A long, dreary season, of pain, real or imaginary, yet not the less real because it is imaginary; of anger and mortification, of important struggle – against unjust parents, the girl believes, or, if romantically inclined, against cruel destiny. Gradually this mood wears out; she learns to regard ‘love’ as folly, and turns her whole hope and aim to – matrimony! Matrimony in the abstract; not the man, but any man – any person who will snatch her out of the dulness of her life, and give her something really to live for, something to fill up the hopeless blank of idleness into which her days are gradually sinking.

Well, the man may come, or he may not. If the latter melancholy result occurs, the poor girl passes into her third stage of young-ladyhood, fritters or mopes away her existence, sullenly bears it, or dashes herself blindfold against its restrictions; is unhappy, and makes her family unhappy; perhaps herself cruelly conscious of all this, yet unable to find the true root of bitterness in her heart: not knowing exactly what she wants, yet aware of a morbid, perpetual want of something. What is it?

Alas! the boys only have had the benefit of that well-known juvenile apophthegm, that

‘Satan finds some mischief still For idle hands to do:’

it has never crossed the parents’ minds that the rhyme could apply to the delicate digital extremities of the daughters.

And so their whole energies are devoted to the massacre of old Time. They prick him to death with crochet and embroidery needles; strum him deaf with piano and harp playing – not music; cut him up with morning-visitors, or leave his carcass in ten-minute parcels at every ‘friend’s’ house they can think of. Finally, they dance him defunct at all sort of unnatural hours; and then, rejoicing in the excellent excuse, smother him in sleep for a third of the following day. Thus he dies, a slow, inoffensive, perfectly natural death; and they will never recognise his murder till, on the confines of this world, or from the unknown shores of the next, the question meets them: ‘What have you done with Time?’ – Time, the only mortal gift bestowed equally on every living soul, and excepting the soul, the only mortal loss which is totally irretrievable.⁷

Yet this great sin, this irredeemable loss, in many women arises from pure ignorance. Men are taught as a matter of business to recognise the value of time, to apportion and employ it: women rarely or never. The most of them have no definite appreciation of the article as a tangible divisible commodity at all. They would laugh at a mantua-maker who cut up a dress-length into trimmings, and then expected to make out of two yards of silk a full skirt. Yet that the same laws of proportion should apply to time and its measurements – that you cannot dawdle away a whole forenoon, and then attempt to cram into the afternoon the entire business of the day – that every minute’s unpunctuality constitutes a debt or a theft (lucky, indeed, if you yourself are the only party robbed or made creditor thereof!): these slight facts rarely seem to cross the feminine imagination.

It is not their fault; they have never been ‘accustomed to business.’ They hear that with men ‘time is money;’ but it never strikes them that the same commodity, equally theirs, is to them not money, perhaps, but life – life in its highest form and noblest uses – life bestowed upon every human being, distinctly and individually, without reference to any other being, and for which every one of us, married or unmarried, woman as well as man, will assuredly be held accountable before God.

My young-lady friends, of from seventeen upwards, your time, and the use of it, is as essential to you as to any father or brother of you all. You are accountable for it just as much as he is. If you waste it, you waste not only your substance, but your very souls – not that which is your own, but your Maker’s.

Ay, there the core of the matter lies. From the hour that honest Adam and Eve were put into the garden, not – as I once heard some sensible preacher observe – ‘not to be idle in it, but to dress it and to keep it,’ the Father of all has never put one man or one woman into this world without giving each something to do there, in it and for it: some visible, tangible work, to be left behind them when they die.

Young ladies, ‘tis worth a grave thought – what, if called away at eighteen, twenty, or thirty, the most of you would leave behind you when you die? Much embroidery, doubtless; various pleasant, kindly, illegible letters; a moderate store of good deeds; and a cart-load of good intentions. Nothing else – save your name on a tombstone, or lingering for a few more years in family or friendly memory. ‘Poor dear – ! what a nice lively girl she was!’ For any benefit accruing through you to your generation, you might as well never have lived at all.

But ‘what am I to do with my life?’ as once asked me one girl ou...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chronology – Rossetti
• Chronology – Craik
• Selected bibliography – Rossetti
• Selected bibliography – Craik
• Maude
• On Sisterhoods
• A Woman’s Thoughts About Women