s
Conventions; you ridicule socialism (I do not accept that); you
dislike the anti-slavery movement. The only discussion of the
grave social questions of the age, the questions of right and
wrong that lie at the basis of society--the only voices that have
stirred them and kept those questions alive have been those of
these three reforms. Smothered with gold--smothered with material
prosperity, the vast masses of our countrymen were living the
lives of mere getters of money; but the ideas of this half of the
nineteenth century have been bruited by despised reformers, kept
alive by three radical movements, and whoever in the next
generation shall seek for the sources of mental and intellectual
change will find it here; and in a progressive people like ours
that claim is a most vital and significant one....

I contend that woman, broadly considered, makes half the money
that is made. Go the world over, take either Europe or America,
the first source of money is intelligence and thrift; it is not
speculation.... Out of the twenty millions of American people
that make money, woman does more than half of the work that
insures the reward. I claim for that half of the race whose
qualities garner up wealth, the right to dispose of it, and to
control it by law.

Again, take thought. I know our sister has modestly told us how
utterly they are deprived of what are called the institutions of
education; but we know very well that book learning is a
miserably poor thing, and that the best education in the world is
what we clutch in the streets; and of that education, by hook or
by crook, woman has so far gained enough, that, Europe and
America through, where is the man presumptuous enough to doubt
that the hand of woman is not felt as much on the helm of public
opinion as that of man? To be sure, she does not have an outside
ambitious distinction; but at home, in the molding hours, in
youth, in the soft moments when the very balance-wheel of
character is touched, we all know that woman, though she may not
consciously enunciate ideas, does as much to form public opinion
as man. The time has been--and every man who has ever analyzed
history knows it--when in France, the mother to Europe of all
social ideas; France that has lifted up Germany from mystici