The Cecil Whig. [volume] (Elkton, Md.) 1841-current, 1897-03-27
THE WOMAN AT THE WHEEL.

The term NEW woman has come to be
falsely regarded by some as designating
amend -of-the-century type of female, the
legitimate subject of the caricaturist, the
gaunt female, who initiates the habits and
manners of the male sect which she affects
to despise, who tlaunts her views in print,
shrieks from the public platform, and is
generally the embodiment of journalistic
joke.
And yet, it should be plain to the re-
Elective, that the woman properly described
as ''new" is as old as Queen Nashti, or Hy
patia of Alexandria, and has existed from
the time that the unwritten law CON
demned her to degradation when she
worked for money, Or unladylike when she
soiled her hands by the stain of honest toll.
But independence of character, the innate
ability to rise equal to great emergencies,
the patient endurance to suffer mental or
physical pain, the courage to perform
heroic acts, have long ago been recognized
as qualities equally feminine as masculine.
In what category is to be placed the
brave woman, who has just brought safely
into port pestlence striker ship, and the
praise of whose courage and endurance is
resounding in the columns of every city
newspaper-Mrs. Edward w. Reed, the
wife of the captain of the good ship T. F.
Cakes just landed at New York.
True, she is colonial dame having in her
veins the blood Of Mollie Stark Of Revolu-
tionary fame, and has for fourteen years
sailed by the side of her husband in all his
long ocean voyages
In the terrific typhoons of the China Sea,
this intrepid New Hampshire woman, not
only stood at the vessels wheel, but to the
scurvy-stricken seamen of the Inflated vessel
proved indeed a ministering angel, labor
ing day and night to ameliorate the condi-
ton of the suffering sailors, and finally
when but three besides her husband re-
manned, took the wheel of the ship, and
brought her safely to port through the
turbulent seas.
Mrs. Reed is not new woman.
tohS 10 oHS y pc ohiy Va thouS"huo "a Nv
ing woman, whom the accident OF life has
spared the test of such an awful emergency,
yet are just as courageous as she
Read the lives Of the Bronte sisters.
They were little women, pale and atten
uated, with the frailest constitutions.
And yet how brave
Charlotte spent most of her short life
cooped up in dreary moorland rectory,
nursing consumptive sisters-a model of
domesticity, quiet and orthodox.
1t was only when her pen was in her
hand that she was 'new' woman.
She burst through the preiudices of edu-
cation and environment, and let her vivid
personality have full swing. 1t has been
said that great minds are in advance not
merely of their own age but of every age
Going back to the words of great men thou
sands of years dead, one is sometimes struck
by the exactness with which they fit in
modern thought-the concurrence with
later ideas" In time when the unwrittep
law that girls were to be useless ignorant
anu lule I'LL bDey married was us law OF
the Modes and Persians. Charlotte Bronte
could detect and crystalline in words the
vague unrest underlying the then social
constitution, that has gradually spread and
strengthened to the present state of affairs,
in which it &c looked upon as IL reproach to
be without some avowed work to do in the
world.
'tBelieve," she says in ''Shirley,' "that
single women should have more to do
better chances of interesting and profitable
occupation than they possess now"
Further on, after drawing picture Of
the sordd, cramped lives with which girls
were then expected to be content, she asks,
could men live so themselves" thus
putting both sexes Immediately on the same
intellectual level, which is the main point
that the New Woman is trying to estab-
lish.
Further still: "Keep your girls minds
narrow and fettered, they will still be a