Letters to Young Women
LETTER II.
THE TRANSITION FROM GIRLHOOD TO WOMANHOOD.
O mirth and innocence! O milk and water!
Byron.
Ye happy mixtures of more happy days!
We figure to ourselves the thing we like, and then we build it up as
Henry Taylor
chance will have it, on the rock or sand.
EVERY young woman who has arrived at twenty years of age has passed through three dispensations — the chaotic, the transitional, and the crystalline. The chaotic usually terminates with the adoption of the long skirt. Then commences the transitional dispensation, involving the process of crystallization. This process may go on feebly for years, or it may proceed so rapidly that two years will complete it, In some women, it is never completed, in consequence of a lack of inherent vital force, or a criminal disregard of the requisite conditions. This transitional dispensation, which is better characterized by calling it the silly dispensation, is so full of dangers that it calls for a separate letter ; and this I propose to write now.
The silly dispensation or stage of a young woman’s life is marked by many curious symptoms, some of them indicative of disease. As the cutting of the natural teeth is usually accompanied by various disorders, so the cutting of the spiritual teeth in women is very apt to exhibit its results in abnormal manifestations. They sometimes eat slate pencils and chalk, and some have been known to take kindly to broken bits of plastering. Others take a literary turn, and, not content with any number of epistles to female acquaintances, send in contributions to the press, which the friendly and appreciative editor kindly and carefully returns, or as kindly and carefully loses, or fails to receive. Others still take to shopping and dawdling with clerks who have dawning beards, red cheeks, and frock coats with outside pockets, from which protrude white handkerchief-tips. Still others yoke themselves in pairs, drawn together by sympathetic attraction, and by community of mental exercise on the subject of beaux. You shall see them walking through the streets, locked arm in arm, plunging into the most charming confidences, or, if you happen to sleep in the house with them, you shall hear them talking in their chamber until, at midnight, the monotonous hum of their voices has soothed you into sleep; and the same voices, with the same unbroken hum, shall greet your ears in the morning. Others take to solitude and long curls. They walk with their eyes down, murmuring to themselves, with the impression that everybody is looking at them.
If a young woman can be safely carried through this dispensation, the great step of life will have been gained: This is the era of hasty marriages, deathless attachments which last until they are superseded, and deliberately formed determinations to live a maiden life, which endure until the reception of an offer of marriage. If, during this period, a young woman be at home, engaged more or less in the duties of the household, or, if she be engaged in study, with the healthful restraints and stimulus of general society about her, it is very well for her. But if she be among her mates constantly, with nothing to do, or if she be shut up in a boarding-school conducted on the high pressure principle, where imagination is stimulated by restraint, and disobedience to law is provoked by its unreasonableness, it is indeed very bad for her. It is probable that the theatre is a school of vice rather than of virtue, that the ball-room is a promoter of dissipation, and that indiscriminate society has its temptations and its dangers; but a female boarding school, shut off from general society by law, its members lacking free exercise in the open air, denied the privilege of daily amusements, and presided over by teachers who fail to understand the nature of the precious material they have in charge, is as much worse for mind and morals than all these combined, as can well be imagined. I know female boarding-schools that are properly conducted, whose teachers know what a girl is, and what she needs, and who contrive to lead her through this transitional passage of her life into a healthful and rational womanhood ; and I know others whose very atmosphere is that of fever. I know boarding-schools where beaux are the everlasting topic of conversation, and where an unhealthy imagination is so stimulated by irrational restraints and mutual fellow-feeding, that the foundation of nearly every character is necessarily laid in rottenness.
If any young woman, in a boarding-school or out of it, should find herself a subject of any of the diseases which I have pointed out, she should seek a remedy at once. If she finds herself moved to go shopping for the simple purpose of talking with the clerks, let her remember that she is not only doing an immodest and unbecoming thing, but that she is manifesting the symptom of that which is a dangerous mental disease. To begin with, she is doing a very silly thing. Again, she is doing that which compromises her in the eyes of all sensible young men. If she finds herself possessed with unaccountable proclivities to a mineral diet, or a foggy out-reaching for something or other that manifests itself in profound confidences with one similarly afflicted, or any one of a hundred absorbing sentimentalisms, let her remember that she is mentally and morally sick, and that, for her own comfort and peace, she should seek at once for a remedy. Her only safety is in seeking direct contact with a healthier and more advanced life, and by securing healthful occupation for all her powers, intellectual and physical. Dreams, imaginations, silly talk and twaddle about young men, yearnings after sympathetic hearts, the dandling of precious little thoughts about beaux on the knees of fancy, and all that sort of nonsense should be discarded — thrust out of the sacred precincts of the mind — as if they were so many foul reptiles. Get out of this feverish and unhealthy frame just as soon as possible, and walk forth into a more natural, dignified, and womanly life.
A young woman at this age should remember that her special business is to fit herself for the duties of life. I would not deny to her the society of young men, when she has time for it, and a proper opportunity, but she should remember that she has nothing to do with beaux, nothing to do with thoughts of and calculations for marriage, nothing to do but to become, in the noblest way, woman. She should remember that she is too young to know her own mind, and that, as a general thing, it is not worth knowing. Girlish attachments and girlish ideas of men are the silliest things in all the world. If you do not believe it, ask your mothers. Ninety-nine times in a hundred they will tell you that they did not marry the boy they fancied, before they had a right to fancy anybody. If you dream of matrimony for amusement, and for the sake of killing time, I have this to say, that, considering the kind of young men you fancy, you can do quite as well by hanging a hat upon a hitching-post, and worshipping it through your chamber window. Besides, it is during this period of unsettled notions and readily shifting attachments that a habit of flirting and a love of it are generated.
I suppose that coquetry, in its legitimate form, is among a woman’s charms, and that there is a legitimate sphere for its employment, for, except in rare natures, it is natural thing with your sex. Nature has ordained that men shall prize most that which shall cost an effort, and while it has designed that you shall at some time give your heart and hand to a worthy man, it has also provided a way for making the prize he seeks an apparently difficult one to win. It is a simple and beautiful provision for enhancing your value in his eyes, so as to make a difficult thing of that which you know to be unspeakably easy. If you hold yourselves cheaply, and meet all advances with open willingness and gladness, the natural result will be that your lover will tire of you. I introduce this subject here, not because I wish to, but because I am compelled to, in order to explain what I have to say upon the habit and love of flirting.
To become a flirt is to metamorphose into a disgusting passion that which by natural constitution is a harmless and useful instinct. This instinct of coquetry, which makes a woman a thing to be won, and which I suppose all women are conscious of possessing in some degree, is not a thing to be cultivated or developed, at all. It should be left to itself, unstimulated and unperverted, and if, in the formative stage of your womanhood, by initiating shallow attachments and heartlessly breaking them, or seeking to make impressions for the sake of securing attentions which are repaid by insult and negligence, you do violence to your nature, you make of yourself a woman whom your own sex despise, and whom all sensible men who do not mean to cheat you with insincerities as mean as yours, are afraid of. They will not love, and they will not trust you. This instinct, then, is not a thing to be harmlessly played with ; and I know of few more unhappy and disgusting sights than a girl bringing into her womanhood this passion — harmful alike to herself and others.
The natural and inevitable influence of the devotion of your thoughts — spoken, written, or unexpressed — to beaux and the subject of marriage, while your mind is undergoing a process of crystallization, is to deter that process, to vitiate it, and to make you unworthy in many ways. It is all-important to you at this time to have the counsel of a good, sensible woman, who shall be your senior by at least ten years. She should be a married woman, and, by all means, your mother, unless there be some natural bar to entire communion between you. Do nothing, and give a cherished entertainment to no thoughts which you are unwilling to reveal to this woman. If your companions persist in keeping subjects of this character before your mind, leave them — cut them.
It is necessary that, while your education is actively in progress, your perceptions be kept healthful, and your sentiments unperverted by thoughtless tampering with a subject which you will some time come to know is one of the most serious moment. It spoils a girl to get the idea into her head, that marriage is the chief end of woman, that education is but a preparation for matrimony, and that accomplishments are nothing but contrivances for catching a husband. And now, young woman, whose eye traces these lines, I ask you to decide how much of this letter belongs to you. How are you living? What is the principal subject of your thoughts? I know that I reveal some young women to themselves; and I only fear that they will find themselves so bound to their seductive thoughts and fancies — so dissipated and enervated by them — that they have not moral strength enough left to break away from them.