both load her with
honeyed titles and flattering compliments, as though to sweeten with
sugar-plum nonsense her bitter pressure of wrongs. It is the consent of
all historians that woman has been elevated in proportion as knowledge
and virtue have advanced among mankind. No one can read the history of
the world without seeing that woman is upward bound. No one can look at
woman's present estate, her devotion to vanity, her meagre knowledge,
her narrow culture, her circumscribed sphere of action, her monotonous
and aimless life, without feeling that she has many long steps yet to
take before she will attain to her true position, her full womanhood. I
would not intimate that man's love for woman is not sincere, nor that he
designs any harm to her. Nor would I intimate that woman purposely
stoops to degrade herself. The Indian loves his dusky maid with a deep
sincerity of heart; but that love does not prevent him from acquiescing
in the common custom of his people, and making her his drudge, and
regarding her as his inferior and his life-bound slave. So the civilized
man loves his wife with an ardency of devotion he feels for no other
object; but that does not prevent him from subjecting her to the common
lot of woman, or from believing it right that woman should be deprived
by custom and law of that culture, those stimulants, and privileges, and
rights which belong to her as an accountable being. Civilized men do not
demand that their women shall be trained to the highest culture--shall
be taught in the deepest wisdom--shall live for the broadest and
grandest purposes. No; they think it is enough if their women can have a
little smattering of knowledge so as to appear well in the drawing-room
parlor. Wisdom is for men. Man alone may draw from the _deep_ wells of
knowledge. Why have civilized men closed all their colleges and
universities against women? Why have they shut almost every avenue to
public usefulness, to honorable distinction, to virtuous endeavor,
against woman? Why have they deprived her of power, and compelled her to
submit to man in all the relations of life? It is not for the want of a
sincere love for her. No; it is rather for a want of an enlightened view
of what woman should be. Men, as well as women, have failed to
comprehend the true idea of womanhood. Both have been satisfied with too
little in woman. They have borne with the narrowness of woman's culture
and the aimlessness of her life, believing it al