rejudice which
discourages women would only reward proportionately those who surmount the
discouragement. The more obstacles, the more glory, if society would only
pay in proportion to the labor; but it does not. Women being denied, not
merely the training which prepares for great deeds, but the praise and
compensation which follow them, have been weakened in both directions. The
career of eminent men ordinarily begins with college and the memories of
Miltiades, and ends with fortune and fame: woman begins under
discouragement, and ends beneath the same. Single, she works with half
preparation and half pay; married, she puts name and wages into the keeping
of her husband, shrinks into John Smith's "lady" during life, and John
Smith's "relict" on her tombstone; and still the world wonders that her
deeds, like her opportunities, are inferior.

Evidently, then, the advocates of woman's claims--those who hold that "the
virtues of the man and the woman are the same," with Antisthenes, or that
"the talent of the man and the woman is the same," with Socrates in
Xenophon's "Banquet"--must be cautious lest they attempt to prove too much.
Of course, if women know as much as the men, without schools and colleges,
there is no need of admitting them to those institutions. If they work as
well on half pay, it diminishes the inducement to give them the other
half. The safer position is, to claim that they have done just enough
to show what they might have done under circumstances less discouraging.
Take, for instance, the common remark, that women have invented nothing.
It is a valid answer, that the only implements habitually used by woman
have been the needle, the spindle, and the basket; and tradition reports
that she herself invented all three. In the same way it may be shown that
the departments in which women have equalled men have been the
departments in which they have had equal training, equal encouragement,
and equal compensation; as, for instance, the theatre. Madame Lagrange,
the _prima donna_, after years of costly musical instruction, wins the
zenith of professional success; she receives, the newspapers affirm,
sixty thousand dollars a year, travelling expenses for ten persons,
country-houses, stables, and liveries, besides an uncounted revenue of
bracelets, bouquets, and _billets-doux._ Of course, every young
_debutante_ fancies the same thing within her own reach, with only a
brief stage-vista between. On the stage ther