THE MORAL INFLUENCE OF WOMEN IN AMERICAN

SOCIETY

BY ETHELBERT DUDLEY WARFIELD, LL.D.,

President, Lafayette College, Easton, Pa.

The materials for the scientific study of such questions as this are entirely wanting. Generalizations are of no scientific value unless based upon inductions from so large a number of facts as to be approximately exhaustive. Were such a collection of facts available they could not be utilized until they had been studied broadly, analyzed and classified, and reduced to system after mature and searching reflection. What I have to offer to-day is nothing more than the suggestions of one who has been an humble student of history and the political and moral sciences, sitting at the feet of such men as Professor Stubbs at Oxford and Professor Dwight at Columbia, who yet recognizes that the greatest teacher at whose feet he ever sat was a woman, whose power consisted not merely in an intellect as keen and a tongue as eloquent as ever adorned a class room, but even more in a moral purpose clear in object and fertile in resources. These are the suggestions of one who as a practicing lawyer, a busy man of affairs and a teacher in the college class room has given his chief interest to the study of human institutions. Without pretending to that scientific authority, which when only assumed is the curse and reproach of social and economic utterances, I shall merely attempt, with a few suggestive illustrations, a classification of the main forces operating in the field of investigation.

The fundamental social and political institution is the family. I can find no evidence which tends to show that it is anything less than coeval with the existence of man upon the earth. My studies lead me to believe that together with man's moral nature it is a part of the endowment of the race. Where it is found it is not an achievement of man himself, where it is wanting it has been lost by corruption and decay. In the earliest records available to us, in the recently discovered code of Hamurabi, in the book of Genesis, in the memorials of a remote past exhumed from Egyptian

tombs, in the pages of Herodotus, the family stands out a distinct and clearly conceived institution. Variations from the norm of the monogamous family appear as exceptions; the privilege of those who have been corrupted by wealth and power, the curse of those who have been demoralized by lust. The records of antiquity embodying for us the history of those races who have possessed a notable civilization are strikingly confirmed by the first accounts we possess of our Germanic ancestors, such as that of Tacitus, and by all that we know of the family among the Teutonic peoples. The rise and spread of Christianity intensified the type, and gave to the monogamous family as established in the north of Europe upon a basis of Teutonic custom and sanctioned by the Roman culture in process of assimilation, the authority of religion.

For the purpose of our inquiry the analogies that are drawn from the debaucheries of savage tribes are as worthless as conclusions that might be based upon the celibacy of the clergy as indicating the teaching of Christ in regard to the family. These forces worked out together in the great epoch of the Protestant Reformation the social life which forms the immediate starting point of any study of the influence of women in American society.

John Knox's denunciation of the "monstrous regimen of women" calls our attention to the fact that at the historical moment when the world was breaking with the past in the Renaissance and Reformation, the reactionary tendencies were enthroned in three women, Catherine de Medici, Mary Tudor, and Mary Stuart; a fact which may well call our attention to the further probability that women are ordinarily more conservative than men and that the moral weight of woman in the home is generally exerted in the perpetuation of established practices, opinions, and beliefs.

The first emigration was largely from those elements of society which most strongly represented the reformation movement in its Calvinistic form,-the Puritans of England, the Huguenots of France, and the Reformed of Germany and the Low Countries. To these were later added in great numbers the Reformed of Scotland and Ireland. The effect of the reform movement was most strikingly seen in its political teaching of the right of man to civil liberty which wrought itself out in the great movement towards constitutional government. But it was even more profoundly felt in the social movement which carried the emancipation of a few

women of exceptional culture effected in the Renaissance downwards and established it on the broad and firm foundation of moral and spiritual equality with man and laid the basis of universal education in the labors of Luther and Melancthon in Germany and in the free schools of Geneva and Holland.

The great personality of Elizabeth impressed itself upon the imagination of the English people, we may read it in the homely fact that Elizabeth replaced Mary as the favorite baptismal name for little maids in England. The Puritan code of morals withdrew men from places of public resort to the home circle; and the conditions of life in a new country magnified the value of woman when once she was lifted above the level of a drudge. The history of English puritanism is bright with many a portrait of beloved and honored wives and mothers. Green in one of the noblest passages that ever flowed from his pen has summarized for us the portrait of a Puritan gentleman as given us in his wife's memoirs:

his artistic taste,

"The figure of Colonel Hutchinson stands out from his wife's canvas with the grace and tenderness of a portrait of Van Dyck. She dwells on the personal beauty which distinguished his youth, great love for music. We miss, indeed, the passion of the Elizabethan time, its caprice, its largeness of feeling and sympathy, its quick pulse of delight; but on the other hand life gained in moral grandeur, in a sense of dignity of manhood, in orderliness and equable force. The temper of the Puritan gentleman was just, noble and self-controlled. The larger geniality of the age that had passed away was replaced by an intense tenderness within the narrower circle of the home. 'He was as kind a father,' says Mrs. Hutchinson of her husband, 'as dear a brother, as good a master, as faithful a friend as the world had.' The wilful and lawless passion of the renascence made way for a manly purity. Neither in youth nor riper years could the most fair or enticing woman ever draw him into unnecessary familiarity or dalliance. Wise and virtuous women he loved, and delighted in all pure and holy and unblamable conversation with them, but so as never to excite scandal or temptation. Scurrilous discourse even among men he abhored; and though he sometimes took pleasure in wit and mirth, yet that which was mixed with impurity he never could endure.' To the Puritan the wilfulness of life, in which the men of the Renaissance had reveled,

seemed unworthy of life's character and end. His aim was to attain self-command, to be master of himself, of his thought, and speech, and acts."

We catch a clear reflection in this nobie picture of the woma: whom such a man loved, even as she might have caught the reflection of herself as she looked into his tender eyes.

In the letters of John and Margaret Winthrop we have another portrayal of the Puritan wife and mother, and in this case of one who was one of the first American women. Let me but offer one to illustrate the very mold and fashion of the age:

Margaret Winthrop to Her Husband

Most Deare and Loveinge Husband,-I can not expres my love to you as I desire, in these poore livelesse lines, but I doe hartily wish you did see my harte how true and faythfull it is to you, and how much I doe desire to be allwayes with you, to injoy the sweet comfort of your presence. and those helps from you in sperituall and temperall dutyes which I am so unfite to performe without you. It makes me to see the want of you and wish my selfe with you, but I desire wee may be gided by God in all our wayes who is able to derect us for the best and so I will wayt upon him with pacience who is all sufficient for me. I shall not need to right much to you at this time. My brother (Goslinge) can tel you any thinge by word of mouth. I prayse God we are all heare in health as you left us, and are glad to heare the same of you and all the rest of our frends at London. My mother and my selfe remember our best love to you and all the rest, our children remember theare duty to you. and thus desirnge to be remembred in your prayers I bid my good Husband god night, littell Samerwell thinkes it is time for me to goe to bed, and so I beseech the Lord to keepe you in safety and us all heare. Farwell, my sweet husband.

Your obediente wife

MARGARET WINTHROPE.

The conditions of colonial life produced a leveling up and a leveling down. A loss in all that we think of as urbane, a gain in all that we call hardy. Men and women generally responded to the opportunities afforded them in a new country. Yet the idle and the shiftless and the dissolute remained. There was material for Hawthorne's masterpiece even in Massachusetts Bay; for the story of Agnes Suriage also; but the current ran deep and strong through simple lives, finding their inspiration and their happiness in the family, its home life, its bonds of affection, its widening circuit as younger generations cut their way westward through the forest.

The familiar picture of the Puritan father is that of a man burdened with the responsibilities of life for himself and for his children. The companion piece is a mother who is a shield and a comforter, sharing the faith of her husband, but manifesting its gentler aspects; not less anxious for the moral conduct of her offspring, but more confident of the value of a ministry of love. If the picture of the Puritan father is overdrawn for the New England Calvinist and the Pennsylvania Friend, it is entirely out of character for the Huguenot and the Southern Puritan. In their portraiture must be embodied strong sociability and a delight in the life lived by sturdy men in a land where life had much work, that was well rewarded, and few cares. The wives of such men will have the esprit of the Huguenot woman and the cheerful delight in human life, which is one of woman's fairest graces.

Throughout the colonies and, for the greater part of their history, the wife and mother dominated the home, ruling it with a light hand and a loving sway. The home life was very simple. The home training was reduced to a narrow field of purpose. The boys were to be fitted to go forth and earn a living, setting up homes for themselves as soon as possible. The girls were trained to become housewives, taking up their mother's vocation as wife and mother.

However simple the laws of etiquette may be they are very exacting. The primitive family was doubtless insistent on the law of the family. The simple rules of conduct, the regulation of speech and of manners, fell inevitably to woman, more careful of detail in such things than man, if in the end more tolerant of results. Just in proportion as the family prospered the exertion of feminine influence may be seen. We cannot dogmatically assert that feminine influence was always the cause of the prosperity of the family, and of the well being of the community. But the force of character of many a woman has been gladly acknowledged in the biography of many a successful man, and there was feminine agitation long before the first village improvement society came to birth. We can and must mark how potent a factor feminine influence is in every vigorous family and progressive community, and that for generations it was exercised through the family in the activity of the father and the children. We must observe too that in the communities where progress has been arrested or has become retrograde that the women have lost their moral tone, have become indifferent