periences, and
together devise plans for the future, out of which shall arise
well-based hopes of good results to humanity. We are aware that
this proceeding of ours, this calling together of a body of women
to deliberate publicly upon plans to carry out a specified
reform, will rub rather harshly upon the mould of prejudice,
which has gathered thick upon the common mind.

.... There are plenty of women, as well as men, who can labor for
reforms without neglecting business or duty. It is an error that
clings most tenaciously to the public mind, that because a part
of the sex are wives and mothers and have absorbing duties, that
all the sex should be denied any other sphere of effort. To
deprive every unmarried woman, spinster, or widow, or every
childless wife, of the power of exercising her warm sympathies
for the good of others, is to deprive her of the greatest
happiness of which she is capable; to rob her highest faculties
of their legitimate operation and reward; to belittle and narrow
her mind; to dwarf her affections; to turn the harmonies of her
nature to discord; and, as the human mind must be active, to
compel her to employ hers with low and grovelling thoughts, which
lead to contemptible actions.

There is no reform in which woman can act better or more
appropriately than temperance. I know not how she can resist or
turn aside from the duty of acting in this; its effects fall so
crushingly upon her and those whose interests are identical with
her own; she has so often seen its slow, insidious, but not the
less surely fatal advances, gaining upon its victim; she has seen
the intellect which was her dearest pride, debased; the
affections which were her life-giving springs of action,
estranged; the children once loved, abused, disgraced and
impoverished; the home once an earthly paradise, rendered a fit
abode for lost spirits; has felt in her own person all the
misery, degradation, and woe of the drunkard's wife; has shrunk
from revilings and cowered beneath blows; has labored and toiled
to have her poor earnings transferred to the rum-seller's
ill-gotten hoard; while her children, ragged, fireless, poor,
starving, gathered shivering about her, and with hollow eyes,
from which all smiles had fled, begged vainly for the bread she