Women of America Part 5

Apart from its too close resemblance to

"None but himself could be his parallel,"

it strikes one that Mrs. Bradstreet's admirer pays a poor compliment to the lady's modesty, however he may praise her ability; and another and abler critic, the Rev. Nathaniel Ward, takes occasion in paying his respects to the singer to cast a slur upon her s.e.x:

"It half revives my chill frost-bitten blood To see a Woman once do aught that's good;"

which could hardly be described as fulsome praise. It must be remembered that in those days it was rare to see a woman attempt anything with the pen, and the prologue to the volume contains some deprecatory reference to this state of affairs:

"I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits, A Poet's pen all scorn I thus should wrong, For such despite they cast on Female wits; If what I do prove well, it won't advance, They'll say it's stoln, or else it was by chance."

This strikes the judicious reader as better sarcasm than poetry; and, indeed, when one looks through the volume it is difficult to understand the enthusiasm roused by the production. It is a very ambitious affair; the Elements, as promised by the t.i.tle page, have a great deal to say, and most of it is said in the right Ercles vein. Here, for example, is the manner in which Fire ends her little speech:

"What shall I say of Lightning and of Thunder Which kings and mighty ones amaze with wonder, Which make a Caesar (Romes) the worlds proud head, Foolish Caligula creep under 's bed.

And in a word, the world I shall consume And all therein at that great day of Doom."

This is not impressive; and we may gladly skip the rest of the remarks made by the Elements. The second quaternion of poems, as shown by the t.i.tle page, is concerned with the four Ages of man, wherein the first Age exclaims:

"What gripes of wind mine infancy did pain What tortures I in breeding teeth sustain!"

which is very excellent realism, but not highly poetical, either in sentiment or expression. The Seasons have but little more claim to a hearing than the Elements, and in the poem on the Four Monarchies, which is merely a rhymed version of Raleigh's History of the World, the only notable lines are those containing Mrs. Bradstreet's defence of her s.e.x:

"Now say, have Women worth? or have they none?

Or had they some, but with our Queen is't gone?

Nay Masculines, you have thus taxed us long; But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong.

Let such as say our s.e.x is void of Reason, Know 'tis Slander now but once was Treason."

The queen to whom these lines refer is of course Elizabeth; and we can well believe that in her day so to asperse the s.e.x as to decline to admit their possession of the attribute of reason may well have been treason sufficient, if reported to the highest quarter, to be punished by the _terrible peine forte et dure_. Although we may entirely sympathize with Mrs. Bradstreet's vigorous defence of her s.e.x from the foul slanders of the "Masculines," it is difficult to see wherein she makes good her claim to be considered the Tenth Muse, or the Hundred and Tenth, if so many could be named. Nevertheless, at her death sermons laudatory of her life and work were preached in nearly every church in New England, and her afflicted family must have been greatly comforted by the number and expressions of the elegies with which they were fairly deluged. Here is a specimen from the pen of the Rev. John Norton:

"A Funeral Eulogy, upon that Pattern and Patron of Virtue, the truly pious, peerless and matchless Gentlewoman

MRS. ANNE BRADSTREET, RIGHT PANARETES,

Mirror of her Age, Glory of her s.e.x, whose Heaven-born-Soul leaving its earthly Shrine, chose its native home, and was taken to its Rest, upon the 16th Sept. 1672."

All of which strikes us as a little hyperbolic, while the phrase "Patron of Virtue" does not appear as very happily chosen, and the reference of the reverend gentleman in the body of his "poem" to the

"Black, fatal, dismal, inauspicious day"

would be a little overdone if applied to a general catastrophe. Yet even this balderdash is of interest as showing us the estimate in which was held America's first woman of letters the first at least to attain note and thus worthy, in that respect at least, to be held as patron saint by all the lady writers of our day and country.

There were a few other women writers during the period of settlement; but they were very few. As may be gathered from the tenor of the quoted lines from Anne Bradstreet's prologue, the spirit of Puritanism was opposed to literary pursuits by a woman, at least to the degree of a profession. Indeed, it is probable that there was widespread sympathy with the sentiments of the chronicler of the following incident, in which is to be seen the regard in which were held feminine _litterati_:

"The Governor of Hartford upon Connecticut came to Boston, and brought his wife with him (a G.o.dly young woman and of special parts) who was fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason, which had been growing upon her divers years by occasion of her giving herself wholly to reading and writing, and had written many books. Her husband being very loving and tender of her was loath to grieve her; but he saw his error when it was too late. For if she had attended to her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, she had kept her wits and might have improved them usefully and honorably in the place G.o.d had set her."

It was Governor Winthrop whose domestic affliction arose from such a strange cause; and it is not unlikely that he inspired the words here set down. At all events, the comments are amusing. If all the women now writing books were to suffer like penalty with Mistress Winthrop the insane asylums would have to be considerably enlarged; but authorship seems to have grown less fatal to the fair s.e.x of late years.

For the rest, we must regard these mothers of the country in the ma.s.s rather than as individuals; and this is in accord with their true natures. They were not given to "brawling in the streets" or to "contention upon the housetops," these women of the old Puritans; they did their duties in their household and left the management of the weightier affairs of the young colony to the men. Yet they guided these same men in ways which they hardly knew; and they were in all ways fitted to be the mothers of the nation which was even then beginning to stretch its infant arms in growing strength. They were grave, decorous, and terribly strong, those wives and daughters of the Pilgrims. They took upon themselves the cares of the household, and these were not slight in those days when all provision must be garnered by the sweat of the eater's brow. There were then no shops to which one might send in search of luxuries or even necessities; the Puritan woman usually brought with her on her ship some store of household goods, some chests of clothing, some plate perhaps to furnish forth her table; for all the rest she depended upon the energy and skill of her husband, the work of her own hands, and the blessing of that G.o.d to worship whom in freedom she and hers had sought the wilderness as their home. And the spirit of that wilderness entered into her as she dwelt in its boundaries; she drew from its breast some of its quiet and strength and truth, even as the aborigines had imbibed these qualities in their long communion with nature at her best. There was to come a time, and that right soon, when the reclamation of the wilderness should have so far progressed that there would be town life, on its borders at least, and the Puritan woman would lose some of the qualities which had been imparted to her by the land to which she had come as an alien and where she remained as a daughter; but until the coming of that time she was true to the inspiration of the country in which her lot was cast. America was then a land of mystery; back from the Atlantic stretched miles upon miles of untrodden, unknown wood and plain and hill and lake and river; and the power of the unknown was felt over that little strip of coast which acknowledged though not in entire subjection the control of the white race. So the Pilgrim Mother had ever the sense of the mysterious, the unfathomable, pressing upon her, ever ready to whisper new secrets in her ear; and though she was as a rule stern and unimaginative, she was more profoundly affected by this mystery than she knew. It was to bear terrible fruit in after time in the horrors of Salem witchcraft; but for the present it only tried and proved and hardened the courage of the women who faced it with confidence in the strength of their husbands and in the protection of their G.o.d.

So to New England and Virginia there came the founders of a race led forth from home by different motives, bringing different qualities of body and mind and spirit to the formation of the people, but both foundations possessing strength upon which could be built a mighty nation. And not the men of Jamestown or Roanoke, with their fighting and their tilling, not the Pilgrim Fathers, with their stern courage and their strait creed, but the women of Virginia and the Pilgrim Mothers were those to whom must look that new nation for all its best. It was not the blood of kings and princes that came to vitalize this our land in the period of its rescue from the dominion of the lesser races, but the blood of yeomen and peasants, sprung from generations of fighters with the soil rather than with men, yet soldiers too, and so in all ways fitted for the battles they must wage with men and beasts and the earth itself ere they could win an empire for their race. And this blood comes down to us through the women of that day--the Mothers of a Nation.

CHAPTER V

THE EARLY COLONIAL PERIOD

There were many marked differences between the period of settlement and the early colonial period, which latter, for our present purpose, we may roughly cla.s.s as that extending from 1630 to 1685. Of course the most salient difference was that in the colonial epoch there first appeared the racial American as we now know him--not the red man of the forest and plain, to whom such t.i.tle was really due, but the white American, the son of the soil, but not of generations of dwellers thereupon,--the American as universally ent.i.tled to-day.

It must be remembered that there is no parallelism in the chronology of the beginnings of the North and the South. The Virginia colony was, in matter of time, far in advance of that on the sh.o.r.es of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, and the colonial period had fairly begun in the South when settlement was yet hardly established in the North. Many white children, native Americans, had succeeded Virginia Dare in the southern colony before Peregrine White made his appearance as the pioneer American of the New England dominion; and therefore the American type had to some extent become confirmed in the one section before it had been modelled in the other. So that synchronistic treatment of the development of the American race in its beginnings is impossible, and this tends to produce confusion of statement and consequently of thought. It is fortunate for our present purpose, therefore, that the development of a distinct feminine type seems to have been almost confined to New England. The Virginia woman was not markedly individual; she had certain definite characteristics, even from the first, but these seem to have been rather of environment as modifying original race than of race as taking impression from environment. There were many reasons for this, which we shall consider later in the chapter; but for the present we will leave the woman of Virginia to turn to her younger but stronger sister of the North, the American Puritan woman.

If it be true--and denial is hardly possible--that during the period of settlement women played but a small part, at least as individuals, in the general result and progress, the same statement concerning the early colonial period, at least in New England, would meet with prompt and strenuous denial at the hands of history. We are accustomed to vaunt the present as the day of feminine influence in matters of human interest; but it may be doubted if, as far as our own country is concerned, the palm must not be awarded to the early days of the Puritan settlements.

Such award may not be altogether to the liking of the fair s.e.x, since the effect of the feminine influence was almost invariably in the direction of turbulence and revolt; but that effect was very intense and formative. It was chiefly in the matters of religion, or that which pa.s.sed for such, that woman's influence was exerted and effectual; but it must be remembered that religion was the paramount subject in the consideration of the Puritan, whether male or female. None the worse for that, doubtless, were those staunch, if stern, followers of conscience; but one may be permitted to wish that they had been less unbending, less gloomy,--less Puritanical, in short,--in their ideas concerning that which they termed Christianity. As in all else, it was the women who were the extremists in this matter; and fanaticism, persecution, and enthusiasm were by the women rather than the men maintained at a height of fervor, not to say frenzy, that stopped short not even at the taking of life to further its own ends or to crush the purposes of others.

Before entering into this more particular portion of our present subject, however, it may be well to cast a hurried glance at the status of woman in the Puritan settlements when these began to attain to the dignity of colonies. As early as 1631 we find the court of Plymouth sending for the elders and charging them to urge upon the conscience of the people that they should avoid the costliness of apparel which was beginning to be noted, as a detriment to the young colony; but, unfortunately, the worshipful court did not take into consideration all the circ.u.mstances of the case, for we read that "divers of the elders'

wives were partners in the general disorder," and we may be entirely sure that the elders did not dare too strenuously to urge reform in this matter. Winthrop tells us that "little was done about it." So that even here we find feminine influence paramount, and on the side of disorder; and this was to be the history of the s.e.x in New England for many a day, even though there were to be notable exceptions to the rule thus begun.

When we read the "Twelve Good Rules" of the infant colony, we are constrained to believe that some of them were framed with especial reference to women, and that they were dictated by some sad experiences.

The twelve rules ran thus:

1. Profane no divine ordinance.

2. Touch no state matters.

3. Urge no healths.

4. Pick no quarrels.

5. Encourage no vice.

6. Repeat no grievances.

7. Reveal no secrets.

8. Maintain no ill opinions.

9. Make no comparisons.

10. Keep no bad company.

11. Make no long meals.

12. Lay no wagers.

Truly a Draconian code in its paternalism; but we are inevitably forced to the conclusion that the framers thereof had in their minds' eye their helpmeets when they laid down rules 6 and 8, while they must have smiled at one another when they wrote rule 7.

One of the first regulations of the infant colony was in regard to marriage, and ever and anon we find the Solons of the settlement laying down new legislation for the better enforcement of the marriage tie as a thing to breed accord rather than discord in the colony. It would seem that there was considerable trouble in regulating the matrimonial desires of maidens under guardianship and maid-servants, since in 1638 there was published a regulation which deserves quotation in whole, both for its quaintness of phraseology and for the light which it throws upon female servitude in the colony, whether undergone because of ties of blood or of bondage resulting from apprenticeship: