BROTHERLESS WOMEN.
INTE are not of those who doubt women's capacity for literary 'work; but certainly, if we ever distrusted it, it would be after glancing through a number of newspapers written by women for women's benefit. There are so many of them, and they are generally so poor, so lacking alike in seriousness, and in any distinctive quality. They are not, of course, all alike ; but the majority of them leave on a man who reads them the impression that some at least of the old satires against women must have been merited, or the papers which they write for themselves could not be so full of " society " rubbish, millinery, and feeble chat upon subjects not worth discussing. We suppose the abler female writers prefer to expend their strength in papers and magazines edited by men, for even the essays intended to be instructive are often childish in all except a certain ease, rising occa- sionally to felicity, of expression. There may be an explana- tion of this in the much deeper gaps which exist between cultivated and uncultivated women, than exist between cultivated and uncultivated men ; but of the fact there can be no doubt whatever. In the last number of Woman, for example, a lady tries to tell us what we think most men and all women would be glad to hear, her opinion as to the difference which the absence of sisters makes to the young men of a family. That is a subject which, ably treated, might really add to the general knowledge upon a question of first-class importance, the question, in fact, whether the English and Americans, who wish the sexes to associate in early life, are or are not wiser than the Con- tinentals, who are immovably convinced that it is better, so far as possible, to seclude them from each other. All that the writer has to say, however, is that men without sisters are apt to regard women as goddesses, know nothing what- ever of the mysteries of feminine dress, cannot realise how expensive dress is, and never understand that women occasionally use hair to improve their locks which is not their own. There is certainly no instruction in that, and we should be inclined to add, very little truth. Observing many families from the standpoint of many years, we should say that men without sisters tend rather to want of consideration for women, to lack deference for them rather than to be oppressed with it, and above all, to make the greatest of all the blunders which one sex makes about the other, that of thinking of them in groups. Men with sisters know too well that Clara and Lucy are not alike, to assign qualities to " women " as such, and acquire at least some idea of those compensations in character, which if we forget, we can by no possibility understand any human being. As to their ignor- ance and consequent reverence, it is a fallacy, as any one may perceive who looks round among his acquaintance. He will find nine times out of ten that the men who have made horrid blunders in their marriages have had good sisters, and have acquired in observing them the belief that all women are better than all men. It is the many-sistered men who are the most reverential. It is the sisterless men who are curious, who are interested in female chiffons, and who mark little differences of habit and conversation and taste with a permanent under-feeling of contempt. If sisterless men are so over-reverential, so a fortiori ought old bachelors to be, and by the consent of the ages as written in all literatures, they are not. The writer in Woman suggests that elates
less men adore readily, and make bad husbands, because they are so sure to be disillusioned ; but we should say that the truth is a much broader thing, and that while no men are so cynically contemptuous of women as men with bad or disagreeable sisters, men who like their sisters, enjoy their conversation and understand them, make of all men the best husbands, or at all events—for goodness and badness depend on other things than circumstance—make the husbands it is easiest to get along with. They are not fretted with peculiarities which they know from the beginning are only
those of sex. If eisterless men are so inclined to reverence women, then the great objection to public-school life, that it herds boys too exclusively together, and destroys home influences, is clearly wrong ; and the best place in which to train lads into good husbands and fathers would be a kind of monastery.
The true loss, of course, both of sisterlese men and brother- less women is the loss of the best opportunity of comprehen- sion, the comprehension which is gained at a time when both sexes are frank, when neither feels any necessity for acting ; and when each rather admires itself for its own distinctive qualities. The girl, to put it roughly, despises her brother for want of mental quickness ; while the boy despises his sister because she cannot climb. The loss to brotherless women is, we think, on the whole, the greater. They cannot make- up for it so well by intimacy with cousins and friends, and are apt to grow up entirely without that spirit of camaraderie which all men find in all women so delightful. They never, or most rarely, understand the peculiar perversities of young men, their special vanities, the reasons which induce them "to put on side," or the virtues which often make them most provoking. They get hold of the idea so often expressed in Mrs. Oliphant's novels, that men are unaccountable and uncomfortable works of God, with impulses and thoughts and aberrations past all ordinary understanding. They tend to stand on the de- fensive, to ask, before all things, deference, and to become in conversation just a little priggish. A nunnery is a school of all the virtues, but not of comprehension or of tolerance, and a brotherless household, unless, as some. times happens, the father becomes hie daughters' elder brother, is apt to be a nunnery. There is a disposition in such households not to recognise the good in men, to fear them, in fact, slightly, and in after married life to stand apart from them, as if somehow the difference of mental sex forbade perfect comprehension. The single daughter of a house without sons is of all women the most apt to grow into a self-sufficing prig, and a number of daughters without brothers will often display in a less degree the same proclivity. There is often, too, a furious spirit of rivalry. Brotherless women have had no chance of learning, as children, in what they can rival or surpass men, and in what they must infallibly, by the operation of the mere laws of nature, be outstripped. They have not the opportunity of learning, without thinking, wherein men intend to rule, have ruled from the beginning, and will rule to the end. It is not, as a rule, from the houses where there are sons and daughters both, that the mannish women come, but from the houses where there are no sons, or where the sons are exceptionally weak. The boys in a mixed household beat the girls in all boy's work so easily, so continuously, and so permanently, that rivalry in their pursuits dies away, and the girls turn, without effort and without much disappointment, to their own proper field. Above all, they learn early and without pain the grand art, first perhaps of practical feminine arts, of "putting up with things," including a certain amount of what many women now describe as oppression,—the greater expenditure, for instance, on boys, who are destined to maintain households; their greater liberty, which proceeds from unalterable circumstances and cannot be changed ; and their much later introduction into the active life and business of the world. The girls with brothers, we think we may assert with confidence, are as wives much less liable to get irritated with their husbands than the girls without them.
The substance of it all, of course, is that the sexes benefit greatly by early knowledge of each other, and the best way to ensure that knowledge without any attendant evil, is the most permanently pressing of all the social problems. On the whole, perhaps the Americans, who allow almost boundless liberty to their daughters, have succeeded best ; but they have the advantage of a feeling of respect for women which spreads through all classes, and protects girls as effectively as the passionate pride which avenges the slightest insult to them at once with the pistol or the knife; and they pay one heavy price for their success. The single drawback to the American girl, who is other- wise a very wonderful product of modern civilisation, is that she is apt to be a spoiled child. American girls, however, really understand their comrades of the other sex, and are seldom unhappy in marriage, failure marking itself in quiet alienation rather than in open quarrels. The British system, too, works well, but it has one imperfection, an absence of sufficient intimacy between persons who in the end will marry. The girls may understand men fairly well, yet hardly meet in any frank converse the men who, as they know, in- tend to propose to them. That defect in our system, is how- ever, remedying itself slowly with the general increase of social liberty and the better education of women. The Swiss, too, believe in their own plan, which is, we are told, among the better classes to keep up "circles," composed of friends often hereditary, whose children are often at least as familiar with each other as cousins are among ourselves, using the christian name for example habitually from the first, and we can readily conceive that the plan, if carefully regulated, works with a good deal of ease. The Continental plan, which is based on a theory of seclusion, the girl really knowing no one except her father until she is married, seems to English- men the worst of all ; but in country districts it is said to work sufficiently well, and it is hard to believe that great and highly civilised racee would persist for centuries in a blunder as to the arrangement of their own family lives. Still, the English principle is far better ; and we cannot doubt that in carrying it out, families in which the sexes are mixed possess, often without the slightest consciousness of it, a very great advantage. Acquaintance with each others' dress does not appear to us quite so important as it does to the writer in Woman; but that the sexes which must for ever live together should understand from childhood something of each others' characters must surely be beneficial.
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