CONCLUSION.

On the whole, the outlook for the education of women in the Southern States is not discouraging. The difficult first step has been taken,-there are women college graduates here and there, and it is no longer necessary to look upon them as monstrosities. In many a Southern family, the question whether a girl shall go to college or not has become, at least, a question to be discussed. It rests largely with existing college graduates to determine whether a sentiment in favor of the higher education for women shall grow rapidly or slowly, and whether schools for "superior instruction" shall be or shall not be improved in quality. It is not necessary that every girl should go to college, but it is necessary that some should go, for there is absolutely no other way of keeping up the standard of the lower schools except by making sure that they give such instruction as will stand the test of the college entrance examinations. No more important work could be done for women than to establish a dozen preparatory schools throughout the South, similar to the Bryn Mawr school in Baltimore, for the purpose of giving Southern mothers a standard of comparison, and enabling them to exterminate, by loss of patronage, those girls' schools which are thoroughly unfitted for the performance of their work.

Men can do best, and women know it well.
Pre-eminence in each and all is yours,

Yet grant some small acknowledgment of ours."

-ANNE BRAdstreet, 1640.

"Let us be wise, and not impede the soul. Let her work as she will. Let us have one creative energy, one incessant revelation. Let it take what form it will, and let us not bind it by the past to man or woman.'

-MARGARET FULLER, 1844.

IT is difficult to disengage a single thread from the living web of a nation's literature. The interplay of influences is such, that the product spun from the heart and brain of woman alone must, when thus disengaged, lose something of its significance. In criticism, a classification based upon sex is necessarily misleading and inexact. As far as difference between the literary work of women and that of men is created by difference of environment and training, it may be regarded as accidental; while the really essential difference, resulting from the general law that the work of woman shall somehow, subtly, express womanhood, not only varies widely in degree with the individual worker, but is, in certain lines of production, almost ungraspable by criticism. We cannot rear walls which shall separate literature into departments, upon a principle elusive as the air. ''It is no more the order of nature that the especially feminine element should be incarnated pure in any form, than that the masculine energy should exist unmingled with it in any form." The experiment which, Lowell tells us, Nature tried in shaping the genius of Hawthorne, she repeats and reverses at will.

In practice, the evil effects which have followed the separate consideration of woman's work in literature are sufficiently plain. The debasement of the coin of criticism is a fatal measure. The dearest foe of the woman artist in the past has been the suave and chivalrous critic, who, judging all "female writers" by a special standard, has easily bestowed the unearned wreath.

The present paper is grounded, it will be seen, upon no preference for the Shaker-meeting arrangement which prevailed so long in our American Temple of the Muses. It has seemed desirable, in a historical review of the work of women in this country, to follow the course of their effort in the field of literature; to note the occasional impediments of the stream, its sudden accessions of force, its general tendency, and its gradual widening.

The colonial period has of course little to give us. The professional literary woman was then unknown. The verses of Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, called in flattery "the tenth Muse,' were "the fruit but of some few hours, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments." The negro girl, Phillis Wheatley, whose poetical efforts had been published under aristocratic patronage in England, when robbed of her mistress by death "resorted to marriage"-not to literature-"as the only alternative of destitution." Mrs. Mercy Warren was never obliged to seek support from that sharp-pointed pen which copied so cleverly the satiric style of Pope, and which has left voluminous records of the Revolution. She too wrote her tragedies "for amusement, in the solitary hours when her friends were abroad."

Miss Hannah Adams, born in Massachusetts in 1755, may be accepted as the first American woman who made literature her profession. Her appearance as a pioneer in this country corresponds closely in time with that of Mary Wollstonecraft in England. She wrote, at seventy-seven, the story of her life. Her account sets forth clearly the difficulties which, in her youth, had to be dealt with by a woman seriously undertaking authorship. Ill-health, which forbade her attending school, was an individual disadvantage; but she remarks incidentally on the defectiveness of the country school, where girls learned only to write and cipher, and were, in summer, "instructed by females in reading, sewing, and other kinds of work. . . . I remember that my first idea of the happiness of heaven was of a place where we should find our thirst for knowledge fully gratified." How pathetically the old woman recalls the longing of the eager girl! All her life she labored against odds;

learning, however, the rudiments of Latin, Greek, geography, and logic, "with indescribable pleasure and avidity," from some gentlemen boarding at her father's house. Becoming interested in religious controversy, she formed the plan of compiling a "View of Religions"; not at first hoping to derive what she calls "'emolument" from the work. To win bread she relied at this time upon spinning, sewing, or knitting, and, during the Revolutionary War, on the weaving of bobbin lace; afterward falling back on her scant classical resources to teach young gentlemen Latin and Greek. Meanwhile the compilation went on. "Reading much religious controversy," observes Miss Adams, "must be extremely trying to a female, whose mind, instead of being strengthened by those studies which exercise the judgment, and give stability to the character, is debilitated by reading romances and novels." This sense of disadvantage, of the meekly accepted burden of sex, pervades the autobiography; it seems the story of a patient cripple. When the long task was done, her inexperience made her the dupe of a dishonest printer, and although the book sold well, her only compensation was fifty copies, for which she was obliged herself to find purchasers, having previously procured four hundred subscribers. Fortunately she had the copyright; and before the publication of a second edition, she chanced to make the acquaintance of a clerical good Samaritan, who transacted the business for her. The emolument" derived from this second edition at last enabled her to pay her debts, and to put out a small sum upon interest. Her "History of New England," in the preparation of which her eyesight was nearly sacrificed, met with a good sale; but an abridgment of it brought her nothing, on account of the failure of the printer. She sold the copyright of her "Evidences of Christianity" for one hundred dollars in books.

64

This, then, is our starting-point: evident character and ability, at a disadvantage both in production and in the disposal of the product; imperfect educational equipment; and a hopeless consciousness of inferiority, almost amounting to an inability to stand upright mentally.

Susanna Rowson, who wrote the popular "Charlotte Temple,** may be classed as an American novelist, although not born in this country. She appears also as a writer of patriotic songs, an actress, a teacher, and the compiler of a dictionary and other school-books. "The Coquette, or the History of Eliza Wharton," by Hannah Webster Foster, was another prime favorite among the formal novels of the day.

Kind Miss Hannah Adams, in her old age, chanced to praise a certain metrical effort,-unpromisingly labeled "Jephthah's Rash Vow,"-put forth by a girl of sixteen, Miss Caroline Howard. Here occurs an indicative touch. "When I learned," says this commended Miss Caroline, "that my verses had been surreptitiously printed in a newspaper, I wept bitterly, and was as alarmed as if I had been detected in man's apparel.' Such was the feeling with which the singing-robes were donned by a maiden in 1810-a state of affairs soon to be replaced by a general fashion of feminine singing-robes, of rather cheap material. For during the second quarter of the present century conditions somewhat improved, and production greatly increased. "There was a wide manifestation of that which bears to pure ideality an inferior relationship," writes Mr. Stedman of the general body of our literature at this period. In 1848 Dr. Griswold reports that "women among us are taking a leading part"; that "the proportion of female writers at this moment in America, far exceeds that which the present or any other age in England exhibits." Awful moment in America! one is led to exclaim by a survey of the poetic field. Alas, the verse of those "Tokens," and "Keepsakes," and "Forgetme-nots," and "Magnolias," and all the rest of the annuals, all glorious without in their red or white Turkey morocco and gilding! Alas, the flocks of quasi swan-singers! They have sailed away down the river of Time, chanting with a monotonous mournfulness. We need not speak of them at length. One of them early wrote about the Genius of Oblivion; most of them wrote for it. It was not their fault that their toil increased the sum of the **Literature suited to Desolate Islands." The time was out of joint. Sentimentalism infected both continents. It was natural enough that the infection should seize most strongly upon those who were weakened by an intellectual best-parlor atmosphere, with small chance of free out-of-door currents. They had their reward. Their crude constituencies were proud of them; and not all wrought without "emolument," though it need hardly be said that verse-making was not and is not, as a rule, a remunerative occupation. Some names survive; held in the memory of the public by a few small, sweet songs on simple themes, probably undervalued by their authors, but floating now like flowers above the tide that has swallowed so many pretentious, sand-based structures.

Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney, the most prolific poetess of the period, was hailed as "the American Mrs. Hemans." A gentle and pious womanhood shone through her verse; but her books