icance in their demands for civil and political
rights. Custom and philosophy, in regard to woman's happiness, are
alike based on the idea that her strongest social sentiment is love of
children; that in this relation her soul finds complete satisfaction.
But the love of offspring, common to all orders of women and all forms
of animal life, tender and beautiful as it is, can not as a sentiment
rank with conjugal love. The one calls out only the negative virtues
that belong to apathetic classes, such as patience, endurance,
self-sacrifice, exhausting the brain-forces, ever giving, asking
nothing in return; the other, the outgrowth of the two supreme powers
in nature, the positive and negative magnetism, the centrifugal and
centripetal forces, the masculine and feminine elements, possessing
the divine power of creation, in the universe of thought and action.
Two pure souls fused into one by an impassioned love--friends,
counselors--a mutual support and inspiration to each other amid life's
struggles, must know the highest human happiness;--this is marriage;
and this is the only corner-stone of an enduring home. Neither does
ordinary motherhood, assumed without any high purpose or preparation,
compare in sentiment with the lofty ambition and conscientious
devotion of the artist whose pure children of the brain in poetry,
painting, music, and science are ever beckoning her upward into an
ideal world of beauty. They who give the world a true philosophy, a
grand poem, a beautiful painting or statue, or can tell the story of
every wandering star; a George Eliot, a Rosa Bonheur, an Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, a Maria Mitchell--whose blood has flowed to the
higher arches of the brain,--have lived to a holier purpose than they
whose children are of the flesh alone, into whose minds they have
breathed no clear perceptions of great principles, no moral
aspiration, no spiritual life.

Her rights are as completely ignored in what is adjudged to be woman's
sphere as out of it; the woman is uniformly sacrificed to the wife and
mother. Neither law, gospel, public sentiment, nor domestic affection
shield her from excessive and enforced maternity, depleting alike to
mother and child;--all opportunity for mental improvement, health,
happiness--yea, life itself, being ruthlessly sacrificed. The weazen,
weary, withered, narrow-minded wife-mother of half a dozen
children--her interests all centering at her fireside, forms a painful
contrast