Huntsville gazette., 1890-12-13
IN WOMAN'S BEHALF.
FUTURE OF AMERICAN WOMEN.

Up for Women of the Present Day.
Whatever demand for prophecy as to
woman's future the past may have held,
to-day has small need of it, and to-mor-
row will have less. For all women, the
world over, life holds promise unknown
to any generation, and the twentieth
century, whose dimly rounded sphere
even now moves on toward the fullness
of light, carries with it the hope and
fulillment of all dreams of the past.
Here is certainty, yet the student OF
human life, to whom at moments a
thousand years seem but day, in any
backward look finds day as thousand
years, and marvels, not SO much at the
dragging pace as at any pace at all
For if real search begins, and this past
is weighed and measured; if the true
story of human struggle is told. with
the slow unfolding and evolution OF the
human soul, there is always the sense
of a miracle, and the acceptance OF all
the ages as the necessity for growth,
in which the century counts hardly
more than the moment of to-day.
With this evolution we have naught
slant return to it before any present es-
innate becomes possible. 1t is the
American woman's background that con-
Germs us. 1t is her past that is founda-
tion for the future on the way.
The English woman of that seven
teenth cent tury in which the story of the
Republic begins was composite pro-
duction. Anglo-Saxon and Norman
traits still battled together for suprem-
acy, though Puritanism had taken both
in charge, and hidden nature behind a
mask of its own The transfer to Amer
lean soil simply shifted the scenes, but
for long, made no alteration in facts.
From the beginning of American life,
two distinct types were always hers.
The Puritan led-the Puritan in whom
every impulse had been repressed and
schooled; whose sense of beauty in art
and literature had been stified or rooted
out as the work of the enemy of souls
himself, and whose life was bounded by
duty, with small margin for human love
or human desire. Painful, minute OBJ
servance; rigid obedience to law; un-
swerving fidelity to principle, was the
life of our New England fore-mothers,
who spun and wove, and cared for their
households with zeal which knew no
tagging, and had few ambitions be-
yond.
One, was common to man and woman
alike. The colony which before the
tree-stumps were brown in its fields had
founded college regarded learning as
prize second only to godliness, and the
New England mother, as she rocked the
cradle, saw already the gown and bands,
which meant the highest attainment
mortal could know. The voice of one
mother has come down to us in an old
chronicle of those early days: Child,
if God make thee good Christian and a
good scholar, thou hast all that thy
mother ever asked for thee"
This was the Puritan woman, narrow
ing year by year, and year by year more
incapable of comprehending that on the
same continent, under the same sky,
breathing the same air, the cavalier on
Virginia soil had sought and found
equal rights. For them faith in beauty
and joy, and the delight of living had
never been quenched, and their women
shivered as they thought of the North,
and the lives as barren as the New Eng
land hill-sides, and counted their own
ers an alien people.
Farther south, the Spaniard and the
Frenchman had already set their seal,
and dark-eyed, soft-voiced creoles added
another type to the sharply-defned ones
already in possession.
So the years went on, and as the Sax
on love of dominion and possession
drove its owners always before it, ad
vance guards from South and North met
in the West the angles of the last soft
ened by the curves of the first, till
new people, bearing the traits of both,
had sprung up and lived life freer than
had been possible to either. Invention,
fertility of resource, adaptiveness to
conditions, and always the outreach for
something better, had added themselves
to the sturdy English qualities. Climate
and condition worked together. That
subtle added drop of nervous fluid"
stirred in American blood and sharpen
ed American perception; tinged in the
child, and urged the mother to ever
more strenuous effort to give it the
''chance" often denied herself
These were the forces slowly prepar-
ing for the work to come, but uncon-
scious of its nature or need. Old tradi-
tions were strong and still held the eyes
from seeing. Women were counted the
natural enemies of women. 1t was de-
MED that they could ever work to-
gether; certainly never in wider sphere
than that offered by the sewing-circle or
the missionary society. Women them
selves repeated the old formula, and
eyed suspiciously the few who affirmed
that such faith was part of the old bond
age, and that larger life was on the
way. Fight as they might, it was al
ready here. A thousand forces unknown
to the Old World work in the New. In
the sharp struggle with hard conditions
grosser forms fell away, and the new
ideal showed its true shape. Dominated
rs it might be by partisanship and all
1f