American women, though the record
be of the saddest. That Mrs. Surratt was legally guilty of complicity in
the murder of the martyred president is at least doubtful; it may even
be questioned if she were guilty of foreseeing the crime, her part in
the conspiracy most probably ending with the plan of abduction which was
the forerunner of the murder. None the less, she suffered a shameful
death, the passions of the time being too strong for the cooler voice of
justice to be heard; and again was enacted, in minor form, the national
drama that followed upon the insurrection of John Brown. The women of
the South, if they did not go to the lengths of their Northern sisters
on the former occasion, looked upon Mrs. Surratt in the light of a
martyr to their lost cause, and so expressed themselves with a
bitterness and forgetfulness of the true nature of the case which was a
denial of their best attributes as women; and the Northern woman,
holding Mrs. Surratt to be a very devil of malignity and criminality,
could not patiently hear her name spoken with aught but horror and
detestation. So the war ended, as it began, in misunderstanding, and,
therefore, the bitterest of hatred between the two sections of a land
which was at the end of the struggle no more united than at the
beginning.

It is pleasant to turn from these manifestations of all that was worst
in American womanhood to the consideration of woman's social conditions
at the time of the expiration of the war. Even during the period of
strife there had been uplifted a new voice from the women of our land,
though as yet that voice was too feeble and too drowned in the clash of
battle to attract much attention. One of the expressions of this new
spirit which had arisen in at least a portion of our women is worthy of
note as being in some sense a pioneer. In 1864 there was issued a book
called _Woman and Her Era_, by Eliza W. Farnham. The object of the
author was to demonstrate the superiority of women over men: not
superiority in comparative sense or even for certain ends, but absolute
and unimpeachable. The leading argument of the book, as it appeared in
syllogistic form and in all its wonders of capital letters, was as
follows: "Life is exalted in proportion to the Organic and Functional
Complexity; Woman's Organism is more Complex and her Totality of
Function larger than those of any other being inhabiting our earth;
Therefore her position in the Scale of Life is the mos