sional insults or die
outright, than live the life of a _coward_, or never move without a
protector. The best protector any woman can have, one that will serve
her at all times and in all places, is _courage_; this she must get by
her own experience, and experience comes by exposure. Let the girl be
thoroughly developed in body and soul, not modeled, like a piece of
clay, after some artificial specimen of humanity, with a body like
some plate in Godey's book of fashion, and a mind after the type of
Father Gregory's pattern daughters, loaded down with the traditions,
proprieties, and sentimentalities of generations of silly mothers and
grandmothers, but left free to be, to grow, to feel, to think, to act.
Development is one thing, that system of cramping, restraining,
torturing, perverting, and mystifying, called education, is quite
another. We have had women enough befooled under the one system, pray
let us try the other. The girl must early be impressed with the idea
that she is to be "a hand, not a mouth"; a worker, and not a drone, in
the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to
look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself
for some trade or profession. Woman has relied heretofore too entirely
for her support on the _needle_--that one-eyed demon of destruction
that slays its thousands annually; that evil genius of our sex, which,
in spite of all our devotion, will never make us healthy, wealthy, or
wise.

Teach the girl it is no part of her life to cater to the prejudices of
those around her. Make her independent of public sentiment, by showing
her how worthless and rotten a thing it is. It is a settled axiom with
me, after much examination and reflection, that public sentiment is
false on every subject. Yet what a tyrant it is over us all, woman
especially, whose very life is to please, whose highest ambition is to
be approved. But once outrage this tyrant, place yourself beyond his
jurisdiction, taste the joy of free thought and action, and how
powerless is his rule over you! his sceptre lies broken at your feet;
his very babblings of condemnation are sweet music in your ears; his
darkening frown is sunshine to your heart, for they tell of your
triumph and his discomfort. Think you, women _thus_ educated would
long remain the weak, dependent beings we now find them? By no means.
Depend upon it, they would soon settle for themselves this whole
question of Woman's Righ