Woman free

Front matter

Reading edition

Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

WOMAN FREE

ELLIS ETHELMER

1893

PUBLISHED BY THE

WOMEN’S EMANCIPATION UNION

Hon. Sec.:—Mrs. WOLSTENHOLME ELMY

Buxton House, Congleton

[PRICE FIVE SHILLINGS, POST FREE]

WYMAN AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND REDHILL.

“Le philosophe, en étudiant les lois de la Nature, acquiert chaque jour la conviction que de leur violation seule naissent tous les maux dont gémit l’humanité.”

“The philosopher, in studying the laws of Nature, acquires more deeply every day the conviction that from their abuse alone spring all the evils from which humanity is groaning.”

Dr. Menville de Ponsan

(Histoire de la Femme; Vol. III., p. 3).

WOMAN FREE.

I.

Source of the Light that cheers this later day,

Science calm moves to spread her sovereign sway;

Research and Reason, ranged on either hand,

Proclaim her message to each waiting land;

In truths whose import stands but part revealed,

Till man befit himself those truths to wield;

Since to high Knowledge duties high belong,

As to the poet’s power the task of worthy song.

II.

And man, from every stage of slow degree,

Amendment for his previous rule may see;

His keener conscience in our fuller time

Perceives the whilom careless act a crime,

Or finds some fancied fault to progress tend,—

By wiser vision traced to truer end;

Till, growing shrewder in the growing light,

We know no lack of good but our own lack of sight.

III.

Thus, sad at first, we mark each evil deed,

Of ignorance or will, bear fatal seed

Of suffering to others in its train,—

The guileless share its penalty of pain,—

And man’s worst misery ofttimes is brought

By trespass he himself nor did nor thought;

Austere the fiat, yet therefrom we learn

A purer life to frame, lest myriads mourn in turn.

IV.

Deep though the teaching that this truth reveals

Of fellowship of man with all that feels,

Remains the riddle that, though inmost ken

Of humblest creatures and of rudest men

Has sense of freedom as an instinct strong,—

Resenting injury as act of wrong,—

Man listed not this monitor’s still voice,

But gave his wanton wish the guilty force of choice.

V.

Dark looms the record of his earlier years,—

A troubled tale of infamy and tears;

For, of the ill by man primeval wrought,

Shows forth predominant with anguish fraught,

And long disaster to the ensuant race,

The direful course of degradation base,

Where freedom, justice, right,—at one fell blow,—

In woman’s life of slave were outraged and laid low.

VI.

The inklings gleaned of prehistoric hour

Speak woman thrall to man’s unbridled power;

Than brute more gifted, he, with heinous skill,

Subdued her being to his sensual will;

Binding her fast with ties of cunning weight,

By mother’s burden forced to slavish fate;

Thus woman was, and such her man-made doom,

Ere yet the dawn of love illumed the soulless gloom.

VII.

Ere Evolution, in unhasting speed,

Trained man’s regard to larger life and need;

By Art his feelings waked to functions higher,

Disclosed within his clay the veins of fire,

Taught him his pleasures of the flesh to find

But presage of the mightier joys of mind;

Evoked the soul from fume of mortal dust,

The vestal flame of love from lower flush of lust.

VIII.

The eye that once could note but food or foe

Grew wise to watch the landscape’s varied glow;

To gaze beyond our earthly temporal bars,

And track the orbit of the wandering stars:

The voice erst roused by hunger or by rage

Now tells the nobler passions of the age,

Till with love’s language is uplifted love

To high and selfless thought all sensuous aim above.

IX.

But not at once such life and love to know,

For progress strives through many an ebb and flow;

Man’s kindling sense, though stirred by call of Art,

Still missed the motive of her deepest heart;

’Twas in her gracious embassy to give

A fairer faith and fate to all that live,

Neglecting none,—yet man, ’twixt lust and pride,

Due portion in the boon to woman still denied.

X.

Æons of wrong ere history was born,

With added ages passed in slight and scorn,

Maintained the chains of primal womanhood,

And clogged in turn man’s power of greater good;

Egypt or Greece in vain sought heavenly light

While woman’s soul was held from equal flight,—

Her path confined by man to sordid end,

As subjugated wife, or hireling transient friend.

XI.

Marriage—which might have been a mateship sweet,

Where equal souls in hallowed converse meet,

Each aiding each the higher truths to find,

And raising body to the plane of mind,—

Man’s baser will restrained to lower grade,

And woman’s share a brainless bondage made;

Her only hope of thought or learning wide,

Some freer lot to seek than yoke forlorn of bride.

XII.

Yet, as hetaira,—comrade, chambermate,—

(The ambiguous word bespoke her dubious state),

She, craving mental food, might but be guest

By paying with her body for the quest;

Conceding that, might lead a learned life,—

A licence vetoed to the legal wife,—

Might win great wealth, or build a lasting fame,

Not due to her the guilt that left the tinge of shame.

XIII.

What guilt was there, apportion it aright

To him who fixed the gages of the fight;

Blame man, who, reckless of the woman’s fate,

In greed for meaner pleasure lost the great;

Blame him, the vaunted sage, who knew her mind

Peer to his own in skill and wit refined,

Yet left the after-ages to bemoan

The waste of woman worth that dawned and die unknown.

XIV.

And deep the shame on man’s insensate heart

For later woman doomed to hideous part;

Poor lostling, bowed with worse than brutal woes,—

To her not even dealt the brute’s repose;

Her sweetness sullied, and her frame disgraced,

Soul scarce might light her temple fair defaced,—

Its chastest sanctities coerced to give

For painful bread to eat, for piteous chance to live.

XV.

While such her fate in lands of cultured creed,

Judge woman’s griefs with man of barbarous breed;

Slave to his lust, and tiller of his soil,

Crippled and crushed by cruelty and toil;

Yet still her heart a gentle mien essayed,

By deeper passion, holier impulse, swayed;

Care for her wretched offspring rarely swerved,

And mother-love alone the infant oft preserved.

XVI.

Thus woman’s life, in low or high estate,

Man fettered with a more than natural weight

Of sexual function,—disproportioned theme

And single basis in his female scheme;

He strove to quench her flash of quicker fire,

That crossed his lordship or his low desire;

Her one permitted end to serve his race,

Her individual soul forbidden breathing place.

XVII.

Scarce other seemed that soul than sentient tomb

Of human energy debarred to bloom;

Her spirit, pining in its durance drear,

Leaves legacy of many a burning tear

For aspirations crushed, and aims denied,

And instincts thwarted by man’s purblind pride;

Her every wish made subject to the nod

Of him whose mad conceit proclaimed himself her God.

XVIII.

So stood at halt, through years of sterile change,

His narrowed brain and her restricted range;

And man intelligent and woman free,

Was union which the world had yet to see;

For time to come reserved the golden sight

Of glorious harvest from the natural right,

To her as amply as to him assigned

To compass power unknown in body and in mind.

XIX.

Happy the epoch destined to show

What force of good from that free fate shall flow;

The artificial limits to efface

Of laws and forms that womanhood debase;

Even our own imperfect hour may prove

The ecstasy of earnest souls that move

In dual union of unselfish strife

To reach by mutual love to true and equal life.

XX.

Yet slow, so slowly, gleams the gathering light,

And lingers still the hovering shade of night;

Though part undone the wrong that we confess,

Repentance cannot instant bring redress;

Nor woman, tortured by her thraldom long,

At once stand forth emancipate and strong;

Her pain persistent, though she calm suppress

Her rancour for the past, with sweet forgivingness.

XXI.

For carnal servitude left cruel stain,

And galls that fester from the fleshly chain;

Unhealed the scars of man’s distempered greed,

The wounds of blind injustice still they bleed;

Recurrent suffering lets her not forget

The aimless payments of a dismal debt,—

Survival from dim age of man’s abuse

Of functions immature, profaned by savage use.

XXII.

Her girlhood’s helpless years through cycles long

Had been a martyrdom of sexual wrong,

For little strength or choice might child oppose

To shield herself from force of sensual foes;

Impending motherhood might win no rest

Or refuge sacred from the satyr quest;

Unripe maternity, untimely birth,

The woman’s constant dole in those dark days of earth.

XXIII.

Action repeated tends to rhythmic course,

And thus the mischief, due at first to force,

Brought cumulative sequence to the race,

Till habit bred hereditary trace;

On woman falls that heritage of woe,

And e’en the virgin feels its dastard blow,—

For, long ere fit to wield maternal cares,

Abnormal fruits of birth her guiltless body bears.

XXIV.

Misread by man, this sign of his misdeed

Was held as symptom of her nubile need,

And on through history’s length her tender age

Has still been victim to his adult rage;

He, by his text, with irony serene,

Banned her resultant “manner” as “unclean”;

The censure base upon himself recoils,

Yet leaves the woman wan and cumbered in his toils.

XXV.

Vicarious punishment for manhood’s crime

Takes grievous toll of all her active prime;

The hap, in educated woman’s fate,

Is instinct with antipathy and hate;

Reason confirming tells, no honest claim

Could ever cause such gust of inward shame,

Nor act of normal wont might man blaspheme

To make of Nature’s need a vile opprobrious theme.

XXVI.

Thoughts like to these are breathings of the truth

To whoso ponders deep the tale of ruth;

The futile mannish pleas that would explain

The purport of her periodic pain,

All bear unconscious witness to the wrong

In blindness born, in error fostered long,—

The spurious function growing with the years,

Till almost natural use the morbid mode appears.

XXVII.

Grievous the hurt to woman, which to right

Is instant duty of our stronger sight;

From off her weary shoulders, bruised and worn,

To lift the cross in longtime misery borne;

Until, reintegrate in frame and mind,

A speedy restitution she shall find,

From every trammel of man’s mastery freed,

Nor held by his behest from fullest life and deed.

XXVIII.

And soon may pass her suffering, for the ill

By man begot lies subject to our skill;

All human malady may be allayed

With human forethought, human action’s aid;

Ours then the fault, since, given in our hand

Is power the evil hazard to command;

For Nature, kindly wise our woes to shape,

In very pang of pain both prompts and points escape.

XXIX.

So woman shall her own redemption gain,

Instructed by the sting of bootless pain;

With Nature ever helpful to retrieve

The injury we heedlessly achieve,

From seed of act, by recent woman sown,

Already guerdon rich in hope is shown;—

Such faculty her new-found presence decks,

The sage physician, she, and saviour of her sex.

XXX.

With purer phase of life proves woman less

The burden of the wasting weariness;

And thus, in rank refined or rude have grown

Maidens in whom the weakness was not known;

Hale woman and true mother have they been,

Yet never have the noisome habit seen:

Not to neglectful man to greatly care

How such immunity all womanhood might share.

XXXI.

Her intellect alert the harm shall heal,

And ways of wholesomeness and strength reveal;

The saving truth she wins with studious thought

More swiftly to her daughter shall be taught,—

How body still is supple unto mind,

By dint of soul is fleshly form inclined,

And woman’s will shall work of man atone,

The deed his darkness wrought be by her light undone.

XXXII.

No longer drilled deformity to nurse,

And woo, when slow to appear, the absent curse,

Her counter-effort, helped by Nature’s grace,

Shall quell the “custom’s” last abhorrent trace;

Its morbid usurpation shall refute,—

Not more to woman natural than to brute;—

A needless noyance with a baseless claim,

The lingering mark of man’s unthinking guilt and shame.

XXXIII.

Her body, saved from enervating drain,

Shall lend a newer vigour to the brain;

Wide shall she roam in realms of untold thought,

Which ages since her shackled instinct sought;

For oft her prison had the yearnings heard,

In murmurings scarce rendered into word;—

Promptings which man suspicious strove to choke,

Lest that her soul should rise and break his timeworn yoke.

XXXIV.

For autocrats of old, with treacherous guile,

Had bribed the villain’s soul by sensual wile;

To meanest man a lower drudge assigned,—

With gift of female thrall cajoled the hind;

The stolid churl his servitude forgave

Whilst he in turn was master to a slave;

Through every rank the sexual serfdom ran,

And woman’s life was bound in vassalage to man.

XXXV.

Then, fearing that the slave herself might guess

The knavery of her forced enchainedness,

A subtle fiction mannish brain designed

To dominate her conscience and her mind,—

Inhuman dogmas did his genius frame,

Investing them with sanctimonious name

Of “woman’s duty”; and the fetish base

E’en to this reasoned day uplifts its impious face.

XXXVI.

By cant condoned, man fashioned woman’s “sphere,”

And mapped out “natural” bounds to her career;

His sapience—should she dare any deed

In contravention of his code—decreed

On soul or body penalties condign,

In part dubbed civil law, and part divine:

Misguided man,—confused in self-deceit

His unisexual wit and pious pretext meet.

XXXVII.

Obeisance yet his caste of sex demands;—

In legislative script the verbiage stands

How lowest boor is lordly “baron” styled,

And highest bride as common “feme” reviled;

The tardier fear that grants the clown a share

In his own governance, denies it her;

And British matrons are, by man-made rules,

In solemn statute ranked with infants, felons, fools.

XXXVIII.

The crass injustice early man displayed,

His own crude infancy of brain betrayed;

His riper judgment scorns the childish use,

And cries to all his bygone freaks a truce;

Enactments that long blemished legal page

Shall fade as figments of a foolish age,

Till saner years have every bond erased

Which selfish law of man on life of woman placed.

XXXIX.

Till like with him in human right she stands,

Her will an equal power of rule commands;

Her voice, in council and in senate heard,

To stern debate brings harmonising word;

In mutual stress each sex the other cheers,

Since one are made their hopes and one their fears;

“Self-reverent each, and reverencing each,”—

The theme that truer man and freer woman teach.

XL.

For but a slave himself must ever be,

Till she to shape her own career be free;—

Free from all uninvited touch of man,

Free mistress of her person’s sacred plan;

Free human soul; the brood that she shall bear,

The first—the truly free, to breathe our air;

From woman slave can come but menial race,

The mother free confers her freedom and her grace.

XLI.

By her the progress of our future kind,

Their stalwart body and their spacious mind;

For, folded in her form each human mite

Has its first home, its sustenance and light;

Hers the live warmth that fans its spirit flame,

Her generous sap supplies its fleshly frame,

And e’en the juice,—the fullborn infant’s food,

Is yet a blanched form of woman’s living blood.

XLII.

Strange wisdom by her unkenned craft is taught

While yet the embryo in her womb is wrought;

For, long ere entering on our tumult rife,

It learns from her the needful art of life;

Unconscious teacher, she, yet all she knows

Of dark experience to her infant flows,

And brands him, ere he rest upon her knee,

Offshoot of slavish race, not scion of the free.

XLIII.

To either sex the bondage and the pain,

They seek to live a freeman’s life in vain;

For man or woman can but act the part,

When ’tis not freeborn blood that fills the heart:

Strive as he may, the modern man, at best,

Is tyrant, differing somewhat from the rest;

Nor woman thraldom-bred can surely know

Where lies her richest gift, or how its wealth to show.

XLIV.

Thus learn we that in woman rendered free

Is raised the rank of all humanity;

The despot is the fullfruit of the slave;—

To form the freeman, equable and brave,

Habit of freedom must spontaneous come

As life itself, and from the selfsame womb;

Life, liberty, and love,—lien undefiled,—

The freeborn mother’s heirloom to her freeborn child.

XLV.

So shall her noble issue, maid or boy,

With equal freedom equal fate enjoy;

Together reared in purity and truth,

Through plastic childhood and retentive youth;

Their mutual sports of sinew and of brain

In strength alike the sturdy comrades train;

Of differing sex no thought inept intrudes,

Their purpose calmly sure all errant aim excludes.

XLVI.

For soul, not sex, shall to each life assign

What destiny to fill, or what decline;

Through years mature impartial range shall reach,

And wider wisdom, juster ethics, teach;

Conformed to claims of intellect and need,

The tempered numbers of their high-born breed;

Not overworn with childward pain and care,

The mother—and the race—robuster health shall share.

XLVII.

Nor blankly epicene, as scoffers say,

The necessary sequence of that day;

For not by vapid imitation low,

Or aping falser sex shall truer grow;

Nor modish mind may fathom Nature’s range,

Or fix the fleeting scope of human change;

Can singer blind the rainbow’s tints compare?—

The brain enslaved from birth the freeman’s powers declare?

XLVIII.

Work we in faith, secure that precious seed

Shall bear due fruit for man’s extremest need;

Not greatly timorous, as those fruits we see,

What changed existence from such food may be;

For well we wot shall come forth worthy soul,

Or male or female, with impartial dole

Of all that life can grant of good or great,—

Happy what each may bring to help the common fate.

XLIX.

By mutual aid perfecting complex man,

Their twofold vision human life may scan

From differing standpoints, grasping from the two

A clearer concept and a bolder view;

And thus diverse humanity shall learn

A wisdom which not single sex might earn;

Each on the problem casting needful light,

Not fully known of one without the other’s sight.

L.

How should he write what she alone may tell?—

The movements of her psychic ebb and swell;

The latent springs of life that in her gush,

When motherhood’s first throb awakes her flush,

And swift the signal flashes to her soul,

Of future being claiming her control;

Seeking from her its mind and body’s food;

Drawing, to make its own, her evil and her good.

LI.

Within herself the drama’s scene is laid,

The Birth and Growth of Soul the mystery played;

She, in her part, is but an agent mute,

Her brain untutored, nor her tact acute,

Her nerve-strung body slow as senseless soil

To watch the working of the seedling’s toil;

In vain before her inmost vision spread

The hidden streams from whence the vital founts are fed.

LII.

The mother’s blindness was blind man’s decree,

And to himself reverts the misery;

Through hapless years his ordinance has run,

And harsh reward of ignorance has won;

His pride of maledom, dull to recognise

The deeper depth accessive to her eyes,

Forbade to teach her brain to understand

The facts that, deftly sought, lay ready to her hand.

LIII.

Less wisely he, his curious search to serve,

In helpless creature teased the quivering nerve,

And strove to probe the covert ways of life

By living butchery with learned knife,

And cruel anodyne that chained the will,

Yet left the shuddering victim conscious still:

But Nature shrinks from foul and fierce attack,

Nor yields her holiest truths on such a murderer’s rack.

LIV.

True science finds its own by kindlier quest,

Nor lowers itself to torture’s loathsome test;

Multiplies not the sentient being’s pain,

But makes a keener lens of man’s own brain;

Seeks not by outrage dire a soul to grasp,

Or dimly trace its agonising gasp;

But surer learns what fire that soul may move,

Not wrung with deathly pang, but thrilled by breath of love.

LV.

To touch of love alone will Nature pour

The choicest treasures of her occult store;

Into the ear of love alone repeat

The secret of the song our pulses beat;

To eye of love alone, with joyance bright,

Shows she her form suffused in living light;

To heart that loves her, Nature gives to know

How from Love’s might alone all thoughts of Wisdom grow.

LVI.

So opes a vaster knowledge to the view,

Love points the way and woman holds the clue;

Nature on her the trustful office laid,

And arbiter of human fortune made;

With woman honoured, rises man to height,

With her degraded, sinks again in night;

Yet still the wayward race has sluggish been

To learn the fealty due to Earth’s advancing queen.

LVII.

For long, in jealousy for corporal power,

Had man contemned his sister’s worthier dower;

What time his ruder feelings held the sway,

With little hope or hint of truer way;

Till on a wistful world has dawned benign

The prescience of a potency divine

Sleeping, unrecked of, deep in woman’s heart,

Waiting some kiss superne, into full life to start.

LVIII.

Woman’s own soul must seek and find that fay,

And wake it into light of quickening day;

Man’s counsel helpful in that track shall be

For all his learning rich return and fee;

His philosophic and chirurgic lore,

To her imparted, swell her innate store;

Till, clothed with majesty of mind she stand,

Regent of Nature’s will, in heart, and head, and hand.

LIX.

Each sequent life shall feel her finer care,

Each heir of life a wealthier bounty share;

Those lives allied in equal union chaste

A sweeter purpose, purer rapture, taste;

Both parents vindicate the duteous name,

The troth and kinship of their linked claim;

The only rivalry that moves their mind,

How for their lineage fair still larger fate to find.

LX.

Their task ineffable yields wondrous gain,

Their energies celestial force attain;

Their intermingled souls, with passion dight,

In aspiration soar past earthly height;

Nor fades their prospect into void again,—

Woman has gift the vision to retain,

And mould their dreams of love, with conscious skill,

To human living types supreme of form and will.

LXI.

The psychic and the physical at one

In fervid vigour through their frame shall run;

Their science leaps the bounds of straiter space,

Whose crude dimensions curbed their growing grace;

Whose inefficiencies allowed not verge

For rich research their lofty souls would urge;

To them the keys of life and love are given,—

The love that lifts the life from rank of earth to heaven.

LXII.

And “winged words on which the soul would pierce

Into the height of love’s rare Universe”

Shall native flow from them as mother tongue

In softest strain to listening infant sung;

Till, the sad memories of unmeant wrong

Solving in music of conciliant song,

Man’s destiny with woman’s blended be

In one sublime progression,—full, and strong, and free.

LXIII. L’Envoi.

The bard of yore, the stately Florentine,—

The seer of the dream men named Divine,—

Through whose grave tones one strenuous passion rolled,

While to slow ears the voice fell stern or cold,—

In his last verse proclaimed his crowning faith,

By words whose echoes pass the bar of death;—

As breathed his soul with Beatrice afar—

“The love that moves the sun and every circling star.”

WOMAN FREE.