It is not a great many years since women sculptors were unknown, because woman’s talent was not encouraged. Some years ago a match-girl of Boston fashioned a bust of Rufus Choate in plaster and placed it in a show window, hoping some benevolent lover of art might be so attracted by it as to aid her to educate herself in the profession of sculpture. A gentleman who saw great merit in it inquired who was the artist, and when told that it was a young girl, exclaimed, ‘What a pity she is not a boy!’ He saw that such talent in a boy would be likely to make him famous and enrich the world. But a girl had no right to such gifts. It would be an unladylike profession for her, and so she must bury her God-given talent and keep to match selling and dish washing. A few years later Harriet Hosmer overleaped the obstacles that stood in her way and went to Rome to undertake the work of a sculptor. The world now rings with her praises and is enriched by her genius. She, too, removed barriers to a hitherto proscribed sphere and proved that the All-Father in committing a talent to woman’s trust gave along with it a right to use it. Vinnie Ream and others have followed in the way thus opened, and no one now questions the propriety of women working in plaster or marble. And so of many other departments of trade, profession and labor that within my recollection were not thought proper for woman, simply because she had not entered them. Women are debarred from voting and legislating, and therefore it is unfashionable for them to do either; but let their right to do so be once established, and all objections of that kind will vanish away. And I must say I can conceive of nothing so terrible within the precincts of the ballot-box as to exclude woman therefrom. Who go there now? Our fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons. And do they act so badly while there that they dare not suffer us to go with them? If it is really so bad a place surely they should stay away from it themselves, for I hold that any place that is too corrupt for woman to go to is also too corrupt for man to go to. ‘An atmosphere that is too impure for woman to breathe cannot but be dangerous to her sires and sons.’ We mingle with our gentlemen friends elsewhere with safety and pleasure, and I cannot think it possible that the exercise of the right of franchise turns them at once into ruffians. Yet we are gravely told that woman would be treated with rudeness and insult should she go to the polls in the exercise of a right guaranteed to her by the laws of her country.