Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
again woman gives to man as much as she receives. Whatever force
the argument based on the right of soldiers to rule may once have
had is rapidly passing away. The era of the destroyer is dying,
the epoch of the Creator is coming in....
The subjugation of woman doubtless arose from an honest desire of
man to protect her. His mistake lay in assuming that his mind and
will could do private and public duty for both. Woman's mistake
lay in assuming that she might with safety permit man's mind and
will to discharge the duties nature meant to be fulfilled by her
own. Unhappily nature has a way of allowing the human race to
learn by its own experience, even though the lesson consume ages
of time; and she has also a rule that unused faculties and
functions fall into a state of atrophy. It was by such a
substitution of masculine for feminine will that woman fell so
far behind him whom she originally led in the race, industrial
and intellectual. If they are ever to march side by side as true
comrades and free partners, it must be by a voluntary resumption
of independence in feminine mind and will. In this man can assist
by stimulating her spirit of independence, or he can discourage
it by a contrary course, but the final result lies with woman
herself. She alone can free herself from the habits of thought
and action engendered by thousands of years of slavery.
The steps toward the emancipation of women are first
intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great
strides in the first two of these stages already have been made
by millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely
carrying them towards the last.
In the address of Mrs. Ruth C. D. Havens (D. C.) on The Girl of the
Future, which was greatly enjoyed, she said:
The training and education of the girl of the present have seldom
been discussed except from one standpoint--her suitable
preparation for becoming an economical housekeeper, an
inexpensive wife, a willing and self-forgetful mother, a cheap,
unexacting, patient, unquestioning, unexpectant, ministering
machine. The girl's usefulness to herself, to her sex and race,
her preferences, tastes, happiness, social, intellectual or
financial prosperity, hardly have entered into the thought upon
this question....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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