The True Woman: A Series of Discourses, to Which Is Added Woman vs. BallotFulton, Justin D. (Justin Dewey)
Religion
The True Woman: A Series of Discourses, to Which Is Added Woman vs. Ballot
Fulton, Justin D. (Justin Dewey)
Husband and wife; Women -- Religious aspects -- Christianity; Women -- Suffrage
Education is essential for her. She is the educator of the home, for
she is its soul. If one must be ignorant, let it be the man, and not
the woman. Many of our most intelligent men have had cultured mothers.
Very few sons ever grew to be learned whose mothers cared not for
books. This fact is appreciated, and leads us naturally to conclude
that if woman lacks social respect it is her own fault. If a woman
prefers superficiality to thoroughness; music, drawing, and dress, to
a knowledge of housework, an acquaintance with literature, and the
endowments of common sense, simply because brainless men are disposed
to seek out the effeminate and the frail in preference to the rugged
and the well-endowed, then she must suffer the consequences. If a
young lady, compelled to toil for support, will prefer the factory or
the store, with its hot air and depressing associations, to work in
the home, because she hopes in the store or factory to secure the
hand and heart of a husband sooner than elsewhere, she must suffer
accordingly. But if woman will unite in securing a reform in this
direction,--if the pure and the virtuous will say, Such a life as is
offered me in the family is in harmony with my future well-being, and
I will scorn the allurements elsewhere held out, and fit myself, by
study, for companionship with the noble of the land, she will succeed.
If woman will respect herself, she will be respected.
It is not by clamoring for rights that have been conferred upon
others; it is not by restless discontent, by partisan appeals, by
stepping out of her God-given sphere, and by attempting to destroy the
network of holy influences by which he ever has surrounded her; it is
not by ridiculing marriage and casting scorn on motherhood, that she
is to obtain the blessings she courts, but by tranquilly laboring
under this heaven-imposed law of obedience. Woman's weakness is
transmuted into strength when she opens her nature to the influences
of love, and when she consecrates herself to the happiness of others.
Then it is she obtains a moral and spiritual power to which man
is glad to do homage. Ambition, pride, wilfulness, or any earthly
passion, will distort her being. She struggles all in vain against
a divine appointment. It is from the soul of meekness that the true
strength of womanhood is derived; and it is because it has its root in
such a soil that it has a growth so majestic, showering its blessing
and fruits upon the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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