the Southern
slaveholders were wont to argue that a negro was only blest when a slave,
and there was no such inhumanity as to free him. Then, if a slave happened
to save his master's life, he was rewarded by emancipation immediately,
amid general applause. The act refuted the theory. And so, every time we
have disfranchised a rebel, or presented some eminent foreigner with the
freedom of a city, we have recognized that enfranchisement, after all,
means honor, and disfranchisement implies disgrace.

I do not see how any woman can avoid a thrill of indignation when she first
opens her eyes to the fact that it is really contempt, not reverence, that
has so long kept her sex from an equal share of legal, political, and
educational rights. In spite of the duty paid to individual women as
mothers, in spite of the reverence paid by the Greeks and the Germanic
races to certain women as priestesses and sibyls, the fact remains that
this sex has been generally recognized, in past ages of the human race, as
stamped by hopeless inferiority, not by angelic superiority. This is
carried so far that a certain taint of actual inferiority is held to attach
to women, in barbarous nations. Among certain Indian tribes, the service of
the gods is defiled if a woman but touches the implements of sacrifice; and
a Turk apologizes to a Christian physician for the mention of the women of
his family, in the very phrases used to soften the mention of any degrading
creature. Mr. Leland tells us that among the English gypsies any object
that a woman treads upon, or sweeps with the skirts of her dress, is
destroyed or made away with in some way, as unfit for use. In reading the
history of manners, it is easy to trace the steps from this degradation up
to the point now attained, such as it is. Yet even the habit of
physiological contempt is not gone, and I do not see how any one can read
history without seeing, all around us, in society, education, and politics,
the tradition of inferiority. Many laws and usages which in themselves
might not strike all women as intrinsically worth striving for--as the
exclusion of women from colleges or from the ballot-box--assume great
importance to a woman's self-respect, when she sees in these the plain
survival of the same contempt that once took much grosser forms.

And it must be remembered that in civilized communities the cynics, who
still frankly express this utter contempt, are better friends to women than
th