re those who consider--and I agree with
them--that the education of boys under the age of twelve years ought to
be entrusted as much as possible to women. Let me ask--of what period of
youth and of manhood does not the same hold true? I pity the ignorance
and conceit of the man who fancies that he has nothing left to learn from
cultivated women. I should have thought that the very mission of woman
was to be, in the highest sense, the educator of man from infancy to old
age; that that was the work towards which all the God-given capacities of
women pointed; for which they were to be educated to the highest pitch. I
should have thought that it was the glory of woman that she was sent into
the world to live for others, rather than for herself; and therefore I
should say--Let her smallest rights be respected, her smallest wrongs
redressed: but let her never be persuaded to forget that she is sent into
the world to teach man--what, I believe, she has been teaching him all
along, even in the savage state--namely, that there is something more
necessary than the claiming of rights, and that is, the performing of
duties; to teach him specially, in these so-called intellectual days,
that there is something more than intellect, and that is--purity and
virtue. Let her never be persuaded to forget that her calling is not the
lower and more earthly one of self-assertion, but the higher and the
diviner calling of self-sacrifice; and let her never desert that higher
life, which lives in others and for others, like her Redeemer and her
Lord.

And if any should answer that this doctrine would keep woman a dependant
and a slave, I rejoin--Not so: it would keep her what she should be--the
mistress of all around her, because mistress of herself. And more, I
should express a fear that those who made that answer had not yet seen
into the mystery of true greatness and true strength; that they did not
yet understand the true magnanimity, the true royalty of that spirit, by
which the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and
to give His life a ransom for many.

Surely that is woman's calling--to teach man: and to teach him what? To
teach him, after all, that his calling is the same as hers, if he will
but see the things which belong to his peace. To temper his fiercer,
coarser, more self-assertive nature, by the contact of her gentleness,
purity, self-sacrifice. To make him see that not by blare of trumpets,
not b