Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
Looking over these twenty-eight years, I feel that what we have
achieved, as yet, bears no proportion to what we have suffered in
the daily humiliation of spirit from the cruel distinctions based
on sex. Though our State laws have been essentially changed, and
positions in the schools, professions, and world of work secured
to woman, unthought of thirty years ago, yet the undercurrent of
popular thought, as seen in our social habits, theological
dogmas, and political theories, still reflects the same customs,
creeds, and codes that degrade women in the effete civilizations
of the old world. Educated in the best schools to logical
reasoning, trained to liberal thought in politics, religion and
social ethics under republican institutions, American women
cannot brook the discriminations in regard to sex that were
patiently accepted by the ignorant in barbarous ages as divine
law. And yet subjects of emperors in the old world, with their
narrow ideas of individual rights, their contempt of all
womankind, come here to teach the mothers of this republic their
true work and sphere. Such men as Carl Schurz, breathing for the
first time the free air of our free land, object to what we
consider the higher education of women, fitting them for the
trades and professions, for the sciences and arts, and
self-complacently point Lucretia Mott, Maria Mitchell, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, Susan B. Anthony, to their appropriate sphere, as
housekeepers with a string of keys, like Madam Bismark, dangling
around their waists.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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