17G
THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
Nor is the danger less in intellectual ways. “ It is fashionable in Boston to patronize classical music,” says a cynic observer; “ so people lie by the thousands.
They say they like it and go to the concerts to be bored, or else outrage true music lovers by whispering and stirring about.” We may well say, better a fashion for high things not understood, or yet really liked, than a fashion for bull-fights or coarse minstrel jokes. Yes; but true growth for the individual, and so for the social organism, is along lines of sincerity. And a pretence never truly educated anyone.
It is fashionable in many circles for women to belong to a literary or artistic “club.” A good fashion, infinitely better than the set “ party ” with its horrors of commonplace, or an informal tea with slander, spiced gossip or belittling gabble called conversation. Yes; but many a woman thinks she is “ cultivated ” because she hears swiftly-forgotton “ papers ” by the bushel; and snubs women far superior to herself who modestly disclaim absorbing devotion to literature. '
Beware of danger in intellectual club-life if it makes you only willing to accept all that wisdom and knowledge can pour into you from another’s thought and study.
No woman grows from club-life as she can and ought who does not feel stimulated
by it to individual study and personal strenuous thinking. ;
Beware of the danger in charitable club-life if it makes you contented only with ;
giving in the mass to the mass. No woman is ennobled by such effort. What is wanted for all true growth for the individual woman as for the sex is the awakening to self-knowledge, the stimulation to personal study and work. And herein lies one of the great gifts of the Woman Suffrage Association to woman’s growth. By its very nature, so broadly inclusive and so sharply logical is it, the woman suffrage demand has been debarred an easy popularity. It has never had any social distinction to care for, any personal ambition to serve which might not be more easily and quickly attained from other sources. Always has its emphasis been strongest of all the organizations of women upon the full and free development a?nd expression of the individual. And in it men and women have always worked side by side.
Beware of the danger in associated demand for rights and privileges if it leads j
you to forget personal duty toward your inferior, in nature or circumstances, in the )
abstract demand for equality of rights. No woman grows in individual justice by i
“ resolutions,” or even by most strenuous and wise labors which base themselves on .
that virtue, unless her homage and service to the universal principle constantly leads ’■
her to practice it downward as well as demand it upward. j
I have known a woman visit “slums” with benevolence, and beat down the wages 1
of her children’s governess. I have known a woman gloat over a fine essay at a j
club and neglect the simplest rules of intellectual development in her own life and family. I have known a woman to spend unceasing devotion in defending and \
establishing abstract principles of justice, who never stopped to inquire if the money \
on which she lived was unstained by oppression, or if the labor she exacted from her j
servants was righteously compensated. j
But say you all, I am sure, just here, such women are not made worse by the '
associated effort; they have only not yet pulled themselves up to their own standard.
Yes, true;but a subtle danger to character, unknown to the isolated woman, lies in these modern associations, the danger that we pretend to be what we are not, that we think ourselves leading in the march of progress when we are only tagging on because the crowd attracts us.
The “Time Spirit” speaketh these words, I repeat, Individual Development Associated Effort.
Beware lest, as was said of George Eliot by a too severe critic, “ we keep our ethics only for foreign export.”
Beware lest the show of learning cheat us of the substance, of that true knowledge which must be fibered upon our own thought to produce fruit of wisdow.
Beware lest the lazy, modern way of getting smatterings of things deceive us as to the leanness of our own mental cupboards.