or notoriety and the scramble
for office, a more virulent division of neighbors and of families, a
new lease for the spirit of ambition and partisanship, would be an
evil of the deadliest fatality. Being out of politics, which is the
transient sphere of some, is it not best that woman keep out of it,
and devote herself to morality, which is the permanent sphere of all?
Here is furnished an honorable ground on which she may be, not shut
out of, but excused from, the province of government.

What is the ideal of perfect society? Is it a state where there is a
universal contention for notice, power, and honor? Then let women
enter that contest now. Is it a state where each is content with the
personal fruition of his own powers, in harmony with the same
enjoyment by all others? Then let women, by setting such an example
of abstinence from the public realm of politics, draw men also to
their true happiness, in "the realm of home and morals."

Turning from the authority of history to the authority of moral
science, there is no reason for the enslavement of woman to man. This
is not yet fully seen, because the historic type of woman as pure
subject, of man as pure sovereign, has sunk so deeply into the
imagination of both sexes. The Gentoo Code declared, "A woman ought
to burn herself alive on the funeral pyre of her husband." Body and
soul, she was a mere appendage to him. The Mosaic Code declared a
woman unclean eighty days after bearing a female child, but only
forty days after bearing a male child. One of the laws of Solon
forbade the Greek fathers and brothers from selling their daughters
and sisters as slaves; showing that such an infamous custom had been
prevalent. The passage of thousands of years had brought a degree of
physical emancipation to woman; but she still remained mentally
servile, when Catharine Parr said to her husband, Henry VII, "Your
majesty doth know right well, neither I myself am ignorant, what
great imperfection, by our first creation, is allotted to us women,
to be appointed as inferior and subject unto man as our head; and
that, as God made man in his own likeness, even so hath he made woman
of man, by whom she is to be governed." This type of unquestioning
subjection and obedience is depicted by Chaucer, after Boccaccio, in
his "Griselda," and by Tennyson in his "Enid." The husbands of these
most lovely and womanly of women try their temper, and their
subjectedness, by the most capricious, and