W YORK, _November 22, 1856_.

MY FRIEND:--You are promised to be present and speak at the
approaching "Woman's Rights Convention." I, too, mean to attend
its deliberations, or some portion thereof, but not to take part
in them. For I find this evil apparently inseparable from all
Radical gatherings: a very large and influential portion of the
press, including, I grieve to say, religious as well as secular
journals, are prone and eager to expose to odium those whom they
would undermine and destroy, by attributing to them, not the
sentiments they have personally expressed, but those of others
with whom they are or have been associated in some reformatory
movement. He, then, who appears as a speaker at a Woman's Rights
Convention is made responsible for whatever may be uttered at
such Convention--no matter by whom--which is most likely to
excite popular prejudice and arouse popular hostility. I have
borne a good share of this unfairly exalted and unjust odium,
with regard to the dietetic, anti-slavery, and social reforms
suggested in our day, and shall bear on as patiently as I may;
but I grow older, and do not confront the world on a fresh issue
with so light a heart, so careless a defiance, as I might have
done twenty years ago. Allow me, then, through you, to say what I
think of the woman's rights movement, its objects, incitements,
and limitations. If I may thus attain perspicuity, I can bear the
imputation of egotism.

1. I deem the intellectual, like the physical capacities of women
unequal in the average to those of men; but I perceive no reason
in this natural diversity for a factitious and superinduced legal
inequality. On the contrary, it seems to me that the fact of a
natural and marked discrepancy in the average mental as well as
muscular powers of men and women ought to allay any apprehensions
that the latter, in the absence of legal interdicts and
circumscriptions, would usurp the functions and privileges of the
former.

2. I believe the range of employment for woman, in our age and
country, far too restricted, and the average recompense of her
labor, consequently far less than it should be. In saying this, I
do not intimate a doubt that the best possible employment for
most women is to be found in the care and management of