those finer portions of
the intellect that people call taste. Men plant the grain and timber of
every-day life with their strong hands, which God made for that very
purpose. We women fill in the hollows and crevices and swelling banks
with flowers and ferns and delicate shade-trees, which make the vigorous
work of their strong hands beautiful."

Sisters, I said this to that stuck-up girl because I wanted to express
an opinion on this subject--first, because it was my opinion, and again,
because I know that it is yours, going as you do for it in a spirit of
feminine spontaneosity. I don't want the nature of our Society
misunderstood. We are not Woman's Righters, nor Woman's Wrongers, but
straight out women, wanting nothing better on this earth than to be just
as God made us, with a full, free, and generous development of all the
femininities that belong to the sex.

For my part, I don't want to be a man; his work is too rough and hard
for me. His thoughts have too heavy and coarse a grain. His clothes
wouldn't fit me any better than his thoughts and duties.

We being women, according to a beneficent God's intention, have got
enough to occupy a whole life in the same path that our good old New
England mothers trod. We don't want to get out of that path into any
other, and we don't mean to entice the children that are growing up
amongst us into an idea that pure-thinking, hard-working womanliness
isn't the highest and best destiny that God has yet given to his
creatures.

I have no patience with women who scorn their own sex so much that they
would rather turn into weak, meddlesome men than work, study, bring up
children, and live as high-souled, loving women should. As for voting
and all that, it's just turning gold into brass, and getting nothing but
the baser metal for change.

Why, influence is a thousand times sweeter and more certain than legal
power, and that is given to every woman who loves and is beloved.

As for my part, I should be ashamed if I couldn't persuade ever so many
men to do any right thing I wanted. Shouldn't I be a fool to swap off
that influence for the rights that only one man owns for himself?

If women want power, let them be sweet, good, and persuasive, wise
enough to have their opinions command respect, and bright enough to
enforce them pleasantly. That is the way to move nations, if the mind of
woman ever can do it. At any rate, it is the way to govern families and
make them respecta