Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
The upward tending spirit of the age, busy in an hundred forms of
effort for the world's redemption from the sins and sufferings
which oppress it, has brought this one, which yields to none in
importance and urgency, into distinguished prominence. One-half
the race are its immediate objects, and the other half are as
deeply involved, by that absolute unity of interest and destiny
which Nature has established between them. The neighbor is near
enough to involve every human being in a general equality of
rights and community of interests; but men and women in their
reciprocities of love and duty, are one flesh and one blood;
mother, sister, wife, and daughter come so near the heart and
mind of every man, that they must be either his blessing or his
bane. Where there is such mutuality of interests, such an
interlinking of life, there can be no real antagonism of position
and action. The sexes should not, for any reason or by any
chance, take hostile attitudes toward each other, either in the
apprehension or amendment of the wrongs which exist in their
necessary relations; but they should harmonize in opinion and
co-operate in effort, for the reason that they must unite in the
ultimate achievement of the desired reformation.
Of the many points now under discussion, and demanding a just
settlement; the general question of woman's rights and relations
comprehends these: Her education--literary, scientific, and
artistic; her avocations--industrial, commercial, and
professional; her interests--pecuniary, civil, and political; in
a word, her rights as an individual, and her functions as a
citizen.
No one will pretend that all these interests, embracing as they
do all that is not merely animal in a human life, are rightly
understood, or justly provided for in the existing social order.
Nor is it any more true that the constitutional differences of
the sexes which should determine, define, and limit the resulting
differences of office and duty, are adequately comprehended and
practically observed.
Woman has been condemned for her greater delicacy of physical
organization, to inferiority of intellectual and moral culture,
and to the forfeiture of great social, civil, and religious
privileges. In the relation of marriage she has been ideally
annihilated and actually enslaved in all that concerns her
personal and pecuniary rights, and even in widowed and single
life, she is oppressed with such limitation and degradation of
labor and avocation, as clearly and cruelly mark the condition of
a disabled caste. But by the inspiration of the Almighty, the
beneficent spirit of reform is roused to the redress of these
wrongs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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