Womanhood

What is womanhood? Is there any more important question for young women to consider than this? It should be the highest ambition of every young woman to possess a true womanhood. Earth presents no higher object of attainment. To be a woman, in the truest and highest sense of the word, is to be the best thing beneath the skies. To be a woman is something more than to live eighteen or twenty years; something more than to grow to the physical stature of women; something more than to wear flounces, exhibit dry-goods, sport jewelry, catch the gaze of lewd-eyed men; something more than to be a belle, a wife, or a mother. Put all these qualifications together, and they do but little toward making a true woman. A true woman exists independent of outward attachments. It is not wealth, or beauty of person, or connection, or station, or power of mind, or literary attainments, or variety and richness of outward accomplishments, that make the woman.

 It is the consent of all historians that woman has been elevated in proportion as knowledge and virtue have advanced among mankind. No one can read the history of the world without seeing that woman is upward bound. No one can look at woman's present estate, her devotion to vanity, her meager knowledge, her narrow culture, her circumscribed sphere of action, her monotonous and aimless life, without feeling that she has many long steps yet to take before she will attain to her true position, her full womanhood.

Men, as well as women, have failed to comprehend the true idea of womanhood. Both have been satisfied with too little in woman. They have borne with the narrowness of woman's culture and the aimlessness of her life, believing it all right. It is a fact—a glaring, solemn, humiliating fact—that woman is not what she should be. She is weak, thoughtless, heartless, compared with what she should be. Look at the world. Woman is said to be mistress of her home. The mother is called the maker of her children's characters. Is it so? See the drunkards, tipplers, tobacco-mongers, libertines, gamblers, swearers, brawlers, robbers, murderers. There is a great army of them. They all constitute a large share of the men and some of the women of our world.

Where are the mothers who will acknowledge that they made the characters of these people? Where are the mothers who teach their boys to chew, and smoke, and swear? to drink, and brawl, and fight? to do those deeds of darkness which the sun refuses to shine upon? Somebody has taught them these things. If their mothers did not, who did? If their mothers had been wise and forcible, as they should have been, would the children have been so easily led astray? If women had that influence which some attribute to them, would these things be so? If they had the influence they ought to have, would they be so?

Talk as we will about woman's influence, it is not what it should be. We all know that if woman ruled the world, she would have less low, drunken, rowdy, sensual men. It has long been a hollow compliment which man has paid to woman to tell her that she rules the world. But no man believes it when he says it. Every woman should spurn the compliment as slanderous. Woman would rule the world better if it was under her control. Why are so many young men reckless, drunken, profane, and lawless? It is not because young women would have them so. Far from it. Their female associates do not hold half the control over them that they ought.