Nature has designed that women shall only devote a portion of her life to maternity and its attendant duties. It has set her free of them at a time when her mind and body are fully capable of most of the avocations of life. Having fulfilled these great services to mankind, you have ordained by custom and usage that she shall remain thereafter a mere unconsidered supernumerary on the world’s stage. In your lower circles she becomes a helpless drudge in the interests of her children, and in the higher ones, either an unwelcome retainer in the household of a daughter, or a more or less constrained member in the family of a son; but in all of these her lot is a happy one when compared with her utter desolation in the world when her children have departed from her by immigration or death. You have given her no part in great affairs, and she has but little knowledge of or interest in them. They afford her no entertainment amid her loneliness, and by the narrow training of her faculties, diverted only by the minor things of life,--its personal episodes and gossiping incidents--she lives out her remaining purposeless career. This mere lack of mind expansion has been cited against her as a sex weakness, but it is safe to predict that if men had been subject to such conditions, without her deep human sympathies and her religion, they would have fallen into complete mental imbecility, and if men for all the ages past had been confined as she had been to duties requiring no high attainments, the present balance of mind work could not be shown in their favor.