rouse their latent powers. .. . In families that I know, some little girls like
to saw wood, others to use carpenter's tools. Where these tastes are
indulged, cheerfulness and good-humor are promoted. Where they are
forbidden, because 'such things are not proper for girls,' they grow sullen
and mischievous. Fourier had observed these wants of women, as no one
can fail to do who watches the desires of little girls, or knows the ennui
that haunts grown women, except where they make to themselves a serene
little world by art of some kind. He, therefore, in proposing a great variety
of employments, in manufactures or the care of plants and animals, allows
for one-third of women as likely to have a taste for masculine pursuits,
one-third of men for feminine.7 .. . I have no doubt, however, that a large
proportion of women would give themselves to the same employments as
now, because there are circumstances that must lead them. Mothers will
delight to make the nest soft and warm. Nature would take care of that;
no need to clip the wings of any bird that wants to soar and sing, or finds
in itself the strength of pinion for a migratory flight unusual to its kind.
The difference would be that all need not be constrained to employments
for which some are unfit. Apropos of the same subject, we find Mary Wollstonecraft offering a sug
gestion which the women of the United States have already begun to carry
out. She says: Women, in particular, all want to be ladies, which is simply to have
nothing to do, but listlessly to go they scarcely care where, for they cannot
tell what. But what have women to do in society? I may be asked, but to
loiter with easy grace; surely you would not condemn them all to suckle
fools and chronicle small beer.8 No. Women might certainly study the art
of healing, and be-physicians as well as nurses. . . . Business of various kinds
they might likewise pursue, if they were educated in a more orderly man
ner. . . . Women would not then marry for a support, as men accept of
places under government, and neglect the implied duties.
6. A Polish patriot who became a captain in com-heroine': probably Moscha, who led a band of mand of a company in the insurgent army fighting three hundred women to rout the Turks during the the Russians in 1831. 'Maid of Saragossa': Maria siege of Souli, in Albania, in 1803. Agustin, who fought against the French at the 7. Charles Fourier (1772?1837), in his Utopian siege of Saragossa, in Spain, in 1808 (see Byron, treatise The New Industrial World (1829-30), Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 1812, 1.54-56). 'Maid develops these theories in his discussion of 'the of Missolonghi': an unidentified Greek, who must Little Hordes.' have made some heroic exploit during the Turkish 8. Iago on the role of women; Shakespeare's Othsieges of that town in 1822 or 1826. 'The Suliote ello!.1.162.
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MARGARET FULLER AND MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT / 1341
Men pay a heavy price for their reluctance to encourage self-help and inde
pendent resources in women. The precious meridian years of many a man of
genius have to be spent in the toil of routine, that an 'establishment' may be
kept up for a woman who can understand none of his secret yearnings,9 who
is fit for nothing but to sit in her drawing-room like a doll-Madonna in her
shrine. No matter. Anything is more endurable than to change our established
formulae about women, or to run the risk of looking up to our wives instead
of looking down on them. Sit divus, dummodo non sit vivus (let him be a god,
provided he be not living), said the Roman magnates of Romulus;1 and so men
say of women, let them be idols, useless absorbents of previous things, pro
vided we are not obliged to admit them to be strictly fellow-beings, to be
treated, one and all, with justice and sober reverence. On one side we hear that woman's position can never be improved until
women themselves are better; and, on the other, that women can never
become better until their position is improved?until the laws are made more
just, and a wider field opened to feminine activity. But we constantly hear the
