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heart of this bitter struggle with a hostile environment came the New England womanhood which, more than any other influence, accounts for the astonishing success, in all realms of our American life, of that little corner of the Republic. Those women, out of the meager district school and the county boarding-school, deprived of access to the higher region of liberal culture, conquered the situation. Half a century ago they had become the best informed and most aspiring body of women in Christendom. And when Providence came to the rescue, with the reenforcement of the Irish peasant girl, and labor-saving machinery relieving the awful strain of two centuries on her physical energy, she charged upon and captured, one by one, the most vital opportunities of the new age. She found out three hundred and fifty ways of getting an honest living. She took, as her right, nine-tenths of the positions as teacher in the common school. She thronged the academy, free high and normal schools, and, later, developed a group of the most thorough institutions for the higher education of woman, and persuaded successive legislatures to declare her a voter and holder of office in State, city, and township school affairs. And now, flushed with success, she has placed even Harvard University in a state of siege. The Woman's Annex of that institution "has come to stay "-planted before its gatestill the last American stronghold of exclusive masculine opportunity in university education strikes the flag and the woman's victory is won.

XIX.

We shall never do justice to the Southern sisterhood of the Republic till we recognize in the women of these sixteen States the capable and aspiring native type of character so magnificently displayed in the women of New England and the North. In the South, society, less modified by recent foreign admixture than even the New England of the past generation, was more strongly dominated by obstinate laws of caste than even in the mother country. With no hereditary civil or social privilege, the old-time industrial system of itself drew a practical landmark of social separation, even more difficult to overleap than the wavering line of what Richard Cobden called "the Chinese social caste of Great Britain." Nowhere was the opportunity for educational and social development more persistently withholden from the majority of women of the lower orders than in the older Southern States previous to 1860. Yet nowhere was there to be found a greater body of the sex, of good natural parts, with all the capabilities of womanly advancement, in a condition so unpropitious. On the other hand, the old plantation life, though in some respects favorable to the training of a superior womanhood, was heavily weighted with occasions for despondency, discouragement, and all the temptations that besiege the home of a more favored class. Unfortunately the outside world too often came in contact with that sort of Southern woman which misrepresents any community-the pleasure hunting, selfish, ultra fashion

able set, on which all unfavorable influences tell most visibly. The result was that the North, several generations before the war, came to regard the most demonstrative class, the Southern visitors at its summer resorts, as the type of the superior woman of the fifteen Southern States.

XX.

Even in the twilight of the partial acquaintance of the present, one is amazed at the grotesque misapprehension of Southern womanhood that in the generation preceding the civil war prevailed everywhere outside of special circles, especially in the Northeastern States. The day of the omnipresent society editor of the metropolitan journal had not dawned. The growing estrangements of public policy and the preoccupation of the political press with exasperating differences really shut off these fifteen States from the great mass of respectable people through the entire North. The only class of Southern women that was spoken of was the society based on the life of the slave plantation, with the professional classes that at once served and represented it.

The peculiarities, individual, domestic, and temperamental; the local and provincial habits of social life; the lights and shadows of this faroff realm were magnified and distorted, till a notion of Southern womanhood as misleading as the corresponding caricature of what was styled the Puritan society of New England became the established conviction north of Mason and Dixon's line. The eccentricities of individuals, conceits of cliques, and antics of visiting adventurers in Washington and the summer resorts of fashion were transferred to the entire class.

The Southern woman was pictured as an object lesson of feminine self-indulgence and laziness-a sort of barbaric queen, surrounded by her dusky satellites, who anticipated her every whim. Her pet activities were furious secession politics, ultra fashionable excesses, with an occasional cyclone of jealousy or passionate rage over one of the inevitable outbreaks that, like tropical earthquakes, relieved the stagnation of her monotonous home life. With occasional brilliant exceptions iguorant of letters, art, and music, with no capacity for literary production or interest in the great movements for the elevation of humanity that so profoundly excited the serious society of other States and nations, she was pictured rather as the heroine of the sensational novel, or the leading lady of the stage, than as the descendant of Martha and Mary Washington and the group of notable and patriotic Southern dames and damsels of an earlier epoch.

And still, although the opportunities for intimate acquaintance between the people of the different sections are wonderfully enlarged, in the face of the annual march of the army of tourists to "the sunny South" and the growing habit of visitation to the Northern cities, at all seasons, by crowds of eager young Southern women, the old-time notion of the personal and social status of the Southern women remains

"a delusion and a snare." I am perpetually questioned, by intelligent and influential people in all parts of the country, concerning the Southern woman of the period in a way that is at once an amusement and an amazement. At the bottom of this misconception is found the extreme difficulty of an impartial and just estimate of an aristocratic and democratic order of society from mutual observation; and when, as in the present case, the difficulty is exaggerated by the fact that society in the South is an aristocratic in a state of rapid transformation to an Ameri. can democratic order of affairs, we need not wonder at the popular misapprehension on both sides of the line.

XXI.

But, even at this distance of time, under the greatly changed condition of affairs in the Southern country life, it is possible for a sympathetic and just observer to picture to himself the life of the great body of good Southern women of the old time; the class which in every community deals with the common interest and keeps society alive. The plantation "house-mother" of the years before the great Revolution was, in fact, a most laborious, screly tried woman, burdened with weighty responsibilities. Instead of the oriental queen, attended by her handmaids, she was the responsible head of a family, made up of all the ele ments that "try women's souls," in a position requiring the best administrative talent and unflagging tact. The situation, all the time, appealed to her deepest sympathies and taxed to exhaustion the resources of an intelligent and forcible womanhood. Her husband's slaves were a crowd of exacting and dependent children, always at hand, looking to her as the comforter in trouble, the kind mediator in every difficulty, the Lady Bountiful, from whose generous hands descended perpetual showers of the good things that made the condition tolerable and wreathed its darkness with such rainbow hues as its fearful possibilities would admit. How she bore herself during that long period amid the duties of her common life, outside the surface realm of her private opinion, prejudices, and natural preference for her own style of life, is only to be learned, at present, by one who has lived with her now these dozen years, and through the sacred confidences of numberless families has been able to reconstruct that fabric of old-time society that, seen through the lurid splendors of a mighty revolution, now appears the golden age to the imaginative maiden in the seminary or to the grandmother in the dilapidated mansion, sinking away from this life through dreams of the dear old days that can never return. The life of the vast majority of the best women of the South, then as now, was lived far from cities, outside the attractions and temptations of the fierce and splendid metropolitan living of to-day, on the plantation in the country, or in little villages, which were mainly collections of well-to-do people brought together by the public necessities of the county affairs of that far-off period.

XXII.

This country and village life was the real university where was trained the womanhood which was the best product of the old South. The absence of the magnificent opportunities of the aristocratic life of Europe drove the boy of the plantation into the temptations that always beset a leisurely class in a new country-rough sports, a sensual and despotic personal habit, and a perilous opportunity for the abuse of irresponsible power. But, because of this peril from the whole world outside the home, the wife and mother drew closer the cords of restraint upon the daughters of the house. Here was the very heart, the "saving grace" of the old Southern life; the mistress and mother among her daughters and handmaids in her own country house. Though shut up by the inflexible law of the old-time American society from much that is now open to her granddaughter, she did assert and maintain a singular personal independence in her own little domain. What she could not do with the men, she did achieve, all the more surely, with the women of the household. No set of girls in Christendom were watched with more vigilant eyes; more carefully guarded from the sight or even the knowledge of much that was going on about them; more persistently urged by the Christian mother and clergyman to take fast hold on the solemn realities and rely on the divine consolations of religion; in all ways more surely girdled about, as with a wall of fire, from the sensual temptatious of society, at home and elsewhere, than the Southern young women of the more favored sort in those early days.

Many of them were educated entirely at home, often by teachers of superior merit. Large numbers of the most eminent men of the North, among whom in their student days were William H. Seward, Dr. William Ellery Channing, and James G. Blaine, served an apprenticeship as teachers and tutors in Southern families. In our journeyings through the Southern States we often come upon au excellent family whose mother or grandmother came South as a teacher of girls and remained and cast in her lot with the people of the section. And when the daughter of the household came home for her brief outing from school,-after a short run in society, she almost invariably succumbed to the common fate of an early marriage and joined the procession of hard-working, heavyladen wives and mothers who were the heart and soul of her dear Southland. This life, with all its drawbacks of a narrow sphere of outward activity, inevitable provincial and class prejudice, its terrible strain on the physical energies, and constant trials to the higher moral and artistic sensibilities, had the compensation of a genial social spirit, a proverbial hospitality, a charming personal frankness of manner, and a quick sensibility to exalted sentiment and noble enthusiasm that gave the better sort of our American Southern women an enviable place in society at Washington and opened doors of welcome in every civilized land.

Here, in this peculiar life, destined by its very nature to be tempo. rary-always threatened with the perils of insurrection from below or aggression from outside-did the Southern woman of the dominant class of half a century ago find her real university. Here did she concentrate her native power and plume her restless aspirations. And here did she so prevail in her own sphere of influence that the best manhood of the South fell down and worshiped at her shrine; so that the heroine of the new Southern literature is the woman of the old time, the housemother, the queen of society, the peacemaker of the neighborhood, the saint of the church.

XXIII.

But the environment of the old social order found its inevitable close. Into this woman's kingdom of the old Southern country life burst the storm of the greatest civil war of modern times, a conflict burdened with more radical changes of the basal structure of society than any in the chronicles of time. As by a terrible black hand, the country in eleven States was swept clean of its effective fighting manhood, leaving the women, children, and slaves in virtual possession of the land. No period of American history is so rich in the materials for a national literature as the condition of these States during the progress of the four years' war. Still largely hidden from popular knowledge, this period abides in the memory of the Southern people of both races with a teuacity that no argument or experience of other conditions can efface. During these terrible years the Southern woman came to the front as never before, and, like American womanhood in every great emergency, revealed qualities not only of endurance, but of great executive capacity. As the years go on all this will come out in literature, in the recollections of families, in the gathering of local historical materials, but most of all in the impression left upon the generations by this great uprising of the mothers. For this was the awful day of decision, whether the Republic should lose the treasures of womanhood garnered through two centuries of Southern life, now being revealed amid the perils of revolution in such prodigious force of character, henceforth to be evolved into new excellence through the long centuries of constructive American civilization. This episode was the fit culmination of the peculiar style of life which had been the university of the Southern woman from the early settlement of the southern Atlantic coast till the close of the "war for the independence of the South." Happily for the cause of republican society, for the uplift of man through all coming time, an all-wise Providence decreed that only through the living together of the whole American people in "liberty and union, one and indivisible, now and forever," could be realized the highest form of local independence consistent with a Christian nationality in the present age of the world.

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