Edward William Johnston (aka Il Secretario): "American Letters," Part V

Edward William Johnston under the pen name IL SECRETARIO, "American Letters -- Their Character and Advancement." The American Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art and Science. Volume I, Issue 6 (June 1845): pages 575-581.

In this section, Johnston unintentionally (and somewhat comically) seems to reveal how he feels threatened by manifestations of feminism outside the "domestic sphere." For more context, see Linda K. Kerber, "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History," Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 9-39.

[Page "577*" continued]:

It is strictly true that the entire mass of what female authorship has produced, might be struck out of existence without ever being missed in the permanent learning of the world. None of the works of genius have been produced by women. They have, evidently, as occasional Amazons, distinguished themselves quite as much in arms as in letters . . . surely, then, it were quite as fit to encourage ladies to enlist in the Horse Guards, or line, and aspire to be sexual monsters of bravery, as to aim to be wonders in authorship.

To obtain these most inconsiderable results, subordinate in even the inferior parts of letters (for they are confined almost entirely to fugitive poetry, prose, fiction, memoirs, epistles, travels, and a little half-grown drama) what must we not sacrifice? Two of the chief embellishments of life: for one sex, a manly and severe literature; for the other, that perfect delicacy which makes the woman all within, as the man should be all without; for their spheres are utterly different, and cannot mix: neither can be the rival of the other. Of the one, all the faculties tend to action; of the other, to the affections. In their exercise, they cannot, and do not coalesce, except . . . in those periods of thought when both have degenerated, and women begin to aspire . . . to be competitors of the masculine arts, only because those arts are sinking into effeminacy.

Harsh words, hard truths, these may sound to the softer sex – that wish so much to be soft no longer – and rude to their abettors, the carpet-knights of literature, to whom – living among silks and essences, and flowers – it is, at most, a matter of the tilt-yard, and of its guerdons of gloves and garlands, not the rough game of war itself, that deals blows, not compliments, and wins not holiday chaplets and imitated renown – the easy interchange of dame and squire – but laurel and eternal palm, such as grow not in the flower-pots of a boudoir, or are forced in the conservatories of fashion, but must be plucked in the stoutly disputed field, amidst sweat and blood, the waving of torn banners, not perfumed pocket-handkerchiefs, and the glancing, not of bright eyes, but of blade and bayonet. 

[To be continued].