be happy in a union
with such. Ladies! the day is coming when men who have seen more
well-developed women, will scorn the present standard of female
character. Will you not teach them to do so? You may have to
sacrifice much, but you will be repaid. This history of the world
is rich with glorious examples. Mary Wollstonecroft, the writer
of that brave book, "The Rights of Woman," published two
generations ago, dared to be true to her convictions of duty in
spite of the prejudices of the world. What was the result? She
attained a noble character. She found in Godwin a nature worthy
of her own, and left a child who became the wife and worthy
biographer of the great poet Shelley. Let us imitate that child
of glorious parents--parents who dared to make all their
relations compatible with absolute right, to give all their
powers the highest development.

People say a married woman can not have ulterior objects; that
her position is incompatible with a high intellectual culture;
that her thoughts and sympathies must be restricted to the four
walls of her dwelling. Why, if I were a woman (I speak only as a
man) and believed this popular doctrine, that she who is a wife
and a mother, being that, must be nothing more, but must cramp
her thoughts into the narrow circle of her own home, and indulge
no grander aspirations for universal interests--believing that, I
would forswear marriage. I would withdraw myself from human
society, and go out into the forest and the prairie to live out
my own true life in the communion and sympathy of my God. So far
as I was concerned, the race might become worthily extinct--it
should never be unworthily perpetuated. I could do no otherwise.
For we are not made merely to eat and drink, and give children to
the world. We are placed here upon the threshold of an immortal
life. We are but the chrysalis of the future. If immortality
means anything, it means unceasing progress for individuals and
for the race.

Mr. Blackwell complimented those women who were just inaugurating
a movement for a new costume, promising greater freedom and
health. He thought the sneers and ridicule so unsparingly
showered on the "Bloomers," might with more common sense be
turned on the "tight waists, paper shoes, and trailing skirts of