pictures of real
life so vivid as to force from you the agonized exclamation, How can
women endure such things!

We who have spoken out, have declared our rights, political and civil;
but the entire revolution about to dawn upon us by the acknowledgment
of woman's social equality, has been seen and felt but by the few. The
rights, to vote, to hold property, to speak in public, are
all-important; but there are great social rights, before which all
others sink into utter insignificance. The cause of woman is, as you
admit, a broader and a deeper one than any with which you compare it;
and this, to me, is the very reason why it must succeed. It is not a
question of meats and drinks, of money and lands, but of human
rights--the sacred right of a woman to her own person, to all her
God-given powers of body and soul. Did it ever enter into the mind of
man that woman too had an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of her individual happiness? Did he ever take in the idea that
to the mother of the race, and to her alone, belonged the right to say
when a new being should be brought into the world? Has he, in the
gratification of his blind passions, ever paused to think whether it
was with joy and gladness that she gave up ten or twenty years of the
heyday of her existence to all the cares and sufferings of excessive
maternity? Our present laws, our religious teachings, our social
customs on the whole question of marriage and divorce, are most
degrading to woman; and so long as man continues to think and write,
to speak and act, as if maternity was the one and sole object of a
woman's existence--so long as children are conceived in weariness and
disgust--you must not look for high-toned men and women capable of
accomplishing any great and noble achievement. But when woman shall
stand on an even pedestal with man--when they shall be bound together,
not by withes of law and gospel, but in holy unity and love, then, and
not till then, shall our efforts at minor reforms be crowned with
complete success. Here, in my opinion, is the starting-point; here is
the battle-ground where our independence must be fought and won. A
true marriage relation has far more to do with the elevation of woman
than the style and cut of her dress. Dress is a matter of taste, of
fashion; it is changeable, transient, and may be doffed or donned at
the will of the individual; but institutions, supported by laws, can
be overturned but by revol