The Duty of a Woman to be a Lady

1877

Wildness is a thing which girls cannot afford. Delicacy is a thing which cannot be lost and found. No art can restore to the grape its bloom. Familiarity without love, without confidence, without regard, is destructive to all that makes woman exalting and ennobling.

"The World is wide, these things are small,
They may be nothing, but they are all."

Nothing? It is the first duty of a woman to be a lady. Good breeding is good sense. Bad manners in a woman is an immorality. Awkwardness may be ineradicable. Bashfulness is constitutional. Ignorance of etiquette is the result of circumstances. All can be condoned, and do not banish man or woman from the amenities of their kind. But self-possessed, unshrinking and aggressive coarseness of demeanor may be reckoned as a state prison offence, and certainly merits that mild form of punishment called imprisonment for life.

It is a shame for women to be lectured on their manners. It is a bitter shame that they need. Women are the umpires of society. It is they to whom all mooted points should be referred. To be a lady is more than to be a prince. A lady is always in her right inalienably worthy of respect. To a lady prince and peasant alike bow. Do not be restrained. Do not have impulses that need restraint. Do not wish to dance with the prince unsought; feel differently. Be sure that you confer honor. Carry yourselves so lofty that men shall look up to you for reward, not at you in rebuke.

The natural sentiment of man toward woman is reverence. He loses a large means of grace when he is obliged to account her a being to be trained into propriety. A man's ideal is not wounded when a woman fails in worldly wisdom; but if in grace, in tact, in sentiment, in delicacy, in kindness, she should be found wanting, he receives an inward hurt. — Gail Hamilton.