The same demoralizing principle of subordination runs through the whole position of women.  Many a husband makes of his wife a doll, dresses her in fine clothes, gives or withholds money according to his whims, and laughs or frowns if she asks any questions about his business.  If only a petted slave, she naturally develops the vices of a slave; and when she wants more money for more fine clothes, and finds her husband out of humor, she coaxes, cheats, and lies.  Many a woman half ruins her husband by her extravagance, simply because he has never told her frankly what his income is, or treated her, in money matters, like a rational being.  Bankruptcy, perhaps, brings both to their senses; and thenceforward the husband discovers that his wife is a woman, not a child.  But for want of this whole families and generations of women are trained to deception.  I knew an instance where a fashionable dressmaker in New York urged an economical young girl, about to be married, to buy of her a costly trousseau or wedding outfit.

“But I have not the money,” said the maiden.  “No matter,” said the complaisant tempter:  “I will wait four years, and send in the bill to your husband by degrees.  Many ladies do it.”  Fancy the position of a pure young girl, wishing innocently to make herself beautiful in the eyes of her husband, and persuaded to go into his house with a trick like this upon her conscience!  Yet it grows directly out of the whole theory of life which is preached to many women,—­that all they seek must be won by indirect manoeuvres, and not by straightforward living.

It is a mistaken system.  Once recognize woman as born to be the equal, not inferior, of man, and she accepts as a right her share of the family income, of political power, and of all else that is capable of distribution.  As it is, we are in danger of forgetting that woman, in mind as in body, was-born to be upright.  The women of Charles Reade—­never by any possibility moving in a straight line where it is possible to find a crooked one—­are distorted women; and Nature is no more responsible for them than for the figures produced by tight lacing and by high-heeled boots.  These physical deformities acquire a charm, when the taste adjusts itself to them; and so do those pretty tricks and those interminable lies.  But after all, to make a noble woman you must give a noble training.

VIII

SUFFRAGE

“No such phrase as virtual representation was ever known in law or constitution.  It is altogether a subtlety and illusion, wholly unfounded and absurd.  We must not be cheated by any such phantom or any other trick of law and politics.”—­JAMES OTIS, quoted by Charles Sumner in speech, March 7, 1866.

DRAWING THE LINE

When in Dickens’s “Nicholas Nickleby” the coal-heaver calls at the fashionable barber’s to be shaved, the barber declines that service.  The coal-heaver pleads that he saw a baker being shaved there the day before.  But the barber points out to him that it is necessary to draw the line somewhere, and he draws it at bakers.