once again i have visited that strange city in dream-land, where men, and only men, were the housekeepers and bridgets.
it is midnight: i have just awakened from my dream, and risen to pen it down, lest in the morning i should find my memory treacherous. my good husband has protested against writing by gas-light, and very gravely given his opinion on midnight writing; and – ah, well! he is sound asleep now, i see; and so at once to my dream.
i thought my husband and i were walking along some beautiful streets, when all at once i exclaimed, “why, husband! here we are together in that very city i told you about, where the men are the housekeepers and kitchen-girls. oh, i’m glad! let us find out every thing about these inhabitants, both men and women.”
while we were talking together, several gentlemen, pale and delicate in appearance, passed us. some were dressed in calico suits, trimmed with little ruffles – ruffles round the bottom of the pants, ruffles down the front and round the tails of the coats; and on both sides of the button-holes of their vests were rows of small ruffles. from some of their little flat hats flowed ribbon-streamers; while on others were placed, jauntily and conspicuously, feathers and flowers.
more and more gentlemen passed us. what a variety of costume! i was almost bewildered; gentlemen in red, green, yellow, drab, and black suits, trimmed in such elaborate and fanciful styles! some suits were parti-colored; that is to say, the pants perhaps yellow or red, the vest blue, the coat green, crimson, or drab. some of these suits were trimmed with lace: lace down the sides of the pants and round the bottoms; lace round the edges of the coat, and beautifully curving hither and thither as a vine, over the backs and down the fronts of the coats; and also over the fronts of the vests. some suits were almost covered with elaborate embroidery, or satin folds, or piping, or ribbon, while bows and streamers of the same or contrasting colors, according to taste, were placed on the backs of the coats, shoulders, and, here and there, on the vest and pants. it really makes me laugh at this moment to think of that comical sight. their head-dresses, too, were most fantastic; flowers, bits of lace, tulle or blonde, feathers, and even birds, were mixed in endless profusion with ribbon, tinsel, glitter, and (ad libitum) grease. many of these gentlemen carried little portemonnaies, which hung on their jewelled fingers by tiny chains. others carried fans, some edged with feathers, or covered with pictures, or inlaid with pearl, &c., varying, i supposed, according to the purse.
each of these gentlemen seemed particularly interested in every other gentleman’s costume; for they turned and looked at each other, while several exclamations reached my ear; such as, “what a superb suit!” “what a splendid coat!” “what a darling vest!” “what a love of a hat!”
these gentlemen had a swinging gate, something like that of a sailor, that made their coat-tails move to and fro as they walked. i noticed, too, that they were very careful of their pants, which were decidedly wide; for on passing over a gutter or soiled part of the pavement, they carefully and daintily raised the legs of the pants with the finger and thumb. this impressed me favorably as to their love of cleanliness; for otherwise the laces, ribbons, embroidery, or ruffles which graced the bottoms of their pants, would have come in contact with the mud of the streets.
as we stood looking at those strange gentlemen, my husband suggested the idea of a masquerade. then suddenly i found myself alone, and flitting from dwelling to dwelling, from home to home; and everywhere the gentlemen were dressed in flimsy materials, and all more or less decked with trimmings.
i found the majority of gentlemen busy with needlework, some doing the sewing of the family; but many, very many, with their sons, dressed in delicate morning suits, doing fancy-work. some were working little cats and dogs on footstools; others were busy with embroidery, fancy knitting, and all the delicate nothings that interest only ladies in this waking world of ours.
as i listened to their conversation, which was generally composed of gossip, fashion, or love-matters, – for the male sex took the fashion-books, and not ladies, and these i found in the majority of homes, headed “gentlemen’s magazine of fashions,” – as i listened to their conversation, i repeat, and observed all this, my soul was filled with unutterable sadness. “alas! alas!” i said: “what means this degradation? why have the lords of creation become mere puppets or dolls? where is the loftiness and intellectuality of man – noble man!”
just then i was aroused from my reverie by an aspiring young gentleman who was sewing some ruffles on the legs of his pants, saying to his father, “i don’t see, papa, why men can not earn money as well as women: i want to learn a business.”
“that is all nonsense,” replied his father: “your business is to get married. there is no necessity for a boy to learn a business; what you have to do is to learn to be a good housekeeper; for you will be married some day, and will have to attend to your children and your wife; and that is enough business for any man.”
“but i may not marry,” said the boy; “and i know i will not, unless i can get a woman with money, that can give me a good home.”
then they talked about mr. some-one – i could not catch the name – that had married well: his wife was worth over fifty thousand dollars, and was very kind to him, taking him to theaters and concerts, and wherever he wanted to go: she let him, too, have all the dress he wanted. she had only one fault: she would not allow him to go anywhere unless she accompanied him.
oh! my soul was sick with sympathy and pity for that race of poor degraded men! “what does it mean?” i asked myself: “why are they in this pitiable condition?”
then, for the first time, i realized that this city was the capital of a great nation; that women, and only women, were the lawmakers, judges, executive officers, &c., of the nation; that every office of honor and emolument was filled by women; that all colleges and literary institutions, with very few exceptions, were all built for women, and only open to women, and that men were all excluded. i went from school to school, from college to college; and, ah! the beauty, the dignity, of those women! science and art had truly crowned them with their own best gifts: their faces seemed to me almost divine; and, ah! what a contrast to the vain, silly, half-educated men who staid at home, or paraded the streets, thinking principally of fashion and dress! for these women were everywhere dressed in plain, substantial clothing, which lent them such a charm that i realized instinctively there was something about them far more beautiful than beauty.
as i looked upon these women in the colleges, as students and professors, as lawyers, judges, and jurors, as i looked upon them in the lecture-room and the pulpit, the house of representatives and the senate-chamber, – yea, everywhere, – i observed their quiet dignity, clothed in their plain flowing robes; and i was almost tempted to believe that nature had intended – in this part of the world at least – that woman, and only woman, should legislate and govern; and that here, if nowhere else, woman should be superior to man.
in the galleries of the legislative bodies were hundreds of gentlemen, young and old, looking on, and listening to the speeches made by the lady members. how they fluttered and fanned and whispered and smiled!
“alas, for fallen man!” i said. then, in an instant, i had, as by one glance, looked into the pockets of every lady and gentleman present, and also into the acquisitive pockets of the brain of each; and the result proved to me, that, as man held the purse with us, so woman held the purse in that wonderful dream-land. to obtain money from their wives, those weak, silly men would often resort to cajolery and deceit. only from their wives could they obtain money for dress or any thing else; and so, as by common consent, nearly all the husbands had seemingly decided that they had a right to get all they could out of their wives, without any reference to the question whether the wife could afford it or not. thus i found, that the woman being the purse-holder, she the giver and he the receiver, worked most disastrously; for it made the interests of wife and husband separate: the interest of the wife was not the interest of the husband, his greatest care being to get all he could, and spend all he could get.
i left those buildings, and took the street-cars. here those noble-looking, stately women escorted the gentlemen to the cars, stood while the gentlemen walked in first, then demurely stepped on board, and paid the car-fare for both. what impressed me as much as any thing i saw was, with what matter-of-course style the gentlemen, in their dainty, flimsy, flying garments, occupied the seats of the cars, while the ladies stood; or, if a lady had a seat, with what noble demeanor she rose and gave it up if a gentlemen stepped on board. i saw that those ladies took gentlemen to theaters and places of amusement; ladies took those gentlemen to church, and very kindly saw them safely home; ladies told those gentlemen how beautiful they looked, how prettily they were dressed, &c.; and i saw that it gave these poor, weak-minded men much pleasure.
in ice-cream saloons and other places of refreshment, these gentlemen were as kindly and as gallantly taken by the ladies, who, in all cases, paid for the refreshments.
i looked into the churches, which were principally filled with elegantly-dressed gentlemen. “ah!” i said to myself, “in religion these down-trodden men find some consolation;” but, in an instant, i was shocked by realizing that more than half went from custom, or to show their dress and see the fashions.
i looked into the prayer-meetings, and (being, of course, all the time invisible) was also present at the confessionals; and in both, the excess of men who attended was a remarkable fact.
men got up sewing-societies and mite-societies; and, in these, many sad, sorrowful men found a few moments, sometimes, of happy, useful existence.
occasionally, in those public places i found a man who had risen above his fellows, who had become famous in literature. i met with some male poets, and several conversant with science in a degree equal to the best of women. and i said to myself,” if these few men have proved themselves equal to the best of women, then is it not strong presumptive evidence that all these men would be equal to women, were they equally educated?”
then i seemed in my dream to grasp the cause of all this difference between the sexes; and that these beautiful, noble women might have been in the same deplorable condition had they been trained and educated as these degraded men, – without a motive in life, limited in education and culture, shut out of every path to honor or emolument, and reduced to the condition of paupers on the bounty of the opposite sex. i saw that the disadvantages under which one sex thus labored constituted a curse that extended to both; and that, though the drudgery of the kitchen had been removed, it was not the millennium, by any means, as i had supposed in my last dream, but only the beginning of the millennium. man was not the only sufferer, but the wrong due to man acted and re-acted on woman; for men, being defrauded in their education, and nearly all avenues to pecuniary independence closed to them, marriage, with those half-educated, dependent creatures called men, was necessarily their highest ambition. there was no other way for them to obtain wealth or a home; hence they devoted all their powers to the one grand object of catching a woman with money; hence woman became also the sufferer, being often trapped into marriage by one of these silly, worthless men, who had learned well the arts and schemes of wife-catching.
i looked into the thought-cells of these ladies’ brains, and found stored therein, in almost every instance, a decided belief that men constituted the inferior, and women the superior sex.
there is a bright side, however, to every picture; and even my dream had its bright side. for instance: i had dreamed that i looked in on the gentlemen with pale face and haggard countenance, of whom i spoke in my first dream as a man that “did his own work;” and now, instead of toil and anxiety about meals, washing, ironing, &c., he was in the garden with his children, planting vegetable-seeds and flower-seeds; and as i with pleasure noted his returning health and strength, i listened to his talk with the children, whom he was interesting with a story.
how i lingered with that gentleman! i accompanied him to the house, and saw him reading; i looked over his book, and was delighted to find that he was studying physiology. by and by he began to talk with the children about the nerves, which he called electric wires carrying messages to the brain; which delighted the children: and i said in deep reverence, “thank god, that man has been emancipated from the kitchen! he will work out his own salvation: the golden key of the universe has he grasped with his own right hand, and it will open to him every door in the arcana of nature. not for ever will man be considered woman’s inferior.”
then, like a flash, came to me the mental and moral status of every man in that great country; and i realized that with emancipation from the kitchen had come a hungering and thirsting for education, for mental aliment.
then i turned; and, lo! i stood in the street, where great posters caught my eye: –
“man’s rights!
a lecture on man’s rights,”
i read.
fain would i have attended a lecture on man’s rights; but, in my eagerness to do so, i awoke.
p.s. – it is morning; and, to my great joy, i have had another dream. as i retired to my bed after writing the above, instantly dreamland was present, and the thread taken up where it was dropped. i have attended lectures on man’s rights, and man’s rights conventions; all of which i must write down at once, even if my husband has to go without his breakfast; for dreams so often take to themselves wings and fly away!
