VIII. THE RIGHTS OF AMERICAN GIRLS.

A friend whose business compels him to travel a good deal, although he is not that species of commercial agent vulgarly called a “drummer,” came to see me the other day, and in speaking of his travels I asked him what seemed to him the distinctive features of some of our principal cities.

His answer was peculiar.

“The thing that has struck me most forcibly of late,” said he, “is the different aspects after dark of the cities I have last visited. In New York under the gaslight certain forms of vice and danger stalk abroad almost as boldly as in London or in San Francisco. In the upper part of the town the streets are quiet enough, but what few prowling figures you see suggest garroters or highwaymen of one sort or another, while down town the pickpockets, watch snatchers and similar gentry jostle each other on every curbstone. Not a month ago a gentleman from the Provinces, inspecting our ‘Yankee towns,’ as he chose to class New York, told me that, strolling across Madison Square one evening, he was accosted by a well-dressed man, with a very conspicuous watch chain, who quietly said, ‘Give me your pocketbook and watch, or I’ll call that policeman over there and swear you were trying to snatch my watch!’

“My friend was, to be sure, a little verdant, but he was brave, and drawing back, he gave the fellow a blow in the jaw that certainly silenced him for a while, and spitting out a tooth or two he made off just as the policeman strolled that way, and, hearing the story, told my friend such attempts at blackmailing were not uncommon, and very generally succeeded with a quiet or timid sort of man.

“Now, that,” pursued my friend, “is New York. In St. Louis, where I was last week, the streets after dark seem deserted. A few men loaf around the corners, and some tipsy boatmen frolic and sing around the riverside, but you never see a lady unattended. In fact, you seldom see a lady on foot, with or without an escort. But in two other cities, some distance apart—Detroit and Boston—quite a different set of conditions obtains. In both these places the streets are thronged quite as much after dark as before, and with much the same class of persons—quiet, respectable citizens, going about their business or pleasure and taking very little notice of each other.

“In Boston especially I noticed ladies, or at any rate very ladylike and quiet women, both young and middle-aged, walking the streets quite unattended, and apparently quite unmolested—in fact, I saw several both come in and go out of the theaters, sometimes two or three together, but sometimes quite alone. Speaking of this to a Boston woman, she said she should not be afraid to traverse any part of the city where she should be likely to go at any hour of the evening.”

“Which proves Boston to be very much of a country village,” remarked I, with a little sneer, for I much prefer New York to Boston myself; but my traveled friend replied:

“Oh, not at all! Country villages are apt to be very wicked little places, or at least whatever wickedness there is comes to the knowledge of every inhabitant, and village ladies are always very particular about having an escort if they go beyond their next neighbor’s. They say they’re afraid ‘somebody will speak to them,’ a phrase which always moves one to inquire, ‘What are you afraid they will say?’

“No. I think that the air of Boston and Detroit and Philadelphia more than any other cities on this continent is adapted to the coming woman, and that the ‘unprotected female’ is going out of fashion in those places. The new idea (and why isn’t it a good idea?) is that a woman is not necessarily the ward and appendage of some man who must guard her from the attacks of other men, and also from the follies of her own feeble brain, but that she is an individual of equal dignity and responsibility with the man and able to protect herself from whatever dangers may assail her—not with her fists, to be sure, but by her own dignity, and, if need be, by appeal to the officers of the law.”

“Strong minded!” suggested I.

“Well, you don’t think it’s nice to be weak minded,” retorted my friend, with a laugh; and so we parted.

Now, is his theory correct? Do the women of a few of our cities already feel the wave of progress that is slowly rolling around the world to this extent? If so, is it not a foreshadowing of what is to come?

There has been a great deal of talk in the last few years of women’s rights and a great deal of discussion as to what those rights consist in. But there is no solvent of knotty questions of a social nature like time and also experiment.

Woman’s right to work was pretty easily conceded, for, as a general thing, whatever a woman undertakes to do she does well and intelligently, especially if she is spurred on by a determination to show that she can do it as well as a man.

Moreover, women have always consented to work for less wages than men can command, and it is only very lately that some fair-minded and logical employers have practically assented to the proposition that the same amount and quality of work should command the same amount of wage, let it be done by a man or a woman. Then comes the right of standing up in the cars, a right which men themselves invented and conferred upon the mothers and wives of other men, although their own mothers and wives, when subjected to similar discipline from other men, probably explained to their own mankind how injurious they found it.

And the right of franchise is being gradually torn and dragged from the unwilling hand of man, and I for one am very doubtful if it will not prove a very perplexing white elephant when it has been fully captured.

But what concerns us just now is woman’s right to protect herself, and it seems by my friend’s report that this right is on trial in some of our cities pretty extensively.

Now, it seems to me that this is a very legitimate and sensible kind of right, and also one which will develop by its exercise the very best and most valuable traits of the woman of the future. If she is to stand for herself, instead of running behind her big brother at every alarm, she must acquire, or rather practice, dignity, firmness, self-respect and courage—not the courage of the prize-fighter, but of the monarch, the queen, who feels that she is safe among her subjects by the simple right of her queenhood.

Now let us get back to the pith of this little creed and consider whether our girls do really need chaperons, or if the old colonial custom of maids and matrons going whither they would, by sunlight and moonlight, in company with their brothers, their fathers, their cousins or their uncles, as the case might be, or without them, just as it happened, was not really nearer the proposed era of woman’s rights than the world has been during the last half century. Of course, we all know that in the beginning these United States, or rather the society of the new nation, was by preference and choice opposed to the traditions of the old.

Etiquette and formality reigned supreme at the courts of Versailles and St. James, so let us despise etiquette and formality and be as patriarchal and pastoral as possible. President Jefferson, I believe it was, who complained of the cumbrous ceremonial of the White House, and stripped the servants of the modest livery George Washington had instituted, and when he gave a State dinner to the English plenipotentiary and his wife, took some other lady to dinner.

But as the country grows in wealth and luxury, as Americans more and more spend their holidays abroad and keenly observe the manners of other people, a change has crept over the primeval simplicity. Anglomania has succeeded to Anglophobia, and whether the White House servants may be liveried or not, half the coachmen and grooms of New York are, and the etiquette of visiting cards has been found worthy of several elaborate treatises, showing how we may by these magic bits of pasteboard pretend to those friendly visits which our grandmothers honestly made to each other.

Along with the other importations of conventionality has come the system of chaperonage, and it is as artificial as all the rest. The original idea is good. A very young girl should go into society with her mother, just as the parent bird, when the fledgling begins to try its wings, accompanies its feeble flight, chirping encouragement and showing how to guide the tremulous course and how to find the early worm or the glittering grub. But so soon as the young bird has strength and sense enough to fly alone, the mother goes about her more important affairs, and leaves the daughter to make practical use of the lessons she has learned.

But the conventional improvement upon this idea is that the young bird never becomes a responsible bird with the right of self guidance, until she is mated, and that the most venerable and proper and demure old maid sparrow must never try to fly or to pick up that early worm unless she is under the protection of some little, flirty, flighty hen, just married to some jaunty little cock sparrow no older than herself.

I hope the simile is not insulting, but I declare I cannot help thinking of it when I see a lady of uncertain age, who has ripened by the experience of some score of seasons in society, entering the room under convoy of a rosy, curly, fresh young bride, who was in her cradle when the spinster was a débutante.

Now, this absurdity arises from a remnant of the old barbaric idea that all women are fools and all men are brutes, for that is the core of the old code of chivalry, of the institution by Arthur of the Knights of the Round Table, and a great deal more of the pretty and the impossible state of things people sometimes pretend that they would like to reproduce.

What were the duties of the Knight of the Round Table? They were to ride up and down the land rescuing the dames and damsels who were being carried away by wicked knights, or who, being married to other wicked knights, were being dragged about by their hair, turned out to starve and otherwise maltreated. They were also to take and keep a vow of such self control and decency of life as is now expected of every man, but in that day was the exception and not at all the rule.

Well, under such a condition of affairs, chaperons for single women became a necessity, for the married woman, however young and silly herself, possessed a husband whose duty it would be to fight not only for his wife, but the helpless creature under her and his protection. If they went to ride in the green wood, he and his men-at-arms would prevent the predatory knights, who always seemed to be prowling around, from swooping down and carrying off the women, and if they went to a ball at Camelot or some other fashionable resort, the fear of the chaperon’s husband would prevent those open and insulting protestations and proposals which apparently every man was ready to make, and every woman perfectly helpless to resist.

But those noble days of chivalry are past, and the world has moved on several degrees upon that enormous orbit which they tell us encircles some unknown center around which our entire system revolves. Men have learned to cultivate their brains and their pockets, instead of simply their passions for murder and rapine. They are no longer content to be simply the male animal of the genus homo. If they are still formidable to the safety and honor of women, it is only when the woman courts the danger and would not for the world have any Galahads and Percivals interfering in her little amusements. And women are no longer fools, nor babes, nor the helpless prey of her destroyer. She has as a sex grown out of childhood into youth, and has developed an amount of character and a wealth of promise that have fairly made the tradition mongers and conservatives stand aghast and stammer in dismay: “Stop! Stop! Where are you going?”

Does not it seem probable that this extraordinary growth and maturity of womanhood is to make its mark upon society, as it has upon labor and upon politics and upon public thought? If women are showing themselves competent to earn their own living, to think their own thoughts and to express them in literature and out, if they already largely govern the school boards and are reaching out toward the helm of state, is it not time that they should learn to protect themselves from insult and to guide their own steps with discretion?

A young fellow going into society does not take his father along to guard him from the snares and follies most young men are at least tempted to. In fact, these dear boys would resent, with a very formidable wrath, any suggestion that they could not take care of themselves, and also of their sisters, if need be, nor indeed are they loath to propose themselves as the guides, protectors and champions of other men’s sisters, if not of their wives. But why is the boy of twenty so much more responsible and trustworthy than the girl of eighteen, and why, if one is to take care of the other, does not she take care of him? for I think if the girl had been brought up with a sense of her own responsibilities she would be the stronger of the two.

Do not suppose, however, that I am advocating the complete emancipation of young girls from parental control. No, for I think nothing more disagreeable than the independent and almost insulting tone adopted in these days by a good many girls toward their fathers and mothers. No, my idea is simply, let the girls be trained while still children to such true and womanly self-respect and self-reliance that they would no more misbehave themselves in society than their mothers would, and let them as they grow older show their right to freedom by their moderation and wisdom in using it.

But if some weak or ill-advised sister really needs a guardian in going among people, let her at least select some one old enough to be her mother, instead of a bride fresh from boarding school.