sts of misdirected religious enthusiasm in older times, which
indeed it greatly resembled in its methods and propagandists. Its
central theory was so overlaid by cumbering cloaks of absurdity that,
whatever might be its real attractions and merits if seen stripped of
its fantastic garb, it could but be repugnant in present guise to all
true womanhood; it was sent forth in "bloomers," as it were, and was
thus made a figure of fun and deprived of the dignity which it might
have held had its dress been simple and dignified. Yet it was
portentous, though the portent was not of the thing that was seen but of
that which was to be born of it.

Such radical "reformers" as Susan B. Anthony, with her adoption of
semi-masculine costume, just sufficiently masculine to render it
unfeminine and nothing more, or Lucretia Mott, with her impracticable
theories of "women's rights," presented in such form as to be repellent
to all the better attributes of true womanhood, could win but ridicule,
good-natured or acrimonious, as their portion; yet, in a sense, they
were the leaders of the great movement which in altered guise was to
come as a preponderant question of its day. Not in 1866, however, had
that movement taken or even promised to assume any definite shape or one
likely to win sufficient adherents to make it worthy of notice. As yet
American womanhood was content with its sphere. It still ruled the home,
and found in that rule all of "right" that it desired. It was content to
send to the polls, as to the battle, its male representatives and to
guide them by its influence into the paths which seemed best. It did not
"lift up its voice and contend in the streets"; it was quietly strong.

The close of the Civil War, then, found the outer conditions of the
American woman, speaking of them in general and not as affected by the
material results of that war, just as they had been at the beginning of
the strife. Society had indeed been rent into fragments; but the
components of that society which had flourished four years before were
unchanged in their status. Socially speaking, there had come no change
to the women of America during the period of the Civil War; yet by that
war and its results there had been created conditions that were to bear
fruit in after days.

CHAPTER XIII

FEMININE RECONSTRUCTION

During the era which is generally known in the political history of our
country as the "Reconstruction Period," there came a