present but never the future.

So in civilized countries when it was proposed that women should
own their own property, that they should have the earnings of
their own labor, there were not wanting those who were sure that
such a proposition could work only evil to women, and that
continually. It would destroy the family, discordant interests
would provoke dispute, and the only real safety for woman was in
the headship of man; not that man wanted superiority for any
selfish reason, but to preserve intact the family relation for
woman's good. To-day a woman's property belongs to herself; her
earnings are her own; she has been emancipated beyond the wildest
hopes of any reformer of twenty-five years ago. Almost every
vocation is open to her. She is proving her usefulness in spheres
which the "nature" worshiped by the conservative of the last
generation absolutely forbade her to enter. Notwithstanding all
these changes the family circle remains unbroken, the man-child
gets as well educated as before, and the ameliorating influence
of woman has become only the more marked.

Thirty years ago hardly any political assemblage of the people
was graced by the presence of women. Had it needed a law to
enable them to be present, what an argument could have been made
against it! How easily it could have been shown that the
coarseness, the dubious expressions, the general vulgarity of the
scene, could have had no other effect than to break down that
purity of thought and word which women have, and which
conservative and radical are alike sedulous to preserve. And yet
the actual presence of women at political meetings has not
debased them but has raised the other sex. Coarseness has not
become diffused through both sexes but has fled from both. To put
the whole matter in a short phrase: The association of the sexes
in the family circle, in society, and in business, having
improved both, there is neither history, reason nor sense to
justify the assertion that association in politics will lower the
one or demoralize the other.

Hence, we would do well to approach the question without
trepidation. We can better leave the "sphere" of woman to the
future than confine it in the chains of the past. Words change
nothing. Prejudices are none the less pre