The Chautauquan, Vol. 05, June 1885, No. 9Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Philosophy
The Chautauquan, Vol. 05, June 1885, No. 9
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Chautauqua Institution -- Periodicals; Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle -- Periodicals
A turn about is fair play, and the phrase is really quite
refreshing to one’s sense of justice. The ideal woman will not write upon
her visiting card, nor insist on having her letters addressed, to Mrs.
John Smith, or Mrs. Gen. Smith, as the case may be, but will, if her
maiden name was Jones, fling her banner to the breeze as “Mrs. Mary Jones
Smith,” and will be sure to make it honorable. She will not be the lay
figure made and provided to illustrate the fashions of Monsieur Worth and
lesser lights of the same guild, but will insist that the goddess Hygiea
is the only true modiste, and will dutifully obey her orders. As the
Louvre gallery proves that when men were but the parasites of the court
they too decked themselves with ear-rings, high heels, powdered hair and
gaudy garments, so the distorted figures in the detestable fashion plates
of to-day are the irrefutable proofs of woman’s fractional estate; but
this will not be so to-morrow, when she finds her kingdom—which is her
own true self. The ideal woman will cease to heed the cruel “Thus far and
no farther,” which has issued from the pinched lips of old Dame Custom,
checking her ardent steps throughout all the ages past, and will be
studious only to hear the kindly “Thus far and no farther” of God.
The ideal woman will play Beatrice to man’s Dante in the Inferno of his
passions. She will give him the clue out of materialism’s Labyrinth. She
will be civilization’s Una, taming the Lion of disease and misery. The
State shall no longer go limping on one foot through the years, but shall
march off with steps firm and equipoised. The keen eye and deft hand of
the housekeeper shall help to make its everyday walks wholesome; the
skill in detail, trustworthiness in finance, motherliness in sympathy,
so long extolled in private life, shall exalt public station. Indeed,
if I were asked the mission of the ideal woman, I would reply: IT IS TO
MAKE THE WHOLE WORLD HOMELIKE. Some one has said that “Temperament is
the climate of the individual,” but home is woman’s climate, her vital
breath, her native air. A true woman carries home with her everywhere.
Its atmosphere surrounds her; its mirror is her face; its music attunes
her gentle voice; its longitude may be reckoned from wherever you happen
to find her. But
“Home’s not merely four square walls.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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