Social condition of woman

— My friends, in the time when I lived among you it often happened that I made serious reflections on the lot of woman.

My numerous and laborious studies always left a moment for those cherished subjects. Every night, before sleeping, I prayed for those poor sisters so unhappy and so despised, imploring God for better days and asking ideas for some means of making the outcast ones progress. At times, in a dream, I saw them free, loved, esteemed, having a legal and moral existence in society, in the family, surrounded by respect and care; I saw them transfigured. And that spectacle was so consoling that I awoke weeping. But ah! the sad reality then appeared to me in its mournful truth, and at times I lost hope that better days would come. Those days have come, my friends. There are few among you who do not, intuitively, feel the right of woman; many deny it in fact, although they acknowledge it mentally. But it is no less true that there is for her hope and joy amid deep miseries and appalling disillusionments.

A few days ago, paying attention to a circle of ladies distinguished by their position, their beauty and their fortune, I said to myself: These are all perfume; they have been loved and flattered. How they must love! how they must be good mothers, charming wives, respectful daughters! they know much, they love and give much. What a strange error!… All those fresh faces were lying, beneath stereotyped smiles; they prattled, they spoke of clothes, of races, of fashions; they spoke with charming grace, with mischief, but they did not concern themselves with their children, nor with their husbands, nor with literary questions, nor with our geniuses, nor with their country, nor with liberty! Ah! beautiful heads, but brains… nothing! Charming birds, slender, elegant; it is the etiquette; their pretension: to please, to touch upon everything and to know nothing. The wind carries off their prattle and leaves no trace; they are neither daughters, nor wives, nor mothers. They are ignorant of their country, its past, its sufferings, its grandeur. She has entrusted her children to a hireling! Intimate happiness is a fiction. They are fascinating butterflies, with beautiful wings… but, afterward… I also took notice of a group of young working women. What did they know, they of all people? Nothing… like the others… nothing of life, nothing of duty, nothing of reality! They envied, that is all. Were they given the right to understand themselves, to esteem themselves, to respect themselves? Were they made to understand God, His grandeur, His will? No, a thousand times no!… The Church teaches them luxury; they work for luxury, and it is again luxury that knocks at their garret, saying: Open to me; I am the ribbon, the lace, the silk, the fine dishes, the delicate wines. Open, and you shall be beautiful; you shall have every fancy, every dazzlement!… It is for this that so many of them are the shame of their families! Amiable brains, who amuse yourselves with Spiritism, could you tell me what panacea you have invented to purify the family, to give it life? I know it well, in matters of morality you are indulgent; many phrases, laments for the peoples who fall, for the lack of education of the masses; but, to raise woman morally, what have you done? Nothing… Great lords of literature, how many times have you trampled the holy laws of respect for woman, which you so exalt! Ah! you are ignorant of God and you profoundly despise woman, that is to say, the family and the future of the nation! And it is in her and through her that the grave social problems of the future will have to be worked out! What you are incapable of doing, you know it well, Spiritism will do, and will give to woman that robust faith which moves mountains, faith that teaches them their power and their worth, all that God promises through their gentleness, their intelligence, their powerful will. Understanding the magnificent laws developed by The Spirits' Book, none among them will wish to surrender her body and her soul; a daughter of God, she will love in her children the visit of the creating Spirit; she will wish to know in order to teach her own; she will love her country and will know its history, in order to initiate her children into the great progressive ideas. They will be mothers and physicians, counselors and mentors; in a word, they will be women according to Spiritism, that is to say, the future, the progress and the grandeur of the homeland in its broadest expression. Baluze. n (Continuation. – October 27, 1865.)

— In my last communication, my friends, I had shown you women under two aspects, adding that instruction in some and ignorance in others had produced negative results. Nevertheless, there are serious exceptions which seem to defy the rule. There are young women who know how to study and to profit from what the masters teach. These are neither vain nor frivolous; their constant distraction is neither a piece of jewelry nor a ribbon! Nourished by strong and serious lessons, they love what enlarges the spirit, what gives them inner calm, that calm of the strong and of generous natures. In marriage they foresee the family; they ask for and make promises for the beloved child, not to abandon it and cast it to self-interested care, but to sacrifice their whole lives for it. The newborn is the center of everything; for it, the first thought; for it, the caresses and the ardent prayers, the sleepless nights, the days much too short, in which are prepared the thousand details that will be the well-being of the newly incarnated one. The child is study, love under a thousand forms. The husband becomes amiable; he forgets the rough toil of the day or the worldly distractions to support the child's first steps and to give shape to its first syllables. I respect, then, the exemplary exceptions, who know how to resist temptation and to flee from pleasures in order to devote themselves and to live as divinely intelligent mothers. Humble and poor working women; ulcerated hearts, who love your only hope: your child! Much could be said of your self-denial, of your profound sense of duty, of your meekness in the face of the vexations of each day!

Nothing discourages you in consoling the little angel; for you it is strength and labor, that sublime selfishness which makes you sacrifice yourselves night and day.

But if religion, or rather, the various cults joined to instruction could not destroy in the rich and in the poor that general tendency toward living badly and ignoring the aim of life, it is because neither the cults nor instruction have known, until today, how to vividly impress childhood. They speak to it constantly of hostile interests. The parents who struggle against the necessities of life explain themselves before those young hearts with a cynical crudeness. Scarcely do they have the perception of the first words, they already know that one can be choleric, violent, and that personal interest is the pivot around which each individual turns. Those first impressions exploit them widely… Henceforth, religion and instruction will be empty words, if they do not contribute to increasing well-being and fortune! And when we carry the Spiritist thought in all directions, a thought that awakens all the generous passions, a thought that gives a certainty like a mathematical problem, they laugh in our faces! So-called liberals mount themselves on stilts to find us ridiculous and ignorant. We do not know how to write… we have no style!… we are models of ineptitude, madmen… fit to be put into a madhouse. And the apostles of free thought would with much pleasure push the authorities, with the aid of the Penal Code, to persecute these enlightened ones, who lower the public good sense! Fortunately the opinion of the masses does not belong to a newspaper, nor to a writer; no one has more right to have more spirit and good sense than others, and in these times when mere feuilletonists claim to split from top to bottom the theologians, the philosophers, genius under all its forms, good sense in its highest expression, it happens that each one wishes to know for himself. People always run to the men and the things of which the worst is spoken; and, after having read and listened, they set aside all the insolent pamphlets, all the malevolent insinuations, in order to pay homage to the truth, which impresses all spirits. And it is for this that Spiritism grows greater under your blows. Families accept us and bless us. A laborious father, if he has a truly Spiritist son, will not see him, as in the past, desert the home to become an intolerant critic. It will not be he who will ruin the family, sell his conscience and deny the sacred laws of the respect owed to woman, to the child. He knows that God exists; he knows the fluidic laws of the Spirit and the existence of the soul with all its admirable consequences. He is a serious, upright, fraternal, charitable man, and not a well-bred puppet, a traitor to life, to God, to friends, to parents and to himself. Mothers will be truly mothers; penetrated by the spirit of Spiritism they will be the safeguard of their beloved daughters. Teaching them the magnificent role they are called to play, they will give them the consciousness of their worth. The destiny of man belongs to them by right and, in order to fulfill the duty, it is necessary that they instruct themselves, in order to worthily prepare the child that God sends. Knowledge will no longer be the corollary of unbridled desires and shameful wishes, but, quite to the contrary, the complement of dignity and of respect for one's person. Against such women, what can temptations and unruly passions do? As a shield, they will have God and right and, besides, that superior acquisition, which comes to us from superior things. Now, what is woman, if not the family, and what is the family, if not the nation? Such women, such people. We wish, then, to create what you have destroyed by extremes. The Middle Ages had belittled woman through superstition. You, gentlemen free-thinkers, through skepticism!… Neither one nor the other is good! First we moralize; then we emancipate woman, in order to instruct her. You wish to instruct her without moralizing her!

It is for this that the present generation escapes you, and soon the mothers of families will no longer be an exception.

Baluze.

Allan Kardec.

Paris. – Typ. de COSSON ET Ce, rue du Four-Saint-Germain, 43.

[1] [v.

Étienne Baluze.]