THE LIBRARY OF THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 NORTH CAROLINA 
 AT CHAPEL HILL 
 
 ENDOWED BY THE 
 DIALECTIC AND PHILANTHROPIC 
 | SOCIETIES 
 
 HQ1154 
 M353 
 1853 
 
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 GAYLORD PRINTED IN U.S.A. 
 
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 PowHERS AND DUTIE 
 
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 WOMAN. 
 TWO LHOTURES. 
 
 BY HORACE MANN, 
 
 HE FIRST SECRETARY OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BOARD OF EDUCATION. 
 
 ROCHESTER: 
 ao. MP DEWEY. 
 1853. 
 
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1853, by 
 HORACE MANN, 
 In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 
 
 STHREOTYPED BY 
 HOBART & ROBBINS, 
 NEW ENGLAND TYPH AND STERROTYPE FOUNDERY, 
 BOSTON. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 AN earnest desire to elevate the condition of woman, 
 and a hope to furnish at least a few suggestions in re- 
 gard to the true principles on which her elevation must 
 proceed, prompt the publication of the following Lee- 
 tures. Throughout the past ages of the world, the 
 condition of woman has been degrading and demoral- 
 izing to her own sex, and dishonorable to the other. 
 And even at the present day, the same unqualified 
 affirmation may be made of the worst parts of the 
 earth, and of many grades of society, even in the best. 
 The comprehensive calamity of her lot has included 
 servitude of body, non-development of intellect, and 
 depravation of heart. Only until within a period 
 comparatively recent, have these facts of her history 
 been acknowledged, and the duty of reform been 
 recognized. It is still later that any philosophic 
 attempt has been made to learn the true indications 
 of Nature on this subject, and to build the art of 
 woman’s improvement on the sczence of woman’s con- 
 stitution. 
 
iI PREFACE. 
 
 The broad line of demarcation which, in all coun- 
 tries and times, has divided the sexes from each other, 
 must have been founded upon some law of nature. 
 So universal a distinction is not to be accounted for 
 and set aside, as the mere result of caprice or chance. 
 But, while the law at.. order of Providence are divine, 
 all abuses or misuses of them are human. And such 
 is the fallibility of men, that when they discover an 
 error, they are prone to cast away the law itself on 
 which the error has fastened, — cutting away the bot- 
 tom of the ship that holds them, to get rid of its bar- 
 nacles. Men seek relief from the evils of one extreme 
 by rushing into the opposite extreme, where, in the 
 very nature of things, no relief, but only new evils, 
 must be found. They leap from superstition into 
 atheism, from despotism into anarchy, and, —to add 
 an illustration appropriate to my theme, —from a 
 denial of the plainest social and educational rights to 
 the female sex, to an attempt to obliterate the ever- 
 lasting distinctions which God has established between 
 man and woman. 
 
 It is a remarkable fact, and one full of significance, 
 that the women who have that peculiar organization, 
 (in some, it is education, and not organization,) which 
 inclines them to break over the barriers of sex, have 
 always aimed their efforts at those prominent points 
 in which man’s superiority, at that particular time, 
 was most conspicuous and attractive ;— proving that 
 it was the special eminence which man then occupied 
 
PREFACE. iit 
 
 which moved their ambition, rather than any convic- 
 tion of the equality or identity of their widely differ- 
 ing natures. Thus, when war was deemed the glory 
 of mankind, and the highest honors were won by its 
 exploits, it is recorded that the women of the Sauro- 
 matee, (and other barbarous nations have done the 
 same,) dressed themselves in the martial habits of men, 
 and were required to kill an enemy, as a prerequisite 
 to marriage. Hippocrates says that, in order to gain 
 a title to matrimonial honors, they must have killed 
 three; upon which it was very plausibly remarked, 
 that, under so hard a condition, some of them died 
 old maids. So in Rome, when arms and athletic 
 games made the physical signs of high manhood and 
 virility the grand object of desire and envy, so large 
 a body of women emulated the outward appearance 
 of man by cultivating beards, that a law had to be 
 passed to abolish the unfeminine deformity. In times 
 when chivalry reigned supreme, the private sports of 
 women imitated, at a distance, the tournaments of 
 men. After the revival of letters, and the master- 
 ship of Greek and Latin gave men distinction, as 
 authors and in the church, women became their rivals 
 in this department, and obtained professorships in dis- 
 tinguished universities, by the eminence of their clas- 
 sical knowledge. ‘This was laudable and meritorious. 
 And in our day, — according to what, if pursued for 
 its own sake, will hereafter appear a most vulgar 
 ambition, — the honors of office being the passion of 
 1* 
 
TV PREFACE. 
 
 the land, a small company of women have risen up, 
 who lay strenuous claim to a share in all the partisan 
 strifes connected with suffrage and with office-hold- 
 ing ; —an ambition which, at the very next advanced 
 step in civilization, will appear as grotesque and 
 unwomanly as the old passion for wars, or beards, or 
 jousts. 
 
 One fact, however, should here be added, in recog- 
 nition of the true and almost universal instincts of the 
 sex ;— that while Amazons have fought battles; and 
 while the more masculine of the Roman woman, (never 
 the Cornelias and the Portias,) encouraged the growth 
 of their beards, by shaving and by chemical gwanos ; 
 and while, at one time, the hardier women of Athens, 
 emulous of whiskers, used to wear their hair braided 
 over cheek and chin, — yet all the nobler patterns 
 of the sex have mourned over war, and have held * depi- 
 latory powders and fluids” in grateful estimation. , 
 
 The interesting nature of the subject discussed in 
 the following Lectures has drawn upon them an unu- 
 sual share of public attention where they have been 
 delivered. In most cases, the comments made have 
 been friendly and approving; in a few, they have . 
 been dissentient and condemnatory. ‘To show the 
 wide diversity of opinion which prevails in different 
 circles, I will refer to two criticisms, both emanating 
 from the city of New York, and both made on the 
 same Lectures. In one of them, written by a distin- 
 guished advocate of “ Woman’s Rights,” and pub 
 
PREFACE. V 
 
 lished under her own name in the leading paper of 
 that city, the author clearly palliates, if she does not 
 commend, the enormity of a woman’s wearing men’s 
 clothes; and her views of the gospel, in whose spirit 
 these Lectures were designed to be written, may be 
 gathered from some of her remarks which follow : 
 
 “But what means,” says she, “this acting and 
 living the gospel? In the old romances called by 
 that name, there are so many silly and contradictory 
 stories, and most of them so chimerical and impracti- 
 eal, that I am perfectly at a loss to know what living 
 the gospel means. The Arabian Nights might with 
 far more benefit be lived and acted than the gospel,” 
 &e. And again ;— “Of all the causes of difference 
 of opinion and dissension between man and man, there 
 is none so prolific of evil, so productive of rancor, mal- 
 ice and deep-seated hatred, as religion.” * * ¥* 
 «The ill feelings produced by religious dissensions 
 never end, for the simple reason that there are no 
 facts connected with them to appeal to. The dispu- 
 tants know not what they differ about, 2¢ bezng a mere 
 phantom, which each claims to see and understand, yet 
 none can grasp.” 
 
 In the other criticism, which appeared as an edito- 
 rial in a newspaper extensively patronized by the 
 fashionable world, the writer cautiously indicates his 
 preference for a seraglio system; and quotes, in refer- 
 ence to his own views, the following passage, respect- 
 ing an Egyptian harem : 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 “We probably form a false conception of the life 
 of. the harem, misled by writers who suppose its 
 inhabitants to be swayed by a system of ideas differ- 
 ent from that which really prevails among them. My 
 own opinion is, that they are quite as happy as the 
 rest of their sex; otherwise, nature would not have 
 given perpetuity to the institution, which seems quite 
 as suitable to the Hast as any different institutions to 
 the North. At any rate, the women themselves are 
 the best judges, and they appear, upon the whole, no 
 less contented than their sisters of Frankestan.” 
 
 Such extremes as these, with all possible varieties 
 between, render it utterly impracticable to please all; 
 and they show the necessity, also, of seeking for some 
 principles on which consultation and effort may more 
 harmoniously proceed. 
 
 But the advocates for woman’s voting, and being 
 eligible to fill all political offices, really have such 
 impregnable grounds of complaint against the wrongs 
 of men, and against the usages and laws of soci- 
 ety, and they have incorporated so many beneficent 
 and noble causes with this one unsound doctrine in 
 their ereed, that we cannot but look with leniency 
 upon what we must still think a very grave error. 
 The claim, however, now set up, to mingle in unseemly 
 political contests, is far less to be regretted from any 
 apprehension that it will ever lead to practical results, 
 than because it disparages the arguments in favor 
 of woman’s unquestionable and long-withheld rights, 
 
PREFACE. VIT 
 
 and must postpone her acquisition and enjoyment of 
 them. 
 
 The only benefit I can foresee from abolishing all 
 distinctions of sex, (so far as man can do it,) is, that in 
 the new state of society thus introduced, we might 
 advance and enforce the claim that no woman should 
 be so much more masculine than man, and no man 
 should be so much more womanish than woman, as 
 some of them now are. 
 
 In one word: If woman can enjoy the two highest 
 and most sacred rights which belong to the race, — 
 the rights of fair occupation and full education, — I 
 am content to leave all other questions to be here- 
 after settled by the ampler knowledge and the maturer 
 wisdom which shall then be brought to their decision. 
 Who will labor most earnestly for these primary and 
 
 unquestionable rights ? 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 
 West Newton, May 4, 1853. 
 
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LECTURE I. 
 
 Nor long since, I delivered and published a Lec- 
 ture, entitled ‘‘ A Few Thoughts for Young Men.” 
 That Lecture, (far more, I doubt not, from the in- 
 terest which good men felt in its subject, than from 
 any skill of mine in treating it,) has been some- 
 what extensively circulated and read; and I have 
 often been requested to send forth a Sister to keep 
 that Brother company, on his mission of intended 
 good among the youth of our land. I am told 
 that it is not good for him to be alone; that he 
 needs a help-meet, a co-missionary, to go forth with 
 
 him, to win to excellence by the power of love, 
 - where he cannot conquer by the power of reason. 
 
 Could I but treat the subject worthily, there 
 is nothing within the circumference of human 
 thought so congenial to all my past mental habits, 
 or so vivifying and strengthening to all my philo- 
 sophic hopes, as to speak to the all-enduring and 
 all-conquering heart of woman; to make her em- 
 brace the sentiment as a religion, and feel it as a 
 
10 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 prophecy, that it is her glorious prerogative to lift 
 our world from its degradation, to raise the soul of 
 man, until, like his body, it should stand ‘‘erect and 
 look on heaven,’’ and to adorn it with all moral 
 adornments. I have no firmer belief than that a 
 wise womanhood could take the race in its arms, as 
 a mother takes her babe, and shield it from harm, 
 and. nurse it into immortal strength and beauty, 
 and train it to such a glorious manhood as should 
 be worthy of its nature and its Author. 
 
 For twelve years, in a public capacity, I watched 
 over the development and culture of the daughters 
 of my native state, with scarcely less than a fath- 
 er’s assiduity and fondness. I have seen those 
 whom I first knew as little children on the lower 
 forms of the school-room, blossom out and ripen 
 into glorious womanhood ; and it is not possible, 
 after the attachments growing out of such relation- 
 ships and happy experience, that my interest in 
 their welfare should ever be alienated by any trans- 
 fer of official obligations to other spheres of em- 
 ployment however different, or to other places how- 
 ever remote. Rather let the well-springs of that 
 interest deepen and gush forth more copiously and 
 forever ; for what nobler channels can they ever 
 fill, or towards what lovelier objects can they ever 
 flow? 
 
- POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 11 
 
 In presenting a Few Thoughts on the Pow- 
 ers and Duties of Woman, with especial refer- 
 ence to the actual Capacities and possible Triumphs 
 of the Daughters of our land, I can attempt no ex- 
 haustive treatment, no circumnavigation of the sub- 
 ject. The ‘‘ Whole Duty of Woman’’ cannot be 
 expounded in an hour, any more than it can be 
 performed in an hour. New knowledge respecting 
 her peculiar powers of action, and her special adap- 
 tations to beneficence, will impart new views. re- 
 specting the ideal of her life. Though I mean to 
 speak with candor, and for truth, yet doubtless 
 there is a class to whom I shall not speak accept- 
 ably, respecting ‘‘Woman’s Sphere; for, when 
 this matter is rightly understood, I think it will be 
 found that what is now so currently spoken of as 
 the Sphere of Woman is only a Hemisphere. I 
 believe it to be, however, the upper and nobler half 
 of the orb of human duty. 
 
 In much of what has been addressed to women, 
 they have been treated with disrespect. They have 
 been flattered, and flattery is disrespect. They 
 have been admired for their beauty of person, 
 rather than for the graces of the soul. Virtue has 
 not been idolized, but the form in which it should 
 have been enshrined. Through all time, they have 
 been assiduously taught that the garniture of the 
 
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 = 
 
oO, A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 body was more precious than the vesture of the 
 spirit; and in no age nor portion of an age, in no 
 country nor segment of a country, has woman ever 
 been elevated for her reflex power of elevating 
 others. The thought has neither been said nor 
 sung, that, by proper development and training, 
 she could add another octave to the compass of 
 human enjoyments. 
 
 There are certain female charms which the poet 
 Moore has described with a more glowing pencil 
 than any other writer; but it is the woman of 
 high life, and not the high woman, whom he por- 
 trays ;—the belle of the saloon and the boudoir, 
 too nice for use, and not the mother of orphanage, 
 the sister of charity, or the shepherdess whose di- 
 vine voice woos back lost lambs to the fold of Christ. 
 Moore’s highest conceptions of the female sex hard- 
 ly rise above those soulless nymphs whom the Mos- 
 lem calls Houris; and if, as some have believed, 
 the departed soul finds an occupation in another 
 life kindred to the one which it chose in this, then 
 may this happiest writer of ‘sentimental verses for 
 the fashionable world well be converted, after death, 
 into the preparer of perfumery and cosmetics, or 
 become the lace-weaver and ribbon-maker of some 
 Mahometan Paradise. By such metempsycho- 
 sis, he will not have changed his spirit, but only 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN, 13 
 
 his craft; for where, amid all his Elysian beauties, 
 has he ever penned one noble thought of such in- 
 herent and vital energy that it will beget noble 
 deeds wherever it is read ? 
 
 Lord Byron creates women, between the ages of 
 eighteen and twenty-five, who thrill our blood with 
 their sensuous beauty ; but Heaven have mercy up- 
 on the man who must live with them after the age 
 of wrinkles comes on! Beyond any other writer 
 he had the talent for depicting female excellence, 
 inlaid, like Mosaic work, with all the virtues; but , 
 God forever withholds the highest thoughts from 
 impure minds, and therefore they were not given to 
 him. . : 
 
 Shakspere’s noblest ideal women, though su- 
 perlative conceptions of purity and affection, are 
 not women of active beneficence, as all the seventh- 
 heaven women are and must be; and therefore 
 they are incomplete. | Lady Macbeth, as she is 
 called, the strongest of all his female characters, 
 is the worst. 
 
 Delilah, Omphale, Briseis, Cleopatra, what is 
 the moral of all their histories, but that woman has 
 had the charms to rouse into fury the natural pas- 
 sions of man, without the divinity to rebuke them ? 
 
 As for those flocks of supernumerary angels with 
 whom the minor pocts are perpetually filling the 
 
14 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 air, and whom they keep forever hovering over our 
 heads by day, and about our head-boards by night, 
 it would be a vast improvement if their creators 
 would take off their wings, and set them to doing 
 something useful. 
 
 The respect and deference paid to woman in 
 what calls itself fashionable society is degrading 
 rather than elevating. It is too French in its char- 
 acter, confined mainly to conventional language and 
 manner, not emanating from the highest qualities 
 _ In man, and therefore not adapted to bring out, but 
 to suppress, the highest qualities in woman. It 
 does not recognize her exalted powers, nor em- 
 brace the idea of her exalted destiny. In view of 
 this fact, a noble specimen of an American lady * 
 once said to me, ‘‘ We want, not flattery, but 
 justice.” 
 
 Where woman has not been debased by adula- 
 tion, she has been by oppression. ‘The African has 
 - sold her for cowries, as he sells his dog. Through all 
 the Oriental world, her value has been determined 
 and her social position fixed by the law of volup- 
 tuousness. And the whole Caucasian race, in 
 their aggrandizements of wealth and of ambition, 
 have made her a make-weight in diplomacy, or an 
 article of conjugal commerce. Not only her per- 
 
 * Mrs. Lucretia Mott. 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 15 
 
 sonal charms, but all her noble capacities of use- 
 fulness and virtue, have been bought and sold on 
 the Rialtos of men. 
 
 _ My regard for woman is too exalted and sincere 
 to insult her by adulation. Duties lie all along 
 the glorious vista into which I would lead her. I 
 call for strength and endurance in all her frame; 
 for fervor and a celestial enthusiasm in all her fac- 
 ulties; for toil and self-sacrifice, and the burning 
 of the idols which the world now worships; be- 
 cause it is up the Mount of Transfiguration that — 
 she is appointed to ascend. I summon her to the 
 services of a holy Temple, in whose very vestibule 
 she must enrobe herself in the shining garments of 
 Knowledge and Love. 
 
 One cannot discuss any part of this subject 
 without encountering upon the threshold the mod- 
 ern question of ‘‘ Woman’s Rights.’’ An epicene 
 school has arisen in our day, whose creed is that 
 
 - the sexes are equal; that nature has endowed them 
 both with equal faculties and equal capacities for 
 thought and for action ; and hence, that all depart- 
 ments of business, all pursuits and all professions, 
 are a common arena, where both may enter and 
 wrestle for all the prizes of life. The leader of 
 this sect, in Kurope, is temic: Maria Weber, 
 
 (or Helen Maria Weber, Esquire), of Brussels, in 
 2 
 
16 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 Belgium, who dresses like a man, in a strait- 
 bodied coat of blue broadcloth, with shiny buttons, 
 buff vest, and biped continuations. According to 
 this theory of equal powers, equal duties and equal 
 adaptations for the performance of duty, the only 
 noteworthy difference between the sexes is that 
 which cunning tailors and mantua-makers have 
 made, and still manage to maintain, in order to in- 
 erease their custom; and the old saying that ‘‘the 
 tailor makes the man,”’ so far from being a sarcasm, 
 is but half the truth; for he makes men and wom- 
 en both, and the sexes are at his mercy; for, by 
 the cut of his shears, he can turn a man into a 
 woman or a woman into a man, according as he 
 makes the nether portion of their garments bifur- 
 eate or cylindrical.* 
 
 *In this country, 1 am ashamed to say, we have had some 
 instances of women, —of notoriety, if not of eminence, — who 
 have donned the outward semblance of the masculine gender, 
 As Juno ‘‘ walks a queen,’’ so, it is said, we have one woman 
 who walks a farmer, clad in male attire, with horsewhip in 
 hand. 
 
 As a means of preventive police, not all the laws that leg- — 
 islatures could enact, nor all the courts they could establish, 
 nor all the executive officers they could appoint, would be 
 half so efficacious to prevent society at large from becoming 
 a Sodom at large, as the all-pervading though silent influence 
 of a universal and unmistakable distinction in the costume of 
 man and woman. Where this distinction is observed, the very 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. pis 
 
 But, as it seems to me, one great and incontest- 
 able fact,—a fact of which the Creator Himself is 
 the immediate and ever-repeating author,— a fact 
 which is embodied in our bodies, inspired into our 
 spirits, and organized into our whole organizations, 
 — settles this question at once and forever. God 
 created the race, Male and Female, oN THE PRIN- 
 cipLE or A.Diviston or Lazor. Each sex is 
 so far from being the other, that each is necessary 
 as the complement of the other. It takes both to 
 complete either. ‘The relation of unlikeness is as 
 remarkable as the relation of likeness between them. 
 They are the subject of contrast, as much as of com- 
 parison. rom the crown of the head to the sole of 
 
 garments are a guard set over the wearer, going where she 
 goes, stopping where she stops, and abiding with her as a 
 perpetual and restraining monitor. But where this distinction 
 is discarded, the mere fact of casting it aside is evidence of 
 guilty intent. Hence, any woman, however unnecessary she 
 
 may deem the badge of dress to be for her own safety, is traitor- 
 | ous,to the virtue of both sexes, when she practises or palliates 
 
 or tolerates any departure from so protective a custom ;— from 
 a custom founded upon so strong and universal an instinct that 
 none but tribes sunk in the very lowest barbarism have ever 
 discarded it. These views are so prompt an outgrowth of the 
 
 | natural sentiments, and so strongly fortified by reason in all 
 
 stages of its development, that whoever violates them is wor- 
 thy not only of legal penalties, but of the ridicule and scorn 
 
 of the community. 
 
18 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 the foot, there is not a vital organ in the two, 
 which, by its form, locality or function, would not 
 reveal to the anatomist to which sex it belongs; 
 and the subtler analyst of mind and heart will dis- 
 cover corresponding differences in all eesthetical and 
 spiritual endowments. ‘These diversities in organ- 
 ization date from the initial stages of personal ex- 
 istence; and, as they are more and more developed 
 by growth, they become more obviously divergent 
 and palpable. Radical and ineradicable, to efface 
 them or to modify them would be to unsettle the 
 frame-work of nature. They are the preliminary 
 and beautiful condition of the final union of the 
 sexes into one. 
 
 ‘* He is the half part of a blessed man, 
 Left to be finishéd by such as she , 
 And she a fair divided excellence, 
 Whose fulness of perfection lies in him. 
 O, two such silver currents, when they join, 
 Do glorify the banks that bound them in ! ”’ 
 
 A true man’s spirit in a woman’s encephalon, 
 or a true woman’s spirit in a man’s encephalon, 
 could not work one half the machinery. Birds 
 and fishes might as well attempt to exchange na- 
 tures and elements. Sometimes, indeed, the bird 
 does dive into the water, and sometimes the fish 
 flies for a moment through the air; but each must 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 19 
 
 immediately return to its own element, or it per-— 
 ishes,— the true symbol of either sex when striv- 
 ing to be the other. The human intellect in all its 
 magnificence, and the human heart in all its mys- 
 terious workings, were : created male and female, and 
 each is incomplete and sterile without its partner. 
 Most ethnologists maintain that all the different 
 races of men into which the human species is now 
 divided came from the same Adam and Eve; and 
 that all its varieties of Caucasian, Indian, African, 
 Malayan, and so forth, are mere divergences from 
 the same type, which, in the space of six thousand 
 years, have wandered to such vast distances from 
 each other, by force of climate and institutions. 
 But I should like to see an argument to prove, a 
 priori, that men and women themselves can so di- 
 verge from their original constitution as to exchange 
 functions and relations in carrying out the divine 
 plan and economy of the generations; so that, in 
 _ the next, or female era, the men shall sing treble 
 ‘and the women shall sing bass, in all the concerts 
 of the world, and the Jewish command not to ‘‘ mar 
 the corners of their beard’’ shall be addressed to 
 women and not to men, and some sisters of Romu- 
 lus and Remus, the founders of another Rome, 
 shall be suckled by a wolf-sire and not by the dam. 
 After such an epoch, perhaps another Campbell, 
 
20 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 the poet, may arise, to denounce a female soldiery, 
 executing the orders of oppression, as 
 
 ‘Her whiskered Pandoors and her fierce hussars,”’ 
 
 and another St. Paul, writing to new Corinthians, 
 may say, —- Doth not even nature itself teach you 
 that if a man have short hair it 1s a shame unto 
 him? But if a woman have short hair it is a 
 glory to her; for her hair is not given her asa 
 covering. 
 
 De Lolme, a celebrated commentator on the 
 British constitution, claims omnipotence for the 
 British Parliament; but even he was obliged to 
 make one exception, for he declares that, though 
 the sovereign Parliament can do everything else, 
 they cannot turn a man into a woman, nor a 
 woman into a man. 
 
 It is argued, indeed, that woman was made from 
 man,— or Eve from Adam,— and hence a certain 
 doctrine of identity or consubstantiation is derived. 
 But from how much of him was she made? Only 
 enough was taken for a nucleus, or punetum 
 saliens,— only one bone out of his two hundred 
 and fifty, or one two hundred and fiftieth part of 
 his osseous apparatus. And it can need no argu- 
 ment to prove that a bare bone is a very different 
 thing from a bone with a live woman round it. 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 21 
 
 No! qualities supernatural and preternatural to 
 him must have been given to her; for surely 
 Adam would have thought it a most unthank- 
 worthy entertainment to have had only the same 
 old bone given back to him again! 
 
 As to the malicious suggestion that woman was 
 made from the crookedest part of man’s skeleton, 
 and certain psychological inferences thence de- 
 duced, as to female temper and straightforwardness, 
 I have but a single remark to make : — that when 
 we consider how hooked and crooked, how ragged 
 and jagged a creature man is, we see a necessity 
 that. whatever was designed to match him, and 
 consort with him, must be somewhat crooked itself, 
 in order to fit. 
 
 From all that venerable narrative, however, 
 about the derivation of woman from man, the most 
 striking fact pertains to the deep sleep which fell 
 upon Adam, before the bone-ing operation was 
 _ performed. He must. have been in the mesmeric¢ 
 state when Eve was taken from his side; and does 
 not this account for the mesmeric power which 
 women have exerted over men ever since? When 
 this same rib, now endued with charms and spells of 
 wondrous potency, nestles back into its old place, 
 why should we be astonished at the marvels it 
 works? It lies here on the left side, at the very 
 
oF A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 door of man’s heart, which it can open and enter 
 at pleasure ; it commands his whole nervous appa- 
 ratus, which it can tune and play upon, whatever 
 sacred or profane music it pleases; and it is within 
 reaching distance of all his pockets. 
 
 I shall not stop here to prove the duality of the 
 sexes, and yet that they are but semi-parts of asingle 
 whole, by referring to that law of Love, (or, as it 
 often proves, of madness, ) according to which every 
 young man rushes forth in search of the only phy- 
 siclan who can heal this otherwise immedicable 
 wound in his left side; and whom, far more from 
 his own rashness and blindness than from the crowds 
 he must select from, he so often mistakes; nor by 
 exciting in your minds the image of those pathos- 
 moving and inconsolable maidens, who feel assured, 
 as by some second-sight, that they have found the 
 very cleft they were appointed to fill, but which, alas! 
 has been filled by another, who would turn dragon 
 at their approach; and therefore they languish 
 away their lives in almost inarticulate complainings, 
 like the sea-shell, low moaning for its native deep, 
 
 ‘* Raising its little plaint in vain, to lave 
 In the deep bosom ofits parent wave.’’ * 
 
 This madness and moaning have been raved and 
 
 *From Byron’s “ Island,’’ slightly altered. 
 
PC WERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 25 
 
 wailed by Strephons and Chloes, from before the 
 days of Arcadia, proving how the sexes gravitate 
 towards each other, though disturbing forces with- 
 out may prevent the union of mates, or greater 
 disturbing forces within prevent mates from har- 
 monizing as they should do. 
 
 Between the sexes, then, I hold there are innate 
 and connate distinctions, which nature never loses 
 sight of, unless occasionally in the production of a 
 monster or a /usus. ‘They are not alike, but there 
 is a mutuality of superiority. As a general law, 
 the man surpasses the woman in stature, in physical 
 strength, and in those groups or combinations of 
 the intellectual faculties where causality plays a 
 _ part; but the woman surpasses the man in beauty, 
 in taste, in grace, in faith, in affection, in purity. 
 His better nature tends more to science and wis- 
 dom ; hers, to loveand the sympathies. He delights 
 more in the worldly uses of truth; she, more in its 
 - immortal beauty; or, as Swedenborg somewhere odd- 
 ly expresses it: ‘* Man was created to be the under- 
 standing of truth, and woman the affection of good.” 
 
 And thus it happens that in the lower half of 
 the scale of human excellences the balance of 
 superiority is on his side; in the upper half, it is 
 on hers,— proving woman to be God’s last and 
 noblest work. 
 
 2 . 
 
94 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 Female nature is male nature, once more re- 
 fined. She was ‘‘ cast in a finer mould, and tem- 
 pered at a purer flame.”’ Even if the Creator did 
 breathe the breath of life into them both from the 
 same atmosphere, Ais spirit was taken from the 
 cruder strata below; hers from the more incorrupt 
 and purer ether above. His blood was mingled 
 with unfermented wine; hers was made liquid with 
 tears. In their physical development, one takes 
 on the form of Roman grandeur; the other, of 
 Grecian elegance. He is typified by Doric strength, 
 and she by Corinthian beauty. And if he is the 
 Arboretum, she is the Flora, of the moral world. 
 There is as much of philosophic truth as of elegant 
 compliment, in Burns’ description of nature, where 
 he says, 
 
 ‘* Her ’prentice han’ she tried on man, 
 And then she made the lasses, O !”’ 
 Man can carry out his creed to its fell conclusions, 
 hanging or burning heretics for the glory of God, 
 or abasing whole races into brutes to satisfy a 
 theory of government. But, in woman, a loving 
 sentiment arrests the deed, when on the verge of 
 performance, which inexorable reason had coun- 
 _selled ; — as was beautifully exemplified in Joan of 
 Arc, who was oft found in the fore-front of battle, 
 and led on the whirlwind charge of cavalry, but 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. B25 
 
 herself never struck a blow, and brought back her 
 victorious sword unstained with blood. None but 
 a man could have issued the horrid command that 
 all the male children of the Hebrews should be put 
 to death as soon as they were born; but woman’s 
 innate love of children, not less than her fear of 
 God, made the execution of that command by the 
 Hebrew midwives impossible. Portia’s argument, 
 which cast Shylock, was doubtless suggested by 
 her feriinine recoil at the thought of blood, rather 
 than by the inventive faculty. Lord Coke would 
 never have thought of such a legal check-mate. 
 Man’s power culminates in command and in majes- 
 ty; but woman’s in supplication and in tears. His 
 force is dynamic; he invents machines, which, 
 because of their resistless velocity, or thundering 
 hammer-strokes, might well be named after the old 
 Scandinavian god, Thor, or Jupiter Ammon; but 
 woman’s force is that of the imponderable elements, 
 —caloric, magnetism or electricity,— which can 
 beautify or blast, create or annihilate, without audi- 
 ble sound. His might is in muscle and logic; hers, 
 in fascination and pathos. Miss Dix has won as 
 many legislatures as Napoleon ever subdued king- 
 doms; and her sweet voice, thrilling from that 
 deep heart in whose sacred recesses all the moan- 
 ings of the insane are echoed, translates the celes- 
 
26 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 tial languages of benevolence and duty to men, 
 and thus accomplishes what imperial guards and 
 Pretorian Cohorts could never achieve. In fathom- 
 ing the love of man, we soon strike bottom; but 
 plummet will be dropped in vain into the abyss of 
 woman’s affection. Man’s love is often but a 
 vernal fountain, dried up by the summer heats of 
 ambition or cupidity; but woman’s love wells up 
 from exhaustless depths, and resembles those mar- 
 vellous Iceland Geysers which pour their boiling 
 currents forever into the icy bosom of the Arctic, 
 yet themselves are never cooled. Whichever sex 
 may sing such sentiments as the following, woman 
 alone can fulfil the spirit of the song. 
 
 *°Q let me not to marriage of true minds 
 Admit impediment. Love is not love 
 Which alters when it alteration finds, 
 Or bends with the remover to remove. 
 O, no! it is an ever-fixéd mark, 
 
 That stands mid tempests, and is never shaken.”’ 
 * * * * * * 
 
 It may be said that the difference between boys 
 and girls, in regard to sports and playthings, is 
 the effect of education; but one thing cannot be 
 denied, that in all lands and times girls develop 
 earlier than boys; and, with one exception, are the 
 brighter at the same age. I am told by the teach- 
 ers of idiot children that, among their pupils, the 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 27 
 
 boys are the brighter ; thus proving the law of the ~ 
 normal state by the exception of the abnormal. 
 But between the instincts of paternity and maternity 
 in adults, the chasm is almost infinite. Were the 
 nurture and rearing of infancy dependent exclu- 
 sively upon men, | think the race would soon die 
 out from their neglect, or from such clumsiness 
 as would be hardly less fatal than neglect. A 
 man, superintending a nursery of children, is like 
 an elephant brooding chickens,— the more lovingly 
 he broods, the more awfully he flattens them. 
 Who has not observed that, in taking care of chil- 
 dren, all boys’ hands are left hands, while all girls’ 
 hands are right? But that spiritual as well as 
 natural adaptation of the mother to the helpless- 
 ness of the babe; that identification of herself with, 
 all its wants, as though her lungs still breathed for 
 it, and her heart still circulated its blood; those 
 vigils through uncounted hours over its sick cradle, 
 which nothing but the ever-open eye of God can 
 surpass,— all these charms of devotion and self-for- 
 getfulness, though we have seen them all our lives 
 long, yet we can never fully comprehend; and can 
 only say of them, as the Psalmist says of the handi- 
 work of the Omnipotent, ‘‘ Day unto day uttereth 
 speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge.” 
 Let us thank God that He embarks the fragility and 
 
 D ye 
 ore 
 
25 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 glassy essence of infantile years upon a more 
 halcyon sea than the passion-tossed bosom of man. 
 Man never knows that deep, delicious, motherly 
 solicitude which forebodes ill amid happiest scenes, 
 and hopes for good in gloomiest hours, and which 
 made the words so true, though spoken of the 
 mother of the Savior: ‘‘a sword shall pierce 
 through thy own soul also.” 
 
 *¢ St. Mary ! Virgin, how we yearn 
 More of thy life to know ! 
 A life of so much blessedness, 
 A life of so much woe.’’ 
 
 Her disciples have lost sight of the mother in the 
 Madonna; but she sunk the bridal honors of a 
 God in the mother. | 
 
 Not even the Protean genius of woman, so power- 
 ful to dramatize all human passions, is able to 
 conceal its own sex. How vividly true is the apos- 
 trophe of Miss Elizabeth Barrett, to George Sand: 
 
 ‘* True genius, but true woman! Dost deny 
 
 Thy woman’s nature with a manly scorn, 
 
 And break away from gauds and armlets worn 
 By weaker women in captivity ? 
 Ah, vain denial! That revolting cry 
 
 Is sobbed out by a woman’s voice forlorn ; 
 
 Thy woman’s hair, my sister, all unshorn, 
 Floats back dishevelled strength in agony, 
 
 _ Disproving thy man’s name ; and while, before 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 29 
 
 The world, thou burnest in a poet-fire, 
 We see thy woman-heart beat evermore 
 
 Through the large flame. Beat purer, heart, and higher, 
 Till God unsex thee on the spirit shore !”’ 
 
 Even in crime, the characteristics of the two 
 sexes are no less marked and legible. The most 
 ruffian natures take on the form of male and female. 
 Henry VIII. and Elizabeth were as like each 
 other as father and daughter can be; and yet how 
 striking the difference between them,— he being 
 made out of ten thousand bears, and she out of as 
 many cats ! 
 
 The character of woman has a wider arc of ‘os- 
 cillation than that of man. In the golden purity 
 of her nature there is less of the alloy of animal 
 passion ; — she being twenty carets fine, while he, 
 at best, is but twelve or fifteen. Her affinities for 
 religion are stronger. The most devout man counts 
 the hours when he is at prayer; the most devout 
 woman, when she is not. From taste, not less 
 than from conscientiousness, she revolts from vice; 
 for taste repels coarseness, and vice is always coarse. 
 And yet, as, in chemistry, the most saccharine be- 
 comes the most acetous, so itis in moral trans- 
 formations; and when woman falls, the depths of 
 her degradation are as profound as the height of 
 her virtues was sublime. Ifthe Powers above and 
 
30 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 the Powers below ever hold supra-mundane and 
 subter-mundane festivals, in similitude of our ter- 
 restrial Fairs and Shows, where celestial and in- 
 fernal rivals compete with their fellows for the 
 palm of the highest achievements in virtue, or the 
 darkest exhibitions in vice, woman alone, in. both 
 worlds, will be entered on the list of competitors. 
 With readier and swifter wing, she ascends to the 
 seventh heaven of excellence; or, in the perver- 
 sion of her nature, sweeps downward to the antipo- 
 des of the seventh heaven. A true and pure 
 Church: of Christ must be the highest conceivable 
 state of human society; and this the Scriptures 
 symbolize by the bridal glory of woman. On the 
 other hand, the Church of Antichrist, which must 
 be the sum-total and sum-possible of human de- 
 pravity, the same Scriptures typify as a woman 
 sitting upon ascarlet beast, and full of the names 
 of blasphemy. 
 
 Now, in all the works of God with which we — 
 are acquainted, we do know that, from a difference 
 in ingredients, or in organization, there does result _ 
 a difference of adaptation, of fitness, and of capaci- 
 ty; and hence inevitable differences of function and — 
 use. ‘I'he man has not yet opened his eyes to the 
 grand and beautiful economy of Nature, who has 
 not learned that the bestowment of special proper- 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 31 
 
 ties and qualities on any created thing constitutes, 
 of itself, divine ‘‘ Letters of Instruction;” not 
 only giving us special notice of a peculiar use, but 
 commanding us to ascertain and to make the ap- 
 propriate application. Every philosopher, whether 
 practical or speculative, understands that through- 
 out the inanimate and irrational world God. has 
 ereated sufficient means for every necessary end, 
 and special means for special ends. ‘The wing of a 
 bird means air, and the fin of a fish means wafer, 
 just as plainly as though their Maker had labelled 
 them with the names of those elements, respective- 
 ly. The light prophesied the eye, but not the or- 
 gans of taste and smell; and, on the other hand, 
 the savors and flavors of luxurious fruits prophe- 
 sied the senses of taste and smell, and not retinas 
 and lenses. In the same way, differences in the 
 higher attributes of rational and moral natures 
 give us notice beforehand of different spheres of ac- 
 tion; and the fact that Adam was constituted to be 
 a Father, and Eve a Mother, no more clearly fore- 
 told the existence of the human race itself, than 
 their different endowments, physical, intellectu- 
 al and moral, foretold the different parts and 
 functions which men and women were to play in 
 the nurture and government of that race. And 
 do not these facts, — or, rather, these manifesta- 
 
ape A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 tions of the Divine will, which are as visible in 
 the philosophies of mind as of matter,— settle the 
 long vexed and vexing question, about the equality 
 of the sexes? Do they not prove that there is no 
 equality, either in their physical or spiritual con- 
 stitution; but congenital diversities, each bemg 
 superior to the other in those qualities most nearly 
 related to its radical idea, or to that original pro- 
 gramme of parts which their Maker intended them 
 severally to perform? And, in the general com- 
 parison of gifts and excellences, woman clearly 
 holds preéminence,— a concession which the in- 
 stincts of gallantry may more promptly make, but 
 the conclusions of philosophy cannot fail to ratify. 
 
 Why, my friends, knives and forks, locks and 
 keys, buttons and button-holes, hooks and eyes, 
 may as well quarrel about equality, as man and 
 woman. Oxygen and nitrogen may each as well 
 attempt to usurp the part which the other is: to 
 perform in the constitution of the atmosphere ; or 
 iodine and sunshine in the painting of a daguerreo- 
 type; or hill and valley in the formation of a land- 
 scape; or each of the seven colors of the rainbow 
 arrogate to itself the production of that blessed 
 white light which comes from the combination of 
 them all! The actinism of the vernal sun might 
 as well repine because it has not the ripening in- 
 
Col 
 
 POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 38 
 
 fluences of its autumnal beams; or the latter in- 
 dulge the bitterness of envy and reproach, because 
 they cannot shed abroad the virgin glow and bloom 
 of the spring-time. The mariner would not be 
 more thwarted in his navigation, if the north pole 
 of his magnet should abjure its allegiance to the 
 load-star, and veer round to the south, than would 
 all the great interests of society be ruined, if the 
 spirit of either sex should attempt this impossible 
 transmigration into the other. 
 
 That aspect in which the sexes most nearly 
 approach each other is their equality in point 
 of number. By laws and predestinations deeper 
 down than any philosophy of ours has yet been able 
 to fathom, the two sexes in any one generation are, 
 numerically, almost the same. In one family, the 
 children are all sons; in another, all daughters ; 
 and their relative proportions take on all varieties 
 between these extremes. Yet when that great ac- 
 - countant, the Census-taker, sums up the population 
 of a nation or an age, he finds that, by some mys- 
 terious arrangement of Providence, working invisi- 
 bly to human reason, the footings come out,— so 
 many millions of men, and, per contra, so many 
 millions of women, almost with the exactness of 
 a merchant’s well-kept leger;—- Cash debtor to 
 Merchandise, and Merchandise debtor to Cash, each 
 
34 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 balancing the other.. I say, almost like a mer- 
 chant’s well-kept leger; for I believe it is a law 
 that the usual number of male births slightly ex- 
 ceeds that of female; while, owing to the hardships 
 and exposures of men, there is a slight excess in 
 the actual number of female adults over that of 
 males. That is, in the community at large, there 
 are a few more adult women than men. 
 
 Now,* if this be so, and if polygamy be prohib- 
 ited, then more or less cases of female celibacy 
 seem fatally certain. It isa result which no vir- 
 tues or charms on the one side, nor any tax levied 
 upon bachelors on the other, can ever prevent. 
 Eyen though custom should allow ladies to make 
 matrimonial advances, give them ‘‘ free warren”’ 
 to hunt in male ‘ preserves,’’ extend the fabled 
 privileges of Leap Year over the other three, and 
 encourage mothers to carry their daughters to wa- 
 tering-places, to Washington, or other matrimonial 
 bazaars, ‘‘ prospecting’’ for husbands, still the same 
 result must follow ;— the rights and lefts will not 
 come out even; there will always be more or less 
 half-pairs of scissors at the end of every parcel. 
 There must be a few solitary females waiting, for 
 an offer, whom Sheridan,— naughty man that he 
 
 *This topic, and the one respecting ‘* Dress,’’ were age 
 omitted in the délivery of these lectures, 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 85 
 
 was !— compared to rusty conductors waiting for a 
 flash of lightning. Some hypotheses have been 
 suggested, as to the final cause of this phenomenon, 
 which are as repugnant to philosophy as to gallant- 
 ry; and which every man who cherishes a sister, 
 or loves a. daughter, or was born of a mother, should 
 be ashamed to offer. The shop-keeper’s idea about 
 some refuse goods at the end of an assortment, or 
 the sportsman’s explanation about supernumerary 
 articles to repair his tackle, I confront with the 
 well-known facts that the richest goods have the 
 fewest bidders, and the wisest birds are not caught 
 in snares. In fact, I hold the ‘‘ Over-Thirties ”’ 
 to be a beneficent provision in the economy of na- 
 ture. Not being mothers on their own account, 
 they have leisure to be mothers for everybody else. 
 What a blessing in the circle of the families to 
 which she belongs is an unmarried sister! She 
 watches by the aged father or mother with a ves- 
 - tal’s fidelity, while her sisters and brothers. aban- 
 don the old homestead for Cupid, or cupidity. Who 
 so ready as she to solace the bereavement of a 
 friend, all whose earthly hopes have been swallowed 
 up in the grave? ‘To the widowed brother, her 
 sympathetic voice and spontaneity of kindness seem 
 almost like a return from the tomb of the idol he 
 had laid there; and to the bereaved sister, whose 
 4 
 
36 _ A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 stay and support have been stricken down, she be- 
 comes, as it were, the strength of another manhood. 
 Next to the mother herself, she is the last to cease 
 her expostulations with a wayward daughter, or 
 her efforts to reclaim an unfilial son. “T’o children 
 bereft of parents, she becomes both father and moth- 
 er, and trains unconscious orphanage in the way it 
 should go. How Protean her capabilities of use- 
 fulness, transforming herself by turns into friend, 
 nurse, physician, or spiritual zuide;—into the grave 
 companion of the old, or the frolicsome playmate of 
 the young, as ever-varying occasion may demand! 
 Who does not know that when any child of all her 
 kindred is deaf, or blind, or halt, or whom a step- 
 dame Nature has maltreated in any other way, a 
 never-failing resource is found in the ‘ universal 
 Aunty ;”’ as though she kept a full assortment of 
 eyes and ears and faculties for all kinds of ‘‘impo- 
 tent folk’? ? Then, for the children’s dresses, does 
 she not always know the latest style; for their 
 learning, has she not seen the sagest books; and for — 
 their health, has she not the newest cure-alls all 
 by heart? and, O! for theromping and roistering 
 groups of the nursery, does she not carry all the 
 toy-shops of France and China in her pockets ? 
 Who, of all the household, can help paying hom- 
 age to such a divinity, even though it sometimes 
 
POWERS AND. DUTIES OF WOMAN. 37 
 
 does seem as though she would kill us with kind- 
 ness ? 3 
 
 Outside, and beyond the family relation, this 
 personage often becomes a kind of public. charac- 
 ter, though without the envy or the odium which 
 attaches to the notoriety of public men. As a 
 teacher of schools, how she shames the wisdom of 
 the lawgiver and the retributions of the judge, by 
 saving where they sacrifice, and redeeming where 
 they destroy! T'o hospitals for disease and suffering, 
 to prisons for penal retribution, to receptacles for 
 reformation from deepest abasement and guilt, how 
 divinely does she come, her head encircled with a 
 halo of heavenly light, her feet sweetening the 
 earth on which she treads, and the celestial radi- 
 ance of her benignity making vice begin its work 
 of repentance through very envy of the beauty of 
 virtue! The two Misses Fellows, of Boston, with- 
 in the last ten years, have found homes for more 
 than a thousand destitute, orphan children, carry- 
 ing on this warfare against ignorance and perdition, 
 as the apostle said, at their own charges. What 
 mothers, unless it be such as the mother of Wash- 
 ington, deserve so much as they the admiration 
 and homage of mankind ? 
 
 Nor is this class of persons without some posi- 
 tive and substantial prerogatives. ‘‘ ‘Travelling the 
 
38 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE” 
 
 circuit ’’ of several families, as they generally do, 
 they readily learn what may be called the Secrets 
 of State, under the home administration of each. 
 Hence they naturally consider themselves invested 
 with something of the-importance of diplomatic 
 functionaries ; and, from their.knowledge of what 
 may be here called ¢nternational affairs, they are 
 often able to assume one of the highest preroga- 
 tives of government, — that of waging war or mak- 
 ing peace between the neighboring sovereignties. 
 Without having the responsibility of the children 
 in the circle of households around which they mi- 
 grate, they yet maintain a sort of. guardianship 
 over them all,— somewhat like that of the British 
 Lord Chancellor, who is potential guardian of all 
 the children in the realm, though, in fact, assuming 
 the disposal of but very few of them ;— and when 
 any boy or girl belonging to the mimic kingdom of 
 this gzasi chancellor rises to unwonted eminence or 
 excellence, she plumes herself upon the success, as 
 
 though it were the result of her own counsels, and 
 
 thus enjoys the complacency of a parent, unpur- 
 chased by a parent’s cares and pains; but. when, 
 on the other hand, any child strikes off into a course 
 of iniquity and hastens to ruin, her mournful com- 
 ment is ever at her tongue’s end: ‘* I always knew 
 he would, and said go.” 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 39 
 
 ‘In fine, have we not reason for gratitude to that 
 Providence who setteth the solitary in families, 
 that there are a few of the solitary whom he left 
 un-set; and that, when He supplied the world with 
 fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmoth- 
 ers, He did not forget to bless it with a sprinkling 
 of *‘ Aunt Sallys”’ and ‘Aunt Marys,” who shall 
 never themselves be mother or grandmother in the 
 flesh, but only in the spirit! Indeed, almost as 
 well might the benign economy of the generations 
 be carried prosperously on, and reach its sublime 
 goal, without the existence and codperation of the 
 ‘young maids,’”’ as without the kindly offices. of 
 those who are not so young. Let their graves 
 never be without a flower! 
 
 Yet, with this equality in point of numbers, (to 
 which I before referred,) with stronger affinities 
 for virtue, and better adaptations for all the sacred 
 works of benevolence; with repellent instincts 
 against the grosser vices, or, at least, with less 
 proclivity towards them; with imagination to cre- 
 _ ate, with taste to adorn, and with sentiment to exalt 
 and purify,— what have been the rank and influence 
 of woman for six thousand years? She might have 
 conquered nations to virtue, as vulgar heroes have 
 conquered them for aggrandizement; yet man has 
 debased her into a counterpart of hig own animal 
 
 4x 
 
40 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 passions. She might have transmuted the world’s 
 wealth into human blessedness; and yet she has 
 been made to lay that wealth as a golden pavememtt 
 for the way that led to her own bereavement and 
 infamy,— to the waste of camps, and the luxury 
 of courts, and. the voluptuousness of harem or 
 Cyprian chambers. It was in her nature to abol- 
 ish those religious arguments of king and priest,— 
 the axe, the fagot and the rack; and yet, what has 
 she done,— or, rather, what has man permitted her 
 to do,— to humanize the race under the old dispensa- 
 tion, or to Christianize it under the new? For six 
 thousand years, woman has been allowed to be but 
 little more than the mother of the race,— and such 
 a race! !—a race, which, if it be not indefinitely 
 improved beyond its present condition, it is no 
 irreverence to ask, whether the turning of any 
 more of these innocent clods of the valley into 
 such life be not a most inglorious display of om- 
 
 nipotence! If sieges, conflagrations and slaugh- 
 
 ters are to be, as they have been, the pastime of 
 kings; if armies and navies are to absorb the boun- 
 ties of nature and the fruits of human toil; if one 
 half the men and women of the nations whom we 
 are bold enough to call civilized are to grovel in 
 brutish ignorance and more brutish passions; if 
 our cities are to be radiating centres of pauperism, 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 44 
 
 erime and female abandonment ; if one fourth part 
 of ali the children who are born are to die before 
 reaching the age of one year, through parental 
 ignorance or inherited malady, and still their lot 
 to be happier than that of more than one fourth of 
 their survivors; if disease and debility are to be 
 the rule, and health and beauty the exception, for 
 mankind at large; if, even among the professed 
 disciples and followers of Jesus Christ, more is 
 done to denounce and exterminate each other than 
 to spread peace on earth and good will among-men ; 
 if new Africas are to be devoted to servitude, new 
 Irelands to starvation, and new Polands and Hun- 
 garys to oppression; — if all this is to continue to 
 be, as it has hitherto been and now is, then it is 
 high time to inquire whether some ultra form of 
 Hydropathy be not the only hopeful practice for 
 the maladies of such a planet,— whether all its dry 
 land should not be plunged under water for twenty- 
 four hours, without ark or Ararat for escape, and 
 then the earth left to go swinging on through space, 
 bald, lifeless and solitary, for the next million years, 
 and until it shall have been defecated of its present 
 impurities ! 
 
 ‘The Jewish Rabbis have a oar that after 
 God created the body of Adam, he left it for forty 
 days in the garden of Eden; and, in the mean 
 
42 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 time, the devil came and looked at it, and kicked — 
 it in contempt. Better, ten thousand times better, — 
 that he should have kicked and buffeted the inani- — 
 mate form of Adam forever, rather than to have — 
 maintained such supremacy over the life and his- 
 tory of man down to our day; unless, in atonement 
 for the awful hideousness of the past, there is to 
 be a future of inconceivable beauty and grandeur: 
 for the human race ! 
 
 Now, I maintain that if woman had played the 
 part in this awful historic tragedy, for which God 
 and nature fitted and designed her, its scenes and 
 acts would have been relieved from many, if not 
 from most, of their bestialities and satanisms. 
 
 For four thousand years, the Hebrews were 
 among the most conspicuous of all the people upon 
 the globe. or a large portion of this time, they 
 occupied a high historic table-land, where their 
 deeds could be observed by all surrounding regions, 
 and whence their influences might flow down to 
 all the dwellers on the earth. Yet, during this — 
 wide expanse of time, and under their vaunted 
 theocracy, how often did it happen that the Jew- 
 ish mothers gave birth to a generation of men, 
 whose hearts, hewn from the nether mill-stone, no ~ 
 steeping in infinite mercies could soften; and from 
 whose necks no lotion prepared in the divine phar- 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 43 
 
 macy could extract the stiffness! In a large folio 
 volume, published a few years ago by an emi- 
 nent evangelical divine, and deemed worthy to be 
 adorned with all the luxuries of the printer’s and 
 the binder’s art, the biographies of the most cele- 
 brated women of the Old Testament are given. 
 And how many, think you, were deemed worthy 
 of notice in sucha work? Only eighteen! And, 
 to make out even this number of worthies, he was 
 obliged to include Jezebel, Rahab the harlot, and 
 the witch of Endor! And I refer to this paucity 
 of noble women among the Hebrews, not because 
 they were inferior, but because they were superior 
 in civilization to the rest of the world. And, if 
 such was ¢heir condition, what must have been 
 that of the rest of mankind? In the New Testa- 
 ment, not the life of.a single female teacher, artist, 
 poet, or historian, is recorded,— not the life of a 
 single woman justly renowned for her powers and 
 attainments, in, any high and honorable secular 
 calling; and only some half-dozen are commemor- 
 ated for their piety. What triumphant desolation 
 was here!) The low and base character of the sons 
 whom they reared proves too well that they did 
 not know how to train up children in the way they 
 should go, or Solomon was at fault. What moral 
 rank did woman hold, when there was not even an 
 
44 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 inquiry for a virtuous one in all Sodom, and the 
 
 wife of the best man in the city could be preserved 
 only by being converted into salt? Survey the rest 
 of the Oriental world,— Assyrians, Medes, Persians, 
 Babylonians,— survey all Asia, which embraces a 
 third part of the habitable globe, and seareely is 
 there to be found one star of brightness gemming the 
 forehead of woman. Look at broad and populous 
 India, all blazing with suttees as with watch-fires, 
 where wives, after having spent their lives on earth 
 in subserving the passions of their husbands, follow 
 them into the next world, through gates of fire, to 
 minister to the same passions again! China, though 
 pushing her fabulous chronology back into pre- 
 Adamitic periods, is yet almost rayless of female 
 excellence. : Where are the Grecian women, who 
 were at once of brilliant or profound intellect, and 
 models of purity in character? Opening their eyes 
 upon living sculpture, breathing an atmosphere vocal 
 
 with eloquence and poetry, why was there not 
 
 more than one Aspasia for oratory and one Sappho 
 for song; and why were these of such a moral 
 character that we hesitate to speak their names ? 
 Thrice did Rome conquer the world,— once by her 
 
 arms, once by her language, and again by her reli- 
 
 gion,— yet, while I count off the centuries of her 
 hoasted universal dominion, you cannot name to 
 
“i” 
 4 
 
 POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 45 
 
 ‘me one truly great woman, among all the millions 
 
 of her people, foreach hundred years of her suprem- 
 acy. After the light of Roman civilization was 
 éxtinguished, a night of darkness, whose minutes 
 were years, whose hours were ages, enveloped the 
 earth. It was time’s midnight,— yea, the midnight 
 
 of midnight. It seems to us as though the stars 
 
 must have hid their faces from that panorama of 
 
 ‘horrors; as though the sun could not have shone 
 
 then as it shines now; and how slowly did its 
 baleful shadow move upon the Dial of Time, as 
 generation after generation was born in woe, suf- 
 fered its life of pain and rage and sin, and sunk 
 into oblivion! The race swept to its aphelion dis- 
 tance from the great Moral Centre of truth and love. 
 
 But the invincible attractions of that Central Power 
 
 have arrested its centrifugal flight, and wheeled it 
 
 ‘into a returning orbit, and taught to mankind a 
 great lesson of resignation and trust. Let those 
 of our day, who, in their intense aspirations and 
 
 - fervid impatience for the regeneration of the world, 
 
 eall God’s benevolence in question because He 
 seems to loiter in the work of human redemption, 
 jook back across the abyss of those Dark Centuries, 
 and remembering that He who ‘‘inhabiteth eternity”’ 
 measures time by the revolutions of solar systems, 
 and not by an earthly hour-glass, learn to hope 
 
46 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 while they labor, and never cease to labor for the 
 object of their hope. During that reign, and over 
 
 } 
 
 | 
 
 all that realm of sorrow and of sin, we see the con-_ 
 
 dition of woman only by the feeble lights of infer- 
 
 | 
 
 ence and imagination.. We know not even the 
 
 condition of man. He was lost in the thick dark- 
 ness effused by himself. Ignorance was so. wniver- 
 sal as to forbid the writing of its own history. | 
 
 Crime became so omnipresent and overpowering © 
 
 as to exterminate the virtues that would have ad- 
 monished or bewailed it. A. treatise on Human 
 Nature, at that period, based upon its manifestations, 
 would have been a work on Demonology. The 
 glorious ideas of Christianity were used to frighten 
 men into submission by its terrors, and not. to 
 inspire them with its love.  Heclesiastical forgeries 
 changed the truths of heaven into the lies of fiends, 
 and forced the counterfeits into circulation, until 
 they became a common currency. Todahemma to, 
 commit crime had a Price- current, like stocks. in a 
 modern market; and any man might buy a license 
 to sin, secording to his means,— from the cheap 
 peccadilloes of aiues and rape, up to the enor- 
 mous and costly wickedness of striking a priest ! 
 The many mansions which Christ said were in his 
 Father’s house were sold, like: human habitations, 
 though the title of the purchaser was defeasible, 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. AT 
 
 being forfeited by any freedom of thought, or any 
 exposure of canonical iniquities: Hell was the 
 fore-ordained doom of all men and women who 
 would not purchase a tenement in heaven by the 
 payment of money, or the surrender of virtue. 
 The warrior and the priest divided between them the 
 empire of both worlds. Civil government was the 
 fell spirit of despotism, organized into a system and 
 vigorously at work; and ecclesiastical government 
 was religious pitolotaioe and sectarianism, for once 
 perfected and complete. History presents no other 
 scene where all the crimes which the human passions 
 can perpetrate, and all the horrors by which the 
 human heart can be appalled, came together i m 
 such multitudinous and wild assemblage, to hold 
 their Carnival of woe. Of all these Stvotat rites 
 and institutions woman was the victim. In regal 
 life, she was the toy of the court; in religious life, 
 the pleasure of the voluptuary ; in low life, the serf 
 of the boor and hind,—ay, the serf’s serf. Man 
 "was the haughty and overmastering tyrant of the 
 scene. The harem-monastery, the assignation- 
 “Bunnery, the countless infantitides of celibacy, 
 make us wonder that all the instincts of female 
 “purity were not blotted out from the nature of 
 woman forever ; and make us thank God, while we 
 
 - wonder, that He fixed and enrooted the sentiments 
 D 
 
48 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 of virtue in her breast too deep to be eradicated by 
 anything that did not annihilate the soul itself. 
 Yet, amid the ghastly and. demoniac objects: 
 which glare out upon us from fore-ground and 
 back-ground of that historic picture, there is one 
 solacing and redeeming trait. When even the 
 might and majesty of Jehovah had lost. their 
 power to control the passions of men,— when the 
 lovely and endearing history of Christ’s life could 
 not woo men to imitate his divine éxample,— even 
 then, the worship of the ‘‘ Holy Mother’’ preserved 
 one spot in the human heart still sacred to love, to 
 duty, and to truth. Wicked warriors and. false 
 priests came from public carnage, and from secret 
 crime, to bow down before the Mother of Jesus, 
 and to worship her with all the worship their na-— 
 tures could feel. And, as they knelt in homage, — 
 their thoughts and feelings for the moment became ~ 
 configured to the loveliness of the idol they adored. 
 Her sweetness, her purity, and her gentleness ; her 
 meek eyes devoutly bent upon the sacred babe; 
 the maternal exultation, that it was at once her 
 child and the world’s Savior, flashing light in 
 auroral waves over her face,—these tamed the wild _ 
 beasts that surrounded her altars, and kept alive : 
 
 in their breasts some elements of. similitude to 
 humanity. | 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 49 
 
 _ Discarding, as’ we Protestants all do, the image- 
 worship of the Catholics, we cannot sufficiently ap- 
 preciate the subduing and humanizing effect which 
 was produced on the manners, feelings and habits 
 of the Middle Ages, by the worship of the Virgin; 
 nor how much it tempered, where it did not exor- 
 cise, the otherwise almost universal spirit of cruelty 
 and vengeance. It would hardly be extravagant to 
 say that the sweet influences of the Madonna were 
 the means of saving mankind from becoming utter 
 Herods, as the flight into Egypt saved the Child. 
 from the wrath of Judea’s tetrarch. From the 
 adoration of the Virgin, perhaps more than from: 
 all things else, came the manliness, the generosity 
 and the devotion of chivalry; and chivalry, poor 
 
 as it was, was the Day-star which heralded in what 
 "we now, in our extravagance of egotism, call Civ- 
 ilization. ‘This indirect influence of woman, when 
 representing maternal affections and the religious 
 - element, is an earnest and prophecy of the glorious 
 victories she is yet to win. The Mother and Child! 
 as God sees how beautiful were the objects idolized, 
 may he pardon the idolatry ! 
 
 Exhausted and bewildered, as from a long and 
 agonizing dream, where outward realities give 
 birth to the terrible conceptions within, and where 
 the imagination only mirrors the vampires that 
 
«60 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 suck at the veins of life, did mankind awaken from 
 the night of the Dark Ages. Since that time, 
 amelioration in the condition of men has been slow, 
 but in the condition of women much slower ; and 
 it is only by taking long reaches of time that her 
 advancement becomes eSiearbie The great idea 
 of Protestantism,— that of making. each individual 
 soul responsible for itself, and, therefore, in the 
 last resort, sovereign arbiter over its own conclu- 
 sions and conduct,— has done more than anything 
 else for the elevation of woman. Hence, as a 
 whole, the women of Protestant countries have 
 always held a more elevated and honorable social 
 position than those of Catholic countries; and the 
 more intense and practical the spirit of Protestant- 
 ism, the more generous and noble has been her 
 development. Within the last half-century, the 
 United Kingdom of Great Britain ‘and Ireland, 
 with an average population of less than twenty-five — 
 millions, has produced as many eminent and admi- | 
 rable women as all the rest of Hurope, with its 
 more than two hundred millions; and New Eng- 
 land, with its population of between two and three 
 millions, has now nearly or quite as many justly- 
 distinguished females as Great Britain, or the — 
 continent. 
 
 Yet, how few, how lamentably few, are they all, | 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 51 
 
 compared with what they might and should be; and 
 what a wealth and profusion of heaven’s choicest 
 blessings run, with each generation, to remorseless 
 waste! In estimating the number of great and 
 heroic souls who have languished out their lives in 
 dungeon-cells, or fallen beneath the axe of the op- 
 pressor, we count by hundreds and by thousands ; 
 in summing up the multitudes whom conquerors 
 and false heroes have subjugated and enslaved, we 
 count by nations and races of men; but, in enu- 
 merating the women whom man has visited with 
 eruel injustice and wrong, whom he has abased 
 from her lofty realm of charity, and impoverished 
 in the more perfect though unreflecting wisdom of 
 the affections, we express ourselves by a unit, bué 
 that unit is the World ! 
 ‘Who, then, shall stand forth to blame the sex, 
 or even the bolder champions of the sex, if, in 
 _ demanding justice, or in planning the means to 
 ‘ ‘obtain it, they should, occasionally and for a mo- 
 ‘ment, part company with discretion? Who shall 
 say that the leaders, or even the more conspicuous 
 among the leaders,— those who hold conventions, 
 and shout from public rostrums, under the banner 
 of ‘* Woman’s Rights,’’— have unsexed themselves, 
 if, stung and goaded by a keen sense of centuries 
 
 of accumulated wrongs, which the noblest natures 
 5 
 
52 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 most intensely feel, they should sometimes break 
 forth into masculine anathemas, which neither be- 
 come the gentleness of their own sex nor propitiate 
 the injustice of the. other? Conscious of great 
 powers, which have a divine commission to be rec- 
 ognized and. employed, how can the high-souled 
 woman look with composure upon the impotent 
 wings which man has clipped, in the very sight of 
 the upper fields where she was destined to soar? 
 Perfect as an angel must he be,— perfect, too, as 
 an angel must she be,—who, in combating oppres- 
 sion to gain long-withheld rights, never commits 
 an error. | | 
 
 What. man who has wife, mother, sister, or 
 daughter, and knows any of the feelings appropri- 
 ate to such a relation, can reflect upon many things 
 pertaining to the lot of woman, even at the present 
 day, without emotions which go beyond mere pity 
 for the injured sex, and become indignation against — 
 the injurers? In London; there are now thirty- q 
 three thousand needle-women living but one degree 
 above the starvation point, who with perpetual toil 
 can earn only from two and a half to four and a 
 half pence per day, and are thus compelléd to pass 
 their lives in a hand-to-hand struggle with death ! 
 Out of a late meeting of twelve hundred of these, 
 it was found that ninety-eight had earned but one 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 58 
 
 shilling during the preceding week, eighty-two 
 only one shilling and sixpence, and only five had 
 earned so much as’six shillings. In several of our 
 Atlantic cities, the proportion of suffering women 
 is almost as great, and they live as near neighbors to 
 famine. At the same time, the rich and fashionable 
 give a thousand dollars or two thousand dollars an 
 evening to Fanny Ellsler or some other queen of 
 
 the cyprians. And, what is worse than this, man 
 
 "y 
 
 takes advantage of the famine he causes, to corrupt 
 the virtue he contemns. 
 
 It is not the North American savages only alt 
 turn women into pack-animals. In the continental 
 parts of Europe, women are seen at field-work 
 promiscuously with men, and almost as numerous 
 as they; and I have seen a German boor smoking 
 his abominable and everlasting pipe, while seated 
 at his ease beside the dunghill which his wife was 
 removing. In approaching Hton Hall, the resi- 
 
 i dence of the late Marquess of Weseiinstay through 
 a most magnificent avenue, two miles in extent, 
 
 where deer bounded among the trees of the park, 
 and swans floated upon the surface of the lakes, 
 the first human beings whom I saw, after leaving 
 the porter’s lodge, were some dozen of old women 
 carrying heavy logs from the wood to the palace 
 
 on their shoulders, because the lawn was too precious 
 
o4 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 to be marked by hoof or wheel. Sacred aristocracy 
 of dirt! — until it is inspired by the breath of God, 
 — then, vile and worthless humanity ! 
 _ By the rules of the English Common Law, the 
 husband may beat his wife iid a stick, and who 
 of us allcan deny that’some maternal ancestor of 
 his has been swingled and hatchelled under this 
 barbarous authority in his country’s code? By 
 the same law, not only does all the personal prop- 
 erty of the wife become the husband’s on marriage, 
 
 and the use of all her real property, also, during 
 
 his life, but all her earnings, acquisitions, and be- 
 quests, In the same manner, become his; and how 
 often does it happen, in this state of society which 
 we call civilized without blushing, that all the 
 
 daily proceeds of her toil are turned into the meang / 
 
 of drunkenness, and come back to her and her chil- 
 dren, at night, in blows and abuse! In regard to 
 
 the management and transfer of property, in trade — 
 
 or otherwise, there are profound difficulties in giv- 
 ing a control of it to more than one head of the 
 family, which I fear legislation will never be able 
 to solve. Much may be done in the way of mar- 
 riage-deeds and trust-settlements, and there are 
 several points where the legislator may safely inter- 
 vene to give woman more pecuniary independence; 
 but I have a thousand times more hope of saying 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 55 
 
 the sex from wrong through such an educational 
 elevation as shall shame misdoers and prevent mis- 
 doing, than from any new wisdom in the law ora- 
 cles. And yet, I mustsay, that, when the monster, 
 Vice, invades the family, when the husband turns 
 wolf or satyr, and his intemperance or dissoluteness 
 destroys the marriage of the soul, while the law 
 still continues and enforces the marriage of the per- 
 son; it is an opprobrium to the human race that 
 the woman who expected to be the partner of a 
 man should be compelled to remain the slave of a 
 brute! If great immoralities furnish good ground 
 for divorce, then intemperance, which is the parent 
 of all immorality, surely should do so. : 
 
 And, while there are thousands and tens of 
 thousands of men in this country whose income, 
 
 from some honorable office or profession, is from 
 
 two thousand to twenty thousand dollars a year, 
 
 and sometimes more, it is the rarest of events to 
 
 find any woman whose wages or salary amounts to 
 ‘one thousand. The great majority of laboring 
 
 women amongst us obtain barely sufficient to main- 
 tain a decent appearance, even while in health. 
 How, then, shall the multitudes whose earnings 
 
 fall below this point maintain the battle of life? 
 
 How shall they develop and enjoy those varied fac- 
 ulties with which God has endowed them, and how 
 
56 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 shall they preserve the honor which he has intrusted 
 to their keeping? And, as to that female crime, 
 behind which forever stands the unchangeable form 
 of Despair, it is one which man first tempts her to 
 commit and then never forgives, and heightens 
 even this wrong by pardoning the perpetrators in 
 his own sex, as if to encourage them to a 
 it again ! ee 
 
 Pierced with agonies at the thought of what her 
 mothers have suffered, of what her sisters are now 
 suffering, and what her daughters are doomed to 
 suffer, unless juster principles shall preside over 
 the laws and usages of society, who can wonder, I 
 again say, if some of those powerful and sensitive 
 minds, whose characteristic it always is to feel 
 something ofa personal responsibility for existing 
 evils, should sometimes propose remedies which 
 would disrobe their own sex of all its graces and’ 
 charms, without investing them, in requital, with _ 
 aught of the independence or prerogatives of the — 
 other? Walking through forest or grove, how 
 often you will see some lesser tree shooting up 
 beneath the overshadowing branches of the mon- 
 arch of the wood; and, as it rises aloft, it loses 
 something of its beauty by swerving from its erect- 
 ness; yet, for its object’s sake, forbear your con- 
 demnation,— it bends only because it aspires 
 
=f 
 
 POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. of 
 
 towards the open spaces of heaven, to seek that 
 glorious ‘light of the sun, which it is its nature to 
 worship. | | 
 That injustice in woman’s lot which demands 
 the swiftest reform that ingenuity can devise, or 
 energy execute, pertains to her education. The 
 female has every natural right to a full and com- 
 plete mental development which belongs to the 
 other sex. -As compared with man, I believe she 
 would reward all labors and expenditures for her 
 thorough education with quite as ample returns of 
 beauty, utility and power. Yet mark the amazing 
 contrast, as to the provision made for the education 
 of the two sexes, in establishments, outlay, appa- 
 ratus and all the means of culture. I speak of’ 
 this republican country ; for, in many of the best 
 parts of Europe, the education of the daughters 
 of the common people, beyond the merest rudi- 
 
 ments, is yet'an undiscovered idea. In the early 
 
 history of Massachusetts, and long after provision 
 for Public Free Schools had been made, it was a 
 common thing for boys only to attend them. In 
 
 ‘many towns, the first improvement in this respect 
 
 consisted in smuggling in thé girls, perhaps for 
 an hour a day, after the boys had recited their 
 lessons and gone home. Even then, all attain- 
 ments, beyond mere reading and writing, were 
 
58 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 deemed a kind of contraband article for girls. In 
 what is now one of the principal cities of Massa- 
 chusetts, when some adventurous Columbus of a 
 school-master proposed to carry a class of girls 
 through Fractions, the Fathers of the town,—in 
 the shape of a school-committee,— gravely denied 
 that the female mind was capable of understanding 
 them! I cite these instances from Massachusetts 
 history, because, however far below the true stan- 
 dard public sentiment may have been’ among us, 
 it has always been far lower everywhere else. Our 
 late improvements in education, opening an avenue 
 for both sexes to the higher branches of mathemat- 
 icy and philosophy, have demonstrated that the 
 female mind has a quickness, a subtlety, an intui- 
 tion in regard to many abstruse studies, which is 
 not surpassed by the other sex. 
 
 Even now, in the Public Schools of our Atlantic 
 
 cities, the girls’ circle of studies is far more lim- _ 
 
 ited than the boys’. In Boston, a four years’ 
 course in a Latin or High school is open to the 
 boys, while the only opportunity conferred upon 
 the girls, as an equivalent, is the privilege of 
 remaining an additional year in the grammar 
 schools. The city of New York has established 
 a most admirable institution, called the Free 
 Academy, whose course of study is almost that 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 59 
 
 of a first-class college in extent, and far. superior 
 to many of our colleges in useful adaptation to the 
 business of life; but the girls of the city have no 
 such free school, nor any equivalent for it.. The 
 same unjustifiable difference prevails in the city 
 of Philadelphia. 
 
 - Passing from Public Schools to academies, every- 
 body knows that lads or young men compose the 
 great majority of their pupils; and when both 
 sexes are found in the same seminary, the general 
 course of studies pursued by the male is far more 
 extended than that pursued by the female sex. 
 
 . Rising from academies to colleges, with two or 
 three very modern exceptions, we lose sight of the 
 female portion of the-race altogether. From an 
 examination of their catalogues, or a visit to their 
 halls, we should infer that woman had been expa- 
 triated from creation, or had never belonged to it. 
 Neither as student nor as teacher does she appear 
 on academic rolls, or in academic chairs. In those 
 clusters of costly edifices, in those libraries where 
 the wisdom of the world has been garnered, in 
 those cabinets which mimic the great kingdoms of 
 nature, in that beautiful apparatus and in those 
 laboratories where the stupendous operations of 
 the Physical Laws are imitated and explained, 
 woman has no part nor lot. For her superior 
 
 6 
 
60 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 education, she often has no resource but the Cireu- 
 lating Library of novels,— which will reach the 
 highest dignity and utility of which it is capable 
 when it stops circulating. Yet, among all the 
 deeds of men and the wonderful works of God, 
 there are but few things which the mind of woman 
 is not as capable of exploring and. explaining as 
 that of man; and, to balance an exceptional 
 inferiority, there are other things in which she is 
 his superior. See Mrs. Somerville mastering sci- 
 ence by science, and comprehending world: after 
 world, until her own. mind becomes, as it were, 
 a transcript of the universe; and then writing out, 
 with a lucidity which can be borrowed only from 
 nature’s light, the glorious harmonies and adapta- 
 tions of the Creator’s works, until, in perusing 
 her pages, we seem to hear, even with the natural 
 ear, those hallelujahs of praise to His name with 
 which all nature is vocal; while, at the same time, 
 she attends to all her domestic concerns, and makes 
 her own house, for order, simplicity and neatness, 
 like the grand machinery of nature she so loves 
 to contemplate! ‘There is a lady now living in the 
 vicinity of Boston, who, amid the cares and duties 
 of her own household, has fitted many a young 
 man for the colleges which neither she nor any of. 
 her own sex was ever allowed to enter; and, for 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 61 
 
 more than twenty years, Harvard University was 
 accustomed to rusticate its offending students to 
 her roof, that they might improve their learning 
 and mend their manners; and she, while kneading 
 her bread or plying her needle, and without taking 
 a book: into her hand, could instruct them in the 
 ‘dark passages of Grecian and Roman classics, and 
 make their sojourn with her so redolent of a 
 delightful. home, that the offenders were fain to 
 bless the offence which had brought een them 
 such grateful punishment.* 
 
 *In saying that woman has been debarred from those 
 institutions which hold a monopoly of the higher walks of 
 literature and. science, I gratefully make the subjoined 
 exceptions. At Oberlin, in Ohio, and at McGrawville and 
 Lima, in New York, are colleges whose curriculum of studies 
 equals those of most of the New England or European col- 
 - leges, where young ladies are carried through the whole 
 
 course. And at Yellow Springs, Green County, Ohio, an 
 institution called ‘* Antioch College *’ is about to be opened, 
 
 _ where equal opportunities of education are to be afforded to 
 
 both sexes, and where a lady has already been appointed as one 
 of the Professors. In contrast with this, it may be mentioned 
 that, during the winter of 1852-3, some young ladies belong- 
 ing to one of the Massachusetts Normal Schools, — teachers, 
 and those preparing themselves to become teachers, — made 
 application to the authorities of Harvard University for per- 
 mission, — accompanied by a gentleman of their own party, — 
 to attend the lectures of one of the Professors in the college, 
 their object being to qualify themselves to teach a science 
 they could not elsewhere acquire, and were refused. 
 
62 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 Everybody knows that what are called the 
 three learned professions,— Law, Physic and Divin- 
 ity, — monopolize a vast proportion of all the honors 
 and emoluments of society. These professions 
 severally represent the Property and the civil and 
 personal Rights of mankind, their Health; and their 
 Moral and Religious well-being. And what costly 
 institutions are founded and endowed to prepare 
 Young Men for acareer of eminence in’ these 
 highest fields of dignity, beneficence and renown ! 
 What Andovers, Windsors, Newtons and Mead- 
 villes, sparkle over the land, to attract and instruct 
 the young theologian! What Pittsfields, Phila- 
 delphias and Louisvilles, for the medical stu- 
 dent; while Litchfield and Cambridge are known 
 wherever the Common Law bears rule! Here 
 are other edifices, other libraries, cabinets. and 
 museums; other faculties and professorships, for 
 whose honorable duties the talent and learning of © 
 the world are sifted, and their choicest specimens ! 
 culled. And yet, with two inconsiderable ex¢ep- 
 tions in the Medical Department, and those of 
 recent origin, what trace of fellowship or partner- 
 ship has woman in them all? Talent, genius, 
 learning, skill and the holiest desires to bless the 
 world by their use, if enshrined in a woman’s 
 form, can speak no ‘Open Sesame” that will 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 63 
 
 unbar these professional doors. The Gog and 
 Magog of monopoly, in the form of Custom and 
 Prejudice, stand at their portals to guard and repel. 
 And what equivalent fields of honorable and lucra- 
 tive occupation shall she enter? What cocrdinate 
 or collateral spheres are open to her, where, as the 
 
 reward of lofty powers and noble exertions, she 
 
 may win the prizes of utility, independence and 
 renown? ‘Not one! Nor ong! ‘The whole 
 domain of civil and social vocations, which are’ at 
 once elevated and meritorious,— which presuppose 
 great mental powers and brilliant attainments, and 
 give invitation and career for their display,— has 
 been seized upon by men and parcelled out among 
 themselves, by themselves, like a conquered 
 
 country among the conquerors, or spoils among 
 
 robbers. 
 
 ‘Is it not still more extraordinary that, while we 
 continually hear of cases where wealthy women 
 make donations in their lifetime, or leave legacies 
 at their death, for the education of young men, we 
 may challenge all the records of American munifi- 
 eence for halfa dozen cases where women have 
 made any gift or any bequest worth naming, for 
 
 the education of their own sex ? 
 
 Let the lord of creation look upon this inequi- 
 table, that is, this iniquitous inequality, in the 
 6* 
 
64 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 means provided for the education. of the sexes, 
 from the Common School to the University and 
 the Professional School, and let blushes of shame 
 be his only ‘‘ blushing honors,’? and words of 
 repentance his only eloquence, and reform his only 
 action, until reparation be made! Why should the 
 sister be debarred from the generous education of 
 the brother ?— he exploring the glorious: fields of 
 science, while she is mewed up to French verbs 
 and Italian canzonettes! Is the wife to be, not the 
 lady, but the lackey of the husband,— her mind 
 shut out by ignorance from communion with his 
 mind, and her heart left to rely wholly upon 
 impulse, instead of knowledge, for its interpretations 
 of duty! For what grander or holier purpose 
 
 under heaven does a human being need knowledge, 
 
 than for the training of childhood? Why should — 
 
 the mother be less replenished with knowledge than 
 the father, or less disciplined in all her faculties 
 
 tion of soils for the production of crops require 
 more science than the change of those crops into 
 
 " 
 
 for the investigation of truth? Does the prepara-— 
 
 fete 
 
 such forms of food and raiment as will best pro-— 
 
 mote health, strength, beauty and longevity; or 
 do the ‘‘ young” of the stable and the sheep-fold 
 need a more intelligent nurture than the immortal 
 plants of the nursery; and, of all our instincts, 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 65 
 
 what instinct» cam profit more by a wise culture 
 than the maternal? If mathematical studies clip 
 the wings of a too adventurous fancy, and make 
 imagination sober, who needs their corrective influ- 
 ence so much as those who are charged with 
 possessing a too adventurous fancy, and a less 
 temperate imagination? If classical studies <disci- 
 pline the mind, as their advocates so confidently 
 assert, why should half the human race be 
 debarred from the benefits of this discipline? The 
 ability to judge of evidence, to balance probabili- 
 ties, and. to foresee future results from present 
 facts, comes, and only can come, from a generous 
 cultivation of all the faculties; and does woman 
 any less than man need this ability for her safe- 
 conduct through all the exposures and perils of 
 life? The rulers of our country need knowledge, 
 (God only knows how much they need it!) but 
 mothers need it more; for they determine, to a 
 "great extent, the very capacity of the rulers’ 
 minds to acquire knowledge and to apply it. The 
 untold wealth which nature yet hides in her dark 
 erypts and secret recesses, or veils beneath her yet 
 unexplored laws, waits to be revealed by the 
 inspirations of that genius whose infant wings it is 
 _ the mother’s office to plume. The nearer approach 
 of the race to God, through religious affections 
 
66 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 and un obedient life,— the consentaneousness of our 
 spirits with His spirit, and therefore the resem- 
 blance of earth to heaven,— can never come to pass, 
 until intelligent and pious mothers shall teach love 
 to God and love to man as the cradle-song of 
 every household. 
 
 My friends, let the truth be told, and léty its 
 rebuke be heeded, that human reason seksi in vain 
 for a reason why there should be this difference. of 
 patrician and plebeian,—- that is, of education and 
 non-education,— between the sexes. Hasten to 
 cease from this wrong, so long inflicted, and then 
 
 hasten to repair it. Do for the female child what 
 
 the queenly daughter of Pharaoh did for Moses; 
 pluck her from ruin,— from the evils of ignorance 
 and the temptations of a life-long dependence,— 
 more dreadful than monsters of the Nile,— and, 
 
 for opportunities to know her duty; and for incite- — 
 
 ments and knowledge to perform it, place her in 
 kings’ houses,— or, heat is better, in republican 
 schoolhouses ! 
 
 [ hold it as an axiom, that the first step rhich 
 a community, desiring most rapidly and certainly 
 to improve itself, is bound to take, is to improve 
 the physical, mental and moral. condition of its 
 daughters. It is the fault of man that woman has 
 yet done so little for the advancement of the race. 
 
 = 
 
ty 
 
 POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 67 
 
 Man has made great inventions and great discov- 
 eries; but his crowning achievement will consist in 
 enlisting the divinely-adapted energies of woman 
 in the work. of regenerating the world. He will 
 thus give to the forces of civilization a. power 
 superior to his own. Nay, more; he will add 
 @ power which. is the necessary complement of his 
 own,— one without which his own is comparatively 
 barren of good fruits,— and the codperation of the 
 two will have ten-fold more efficiency than the 
 efforts of either while bereft of its natural co- 
 worker. When human iniquity had ruined the 
 Old World,— when not one spot was left where 
 civil and religious liberty was allowed to exist, or 
 
 where the faculties of man could grow up into 
 
 manhood, or of woman into womanhood,— then, in 
 the Providence of God, Columbus discovered a 
 New World, where the fortunes of the race could 
 be commenced anew, and where the fires of civil 
 and sacerdotal despotism, which had been kindled 
 for the destruction of human rights, should thence- 
 forth blaze only as beacon-lights for their safety. 
 No less an epoch and a salvation will it be in the 
 history of the race, if, at this critical and emer- 
 gent hour, when our people and our institutions 
 are rapidly filling up the waste places of this great 
 continent, we can enlist the beneficent energies of 
 
68 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 woman in the mighty work of amelioration and 
 of progress which now impends. 4 
 To foretell the different walks of usefulness 
 which will fall to the several lot of the sexes 
 when woman takes her proper rank in the labors 
 of the world, to predict the changes in municipal 
 law which will assuredly accompany her education 
 and advancement, or to portray the beauties of 
 the new earth when her more exquisite refinement 
 and taste shall adorn it,— these things it is not 
 given to human prescience to reveal. They are 
 like discoveries of great natural laws, which cannot 
 be foretold; for foretelling is discovering, and the 
 prophet is lost in the marvel-worker. Still, there 
 are some points, lying in immediate proximity to 
 us, which we can now discover and decide; and 
 apparent obstacles in the distance will vanish as 
 we approach them. As it ofttimes happens, in 
 descending our mighty western rivers, a terrific 
 wall of mountains appears to be stretched across 
 our course and to frown denial to our progress ; 
 yet, when we seem about to be dashed against these 
 barriers, the beautiful meanderings of the stream 
 unbar gate after gate for our onward passage, until 
 the broad ocean at last opens upon our view; so to 
 the traveller in the heavenly pathway, or to the 
 seeker after human good, the mountains of obstruc- 
 
een ae leer eh 
 
 POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 69 
 
 tion bow down before him, or stand aside from his 
 path, bidding him pass on to his celestial goal, and 
 only rearing their lofty heads behind him to prove 
 how far he has left them in the distance, in his 
 victorious career 
 
 But this more important part of the subject I 
 must leave for another Lecture. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 In my former Lecture, I considered the question 
 whether the human race be really divided into two 
 sexes, of diverse capacities, and therefore adapted 
 and designed’ to fill diverse offices; or whether, 
 according to amodern doctrine, it consists virtually 
 of but one; and I endeavored to maintain the dual 
 hypothesis. As the anatomist must be blind in his 
 eyes, who does not see remarkable diversities in 
 the countenance, mien and structure, of man and 
 woman ; so, as it seems to me, the psychologist must ~ 
 be equally blind in his faculties, who does not see 
 diversities quite as remarkable in their intellectual 
 characteristics, and in their tastes, sympathies and 
 affections. Hence I ventured to affirm that God 
 had created the race Male and Female, oN THE 
 PRINCIPLE OF A Diviston or LABor. ; 
 
 There are species of animals, any one of whom 
 can live and prosper alone, can continue its kind, - 
 and perform all the functions of its narrow economy, 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 71 
 
 without help or sympathy from any other. They 
 may be called natural bachelors; or, rather, they 
 are Adam and Eve in one, without any mutilation 
 of the left side.’ But the offices and functions of the 
 human race are so infinitely manifold and diversified, 
 that its All-wise Creator gave a duality to the spe- 
 cies, and stamped the evidences of this two-fold 
 nature upon all their organization, inwardly as well 
 as outwardly, on the spirit not less than on the 
 body. And therefore, on the simple principle that, 
 in the hands of an intelligent workman, every dif- 
 ferent means prophesies a different result, and every 
 different cause necessitates a different effect, we in- 
 fer that the two sexes were preddapted and pre- 
 ordained to different spheres of action. And what 
 is most beautiful in the Divine arrangement is that 
 their primal diversities from each other are the 
 indissoluble bonds of their ultimate unity. Their 
 moral affinity is not mere juxtaposition, but attrac- 
 tion; it does not resemble mechanical admixture, 
 but chemical combination. And_ hence it necessa- 
 rily results that each is imperfect in itself, and 
 perfected only in the other. If this be so, then 
 any condition of society founded upon the fusion 
 or confusion of the sexes, as though they were 
 alike, must result in the destruction of the highest 
 
 T 
 
ores 
 
 12 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 happiness of both. A race exclusively of men, or 
 a race exclusively of women, would prosper just as 
 well as a race of men and women between whom 
 no differences should be recognized. The Crystal 
 Palace might as well have been all of iron or all of 
 glass, as men and women have been formed of the 
 same elements, mingled in the same proportions. 
 To man God has given more strength, to woman 
 more beauty; to him more causality, to her more 
 sympathy; to him more of the administrative fac- 
 ulty, to her more of the graces and sanctities that 
 adorn and consecrate retirement and repose. ‘T'o 
 build up institutions for the elevation and aggran- 
 dizement of the race is his noblest ambition on 
 earth; rightly to train up childhood is hers. 
 Hence, their relation through life is not one of an- 
 tagonism and rivalship, as it must be on the other 
 hypothesis, but of codperation ; not one of envy on 
 account of each other’s excellences, but of reciprocal 
 
 admiration for them. Hach is superior to the other _ 
 
 in its own sphere, but: Woman’s sphere is the high- 
 er one. ‘The whole order of creation shows that 
 God proceeds, in the formation of his works, from 
 the inferior to the superior. The latest-created are 
 the best. This order was eminently preserved in 
 the creation of man and woman. 
 
 But woman must accept her superiority with its 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 73 
 
 perils. Susceptible of keener enjoyments, she is 
 susceptible also of more poignant griefs. Capable 
 of being better than man, she is capable also of being 
 worse. Her orbit is more eccentric,—wmore centri- 
 petal, more centrifugal,—may approach nearer to 
 the divine source of Perfection, and thrill deeper 
 with its seraphic joys; or, in the perversion of her 
 nature, fly further into the realms of everlasting 
 darkness and cold. If it be true, as the poet says, 
 that | ich: 
 © Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,’’ 
 it is also true that we can conceive of no created 
 
 intelligence which more than she can feel for suf- 
 fering, and fly to succor it, without having herself 
 
 _ first suffered. 
 
 ae 
 
 ~~ Assuming it, then, as demonstrable and demon- 
 strated, that the range of womanly offices is not a 
 
 sphere, but a hemisphere, our next inquiry was, 
 
 whether, in the great circle of human duties, she 
 
 had been allowed to fill her semi-circle. Alas! in 
 
 its highest and noblest departments, she has not 
 been so allowed; but has been cruelly defrauded 
 of the dignities and enjoyments of her birthright. 
 
 _ By his superior physical strength, man has kept 
 
 ; 
 
 her in a state both of physical and moral subservi- 
 ency. She has not only been deprived of rights, 
 
74 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 socially, mentally and spiritually, but has been 
 subjected to terrible and lasting degradations. 
 Look at the institution of polygamy over half the 
 globe and through all the history of that half; and 
 the institution, (if I may so call it,) of celibacy 
 over a great portion of the rest; and measure, if any 
 geometry can measure, the depth and breadth of 
 demoralization and debasement which must result 
 from such wide-spread and long-continued abomi- 
 nations. History and human nature are witnesses 
 that, of polygamy and celibacy, adultery and pros- 
 titution are the moral complements. Look at 
 Turkish Seraglios and Hindoo Suttees, and say 
 whether these were schools where daughters euld 
 be trained to excellence ! 
 
 Woman has not only been despoiled of aes 3 
 
 but defrauded of education. Her mind has been 
 impoverished, as well as her heart corrupted. 
 
 paeinny 
 
 Where has she ever heretofore enjoyed, or where _ 
 does she now enjoy, equal opportunities for educa- — 
 
 tion with the other sex? And yet it may truly be 
 said that if, by some inexorable fate, we were pro- 
 hibited from educating but one of the two sexes, that 
 one should be the female; because a community of 
 intelligent mothers with ignorant fathers would 
 advance the race more rapidly and surely than one 
 of intelligent fathers with ignorant mothers. 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 75 
 
 '» This wrong in regard to education has engen- 
 dered another wrong, hardly less injurious, in. re- 
 gard to occupations and their rewards. Defects of 
 education disqualify for employment. On. no 
 other conceivable reason can the universal custom 
 of society be founded or defended, that woman 
 shall have less occupations than man, and receive 
 but half his» remuneration for equal services. 
 When. her earnings are of equal intrinsic value, 
 why should fifty per cent. be discounted from her 
 pay? What kind of equity is that which, in’ re- 
 warding labor, does not ask as to the relative quan- 
 tity or, quality of the work performed, but who 
 performed it? So you will find, when women 
 are employed in factories, that men, with two or 
 three times their wages, are employed to super- 
 intend them. In great printing establishments, 
 women are hired as compositors,— that is, to per- 
 ’. form the mechanical drudgery of type-setting,— 
 while the literary and better-rewarded department 
 ‘of proof-reading is claimed for men. Instores and 
 shops, though we sometimes see women exposed 
 behind the counters, yet where are they ever found 
 in the more private counting-room, receiving the 
 better pay of book-keepers? Outof the pecuniary 
 dependence resulting from such gross inequalities 
 in the means of obtaining a livelihood, have grown 
 
 1k 
 
76 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 up acommon sentiment and practice, throughout 
 what we call Christendom, that a woman must 
 marry for a settlement,— which is the next worst 
 thing to accepting a settlement without marriage. 
 To marry a purse instead of a man, is the basest 
 kind of cohabitation. . Here we can trace the germ- 
 ination and growth of vice, as easily as of a plant: 
 Out of deficiency of employment comes a want of 
 the necessaries of life; and out: of this, female 
 abandonment. 
 
 Let me now proceed to mention some depart- 
 ments of business for which woman is as well 
 adapted as man, and even better than he; and 
 which therefore should be opened to her immedi- 
 ately. I have spoken of printing. The knowledge 
 which an improved system of Common Schools can 
 impart would prepare women for all the more 
 learned and literary portions of this work. 
 
 Book-keeping has become a business by itself... 
 
 Among clerks, it occupies the highest place, and 
 commands the highest salaries. Why should not 
 such parts of it as need not be performed in a 
 crowded shop or public counting-room be  per- 
 formed by her ? 
 
 Both among merchants and city lawyers, she 
 could copy letters and legal instruments, for which 
 kind of work there is now so large a demand; and 
 
= 
 
 baie en 
 
 POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 17 
 
 thus dispense with the services of those country 
 boys, for whom it would be so much better to hold 
 the plough than the pen. So, at least in those shops 
 where female customers mostly resort, would not 
 young men, were their gallantry anywise propor- 
 tioned to their height, give place to women ? 
 
 And if pharmacy be an appropriate field for 
 woman’s skill, then the business of the apothecary 
 or druggist devolves naturally into her hands. _ 
 
 A. most beautiful field of labor, offering both 
 emolument and distinction, is now open for woman 
 
 in the Arts of Design. For everything belonging 
 
 to ornamental work, or the decorative art, nature 
 has given to the female a finer taste and a more 
 
 creative genius than to. the other sex. Look at 
 
 the hideous forms of the idols which the heathen 
 worship, in India, in China, and throughout Aus- 
 tralasia; look at much of the sculpture on medi- 
 
 eval churches, or even on the architecture of a 
 
 period: somewhat later, and say if women could 
 ever have embodied conceptions so ghastly and 
 loathsome. Why should not the whole scope of the 
 
 _ Fine Arts, the whole scope of decoration and em- 
 
 bellishment, be opened to her? That man alone 
 should design patterns for the fabrics that adorn a 
 
 _ woman’s person, or the furniture that embellishes 
 
78 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 her house, or the plan of her flower-garden or con- 
 servatory, is it not ashame to both parties? But 
 when her finer genius shall be applied’ to engray- 
 ings, when she shall devise patterns for all kinds 
 of woven and textile fabrics, and for every species 
 of upholstery and of cabinet-work, then shall we be 
 everywhere surrounded by new forms of beauty, 
 and the cottages of our humblest people will shine 
 ja specimens of elegance and taste, such as queens 
 with all their wealth can now scarcely command. 
 As art‘advances, Nature too. will enrobe herself in 
 lovelier colors and forms; for Nature has Beauties 
 as well as Powers that await the evoking ’touch of 
 human genius. Let the refining power of song’ be 
 
 imparted to all children, and let the art of drawing’ 
 
 and designing become, as it may, the accomplish- 
 ment of all mothers, and our households, our gar- 
 dens, our schools and our churches, will echo to the 
 
 music of lovelier voices than ever before, and we” 
 shall be apparelled and surrounded with choicer — 
 
 emblems of earthly beauty, stimulating to the 
 beauty that never decays. 
 
 I must be permitted to say that there is one de- 
 partment of labor, both in city and in country, 
 which woman seems disposed to abandon, but 
 which, for her own honor and tho progress of civ- 
 lization, she ought always to fill. The topie is 
 
 5 mets 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 79 
 
 homely, but whatever pertains to home should be 
 delightful. Every woman should be a good house- 
 Keeper. A well-ordered house is worthy the dig- 
 nity of being compared with a well-ordered state. 
 But for perfect housekeeping, as for perfect gen- 
 eralship, one must have seen service in all the 
 subordinate ranks. In the present state of society, 
 we need not go far to find many a man who would 
 sive all the waltzes and polkas that a meretricious 
 genius ever invented, and throw all new-fangled 
 flourishes upon piano or guitar into the bargain, for 
 healthful breakfasts, and for dinners somewhere 
 within fifteen degrees of the longitude of the 
 appointed hour. These are not points in our 
 “ Psalm of Life’ where duty requires of a man’s 
 stomach that it should, as Longfellow says, | 
 
 *¢ Learn to labor and to wait,”’’ 
 
 or rather that it should first wait, and then ¢ravail. 
 No higher respect is due to the greatest inventor 
 or discoverer, than to the woman who has mastered 
 the philosophy of Domestic Economy, and who 
 works the machinery of her household with astro- 
 “nomical order, precision and silence. In such a 
 house, even inanimate things seem to be endued 
 with intelligence, and to feel the force of example. 
 “The stork in the heavens,” says the prophet, 
 
80 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 ‘‘ knoweth her appointed time, and the turtle and 
 the crane and the swallow observe the time of their 
 coming.” And so it is, in such a house, with all 
 turkeys, ducks and sirloins; they know and observe 
 ‘the time of ¢heir coming ;’’ while all unseemly 
 vessels of pantry or scullery, as soon as their work 
 is done, are like Job’s beasts, ‘‘ that go into their 
 dens and remain in their places.’ Such a house- 
 keeper elevates the drudgery of cooking into: the 
 dignity of science. Her kitchen is a laboratory, 
 and shea learned professor. Her culinary pro- 
 cesses of compounding, baking, roasting and so 
 forth, is science applied to the arts,— to the most 
 useful of all arts, that of health-making, strength- 
 begetting and longevity. In all her condiments 
 and preserves, she gives lessons in therapeutics ; 
 and the provocatives and relishes for which ruder 
 workmen exhaust Araby and the Indian Archipel- 
 agoes she finds in fresher and more delicious 
 sweets and savors of nature’s indigenous concoct- 
 
 ing. » Hence, in her household, there is no dys- 
 
 pepsy, but always eupepsy. ~Slops, sops and unc- 
 tuousness, she holds to be an immorality, as they 
 
 truly are. Thus, the swinish gastronomy of the 
 common table is changed into Hygiene; and the | 
 gross sensations of animal appetite are refined into 
 emotions of fitness, elegance and happy compan- | 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 81 
 
 ionship. Under her roof, serene sleep chases away 
 night-mares ; and headaches, which in forty-nine 
 eases Out of every fifty are caused by vile concoc- 
 tions from the larder, or the ‘accursed forgeries of 
 saleratus, never torment her family;* but her 
 children have heart-loves instead of heart-burns ; 
 frolics in lieu of colics; clean bills of health, for 
 druggists’ bills; and benevolence towards all man- 
 
 kind, instead of wishing all the doctors in the Red 
 
 Sea. She puts to scorn the idea that the culti- | 
 vator of the soil needs knowledge, in order to turn 
 the sunshine, the rain and other elements, into pro- 
 ductions for our cellars and our store-rooms; but 
 when we come to the far more difficult and delicate 
 transmutation, and these very productions are 
 themselves to be turned into vital tissues,— into 
 
 the beating heart, into brain, retina, and all the 
 
 papille of touch, taste and smell;— ay, and 
 
 into vital spirits too, buoyancy, glee and spontane- 
 
 ous happiness, which are the token and effluence 
 of health; —that then the process may be pre- 
 sided over by any ignorant slave of the South, or 
 
 * [ have known many persons to be cured of periodical and 
 chronic sick-headaches, by merely discontinuing the use of 
 
 ‘ gravies and melted butter. The disuse of coffee often pro- 
 
 duces the same relief. 
 
82 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 any ‘‘hanimal’”’ just caught from an immigrant 
 ship. 
 
 The husband of such a wife enjoys, in one re- 
 spect, the security ofa hereafter, even in this life ; 
 for he lives where moth and rust do not corrupt. 
 Every article in his wardrobe knows that it is on 
 its good behavior. His. linen never dares to be 
 without a button. . No seam ever ventures, like 
 some passionate men, ‘‘to rip out;”’ because it — 
 knows the instantaneous penalty of haying its lips 
 sewed up. How greatly do all such households 
 promote good humor, and all the social and domestie 
 virtues; and how immensely do they Jessen. the 
 labors of the Society against Profane Swearing ! ) 
 
 But the most honorable and beneficent employ- 
 ment in civilized society is emphatically hers. I 
 mean the education of children. That woman should 
 be the educator of children, I believe to be as much 
 a requirement of nature as that she should be the 
 mother of children. This law summons her at 
 once to the highest posts of honor and of glory. 
 Admit this, and you admit that the highest devel- 
 opment and the most generous attainments belong 
 to woman, by necessity as well as of right; because _ 
 the completest education is never more demanded, 
 or more serviceable, than in educating others. In — 
 mechanical works, the later processes require the | 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 88 
 
 superior skill. In burnishing and chasing silver or 
 gold, in polishing the diamond, in the exquisite 
 labors of the painter or the statuary, the last 
 touches claim the excelling power. \ But, in mental 
 and moral processes, the primordial movements 
 require, and will repay, the most perfected skill of 
 the master’s hand. The artist’s work is surface- 
 work. The teacher’s work is heart-work ; — yea, 
 in the very core of the heart. There is said to be 
 a garden plant, through whose root the gardener 
 draws a skein of silk, of whatever color he pleases, 
 and lo! the luxuriant flower answers to the color 
 of the silk that was buried in its bulb. Thus the 
 life of the man reveals the hue of the principles 
 which the teacher imbedded in the soul of the 
 child. How divine, then, should be the influences 
 ‘which penetrate to the very sources of being, and 
 which inspire, not so much the thoughts, as the 
 _ power of thought; not even the archetypes of 
 beauty, but the genius which evolves the arche- 
 types; not Utopias. and romances of heaven upon 
 earth, but fore-written histories of the benevolence 
 and joy which shall come with the coming of 
 -Christ’s kingdom among men! The callous and 
 indurated frame of an adult will bear physical 
 blows for a day, any one of which would demolish 
 the tender organization of an infant. So the adult 
 
 8 
 
84 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 mind will bear moral strains, which would tear in 
 pieces and. beyond repairing, warp and woof of the — 
 child’s moral tissue. Hence nature’s commands 
 are most peremptory, that affection, as well as in- 
 telligence, the wisest wisdom and the gentlest gen- 
 tleness, shall preside over the rearing of children ; 
 and she visits with most terrible retributions a 
 neglect of these commands. One who has learned 
 everything requisite for the duties of any other 
 department, office or position whatever, in civilized 
 society, has yet much more to learn before becom- 
 ing competent for the training of childhood. 
 Education, then, I say emphatically, is woman’s 
 work ;— the domain of her empire, the sceptre of 
 her power, the crown of her glory. At first, it is, 
 and necessarily must be, almost exclusively hers. 
 The true mother continues to be one with the child 
 for years after its birth. Her consciousness’ em- 
 braces and interpenetrates its consciousness, and — 
 she has rather a feeling than an intuition of its 
 desires. Her soul is an atmosphere around its 
 soul; and if that atmosphere be pure, then, indeed, 
 the child breathes the air of heaven before it is cons 
 taminated with the foul vapors of earth. Man may 
 bestow his care upon a child from the obligations 
 of duty, but woman does it from the spontaneity of 
 affection. He may force open his eyes to wateh it; 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 85 
 
 by day or by night; but woman’s eyes are set, 
 open by nature. The father expects his reward, 
 for all his toils and anxieties, in the future emi- 
 nence of the object of his care ; but with the mother 
 it is the same, whether her child is to be a sage or 
 a simpleton; for her care is like the service ren- 
 dered to God,— its own exceeding great reward. 
 
 Let woman, then, be educated to the highest 
 practicable point; not only because it is her right, 
 but because it is essential to the world’s progress. 
 Let her voice be a familiar voice, in schools and 
 academies, and in halls of learning and science, 
 Let whatever is in her of beauty or of strength, 
 of purity in love or enthusiasm in virtue, of heroic 
 endurance at home or of world-circumnavigating 
 philanthropy, be developed into blossoming and 
 fruitage ; and not man alone, but all nature, shall 
 _ rejoice as a bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride. 
 I have now mentioned some things for which 
 woman has an especial aptitude. As I hold even 
 employments to be masculine and feminine, (though 
 with some of the neuter gender,) there must be 
 others uncongenial, or even incompatible with her 
 nature. 
 
 The military profession is one. I state a prop- 
 sition from which I suppose there will be no dis- 
 "sent, when I say that all wars, at least on one 
 
86 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 side, are unjust; and, in nine cases out of ten, 
 they are wrong on both sides. In all such cases, 
 the very fact of war subverts all the ends for 
 which the social state was formed, reverses. the 
 whole code of international justice and honor, and 
 violates, on the grandest scale, God’s laws of. re- 
 ligion and brotherhood. In peace, homicide is a 
 crime. In war it is an honor, and the conquer- 
 _or’s laurels grow luxuriant according to the streams 
 of human blood with which he fertilizes them. In 
 peace, the incendiary of a single dwelling is pun- 
 ished with death. In war, the light of confla- 
 grated cities becomes a halo of glory around the 
 conqueror’s head. In peace, a pirate is hostis 
 humant generis,—an enemy of the human-race. 
 In war, the privateer, who, as against the bellig- 
 erent, answers to the pirate, seizes honorable 
 plunder. In peace, the greatest proportion of 
 robbers and thieves stamps a community as most 
 iniquitous and debased. In war, the greatest num- 
 ber of robberies and thefts, with the greatest 
 amount of pillage, measures the financial glory of 
 the campaign. In peace, he who creates property, 
 diffuses comfort, and adds to the common. weal, 
 is the public benefactor. In war, the destroyer 
 of property, of comfort, and the common weal, 
 has the huzzas of the multitude, titles, insignia, 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 87 
 
 wealth, fame. In peace, he who provides for 
 widows and orphans, feeds the poor, and is the 
 cripple’s staff, is beloved while living, and lamented 
 when dead. In war, he who makes widows’ and 
 orphans, robs the poor of their bread, and with his 
 broad-swords and cannon-balls cripples mankind 
 by wholesale, is often the contemporary idol, and 
 the historic hero. In peace, it is the duty of the 
 priest to pray for his enemies, and to prepare souls 
 for eternity. In war, he prays for their ruin, and 
 helps to send the souls of both sides to eternity 
 unprepared. 
 
 _ Such is the character of all unjust wars, and of 
 one side, at least, of all wars,—subverting the 
 order of nature, and countermanding the law of 
 God,—at one stroke turning the universe half 
 over, so that the moral zenith becomes the nadir, 
 and the moral nadir the zenith, Satan’s law the 
 - higher law, and God’s law only second best. 
 
 Now; I do not urge the objection suggested by 
 Addison, in the Spectator, that battles might be 
 lost because the female general, on the eve of 
 the encounter, has indispensable engagements in 
 her tent; but I do urge the objection that the 
 general profession of arms is wholly alien and re- 
 pellent from all that is womanly,—from all that 
 ig mother-like, wife-like, sister-like, daughter-hke, 
 
 8* 
 
88 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 and, therefore, utterly abhorrent to all that we 
 admire and love to cherish in the sex. Could they 
 survive the first maddening taste of blood, would 
 not women become wolves? Besides, if armies, 
 and the leaders of armies, had no prospect of ulti- 
 mate peace and repose, no expected home of wife 
 and children to return to, after their martial days 
 were full, would it not petrify the last fibre * 
 tenderness in a soldier’s breast ? 
 
 ‘I well know the prepared reply whose set duty 
 it is to overthrow all this argument. If women 
 were law-makers and soldiers, it is said, all wars 
 would cease; and thus our argument against 
 soldier-women would be more than answered by | 
 the dying out of the soldiery itself But how 
 can those who maintain that men and women are 
 alike in their powers and propensities, still main- 
 tain that women would be so different from men if 
 full play were given to all the mighty passions 
 that enkindle war? Why, rather, would not the 
 restraints which the female sex now imposes upon 
 the martial passions of men be all removed, and 
 women become the priestesses of Bellona, drinking 
 their own blood from self-inflicted wounds, as’ was 
 done by the old Roman priests, to whet their ap- 
 petite for the blood of foes? » Why, rather, on this 
 hypothesis of equality, would not each sex inflame 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 89 
 
 the ferocity of the other, until our moral code 
 should be revolutionized,—vengeance and destruc- 
 
 _ tiveness becoming the virtues, and forgiveness and 
 
 peace the vices, of mankind ? 
 
 Independently of all this, however, and even 
 should all wars be annihilated;— an event which, 
 I thank God, there is good reason for believing 
 will soon come to. pass,— occasions will still arise 
 demanding great physical as well as moral cour- 
 age; and, as I would have a Brutus or a Tell, 
 rather than a Charlotte Corday, strike down the 
 tyrant in his career of oppression, so, when some 
 civil traitor, in the forum or in the senate, turns 
 
 apostate to liberty, and betrays the immortal prin- 
 
 ciples of humanity, I would have a man, rather 
 than a woman, stretch the recreant upon the dis- 
 secting table of his invective, cleave open his 
 _ bosom, and show to the world, by autopsic demon- 
 
 stration, that he who can betray human Freedom 
 
 is without a heart. In fine, do not the fierce pas- 
 sions of combativeness and destructiveness, whether 
 displayed on the battle-field by Boadicea, the war- 
 rior, or in the streets by Xantippe, the scold, de- 
 grade and deform our highest ideals of woman ? 
 Let the gladiatorial spectacles of the Coliseum, the 
 bull-fight and the battle-field, be as strange to the 
 
90 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 practice of her life as they are to the gentleness of 
 her nature. i 
 
 How much of the art of pugilism, or clapper- 
 clawing, a woman should learn, how much of the 
 spirit of pugnacity and calcitration she should 
 possess, for domestic practice, I leave for the Mr. 
 and Mrs. Caudles to determine. But, of all the 
 lectures ever delivered, whether literary or relig- 
 ious, I presume that curtain-lectures have made 
 the smallest number of scholars or saints. 
 
 So, too, the profession of law seems unsuited to 
 woman. [ think she has not, and was never 
 designed to have, that hard, keen, passionless 
 intellectuality which some of the legal departments 
 require. Other parts of the profession, also, de- — 
 mand a firmer nerve than any knife-practice of the 
 surgeon. Women should be with the criminal ten 
 thousand times more than they have ever yet 
 been; but it should be in the prison-cell, where 
 love tenderly reforms, and not in the court-room, 
 where justice sternly condemns. 
 
 As to the demand which has been recently 
 made, and is'so peremptorily urged, of half-man 
 and half-woman juries,— wives separated from their 
 husbands for weeks together, without liberty. to 
 write to them, or even speak to them, unless by 
 permission obtained from the court,— packed into 
 the jury-box by day, and locked up all night in 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 91 
 
 the jury-room, with other wives’ husbands, and 
 marching in procession to and fro, after the mace 
 of a man-sheriff, or of a woman-sheriff, as the case 
 may be, with all the new causes of challenge by 
 the litigants, and of exemption from the panel, to 
 be discussed before the public,— it seems to me a 
 sort of sphinx, or mermaid conception, too gro- 
 tesque and low even for heathen mythology. I 
 shall offer no argument against it; nor, on the 
 other hand, shall I assail it wih ridicule; I leave 
 it to the intuitions of decorum and common sense.* 
 
 * When this Lecture was written, I thought I could safely 
 leave so plain a matter as that of ** women jurors’? ‘to the 
 _ tntuitions of decorum and common sense.’? Claims and sug- 
 _ gestions that I have since heard from persons of some influ- 
 ence apprize me of my mistake. <* W hy,’’ says an advocate 
 of **Woman’s Rights,’’ ‘‘ cannot women sit on juries, and 
 try causes, as well as men? If you say they cannot take 
 their babies with them into the jury-seats, we reply, ‘Some 
 women have no babies.” And if you say they had better be 
 at home with their husbands, we reply, again, ‘ Some women 
 have no husbands.’’? Such notions as these, existing in re- 
 spectable quarters, induce me to state the case more at length. 
 
 In Massachusetts, every voter, with a few exceptions, is 
 liable to be a juror. Every three years, a sufficient number 
 of names is taken from the voting-lists to furnish the town’s 
 quota. These names are put into a box. Before the session 
 of each court, the clerk issues an order to the select-men of 
 each town in the county, directing them to draw and return 
 a certain number of names. These names are then drawn 
 at random ; the persons whose names are drawn are notified, 
 and at the day appointed they are required to attend the 
 
99 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 I see but one reason why woman should not 
 preach the Gospel anywhere and everywhere,— 
 
 court, under a penalty of forty dollars. I would thank the 
 next advocate of ‘* women-jurors ’’ to write out the necessary 
 provisions for new marriages and new babies, within the next 
 three years ; and to tell what the proposed change would 
 amount to, if all the ‘* liabilities °? were to be exempted. 
 
 But, leaving out all considerations of health, of over-ruling 
 engagements and of female delicacy, (for delicacy, in such a 
 state of society, will be an historical word only,) what is the 
 ‘nature of the questions which women, as jurors, must try? 
 Let me refer to law-books and law-dockets, and see what will 
 be, from what has been : 
 
 1. On opening a book at random, the first case presented 
 is an action for slaughtering twenty-seven head of cattle. 
 Issue, was the work skilfully done? 2. On contract for ston- 
 ing a well. 8. Damage for flowing lands. Inspection of 
 premises by jury. Four miles’ travel through dense under- 
 wood and swamps. 4. Plaintiff demands pay for making 
 bridge and wharf. Defence, unsound timber, insufficient 
 trellis-work and clamping. 5, Action for gross mistake in 
 surveying Maine lands. Plaintiffs loss in stumpage, (not 
 oratorical, but ligneous.) 6. Damage, unskilful treatment of 
 a horse as farrier. 7. Lease for half the crops. Question, 
 bad husbandry. 8. Action on contract for a whaling voyage. 
 Defence, that plaintiff was a woman and could not throw har- 
 poon, &c. 9. Issue, unmerchantable quality of bricks. 10. 
 Action for six months’ services by a female. Defence, that 
 plaintiff left at the end of three months. Replication, that 
 defendant owned a mine, and ordered plaintiff down to work 
 with his men in that, which she rightfully refused to do, 
 
 Let this suffice, though the list might be indefinitely 
 extended. As a mere business matter, to say nothing of 
 higher considerations, — is it not self-evident that no class of 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 93 
 
 before congregation, presbytery, or synod ; — and 
 
 that reason is, that it is ten thousand times better 
 
 to go about practising the gospel, even than to 
 preach it. The physical violence and obstruction 
 which the early promulgators of Christianity were 
 obliged to encounter constituted the best of rea- 
 sons why the public ministrations of woman should 
 be interdicted by the Apostle; but that reason 
 was temporary, and has passed away; and we may 
 well-infer that the prohibition ceases, when the 
 reason ceases on which it was founded. | 
 
 For every reason that the crimes and cruelties 
 
 of War are repugnant to woman, the love and 
 
 mercy of the Gospel are congenial to her. Study 
 the character of Christ, and you will see that it 
 embraces all the peculiar elements of female ex- 
 cellence ; it develops to a higher type the tender- 
 ness of woman, not less than the firmness of man. 
 It is universally conceded, also, that the religious 
 nature of woman is more keenly susceptible,— 
 more inflammable, if I may so speak; that is, it 
 takes fire at a lower temperature,— than that of 
 man. ‘Then why should not she, who can feel the 
 charms of benevolence most fervidly, also portray 
 
 persons can be suitably placed on juries, except those whose 
 general employments or vocations in life give them some apti- 
 tude or fitness for trying the questions that are the usual sub- 
 jects of litigation in our courts? 
 
04. A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 them most attractively, and spread. through colder 
 
 | 
 
 hearts the contagion of her own enthusiasm? The | 
 
 hard and penetrative nature of men may make them 
 better theologians, (though, if the natural perfec- 
 tions of God are better apprehended by the intel- 
 lect, his moral perfections are certainly better 
 apprehended by the spirit;) yet, for the lovely 
 and loving evangelism,— the ‘‘ Good News” of 
 the Poel rach sill proclaim it in a voice so 
 sweet and persuasive, and who shall portray that 
 life of the Messiah so surpassingly beautiful, and 
 his death so infinitely heroic and sublime, with a 
 pathos so searching and subduing as hers? Who 
 so bountifully shall reproduce his charities among 
 men, by the captivation of his example? Besides, 
 were women to preach, we might expect more 
 preaching to children, of which, judging from ob- 
 servation and history, men seem almost incapable. I 
 must, however, still repeat, that to go about practis- 
 ing the Gospel is infinitely better than to preach it. 
 
 And what more appropriate vocation for woman 
 
 can be conceived, than some of the departments of 
 the Healing Art? As God created the race male 
 and fasta lby: so many of the rules of Hygiene, and 
 
 many of the maladies to which ignorance and ex- 
 cess have given birth, are also heute and femi- 
 nine. And it is not enough to say that there is 
 a fitness and a propriety in haying female physi- 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 95 
 
 cians for the mother, the wife, and the daughter; 
 but I feel bound to say it is often barbarism to 
 have any other. I speak on this subject advisedly, 
 and aforethought, by authority of many of our 
 wisest men, and of all our wisest women, when I 
 say that there is no custom of savage tribes more 
 unseemly and abhorrent than that of sending every 
 young doctor, or fresh graduate from the Medical 
 schools, with all their levities and pruriency, into 
 the sick chambers of those women whose natural 
 instincts of delicacy, by the influences ofa refined 
 education, have been elevated into a morality, and 
 consecrated into a religion. We all know there 
 are ten thousand cases where nothing but the im- 
 ' minent fear of death enforces the capitulation of 
 females to the present customs of society; and innu- 
 -merable other cases, also, where mediczal consultation 
 is postponed, until life is the forfeit of the delay. 
 
 One of the principal attainments, preliminary 
 and auxiliary to the Healing Art, is the science 
 of Botany ; and what more healthful, appropriate, 
 and delightful pursuit for the female, than io col- 
 lect the materials, and investigate the properties 
 and uses, of that beautiful effluence of the Su- 
 premely Beautiful, the vegetable world? So 
 far, certainly, as flowers made Eden, the women 
 
 of all times have sought to restore the lost Para- 
 | 9 
 
96 » A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 dise. At present, however, women too often cul- 
 tivate flowers, as men cultivate women, for their 
 sensuous properties only; they do not learn that 
 wonderful ‘‘ Language of the Flowers ’”’ which sei- 
 
 ence teaches,— a language of structure and form- 
 
 ation, which speaks to the eye, of medicinal or 
 
 poisonous qualities within, just as the outward — 
 
 organization and aspect of men reveal ¢hei in-— 
 ward attributes to the eye of him who has learned — 
 
 - to read the revelation. 
 
 Pharmaceutics, or the art of preparing medi- | 
 cines, requires the application of the very faculties 
 
 which woman possesses in superiority. Chemistry 
 is the foundation of this curative art, as it is of the 
 disease-preventing, health-creating art of cookery. 
 
 So, too, at all times, from her quickness of per-_ 
 
 ception, and her delicacy and dexterity of touch, 
 
 woman has been so preéminent as a nurse, that the - 
 
 Ne 
 
 yery name implies her sex, and excludes the other. 
 
 Here, then, you have the principal elements 
 which go into combination to make up the phy- 
 
 sician; and you find them all most congenial to the | 
 
 tastes and adapted to the capacities of woman; 
 
 yet a senseless custom debars her from this whole — 
 range of useful and benevolent duties she is so | 
 
 eminently fitted to perform. Let me borrow a 
 
 technical term from the medical profession itself, 
 
 and say that the sexual characteristics of disease, 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 97 
 
 the nicety requisite for preparing remedies, and 
 the gentle and solacing spirit with, which. they 
 should be administered, all ‘‘ zndicate’’ a woman. 
 
 But Politics! Polities!! That any mortal who 
 has ever lived within the roar and stench of that 
 black and. sulphurous lake should desire to see 
 woman embarked upon its tumultuous and howling 
 waters, is a mystery past finding out. The dia- 
 lect of wrath, the throttlings and the» stiletto-prac-’ 
 tice of political parties, mad for office and for 
 plunder, certainly present one of the vilest phases 
 of our present vile civilization. We have been ac- 
 customed to think that mankind made a substantial 
 move upwards when they discarded the use of 
 " poisoned weapons in war; but what are some of 
 our partisan-newspapers but steam-driven engines, 
 of forty-satan power, hurling abroad their missiles 
 _ all saturated with poison? Belligerent parties may 
 not poison each others’ wells and food, as was 
 _ done by hostile armies a few centuries avo; but it 
 has become so common to defend and applaud 
 every person belonging to one’s own party, and to 
 assail and denounce all members of an opposing 
 party, that, while the most upright and exemplary 
 men are often condemned, real intemperance and 
 licentiousness escape with impunity, under the plea 
 _ that political accusations are not to be believed. Thus 
 is built up a refuge for vice, but for virtue a, cross. 
 
98 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 It is too well known to be disputed, that many 
 of the legislative assemblies of this nation are not 
 so much deliberative assemblies as cabals,—con- 
 venient. rendezvous, stationed at eligible points, 
 and supported at the public expense, for intrigue 
 and Machiavelism on a magnificent scale. In the 
 Congress of the United States, measures are often, 
 if not usually, carried by such stratagem or vio- 
 lence as sets all statesmanship aside. That there 
 is an infinite distance between the science of pol- 
 itics and the craft of politicians, and that vast 
 advances, stage beyond stage, indefinitely onwards, 
 are yet to be evolved from political science, and 
 applied to the great art of making nations happy, 
 T have no doubt; but, at the present time, I can 
 conceive of nothing, excepting either some enter- 
 prise of benevolence, for whose success the aid of 
 the government is essential, or the rescue from 
 peril of some great principles fundamental to the 
 well-being of mankind,— such as are enumerated 
 in Bills of Rights, and Declarations of Independ- 
 ence,— which can compensate any man of cul- 
 tivated mind and a peaceful disposition,— much 
 less, any woman,— for entering the political arena, 
 and encountering the same class of opponents that 
 St. Paul says he fought with at Ephesus. Besides, 
 improvement and reforms in politics are to be the 
 result or consequence of improvement and reforms 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 99 
 
 in other things,— in household training, in neigh- 
 borhood proprieties and decencies, in public opin- 
 ion generally. All that laws, whether penal or 
 prohibitory, can do, is to fasten and hold public © 
 practice up to the elevation which public sentiment 
 had before reached. T'o open fountains of purity 
 and honor, therefore, at the fire-side, in the village 
 circle, and at the village school, until their influ- 
 ences shall overflow into the street and the market- 
 place, and at last reach the hustings and the 
 voting-room —is not this a duty infinitely more 
 delicate, more noble, and, therefore, better suited 
 to woman, than to turn legislator, jailer, and hang- 
 man herself? Politics, at best, is but a crude 
 instrument of reform; incapable of nice discrimina- 
 tions; often including the good in its legal con- 
 demnations, and in its legal justifications the bad; 
 and furnishing endless examples, both in the per- 
 sons who are condemned, and in the penalties which 
 are inflicted, how inferior in precision, justice, and 
 equity, is any human law, when compared with the 
 divine. Even the best agents who are selected for 
 the execution of our criminal codes are so blind 
 that they never detect half the offenders, so slow 
 that they never catch half whom they detect, and so 
 subject to weakness, and to every quality of human 
 bias, that justice, in passing through their hands, 
 Q* 
 
100 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 ig sometimes sweetened into compassion and par- 
 don, and sometimes vitriolized into revenge, before 
 it reaches its objects. ‘But the tribunal of a pure 
 conscience and an enlightened reason, which’ the 
 true reformer,—the true mother and the true 
 teacher,— can establish in the human breast, suf- 
 fers no offending deed, nay, no offending thought 
 or desire, to escape; holds the balances of justice 
 with untrembling hands, and punishes, by tale and 
 by weight, according to self-conscious accusations ; 
 rewards, too, fur every good deed that is done. 
 What ‘‘ gentle woman,” pondering upon ‘these 
 truths, will not exclaim, ‘‘ I had rather be a door- 
 keeper in the house, where such as Christ took 
 into his arms and blessed are gathered together, 
 than to dwell in political tents, and be crowned 
 with all political honors”? Nothing, as it seems 
 to me, can account for the present clamor in be- 
 half of women-voters, and women-office-holders, 
 but the amazingly false notions which prevail re- 
 specting the intrinsic dignity and enduring import- 
 ance of education, as compared with the ephem- 
 eral tinsel of political distinctions,— respecting 
 the clean and beautiful work of the teacher, train- 
 ing up characters to empyrean height and purity, 
 as compared with the noisome and bloody work of 
 the politician, sometimes flaying and cauterizing, 
 and sometimes amputating and beheading, in order 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 101 
 
 to cure or cut away from the body-politic those 
 frightful gangrenes, whose very existence would 
 have been prevented by the intelligent and faithful 
 performance of woman’s earlier and holier services. 
 As to the idea that woman has a ‘“ self-evident.”’ 
 and ‘‘inalienable”’ right to assist in the govern- 
 ment of the race, I reply, she does assist. in that 
 government now; and would to Heaven she would 
 exercise a still larger share in its administration ! 
 But this great work, like others, is naturally di- 
 vided between the sexes,— the nobler government 
 of children belonging to women, the less noble gov- 
 ernment of adults to men. 
 
 But if the Halls of Legislature and Congress 
 were opened to women, they would purify them, it 
 is said! The answer to this must recognize both 
 hypotheses respecting the sexes. First, then, if 
 woman is like man, why would she not do as man 
 has done ?— only aggravating and multiplying his 
 evil works ; — because then the competitions would 
 be doubled, and all restraints withdrawn. But, 
 secondly, if, as I contend, woman is unlike man,— 
 better when she is good, and worse when she is 
 bad,— then, at least in the present state of so- 
 ciety, I believe that her participation in political 
 strifes, ambitions and cupidities, would rouse to 
 tempestuous fury all the passions that ever sweep 
 her to swiftest perdition. Men and women are 
 
102 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 yet drawn together by too many passional affini- 
 ties, to allow us even to hope that husbands could 
 leave their wives, and wives their husbands, and 
 pass for months and months, by day and by night, 
 through all the enforced intimacies and juxtaposi- 
 tions of legislative life, without something more 
 than pure Platonic emotions; and she who wishes 
 her sex to encounter these perils has forgotten the 
 wisest prayer that was ever made, ‘‘ Lead-us not 
 into temptation.’’ Politics are now full of secret 
 and base machinations, and many politicians trade 
 in votes as brokers trade in stocks; but, under the 
 combined machinations of politics and amours, the 
 
 trade would be not only in votes, but in virtue; 
 
 and, to existing venality and official malversation, 
 would be added the vices that made Sodom and 
 Gomorrah. The propensities would be invoked to 
 supplement logic; and the triumph of public men, 
 and the success of public measures, would be de- 
 termined by baser instincts than those of ambition 
 or avarice. Restraining men from) impurity, as 
 women now do,—and can a thousand times more 
 than they do,— much may be accomplished, not 
 only in the way of legislative morals, but of the 
 morals of legislators; but whoever, in our present 
 state of society, advocates the promiscuous min- 
 
 gling of men and women at the caucus*and the 
 
 sey, 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WoMAN. 108 
 
 ballot-box, in State legislatures and in Congres- 
 sional halls, ig striving to promote, whether con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, the return of the courts 
 of Louis XV. and Charles II.; and, as the expo- 
 nents of those courts, other hell-ascended crowds 
 of Madame Du Barrys and Duchesses of Cleve- 
 land and: Portsmouth. 
 
 May God save our wives, our mothers and our 
 daughters, from the uncleanness and the rancor- 
 ousness, from the savagery and the temptations, of 
 politics; and may woman beware lest she die of 
 the disease her rashness tempts her to heal ! 
 
 In justice, however, to the other side of this 
 “question, perhaps I ought not to omit certain col- 
 lateral and incidental benefits which may be 
 claimed to accrue, should woman strip off her sex, 
 and rough it with man in the turbulence and riot 
 of the political arena. What a beautiful school 
 for domestic debate, prolonged not merely ‘‘ from 
 morn to dewy eve,” but from eve to bloody morn, 
 should the father be a whig, the mother a demo- 
 erat, and the unsophisticated daughter a ‘‘ third- 
 party man”?! On the stump, at the hustings, or 
 other bear-garden, the intimate relation of hus- 
 band and wife would furnish admirable facilities 
 for mutual impeachment and recrimination, which, 
 to bachelors and marriage-haters, would be intensely 
 
104 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 edifying. If husband and wife were rivals for the 
 same office, then, no matter which party might 
 prevail, the honor and the emoluments would still 
 come into the family. Or, if both were elected 
 to Senate or House, they might pelt each other 
 from the opposition benches, which would be a 
 great relief from closer quarters... It is well 
 known that in every political campaign there is a 
 vast deal of Paul-Prying and eaves-dropping to be 
 done, to learn the enemies’ strategy. But, in 
 this new Utopia, the husband might, just as hon- 
 orably, get at the wife’s correspondence by picking 
 a lock, or the wife get at the husband’s secrets. 
 by tickling him to talk in his sleep. As to the 
 parents’ equal right to inculcate hostile political 
 doctrines on the minds of. their children, they 
 might make a compromise,— each devoting alter- 
 nate lessons, or alternate days, to the exposure of 
 the other’s iniquities, so that the children, in the 
 end, would have a good opportunity to know the 
 wickedness of them both. But this must suffice. 
 I leave it for the advocates of women-politicians 
 and women-office-seekers to complete the argu- 
 ment. 
 
 One thing I must add, that if women are to 
 make a sortie upon the political rostrum, and 
 invade legislative halls, I hope that. men will 
 
«ae 
 
 POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 105 
 
 resign at once, and transfer the entire sovereignty 
 of state and nation into their hands; because this 
 
 would be far better than to have a civil empire 
 divided between both the sexes. Should the world 
 be turned upside down, and men walk on. their 
 heads, we can still conceive that some ideas. of 
 order would be possible; but amid the perpetual 
 collisions and overturnings, if men and women,— 
 half of each,— should drive the chariot of state, 
 order would be impossible. Even should women 
 copy after the female ‘‘ Haranguers”’ of Aristo- 
 phanes,—sew on beards, steal their husbands’ 
 
 clothes, invade the Council-chamber, and, for their 
 
 first. act of legislation, pass a law that no young 
 woman should have a husband until all the old 
 ones had been provided for,— still this, or any- 
 thing else,— except perhaps Polyandry, or a plu- 
 rality of husbands,— an evil which [ think would 
 
 - soon cure itself,— would be a less calamity than 
 
 this proposed shaking together of the sexes in the 
 same political sack. — 
 
 My friends, I feel that an observance of sexual 
 distinctions and proprieties, in the occupations and 
 affairs of life, is something more than a prejudice 
 of education,— something more than a feeling 
 growing out of custom. I revolt at the idea of our 
 wives and sisters mingling promiscuously with men 
 
106 ‘A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 in the varied affairs of life, industrial, social and 
 political,— in their being chimney-sweeps and 
 street-sweeps, and city cartmen by day and by 
 night; butchers and drovers; porters, coal-heavers 
 and4umbermen; jailers and the night-police; jack- 
 tars and jack-ketches! Doubtless there are indi- 
 vidual women whose natural taste and” acquired 
 habits best qualify them for the fish-market and 
 _ the city sewerage, for Paris abattoirs and Cincin- 
 nati slaughter-houses ; but these are rare excep- 
 tions, and should not abrogate the rule. As neither 
 sex can by any possibility do all things, let there 
 be a fair and fit apportionment of services between 
 the two. Let man assume the heavier, the coarser 
 and the more exposed occupations, and woman the 
 lighter, the more refined and the more retired. If 
 this be not justice and gallantry combined, it is at 
 least a justice and a gallantry which woman will 
 never be able to win for herself amid the violence 
 and selfishness of a promiscuous competition. 
 
 In regard to the manifold employments of every- 
 day life, it would be too tedious to attempt to 
 assign them, in the grand divisions of labor, to 
 the sexes respectively. But, as a general rule, 
 applicable to manual labor occupations, will it 
 not hold good, that those whose scene of action 
 lies nearest the fireside, the cradle and the nur- 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 107 
 
 sery, which involve the least of glare and notori- 
 ety, and the most of retirement and _ reserve, 
 which exempt her from the publicity of the 
 wharves and the stageman’s box, belong more 
 appropriately to woman; while, in regard to men- 
 tal labor, those spheres which demand most of 
 an iron sternness and persistence of will, and a 
 hard intellectual fibre, as tough and as tearless as 
 whip-cord, belong more appropriately to’ men? 
 This division simply founds itself upon the idea 
 that man is more forensic, woman more domestic. 
 As to publicity of occupation, was thére not an 
 insight deeper than reason ever reached, in that 
 beautiful fable of Krummacher, where he represents 
 Adam as created at sunrise, to go forth and work 
 amid the gairish glories of the day,— but Eve as 
 created at sunset, amid the more silent and gentler 
 glories of the night! 
 
 As to the rewards of a truer education of woman, 
 let me first mention the one which will react with 
 immediate and blessed effect upon herself, and will 
 usher in a great era of human elevation; I mean 
 the improvement of her own Health. No woman 
 whose mind has been opened, by early education, 
 to a view of the physiological relations she bears, 
 and the physiological duties she owes to the race, 
 
 will ever strive and struggle, as a great proportion 
 10 
 
108 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 of women now literally do, for bodily weakness, 
 early decay, and a premature and painful death. 
 I speak of what is certainly known, and infinitely 
 to be deplored,— I speak of manners and customs 
 before which manhood and womanhood are. fast 
 passing to imbecility and extinction,—not in the 
 directest way, but along a wide circuit of mean 
 and contemptible weaknesses and miseries. The 
 good old Saxon word health, which, in its etymol- 
 ogy, is allied to the sacred words whole and. holy, 
 has been immeasurably debased among us, and 
 has almost lost its pristine meaning. People used 
 to suffer dad health; but now there is hardly any 
 kind of health they do not suffer. Well may they 
 moan out the words of the Common Prayer, 
 ‘‘ There is no health in us,’’ and take them in their 
 largest signification. Compare granddaughters 
 with grandmothers, for stature, development, erect- 
 ness, power of endurance, and probability of long 4 
 life; and. see, if the race tapers down at this rate, 
 how long before it will evanish altogether. Where 
 is the man, and, more emphatically, where is the 
 woman, whose health is such,—as God and nature 
 intended it should be,— that mere physical exist- 
 ence is a, delight, that the functions evolve joy as 
 a flower exhales perfume, and the organs so glide 
 and glow, in their harmonious play, that they may 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 109 
 
 be said, like the starry worlds on high, to have 
 their ‘‘ music of the spheres’’? It is said that a 
 generation of adult slaves in Cuba is killed off, 
 once in seven years, by hard work. Our genera- 
 tions are killed, perhaps not so suddenly, but just 
 as certainly, by ignorance of God’s physical laws, 
 and by those impious crimes which are disguised 
 under the pleasing names of fashion, gentility, and 
 high life. Under the fatuity and criminality of — 
 our present customs, the race would soon come to 
 an end, without any final catastrophe of fire, or 
 warning from Gabriel’s trump, were it not for 
 those Anakim children of the poor, hard-working 
 
 laborers, who come up every two or three genera- 
 
 tions, with their great heads and their strong arms, 
 like Gullivers among Lilliputians, and pluck prop- 
 erty, honors and rank, from the offspring of the 
 rich and luxurious. Even the, English, nobility, 
 
 _ buttressed and shored up as they are, by law, by 
 
 conventional supremacy, by incomputable wealth, 
 and,— what is more to them than all else,— by 
 the vigor of the stock which first turned the com- 
 moner into the peer,—even they could hardly 
 
 | maintain themselves under their habits of idleness 
 _ and luxury, beyond three or four generations, were 
 it not for the transfusion of plebeian vitality and 
 
 energy into their aristocratic lymph. ‘The talent 
 
110 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 and genius that now adorn and glorify England, in 
 art, In science, in poetry, in eloquence, in states- 
 manship, are but the harvest-home of beauty and 
 strength, that were engendered and elaborated, in 
 years gone by, from hard labor, wholesome food, 
 and unenervating habits, in what are there called 
 the middle ranks of life. No man, strong in 
 head and strong in limb, ever was, or ever can 
 be, born of a feeble maternal ancestry. Hence 
 wealthy and luxurious parents may dote and yearn 
 over their sons, as they please ; they may surround 
 them with a crowd of masters in every science 
 and art, fill their pockets with college diplomas, 
 and crown them with the accomplishments of for- 
 eign travel; and, when all this is done, the stal- 
 wart youth from the country hill-sides, who have 
 been nourished by healthful food, have drank from 
 the mountain-stream, breasted the mountain-storm, 
 and. knit their frames by athletic exercises from 
 birth; whose hereditary blood has never been cor- 
 rupted by alcohol, and whose hereditary brain was 
 never narcotized into stolidity by the “ vile 
 weed; ’’ and who, above all other things, were 
 born of a mother, and not of moonshine,— these 
 hardy sons of Toil and Temperance, I say, will 
 overmatch the puny offspring of ease and opulence 
 in every competition for the prizes of wealth, honor, 
 
3 
 
 POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. i111 
 
 or fame; for their whole frames are as full of elec- 
 tricity as a mountain thunder-cloud, and when occa- 
 sion demands they can lighten and thunder like 
 one. God has said He will visit the iniquities of 
 the fathers upon the children unto the third and 
 fourth generation. And this hereditary curse 
 seems to be even more unexceptionably true of 
 bodily imiquities,— that is, of sins against the laws 
 of Health and Life,— than of moral offences. Cer- 
 tain it is, that every act of the mother debilitating 
 her own health, will be visited upon her offspring 
 in debility. 
 
 But, though this law of transmissible penalties 
 
 _ was thundered from Sinai, yet it is no more audi- 
 
 ble and articulate than His gracious promise, that 
 every act of obedience to the Physical Laws, per- 
 formed by parents, is a treasure of power and bless- 
 edness laid up to be manifested and enjoyed by 
 
 ‘their posterity. 0, if for three or four successive 
 
 generations there could be perfect obedience to 
 those beautiful and sublime laws which the science 
 of Human Physiology reveals, then would the 
 earth be glorified by a new race ;— Anakims, not 
 manikins, Apollos, not orang-outangs, sages and 
 seers, and not our Bceotian millions ;—by a race 
 glowing in mien and glorious in heart; whose 
 
 ii at every beating, would send waves of mu- 
 10* 
 
112 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 sic and joy throughout the frame; waose genius 
 would not be, like ours, self-shrouded in the smoke 
 of its own flame, but smokeless as lightning or the 
 stars; and whose wisdom would teach it to be the 
 disciple and apprentice of God, and not the ‘bigot 
 and organ-grinder of parties, schools, or sects. 
 Under such an obedience to the laws of Health and 
 Life, the pocket-Venuses and Ladies’-pages, and 
 all that pigmy species who now threaten to reduce 
 the robust Anglo-Saxon manhood.to the stature of 
 the Aztec children, would disappear, carrying with 
 them the whole progeny of floss-silk and lack-brain 
 gentilities and puerilities, of whom any respectable 
 man or woman must marry at least two dozen, 
 before violating the law against bigamy. 
 
 Surely, the ignorance of God’s laws must have 
 been unfathomably profound, when delicacy of 
 health and fragility of frame and tenuity of form 
 became elements of female beauty; when chalk 
 was chewed, and sirloin eschewed, in order to get 
 the true grave-clothes complexion ; when the lady 
 in the parlor cast her ruddy cheeks, with her faded 
 calicoes, to the servants in the kitchen; when wom- 
 . en were ashamed of freckles on the face, but not 
 of tubercles on the lungs; when mothers Were 
 ashamed of a child dirtily clad, but not ashamed 
 of a sickly one; and when they protected their 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 113 
 
 daughters against the life-giving breezes of the 
 north-west, with defence upon defence and shelter 
 above shelter, until, at last, they gave them the 
 deep shelter of the grave; and when daughters 
 were taught to become emulous of pallor and lean- 
 ness, to recline upon sofas and ottomans, until, for 
 all useful purposes, they lost their classification 
 among the vertebrate species, and to persecute and 
 expel health and strength from the limbs by inac- 
 tivity; and from the brain by novel-reading, until 
 they came, at last, to retain only the semblance of 
 an understanding at either extremity. 
 
 Young describes these ghost-women, as follows: 
 
 ‘* The languid lady next appears in state, 
 Who was not born to carry her own weight ; 
 She rolls, reels, staggers, till some foreign aid 
 To her own stature lifts the feeble maid. 
 
 Then, if ordained to so severe a doom, 
 
 She, by just stages, journeys round the room ; 
 
 But, knowing her own weakness, she despairs 
 
 To scale the Alps, —that is, ascend the stairs. 
 ; My fan! let others say, who laugh at toil ; 
 
 Fan ! hood! glove! scarf! is her laconic style ; 
 
 And that is spoke with such a dying fall, 
 
 That Betty rather sees than hears the call. 
 
 The motion of her lips and meaning eye 
 
 Piece out th’ idea her faint words deny. 
 
 O, listen with attention most profound ! 
 
 Her voice is but the shadow of a sound. 
 
114 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 And help ! O, help! her spirits are so dead, 
 One hand scarce lifts the other to her head. 
 
 If, there, a stubborn pin it triumphs o’er, 
 
 She pants ! she sinks away ! and is no more. 
 Let the robust and the gigantic carve, 
 
 Life is not worth so much, she ’d rather starve ; 
 But chew she must herself ; ah, cruel fate ! 
 That Rosalinda can’t by proxy eat.’’ 
 
 According to the plainest laws of health and 
 hereditary descent, how imbecile and worthless 
 must be the offspring of this’ phantom-class of 
 women, when compared with | 
 
 «*Such as the Doric mothers bore’? ! ok 
 
 Another result of the proper education of 
 woman would be a revolution in Dress.* Lest I 
 should seem to cross the line of demarcation be- 
 tween the sexes which I have endeavored to draw, 
 I shall make but few remarks on this subject; and 
 these, as far as I am able, will be of a didactic 
 character, and, in substance, as applicable to men _ 
 as to women. 
 
 In the first place, Dress is to be treated of as a 
 Necessity. Nature has provided other animals 
 with a covering,— feathers, fur, wool, or other 
 vesture. But man is born nude, while provision 
 
 * See note to page 34, 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 115 
 
 ig made for the greatest profusion and elegance of 
 the materials of clothing, By this arrangement, 
 Nature seems to pay us the compliment of saying, 
 ‘¢ Choose your own wardrobe, and fit, diversify and 
 color it as you will,’”’—a compliment, I am sorry 
 to say, we have as yet given so little proof that we 
 deserve. 
 
 In the next place, the Forms and Materials of 
 Dress should always be made rigidly subservient to 
 the Laws of Health. No garment should ever be 
 allowed to interfere with entire freedom of locomo- 
 tion, or with the natural action of any bodily organ, 
 or with the perfectly free circulation of the blood. 
 _ Dress should be used to moderate the extremes of 
 heat or cold, according to the climate of the wearer; 
 and to ward off just the excess, and no more, of 
 those inclemencies and violences of the weather, 
 which the system has not yet been trained to bear. 
 _ And inasmuch as an inability to dress and undress 
 one’s self is always held, in courts of law, to be 
 one of the proofs of idiocy, all dresses should be so 
 made that the wearer can put them on and off 
 without assistance, at all times, as well as in perils 
 of fire or drowning. In all these respects, dress is 
 one of the Useful Arts. 
 
 And thirdly, dress is one of the Fine Arts. 
 Surely, whatever requires taste and imagination, in 
 
116 A FEW. THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 addition to knowledge,;— whatever admits and courts 
 a display of the harmonies of coloring and_the 
 symmetries of form,— belongs to the province of 
 Beauty, and is therefore to be ranked with the 
 Arts of Embellishment. Contrast the elegance of 
 one style, where all the colors blend and harmon- 
 ize, like those in the petals of a flower, or in the hues 
 of the iris, and where all the motions seem copied 
 from the waving of willow-branches or from ascend- 
 ing flame, with the viciousness of another, where 
 the colors are clapboarded on in stripes of red and 
 yellow or black and white, and where the motions 
 are all as angular and spasmodic as the most jerk- 
 ing eccentrics of a machine-shop. 
 
 But dress is degraded from a useful art mtoa 
 harmful one, and from a fine art into a vulgar 
 one, whenever it is allowed to abate one jot or 
 
 tittle from the beauty and the utility of Health. 
 The laws of health come from God; the laws of — 
 
 fashion, from the Paris milliners. Is it not most 
 lamentable that when the command goes forth to 
 the women of the land, ‘‘ Choose ye this day which 
 ye will serve,”’ they have so uniformly responded, 
 ‘The Paris milliners ’’ ? 
 
 Health, then, is the paramount law of dress; 
 
 4 
 
 comfort is always coincident with health; and, tothe — 
 
 eye of an intelligent observer, nothing can ever be 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 117 
 
 beautiful, everything is always odious, that inter- 
 feres. with either. Why should one wrap the furs 
 of sable or ermine over shoulders and chest, while, 
 with the two-fold simplicity of kid or sheep, she 
 covers her feet with but half the thickness of its 
 pelt?. When there is no law of nature more cer- 
 . tain than that the highest radiance and charm of 
 beauty can emanate only from the highest health, 
 why should the limbs ever be tormented by liga- 
 - ture, or the vitals by compression, as if heaven 
 could be gained only through the penance of 
 cadaverousness and languor? Why should that 
 exquisite shape which the cunning hand of nature 
 has moulded with wavy outline of form, and graced 
 with undulating flow of motion, beautiful as the 
 swell and lapse of moon-lit waters, be cut up 
 sharply into conie sections, or be be-bishoped or 
 be-bustled as though the very genius of deformity 
 “had gone mad? I have read an anecdote of a 
 Moslem priest in an oriental city, who, on seeing 
 a French belle in the streets, fresh from Parisian 
 shops, called his daughter to him, and moralizingly 
 said, ‘‘ My daughter, when you forget Allah, and 
 Mahomet his prophet, may you look like. that 
 woman!” In fine, had not woman better retain 
 what similitude she can to that form which the 
 | Creator moulded, until milliners and mantua- 
 
118 * A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 makers shall authenticate their title to change it, 
 by some less pernicious miracle than the destruc- 
 ' tion of beauty and life, through the ‘‘ evil eye” of 
 Fashion ? 
 
 With one further reflection, I leave this fertile 
 but unpleasant topic. Surely the bitterest woman- 
 hater could devise no sharper sarcasm against the 
 sex than to exhibit an historic gallery of female 
 fashions, chronologically» arranged, from year to 
 year and from age to age. ‘The fashions of man’s 
 dress have been almost incredibly grotesque and 
 absurd; but he, having less natural beauty than 
 woman, could never bear so much caricaturing and 
 spoiling as she. What incomputable wealth has 
 been squandered, and what myriads of lifetimes 
 thrown away, in inventing new modes of deforming 
 the natural form, and in turning its beauty into 
 ugliness! ‘lake the human figure, as God causes 
 
 a healthy one to grow, and you have a standard — 
 
 o 
 
 which has the venerableness of the ancient and the — 
 
 novelty of the modern, and one, teo, which nature 
 pronounces to be ‘‘modish;’’? but when we once 
 abandon this standard, we wander, without pattern 
 or model, amid the endless caprices of folly. 
 Hence those vagaries of fancy, those distortions 
 like the images of a painful dream, and those dys- 
 peptic imaginations which have been embodied in 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 119 
 
 - fashionable dress! Is the world a Lunatic Hos- 
 pital, that sometimes a lady’s dress should be 
 twice her height, and anon but half of it; that 
 sometimes it should expand to the orbit of a far- 
 thingale, (when surely there was no want of am- 
 plitude in ‘‘woman’s sphere,’’) and then be 
 shrunken into swaddling-bands; that. sometimes it 
 should be trailed downwards to sweep: the earth, 
 and then built-up, turret-like, on the top of the 
 head;— so that, as Addison said of the women of his 
 time, their faces were in the middle of them; and 
 that sometimes the neck should be be-ruffed and 
 be-puffed in the Elizabethan style, and then laid 
 
 bare; with a vast anatomical mistake as to its 
 nether boundary. This last unseemliness happens 
 to be the shame of our day. When that Turkish 
 officer, Amin Bey, on his late visit to this country, 
 attended some fashionable parties at Washington, 
 
 he remarked, that on going into our society, he 
 expected to see as many of American ladies, 
 but not as much. The more private exposures of 
 the Model Artists were broken up as a scandal; 
 but they have amply revenged themselves by tak- 
 ing many other spirits worse than the first, and 
 going on public exhibition at Carusi’s and Papan- 
 
 _ ti’s, at all assemblies and ball-rooms. 
 
 I regard this monthly lunacy, too, in the 
 11 
 
120 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 changes of dress, as even more reprehensible in its 
 motives than distasteful in its forms. “The igno- 
 ble purpose is to make a display of superior wealth, 
 or to arrogate a higher caste, and thus to enforce 
 upon others a sense of inferiority. Now, such 
 motives, or emotions, all benevolent and Christian 
 hearts must repudiate with abhorrence. It is the 
 first impulse of a truly noble man, to temper him- 
 self to the condition of the inferiors whom he meets. 
 He seeks to assuage the envy of bad minds, and 
 the mortification of good ones, at the contrasts 
 between his riches and their poverty, his elevation 
 and their lowliness.. A benevolent person will 
 
 never put on airs of learning before the illiterate, — 
 
 nor of knowledge before the ignorant. He does 
 not habit himself in his richest, but in his poorest 
 garb, when he is to meet the humble and lowly in 
 their mean attire. I would forbear to speak of my 
 
 keen eye-sight in the presence of the blind, to 
 
 make known my acute hearing to the deaf, and I 
 would moderate my steps in passing a lame man, 
 so that the painful idea of his own privation need 
 not be forced upon him. There is no littleness 
 more little, nor despicableness more despicable, 
 than the ostentation of covetable qualities before 
 the consciously inferior. However high a man 
 may seem to be raised by any enviable attribute or 
 
 © an ene 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 121 
 
 possession, the meanness of striving to make it an 
 ostentation or a boast, proves that his real nature 
 ig antipodal to the accidents of his position. Yet, 
 these contemptible and criminal motives in regard 
 to dress are the very life and power of that hol- 
 low Olympus, where dwell the lawgivers of fash- 
 ion. In these motives originate those changes of 
 dress, which come, as other lunacies were once 
 supposed to come, with a change of the moon. 
 Hence the discarding of a dress, as soon as it 
 is seen to be worn or imitated by those in a sup- 
 posed inferior condition. Hence, too, the low 
 - malice of equipping a servant in the costume of a 
 rival ‘‘ Lady Patroness;”’ and the spirit, equally 
 low, that cares for it. Among the infinite of 
 remorses and mortifications which will throng 
 around the death-bed and the judgment-day, will 
 there be anything that can make the offender feel 
 quite so mean, as the retrospect and exposure of a 
 life spent in the vulgar ostentation of dress, and in 
 striving to make fellow-beings feel inferior for 
 no better reason than because they happened to be 
 clothed from a different set of animals and plants? 
 
 A truer education for our daughters would 
 change their whole Libraries; — that is, it would 
 - cause them to discard the worthless books they now 
 
122 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 read, and to read the better books they now dis- 
 card. An undeveloped intellect cannot understand 
 intellectual works, and therefore can take no 
 delight in their perusal. Where no ability for 
 investigating science has been conferred, and no 
 love of scientific truth awakened, all scientific 
 books will of course be avoided, as night-birds 
 avoid the light. The noble truths of philosophy 
 have no charms but for the mind that has been 
 ennobled by the love of philosophy. It is impossi- 
 ble for superficial and frivolous minds to cope with 
 the grand questions that lie at the foundation of all 
 human welfare, and all human progress; because 
 they cannot comprehend the logic by which such 
 mighty problems must be solved, and are dead to 
 the glorious sentiments they inspire. What, then, 
 is left, but the frivolities of fashion and the insipid- 
 ities of gossip, varied, perhaps, by that flood of 
 romances and love-stories which sets towards empty 
 heads, as air rushes to a vacuum. It is true that 
 the sprightliness and vivacity of the female mind 
 are such, that it can afford to do without sense 
 better than ours; but, alas! this, like other pre- 
 rogatives, has been stretched too far. If our coun- 
 try-women are ever to add to their present charms 
 and accomplishments the enduring qualities: of 
 sound, substantial sense, of a vigorous, disciplined 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 128 
 
 intellect, capable of handling great ideas,— ay, and 
 of hurling them too, if nbed be,— then they must 
 read a new order of books. They must read books 
 which will give their minds athletic — exercise, 
 demanding exertion, and repaying with increased 
 strength for the next exertion,— conveying wisdom, 
 but developing more selina than they convey. 
 No mind will ever grow strong on music and the 
 modern languages, any more than the muscles will 
 grow strong on battle-door and the graces. Noth- 
 ing but/a sounder and far more extended early 
 adnclies will ever exorcise those evil spirits which 
 have taken embodiment in our lower forms of lit- 
 erature; as, in times gone by, true science dispelled 
 the vagaries of the schoolmen; or as the knowl- 
 edge of the one true God dethroned the myriad 
 deities of polytheism. 
 
 Now, these great calamities. of a disregard of 
 health, and therefore, by inevitable consequence, 
 the loss of strength, of mind and of virtue, in suc- 
 ceeding generations; this self-abandonment to the 
 wasteful and demoralizing despotism of fashion, 
 with all the worse than menial services which it 
 demands from its proudest votaries; this blindness 
 to the whole glorious panorama of scientific wonder 
 and beauty which can be revealed only to an intel- 
 
 lectual eye, and the consequent literary shams and 
 1i* 
 
124 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 -impostures which succeed to their place by natural 
 inheritance ; —all these impoverishments and de- 
 gradations, I say, may be traced back, as plainly as 
 a river to its fountain-heads, to the want of an edu- 
 cation for woman suitable and congenial to her 
 higher nature. They are but the diseased action 
 of noble faculties; —like exquisite flowers and 
 delicious fruits turning into poison and unsightli- 
 ness when developed in darkness and a noisome 
 atmosphere, instead of sunshine and the breeze. 
 They no more represent the true purpose and 
 scope of woman’s life, than ergot represents the 
 nutritive idea of wheat, or fungous excrescences ” 
 the rich flavor of fruit. But, though woman exhib- 
 its these defections from nature, it is-:man who has 
 caused her to wander and to fall) He might and 
 should have proffered his help to educate her to 
 dignity, to honor, and to usefulness; but he has 
 miseducated her,—in high life to idleness, frivolity 
 and the display of outward adornings ; in low life, 
 to toil and social insignificance ; nowhere, to deeds 
 of beneficence and the holy quest of truth. And 
 hence the lofty virtues and benignities with which 
 the female sex has occasionally blessed the world, 
 instead of being the general growth of the soil, are 
 only the few fortunate plants which have escaped 
 the out-rootings of a false cultivation. 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 125 
 
 But it may be said that I demand an education 
 for woman which shall develop. great capabilities, 
 but will give to* those capabilities no adequate 
 career or seope of action; and therefore that I pro- 
 pose only to excite the thirst of Tantalus, while 
 withholding the waters that would assuage it. I 
 answer, that my theory, as here set forth, assigns 
 to woman the empire of Home,— that most import- 
 ant of empires, and the parent of all empires and 
 emperors. Rising from the less laborious and less 
 exposed occupations of every-day life, it assigns 
 her an equal, if not a superior share in the beauti- 
 ‘fal domain of the Fine Arts, a full participation in 
 one, at least, if not in two of the three learned 
 professions, as much of the Parnassian land of 
 poetry, literature and science,— that is, of the 
 whole boundless region of authorship,— as she may 
 please to occupy, and more than half, and the better 
 half, of the divine work of education.* 
 
 *Tn a speech delivered by Mr. Wendell Phillips, before a 
 ** Woman’s Rights Convention,’’ at Worcester, October, 1851, 
 he said : ** Horace Mann says, in the letter that has been 
 read here, that he intends to write a Lecture on Woman ; and 
 I doubt not that he will take the stand which he has always 
 done, that she should be book-taught for some dozen years, 
 and then retire to domestic life.’’ 
 
 Every reader of these Lectures will see how contrary to 
 their whole spirit are the above representations which I have 
 
126 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 - But it is still retorted that I debar her not only 
 from the honorable scars and the blood-stained lau- 
 rels of war, but from all the Olympic games of 
 politics, the rank and emoluments of office, and the 
 
 italicized. In all my past inculcations, whether by speech, or 
 in writing, there never was the slightest foundation on which 
 Mr. Phillips could. make them. The whole statement, on his 
 part, is sheer fabrication. © 
 
 Besides, these Lectures were written and delivered before 
 the date of Mr. Phillips’ speech. If, therefore, he knew any- 
 thing about their doctrines, he knew that his statement was 
 untrue. How much better was it for him, either as a gentle- 
 man or asa man of veracity, if he made the assertions without. 
 knowledge? Mr. Phillips spoke to a female auditory, not 
 weak in point of numbers, powerful in talent, and, from the 
 object and the novelty of their convention, of course highly 
 excited. His assertions, therefore, respecting my views and 
 life-long inculcations on this subject, must have made a deep 
 impression. His speech had a wide circulation at the time ; 
 and, of course, had its effect in prejudicing a portion of the 
 public mind against me, Afterwards, the Lectures were sev-_ 
 eral times reported, and the reports were published in the — 
 leading newspapers of the country ; yet, since these reports, 
 Mr. Phillips has revised his speech for publication as one of a 
 series of ‘* Woman’s Rights Tracts,’’ without striking out his 
 falsehoods relating to my views, past and present. I have 
 found that some of the criticisms made upon the Lectures, and 
 much of the unfriendly feeling excited towards them, had its 
 origin in Mr. Phillips’ untruths. I leave such a man to his 
 own reflections, and to the punishment which honorable men 
 may see fit to inflict upon him. 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 127 
 
 high dignities of statesmanship. And where, it 
 may be demanded, shall fit theatres of action be 
 found for those lofty female minds whom God has 
 endued with an enthusiasm for heroic beneficence ; 
 — born with greatness of soul to bless an empire, 
 where shall they find the empire to be blessed ? 
 And has not the female sex, too, its prodigies, — 
 its Barretiers, its Bayards, its Kania Crichtons, | 
 — whose genius cannot twirl distaffs, nor shone 
 pride be cup-bearer even to the Gods? Where 
 shall these great natures, and such as these, find 
 their Olympian sphere, their goal and their immor- 
 tal palms ? 
 
 _ Yes, ye who feel most keenly the indignities and 
 the privations which make up the long catalogue 
 of ‘“Woman’s Wrongs;”’ ye who most bravely 
 make demand for ‘‘Woman’s Rights,’”’ ply me 
 with your defiant questions; I have an answer for 
 ‘them all. For those whose aspirations look be- 
 yond the organized pursuits of the present day, 
 there is a realm of glory for each and for all, where 
 eyery one who is worthy of a crown shall be 
 crowned as empress here upon earth, before as- 
 -eending to her eternal reward. The sphere of 
 practical, Christian benevolence is the empyrean, 
 the upper heaven, of woman’s glory. The yet 
 undiscovered ways of spreading ‘‘ peace on earth 
 
128. A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 and good will among men’’ are without number or 
 bound. The possibilities of combining greatness and 
 goodness into new forms are as infinite as are their 
 archetypes in the Divine Mind. As the telescope, 
 and printing, and steam; the phototype, the tele- 
 graph. and chloroform, lay outside even of the. 
 Apostles’ ken, so new orders of truth and new 
 beauties of beneficence stand, rank behind rank, in 
 glorious effulgence, beyond .our present vision. 
 The despair that made Alexander weep for another 
 world to conquer was wicked, but its. folly. sur- 
 passed its wickedness. All en us lie worlds 
 of love and truth yet to be conquered; and. such 
 inviting worlds must forever bound the circumfer- 
 ence of mortal achievements, while the Infinite 
 Creator remains superior to the finite creature, 
 When the sculptor, voyaging towards the classie 
 land of Italy, sails by the hills of Carreran marble, 
 he peoples their rocky bosoms with myriad forms _ 
 of beauty yet to be wakened into life ; he says, let — 
 but the blocks be rifted out, and let the chisel re- 
 move those superfluous parts that do not belong to 
 the perfect statues within, and new galleries of 
 sculpture will be revealed for the admiration of the 
 world. So the lover of moral excellence sees all 
 the space between man’s imperfections and God’s 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 129 
 
 perfections waiting to be filled with new forms and 
 new institutions of truth and duty and love. 
 ‘Surely Christ and his disciples set forth the 
 grandest idea ever promulgated upon earth,— that 
 of a kingdom of universal purity and holiness, 
 yielding the reward of universal happiness. This 
 was the sphere which the infinitely benevolent 
 Father of us all marked out for Himself, when, 
 amid the chorus of morning stars and the joyful 
 acclaim of the sons of God, he pronounced the 
 work of creation to be “‘ very good.” Was it not 
 in fulfilment of this divine purpose that the Son 
 of Man came to seek and to save that which was | 
 lost? And if this sphere of action was high and 
 holy enough for the Creator of worlds; if it was 
 beautiful and divine enough for the Redeemer of 
 men; if it has been the prayer and the passion of 
 all the greatest exemplars and prototypes of human 
 - excellence who have adorned the earth; — then who 
 of the most aspiring of the sex shall say it isa 
 sphere too humble and inglorious for her? If. it 
 is the very avenue to heaven, the vista through 
 which its celestial gates are seen, not afar off, but 
 near and nearer by, then let woman cast off all 
 other ambitions and aspirations, and make this holy 
 mission her cherished work. The heavenly vine- 
 
130 FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 yard is before her, and the lord of the vineyard 
 says, ‘‘ Why stand ye here all the day idle?” 
 The happiness of the human race, through 
 purity and a holy life! Who can behold the 
 distance between these conditions of human welfare 
 and the present idolatries and sensualities of the 
 world, and ask for any field where a nobler vic- 
 tory can be won? Who can look upon this glori- 
 ous nature of ours, prone and polluted as it now is, 
 and think of it as it should be, and seek for any 
 higher or more blessed work than to lift it from its 
 degradation, and transfigure it into beauty and glo-. 
 riousness? Not tears, not supplication, not genius, 
 not faith even, can redeem the world. In pushing 
 the frontiers of good into the realms of evil, it is as 
 when civilization pushes back he wilderness,— the 
 pioneer must work. ‘The toiler is the transformer 
 and reformer. The laborer is the miracle-worker. 
 In these latter days, ‘‘signs and wonders’’ are 
 born of a zealous diligence. God speaks to us 
 now, not from Sinai, not from the cloud and the 
 pillar of fire, but through patience and persever- 
 ance in well-doing. Faithful work is holiest wor- 
 ship. Deeds, not words, are our authentic inspir- 
 ation. Divinity is revealed through duty done. 
 The glories of the epic poet are eclipsed by the 
 brighter glories of the moral hero who performs 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 131 
 
 the epic deeds. The divine, in his loftiest specu- 
 lations, does not reveal God to man like the acted 
 Christianity of the humblest life. Deeds of truth, 
 ~deeds of benevolence, are the sublimest PVs os 
 nies. When human woe vibrates the chords of 
 sympathy in the human heart, it makes not only 
 heavenly music, but music in heaven. 
 
 And in what fields of labor can woman most effi- 
 ciently perform these holy services,— services so 
 glorious and beneficent that angels might repine to be 
 her ministers? Did Jesus Christ ever desire to be 
 civil governor of Judea, or seek for any form of po- 
 litical preferment? Neither did his disciples be- 
 siege the court of Rome for proconsulships or Judge- 
 ships. Mrs. Fry succored more human misery 
 than if she could have given the votes of ten Peers 
 of the Realm. Could Miss Dix have been twenty 
 Senators and forty members of the House, in each 
 of the nineteen States where her intercessions have 
 built Hospitals for the Insane, she could never, 
 with such a divine power, have spoken ‘ Peace’? 
 to the howling and tormented maniac; nor, as by 
 the waving of her outstretched hand, exorcised the 
 demons of madness from his bosom. Has she tri- 
 umphed through all her glorious career because 
 she was a politician. or had a vote to give? No! 
 _ but because she was not, and had not: — because 
 12 
 
£5 eA A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 no odor of ambition or cupidity could ever enter 
 the sacred atmosphere of benevolence that has sur- 
 rounded her life. Had Mrs. Stowe been emulous 
 of political honors, she could at most have been but 
 President of the United States; yet how all politi- 
 eal glory pales before that heaven-descended glory 
 which now sits like a crown upon her head, and 
 will grow brighter forever! I pay my homage to 
 the efforts of those noble women, in the State of 
 -New York, who are now holding public meetings, 
 and speaking through the public press, to rouse 
 the obdurate heart of the people to a sense of the 
 infinite woes of intemperance, and to bless the 
 world by their removal. hope to see their exam- — 
 ple followed throughout the land; for I am sure 
 they will yet triumph in their glorious work. — But 
 it is a triumph which as legislators they would 
 never achieve. Nay, had women, for the last fifty 
 years, been partisans and champions in all the con- — 
 tests and corruptions, in all the rivalries and ran-_ 
 cors, of our State and national politics, — had they 
 been traffickers in alcohol, and built distilleries, and 
 tasted of their infamous profits and products, like — 
 men,— I hold it charity to suppose that they would 
 not now be even more remorseless than man in 
 t wning a deaf ear to the pleadings of wife and 
 -hild, of widow and orphan; and more dishonest 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 1838 
 
 than he, if that be possible, in their subterfuges 
 and fallacies for the defence of intemperance. Their 
 better nature, in its perversion, would have become 
 worse, as through all history it has invariably 
 done. very one now feels that the prerogative 
 of woman to speak upon this subject with moral 
 power comes, to a great extent, from her present 
 and past inability to speak upon it with legal 
 power. 
 
 Hitherto, man has done infinite injustice to him- 
 self. Woman now comes upon the stage, as it 
 were, six thousand years later. Hence, she can 
 
 _ look back upon his course as upon that of a race 
 
 _ which has proved faithless and passed away, leav- 
 ing its mighty monuments of error as beacons to 
 warn its successors. He chose the dreadful field 
 of war for the exhibition of his greatness, and a 
 devastated earth and a mutilated humanity have 
 been his trophies. Woman can heal the wounds 
 he has inflicted, and restore its pristine verdure and 
 beauty to the desolated earth. In poetry and in 
 ethical literature, man has described objective ex- 
 cellence. Woman can embody these ideas in liv- 
 ing forms, and show how infinitely superior is the 
 true man of every-day life and of history to the 
 phantom heroes of poesy or romance. On canvas 
 and on marble, man has painted and chiselled the 
 
134 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 highest conceptions of the human mind. _Woman’s 
 diviner work of art les deeper than the insensate 
 similitude. The new generations which God is 
 perpetually sending into the world are her quarry, 
 each individual of whom is more precious than all 
 the marble of Pentelicus. Her studio ig the 
 nursery, the school-room, the lecture-room, or 
 wherever else she can find an instrument or an 
 hour, to shape the human soul into the likeness of 
 Jesus Christ. Socrates, like his father, was 3 
 sculptor until the age of thirty-five. Then he 
 threw down his tools, and resolved, instead of the 
 earthly art of turning marble into the similitude of 
 men, to engage in the heavenly art of turning men 
 into the similitude of God. As no other earthly 
 Magi can do, woman can find the mangers where 
 the Messiahs of pure and celestial thoughts are 
 born. Like the angel clothed in white, she can 
 descend into the sepulchre of the heart, where cru- 
 elty and neglect have buried the still living affee- 
 tions of childhood, and resuscitate them to con- 
 sciousness and activity. Hyery selfish soul is a 
 Paradise Lost; it is only when it learns to succor 
 and to bless that it becomes a Paradise Regained. 
 Not the Venus of Beauty, but of Benevolence, 
 stands forever in the celestial galleries, to be ad- 
 mired by the angels. 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 135 
 
 Wide and illimitable as is woman’s work of love, 
 its centre and beginning must be at home. When 
 the central home is well-ordered, then let its cir- 
 cumference be enlarged to take in other homes, and 
 make the way-sides of poverty smile. ‘There is no 
 neighborhood that does not present attractive scenes 
 for deeds of beneficence. I do not mean almsgiving 
 alone; for money is but one of the ingredients in 
 charity. The Poor need instruction in that great 
 art which belongs equally to the Useful and the 
 Elegant arts,— the Art of Living. A few house- 
 hold ideas often make all the difference between 
 
 penury and competence, between squalor and neat- 
 “ness, between disease and health. These ideas 
 woman can sow, as a sower does his wheat, until 
 there shall not be a neglected or noisome spot in 
 the fields of life. She can dispel the ignorance 
 
 that broods over abandoned childhood,— that igno- 
 - rance which we speak of as one, but whose progeny 
 of false ideas and actions is more numerous than 
 the sands on all the shores. What a work for 
 woman’s plastic hand, in moulding to forms of ele- 
 gance the rude manners of the community amongst 
 whom she lives! When laborers and cottagers 
 dwell amid models of kindness and courtesy whom 
 they love, then will the exuviz of rudeness and 
 _ vulgarity be cast away. 
 12* 
 
136 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 What a moral paradox it is, that cities, where 
 talent concentrates, which art fills with embellish- 
 ment, and which are the Deltas of all the rivers of 
 wealth, should be the great centres of suffering and 
 inhumanity, and the places where the wild beasts 
 of crime make their lair ; while, for every wretched 
 family going blindly to ruin, there is a wealthy 
 ‘‘lady”’ perishing with ennui! Here and there, 
 indeed, are temples consecrated to God, to be 
 ppened on the first day of the week; but ten to one 
 are those other temples, dedicated to the Prince of 
 Darkness, opened seven days in the week, each one 
 of which engulfs its wide circle of ignorant adults 
 and of imnocent children, as the Maelstrom sucks 
 down the unwary mariner. Does the woman of lofty 
 aspirations pant for fields of glory and renown,— J 
 point her to these. ‘There is more true glory in 
 conquering one vicious street to virtue, than in all 
 the battles from Thermopyle to Waterloo. When 
 the woman of high ambition looks with envy upon 
 the orator, as, in the senate or the forum, the en- 
 raptured multitude hangs breathless upon his lips, 
 let her remember that his most eloquent words 
 ascend but a few furlongs into the upper air; but 
 let her go forth, and succor the distresses of the 
 lonely, enlighten the darkness of the ignorant, and 
 lead back wanderers from their guilty course, and 
 
,uwiRS AND DUTIES. OF WOMAN. 137 
 
 her lightest whisper shall pierce the starry dome, 
 and give joy around the throne of God. If, as the 
 luxurious worshipper says, Christ left the realms 
 of bliss to save her from woe, cannot she go into 
 the next street to snatch infancy from certain per- 
 dition? When women, who have expiated the 
 crimes which woman alone can commit, are released 
 from their prison, why should they be met at the 
 prison-gates by the Daughters of Pollution, to 
 carry them back to the haunts of guilt, and not by 
 Sisters of Charity, to redeem them from a life of 
 shame? In all our villages, in all our cities, 
 throughout our land, there are sufferings and 
 -erimes which no human law can remedy, though 
 our lawgivers were a Senate of Solons or of Solo- 
 mons; but which the divine law of benevolence, 
 written on the heart of woman, can reach and abol- 
 ish. As man has discovered science after science, 
 opening into the wonders of the intellectual world, 
 so may woman now discover new and grander 
 realms of benevolence, opening into the beauties of 
 the spiritual world. The genius of man has orig- 
 inated thousands of inventions, to enrich and ag- 
 grandize his race, each of them a wonder in the age 
 of its birth; the heart of woman can develop a 
 thousand esthetic and moral charms, a thousand 
 new allurements to truth, and incentives to virtue, 
 
138 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 each of them a glory and a beauty forever. Art, 
 knowledge, power, grandeur, and all the wisdom 
 which the intellect could give, have been the attend- 
 ant ministers of his dynasty; gentleness, beauty, 
 purity, peace and universal love, will be the angels 
 that come with her Evangel. 
 
 May I not exclaim, then, with the old philoso- 
 pher, “*£éenxa!” “T have found it!’ I have 
 found the sphere of Woman! Rescuing child- 
 hood from the guilt that stains the soul, and 
 from the sorrow that consumes it; finding homes 
 for orphans, and bearing orphans to the homes they 
 have found; kindling up knowledge, and the love 
 of knowledge, in the streets of cities, more beautiful 
 than their illumination in the darkness of night; 
 making her home in asylums where the bereaved 
 of their senses are gathered together for instruc- 
 tion, in hospitals for the chaotic intellect, and in 
 those more dismal receptacles where the morals are 
 in chaos; rescuing the victims of intemperance, 
 and enlisting in the sterner work of reforming the 
 victim-makers ; and preaching everywhere the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount, not in the dead language of 
 words, but in the only living and immortal lan- 
 guage,— a language which was never spoken un- 
 heeded,— the language of deeds. Tere, behold 
 not only a sphere for the noblest woman, but the 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 139 
 
 noblest sphere of woman! Here is work, not for 
 one moral heroine only, but for armies whose rank 
 and file are heroines. Here are services for Sis- 
 terhoods of Charity, for Sleepless Vestals — a long 
 procession, whose end we cannot see in the vista 
 of time! Here are realms and sovereignties for 
 a Senate of Queens,— Queens nobler than ever 
 sat on the throne of Tudor or Plantagenet. 
 
 My friends, at this hour, a youthful woman sits 
 ‘upon the throne of one of the proudest nations of 
 the earth. With that magnetism which always 
 attends power, she draws around her the treasures 
 and luxuries of the globe. The delicacies of every 
 clime are spread upon her table, the selectest 
 wealth of nature and of art adorn her person, and 
 wherever she goes the air is perfumed for her ap- 
 proach. When she personates royalty, a diadem 
 of many-colored jewelry sits like a rambow upon 
 her head, her garments are heavy with diamonds, 
 and she seems borne onward upon a sea whose bil- 
 lows of velvets and silks are covered with floating 
 gold. The proudest lords of her proud realm, at. 
 whose glance elsewhere the people tremble, never 
 approach her, even to utter their salutations, until 
 _ she first bows permission. Her person is protected, 
 during every moment of her life, by a thousand 
 armed guards, and her name is remembered in sup- 
 
140 A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE 
 
 plication wherever prayer is made. Her realms 
 are wider than any upon which the sun ever before 
 shone. The evening pursues the morning, and 
 midnight follows noon, and yet they never leave 
 her dominions in their diurnal or in their annual 
 circuits. The northern. and the. southern solstice 
 are bers. When spring pours. out its wealth of 
 flowery life, in the hither zone, then, in. the fur- 
 ther zone, autumn is ripening its golden. harvests 
 for her; and when winter congeals her northern 
 hemisphere, summer showers gladness and luxuri- 
 ance upon her southern. Her people are of all 
 nations and kindred and tongues; yet, whether 
 near or afar off, the simple writing of her name to 
 law or order carries peace or war, weal or woe, life 
 or death, to them all. 
 
 Well may the people shout, Great Is VICTORIA, 
 THE QuEEN! But hearken, a moment, to me, 
 and I will tell you of sovereignties more royal than 
 hers; of dynasties that shall never come to an end; 
 of queens more lovely than ever sat upon an earth- 
 ly throne. They are the. Daughters, of Benevo- 
 lence! They agonized, because they saw around 
 them a world of agony and sin. Weeping and dis- 
 consolate, they went forth to redeem it; and lo! 
 God made them the happiest of all the, daughters 
 of men. They teach the Gospel of God’s Laws. 
 
POWERS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN. 141 
 
 They teach the gospel of Health; and the noisome 
 abodes of poverty, the Tartarean depths of city 
 streets, open to the purifying breezes of heaven and 
 the disinfecting sunlight; and where they go, He 
 who sendeth forth the pestilence hath forbidden it 
 to follow. They teach the gospel of Beauty; and 
 the charms of art and embellishment spring up, like 
 a luxuriant vegetation, around the humble dwell- 
 ings of the poor. They teach the gospel of Intel- 
 ligence and Refinement; and the seekers after 
 pleasure no longer go downward into the regions 
 of sensation, but upwards into the regions of emo- 
 tion, for their joys. They teach the gospel of Tem- 
 perance; and squalid want and frenzy soon learn 
 to sing the thanksgivings of abundance and peace. 
 They teach the gospel of Virtue; — standing at 
 the diverging paths, whereof_one leads to heaven, 
 and the other to the chambers of death, they point 
 and guide to the ascending way. They teach the 
 
 gospel of Salvation; before which death loses its 
 sting, and the victory is transferred from the grave 
 - to the righteous soul that triumphs over it. The 
 angels call them Sisters. The Father from His 
 throne beholds them: ‘‘ And they shall be mine, 
 saith the Lord of Hosts, in that day, when I make 
 up my jewels.” 
 
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 ROS SPE Pr 292, AH Rowe hcy o8 oy een pA pA etree 504