Various

“ For a new day has dawned, and humanity is moving forward to an era when oppression and slavery are to be entirely displaced, and reason and justice recognized as the rule of life. Science is extending immeasurably the bounds of knowledge and power. Art is refining life, and giving to it beauty and grace. Literature bears in her hands whole ages of comfort and sympathy. Industry, aided by the hundred-handed elements of nature, is increasing the world’s wealth, and invention is economizing its labor. ”

“ And it is not the saints of the world who chiefly give employment to our profession. It has essentially and habitually to do with all that is selfish and malicious, knavish and criminal, coarse and brutal, repulsive and obscene, in human life. It would be revolting to all female sense of the innocence and sanctity of their sex, shocking to man’s reverence for womanhood and faith in woman, on which hinge all the better affections and humanities of life, that woman should be permitted to mix professionally in all the nastiness of the world which finds its way into courts of justice ”

“ A novel of reform, into which a great and generous soul poured its gathered strength, it none the less possesses artistic distinction. Something is, of course, due to the charm of atmosphere, the beauty of the background against which the plot naturally placed itself; more, to the trained hand, the pen pliant with long and free exercise; most, to the poet-heart. “Ramona” stands as the most finished, though not the most striking example, that what American women have done notably in literature they have done nobly. ”

“ Is there a legislature anywhere about to meet, or is Congress in session? there is a woman near at hand who knows it is her business to make the air heavy with the white, hovering wings of prohibition for the better protection of women and girls, for the preventing of the sale of tobacco to minors, for the enforcement of the Sabbath or for the enfranchisement of women. ”

“ Anne Bradstreet, 1640. “Let us be wise, and not impede the soul. Let her work as she will. Let us have one creative energy, one incessant revelation. Let it take what form it will, and let us not bind it by the past to man or woman.” ”

“ Thus, on this first occasion, it was not a sentiment of delicacy that forbade the Harvard students to share their privileges with a woman; but a sense of offended dignity of sex, which distinctly allied itself with the other and equally touchy dignity of race. The odd idea was advanced on this, as on so many other occasions, that whenever a woman should prove herself capable of an intellectual achievement, this latter would cease to constitute an honor for the men who had previously prized it. Hence the urgent necessity of excluding women from all opportunity of trying. ”

“ It was by sheer force of intellect, and of the sympathetic imagination born of intellectual perception, that Elizabeth Blackwell divined for women the suitableness of an occupation whose practical details were, to herself, intrinsically distasteful. Among all the pioneer group of women physicians, hers chiefly deserves to be called the Record of an Heroic Life. For with her, the struggle with bitter and brutal prejudices in the world was not sustained by the keen and instinctive enthusiasm for medicine, which has since carried hundreds of women over impossibilities. ”

“ A respect for labor lies at the very foundation of a true democracy.
The changes which our country has seen in this respect, and the great uprising of industries among women, are then not important to women alone, but of momentous import to society at large. The new activities sap the foundation of vicious and degraded life. From the factory to the palace the quickening impulse is felt, and the social level rises. To the larger intellectual outlook is added the growing sympathy of women with each other, which does more than anything else to make united action possible among them. ”

“ But civilization is not artificial, but real and natural. It is to the race what the flower is to the bud, and the oak tree to the acorn,—growth, development. Again the divine in man asserted itself, and again there came into the world a quickening spirit. Four great events occurred, of world-wide importance, each following quickly its predecessor, and an impetus was given to humanity which has never spent itself, but has steadily gained in power and momentum. ”

“ And if it is true that both sexes fight the same battle for existence, who can honestly deny to women (at present physically the weaker) , the best possible equipment that education of all kinds can furnish? I shall not even touch upon the other, and more poetic, argument of the divine rights of genius, which is of no sex; but I am content to employ only the prosaic one of the practical needs of life, an argument which here in America is by far the most potent one. ”

“ It has been fought, and modestly, in the teeth of the most painful invective that can ever be addressed to women,—that of immodesty. Girls have been hissed and stampeded out of hospital wards and amphitheaters where the suffering patient was a woman, and properly claiming the presence of members of her own sex; or where, still more inconsistently, non-medical female nurses were tolerated and welcomed. Women students have been cheated of their time and money, by those paid to instruct them: they have been led into fields of promise, to find only a vanishing mirage. ”

“ What more graceful act could be imagined with which to mark this memorable year, when Vassar College celebrates her first quarter of a century and when Phillipa Fawcett is four hundred marks ahead of the senior wrangler, than for these universities, without further wheedling or coaxing or bribing, to open to women the opportunities for hard work which women covet, and which the sense of justice of men, tardy though it be, will not permit them much longer to refuse.”—Editorial in New York Evening Post, June 17, 1890. ”

“ In Boston there was a public library as early as 1637, but women were not considered as patrons. The bold venture, on the part of the sex, of invading the quiet precincts of the reading room of the library of the Boston Athenæum, was made, after a decade or two of the nineteenth century had passed, by a shy woman, grown courageous only through her eagerness for knowledge. This was Hannah Adams, who had learned Greek and Latin from some theological students boarding in her father’s house, and who had written books. The innovation shocked Boston people, who declared her out of her sphere. ”

“ While being an ardent believer in the future progress of woman, it would be impossible to subscribe myself to every theory that may be found in these pages. To say one agrees in every detail with the opinions of eighteen women, all of whom are well known to be “women with opinions,” is to boast of a breadth of mind, a roundness of judgment to which I am too modest to lay claim. ”

“ Chief Justice, we hold that to stifle the longings of an immortal soul to follow any useful calling in this life, to be a “departure from the order of nature, and, when voluntary, treason against it.” ”

“ They even hushed the bitter resentment of their souls, which had been aroused by British invasion, and gave Christian burial to their enemies, who, but for them, at times would not have received it. They trained their little children to the same uncomplaining patience, the same steely endurance, and the same heroic love of liberty which fired their own hearts, until boys and girls gloried in danger and privation. What wonder that the heroes of the Revolutionary War proved invincible! ”

“ The profession enters largely into the well-being of society; and, to be honorably filled and safely to society, exacts the devotion of life. The law of nature destines and qualifies the female sex for the bearing and nurture of the children of our race and for the custody of the homes of the world and their maintenance in love and honor. And all life-long callings of women, inconsistent with these radical and sacred duties of their sex, as in the profession of the law, are departures from the order of nature ”

“ The long struggle of American women for education, opportunity, and political equality which has since followed, dates, therefore, from the hour of the nation’s birth. It is the legitimate outcome of American ideas, for which the nation contended for nearly a century. Absorbed in severe pioneer work, inevitable to life in the wilderness, and denied education themselves, the first care of our revolutionary mothers was for the literary and religious instruction of their children. ”

“ The cruel kindness of the old doctrine that women should be worked for, and should not work, that their influence should be felt, but not recognized, that they should hear and see, but neither appear nor speak,—all this belongs now to the record of things which, once measurably true, have become fabulous.
The theory that women should not be workers is a corruption of the old aristocratic system. Slaves and servants, whether male or female, always worked. Women of rank in the old world were not necessarily idle. ”

“ They wished to serve humanity, wanted their gifts to reach the needy in some direct and practical way, and chose their avenue. In this same spirit of self-forgetfulness, the Red Cross accepted and applied, faithfully we know, and acceptably we hope, with the only desire, under heaven, of safely and wisely transmitting those substantial tokens of sympathy and love from a pitying world to a homeless, bereaved, and terror-stricken people as a present help in time of trouble. ”

“ JOSEPHINE SHAW LOWELL. To make even a superficial study of the work done and being done by American women to help their suffering fellow-beings must fill the heart with gratitude for the wisdom and devotion displayed, and with a rejoicing hope for the future. To know that all over this vast continent, intelligent and unwearying women are thinking and working and praying for the needy, the wicked, the ignorant, the weak, and the down-trodden, is a joy and an inspiration. ”

“ The young ladies of Massachusetts, in the last century, were certainly readers even though only self-taught, and their taste was not for the feeble and nerveless sentiment or the frantic passion of our day, but was derived from the deepest wells of English literature. The superb flowering of native mental gifts in many women of the last part of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth centuries, under so slight stimulus of educational advantage, would almost force upon us the theory of Descartes, that “in order to improve the mind we ought less to learn than to contemplate” ”

“ In one hospital, at least, the directors find the greatest assistance from a committee of ladies who look after the maternity patients, both before they enter and after they leave the hospital. They endeavor to procure work for the mother, and watch over her welfare and that of the child. But they make it their invariable rule to give aid only on condition that the mother makes every effort to fulfill her maternal duties; for they believe there is a regenerating power in motherhood, and that care for her child is the surest safeguard against a mother’s committing a second fault. ”

“ The first impulse of the first partnership of means and work, which began the active movement, resulting in the organization of a national society, was an impulse of protection for Indians and their lands from the robberies and horrors of enforced removals, and it voiced itself in pleas for treaty-keeping and the honest observance of all compacts with the Indians until their real consent to changes should be justly won. The impulse was one of common humanity, and recognized the manhood and womanhood of Indians, and their claims in common with all men because human beings. ”

“ The rapidity of movement with which business is conducted, the spontaneity of manner, the originality of plan, the perpetual freshness and ingenuity of the convention, its thousand unexpectednesses, its quips and turns, its wit and pathos, its impromptu eloquence and its perpetual good nature—all these elements, brought into condensed view in the National Convention, are an object lesson of the new force and the unique method that womanhood has contributed to the consideration of the greatest reform in Christendom. ”

“ The seventy years of a life-time will contain much waste, if adjusted exclusively to the five or six years of even its highest happiness. The toiling millions of women of every age of the world have not been permitted to make such an adjustment, even if they should wish to do so. They have always worked; but they demand now, and simply, some opportunity for a free choice in the kind of work, which, apart from the care of children, they may perform. The invasion of the medical profession is one of the more articulate forms of this demand. ”

“ Many good men and women carried on crusades against the purchase of ready-made garments—sad misnomer for things so hardly made. One of their war-cries was, “An honest woman’s back is not the place for a dishonestly manufactured article,” and another that, “It is better for a woman to wear a coat with a hole in it than one with the stain on it of blood-guiltiness.” Economically unwise and impossible of success as this crusade was, it was important as showing that a higher ideal of Justice had begun to enter into woman’s mind. Hitherto people had partaken of the fruits of labor unthinkingly. ”

“ The introduction of kindergarten teaching for little children, which many of those who study the dark problems of pauperism and crime believe will do more to destroy the misery of mankind than any other one educational agency, was due to Miss Elizabeth Peabody, herself a teacher in her youth, who in her middle age was filled with enthusiasm by the beautiful new teaching, and has lived to see it, in her old age, incorporated, mainly by the exertions of women, into the public school system of many of our large cities, where the need of the reform was greatest. ”

“ It is apparent to-day in unjust laws and customs, which disgrace the statute books, and cause society to progress with halting step. There still exist different codes of morals for men and women, different penalties for crime, and the relations of the sexes to the government are dissimilar. In marriage, the husband has control of the wife’s person, and, in most instances, ownership of her earnings, and of her minor children. She is rarely paid the same wages as man, even when she does the same work, and is his equal only when punishment and the payment of taxes are in question. ”

“ The long past has denied to women the possession of souls, and they have been relegated to the ignorance and injustice to which men have always doomed those regarded as their inferiors. Until within a few years, comparatively speaking, the world has been under the dominion of brute force, and might has made right. Every one has been welcome to whatever he has had the brawn and muscle to win and to hold, and all have yielded to the rule of physical force, as to-day we respect the decisions of the courts. ”

“ Their work was that of relief and philanthropy, and, for the first time in the history of the world, the women of America developed a heavenly side to war. They cared for the needy families of soldiers, nursed the sick in camp and the wounded in hospitals, ministered to the dying in the rear of battle-fields, and kept the channels of beneficence full to overflowing, which extended from Northern homes to the army at the front. For their multiform work they needed immense sums of money, and now the latent business abilities of women began to show themselves. ”

“ Thus factory and farm-house had begun to stand in the United States as they had in England from Queen Elizabeth’s days—as the fabled ogre’s castles of ancient legend, which drew women and children into them to serve and suffer hopelessly, unless relieved from captivity and death by a stronger power. ”