The College, the Market, and the Court: or, Woman's relation to education, labor and lawDall, Caroline Wells Healey
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The College, the Market, and the Court: or, Woman's relation to education, labor and law
Dall, Caroline Wells Healey
Women -- Education; Women -- Employment; Women -- Legal status, laws, etc.
Last summer, I heard one of our friends say, that the reason that men
did not wish women to enter medical societies, and receive medical
diplomas, was, that they were unwilling to be detected in their own
double-dealing and malpractice. I should not be willing to indorse a
statement so broadly made. Mean men may justify it: but the men I have
known, the men who have been at once my inspiration and my
strength,--these men were not mean; yet among them even the bravest
doubted, at first, as to the expediency of our discussion.
These men have felt a tender reverence for moral purity in woman. They
have seen laborers of the lower class fall as if smitten by a
pestilence. They had not faith to save the world at such a cost. From
the malpractice and guilty dread of mean men, then; from the sensitive
horror of the noblest, let us learn, at least, that the duty woman owes
the State is a _moral_ duty. A full understanding of this will give her
courage to press her claims. It is the power of conscience and love
which she is to bring to bear on the ballot-box, and which is to mould,
with her aid, questions and interests hitherto untouched by any higher
impulse than the love of gain.
I cannot leave this statement of human rights, without claiming for
woman one right of which men very commonly deprive her; in behalf of
which society makes no clamor, and about which the most radical
reformers say very little. I mean woman's right to find man in his
proper place, as counsellor and friend.
As _father_, to find him interested, equally with his wife, in the
spiritual custody and training of his daughters; giving thus some
portion of each day to imbuing young womanly souls with manly strength.
As _brother_, to find in him wise respect for womanhood, and helpful
free communion.
As _husband_, to find him, unless there is manifest interposition of
Providence, always at the head of his family, always the support and
counsellor of his wife, as she in turn is to be his; making his love her
shelter, his strength her dependence, his experience her guide, his
manliness the complement of her womanliness.
As a _son_, to find him always anxious and ready to minister, provident
to think, patient to bear, and willing to act; never shirking, from
idleness, the duty which an active mother does not shrink from bending,
perhaps _breaking_, beneath.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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