BRITISH HISTORY II. TEXTS
Florence Nightingale: Cassandra
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Now, why is it more ridiculous for a man than for a woman to do worsted work and drive out every day in the carriage? Why should we laugh if we were to see a parcel of men sitting round a drawing-room table in the morning, and think it all right if they were women?
Is man's time more valuable than woman's? or is the difference between man and woman this, that woman has confessedly nothing to do ?
Women are never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted, except "suckling their fools"; and women themselves have accepted this, have written books to support it, and have trained themselves so as to consider whatever they do as not of such value to the world or to others, but that they can throw it up at the first "claim of social life." They have accustomed themselves to consider intellectual occupation as a merely selfish amusement, which it is their " duty " to give up for every trifler more selfish than themselves.
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When shall we see a woman making a study of what she does? Married women cannot; for a man would think, if his wife undertook any great work with the intention of carrying it out, of making anything but a sham of it--that she would "suckle his fools and chronicle his small beer" less well for it,--that he would not have so good a dinner--that she would destroy, as it is called, his domestic life.
The intercourse of man and woman--how frivolous, how unworthy it is! Can we call that the true vocation of woman--her high career? Look round at the marriages which you know. The true marriage--that noble union, by which a man and woman become together the one perfect being--probably does not exist at present upon earth.
It is not surprising that husbands and wives seem so little part of one another. It is surprising that there is so much love as there is. For there is no food for it. What does it live upon--what nourishes it? Husbands and wives never seem to have anything to say to one another. What do they talk about? Not about any great religious, social, political questions or feelings. They talk about who shall come to dinner, who is to live in this lodge and who in that, about the improvement of the place, or when they shall go to London. If there are children, they form a common subject of some nourishment. But, even then, the case is oftenest thus,--the husband is to think of how they are to get on in life; the wife of bringing them up at home.
But any real communion between husband and wife--any descending into the depths of their being, and drawing out thence what they find and comparing it--do we ever dream of such a thing? Yes, we may dream of it during the season of "passion," but we shall not find it afterwards. We even expect it to go off, and lay our account that it will. If the husband has, by chance, gone into the depths of his being, and found there anything unorthodox, he, oftenest, conceals it carefully from his wife,--he is afraid of "unsettling her opinions."
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The more complete a woman's organisation, the more she will feel it, till at last there shall arise a woman, who will resume, in her own soul, all the sufferings of her race, and that woman will be the Saviour of her race.