How can you know yours as women,
but by obedience to the same law?

It is not the business of either sex to theorize about the sphere
of the other. It is the duty of each to secure the liberty of
both. Give women, for instance, every opportunity of education
that men have. If there are some branches of knowledge improper
for them to acquire--some which are in their nature
unwomanly--they will know it a thousandfold better than men. And
if, having opened the college, there be some woman in whom the
love of learning extinguishes all other love, then the
heaven-appointed sphere of that woman is not the nursery. It may
be the laboratory, the library, the observatory; it may be the
platform or the Senate. And if it be either of these, shall we
say that education has unsphered and unsexed her? On the
contrary, it has enabled that woman to ascertain so far exactly
what God meant her to do.

The woman's rights movement is the simple claim, that the same
opportunity and liberty that a man has in civilized society shall
be extended to the woman who stands at his side--equal or unequal
in special powers, but an equal member of society. She must prove
her power as he proves his.

And so when Joan of Arc follows God and leads the army; when the
Maid of Saragossa loads and fires the cannon; when Mrs. Stowe
makes her pen the heaven-appealing tongue of an outraged race;
when Grace Darling and Ida Lewis, pulling their boats through the
pitiless waves, save fellow-creatures from drowning; when Mrs.
Patten, the captain's wife, at sea--her husband lying helplessly
ill in his cabin--puts everybody aside, and herself steers the
ship to port, do you ask me whether these are not exceptional
women? I am a man and you are women; but Florence Nightingale,
demanding supplies for the sick soldiers in the Crimea, and when
they are delayed by red tape, ordering a file of soldiers to
break down the doors and bring them, which they do--for the brave
love bravery--seems to me quite as womanly as the loveliest girl
in the land, dancing at the gayest ball in a dress of which the
embroidery is the pinched lines of starvation in another girl's
face. Jenny Lind enchanting the heart of a nation; Anna Dickinson
pleading for the equal liberty of her sex; Lucretia Mott,
p