No wise person believes in any “reform against Nature,” or that we can get beyond the laws of Nature.  If I believed the limitations of sex to be inconsistent with woman suffrage for instance, I should oppose it; but I do not see why a woman cannot form political opinions by her baby’s cradle, as well as her husband in his workshop, while her very love for the child commits her to an interest in good government.  Our duty is to remove all the artificial restrictions we can.  That done, it will not be hard for man or woman to acquiesce in the natural limitations.

III

TEMPERAMENT

[Greek:  ’Andros kai gunaikos ae autae antae aretae.]—­ANTISTHENES in Diogenes Laertius, vi. i, 5.

“Virtue in man and woman is the same.”

THE INVISIBLE LADY

The Invisible Lady, as advertised in all our cities a good many years ago, was a mysterious individual who remained unseen, and had apparently no human organs except a brain and a tongue.  You asked questions of her, and she made intelligent answers; but where she was, you could no more discover than you could find the man inside the Automaton Chess-Player.  Was she intended as a satire on womankind, or as a sincere representation of what womankind should be?  To many men, doubtless, she would have seemed the ideal of her sex, could only her brain and tongue have disappeared like the rest of her faculties.  Such men would have liked her almost as well as that other mysterious personage on the London signboard, labelled “The Good Woman,” and represented by a female figure without a head.

It is not that any considerable portion of mankind actually wishes to abolish woman from the universe.  But the opinion dies hard that she is best off when least visible.  These appeals which still meet us for “the sacred privacy of woman” are only the Invisible Lady on a larger scale.  In ancient Boeotia, brides were carried home in vehicles whose wheels were burned at the door in token that they would never again be needed.  In ancient Rome, it was a queen’s epitaph, “She stayed at home, and spun,”—­Domum servavit, lanam fecit.  In Turkey, not even the officers of justice can enter the apartments of a woman without her lord’s consent.  In Spain and Spanish America, the veil replaces the four walls of the house, and is a portable seclusion.  To be visible is at best a sign of peasant blood and occupations; to be high-bred is to be invisible.

In the Azores I found that each peasant family endeavored to secure for one or more of its daughters the pride and glory of living unseen.  The other sisters, secure in innocence, tended cattle on lonely mountain-sides, or toiled bare-legged up the steep ascents, their heads crowned with orange-baskets.  The chosen sister was taught to read, to embroider, and to dwell indoors; if she went out it was only under escort, and with her face buried in a hood of almost incredible size, affording only a glimpse of the poor pale cheeks, quite unlike the rosy vigor of the damsels on the mountain-side.  The girls, I was told, did not covet this privilege of seclusion; but let us be genteel, or die.