r quarter of the globe. The
advantage, she has received, the rights and prerogatives she has secured
for herself, are unequaled by any other class of women in the world. It
will not be thought amiss, then, that I come here to-day to present to
your consideration the one grand exception to this general superiority
of women, viz., _The black woman of the South_.

* * * * *

The rural or plantation population of the South was made up almost
entirely of people of pure Negro blood. And this brings out also the
other disastrous fact, namely, that this large black population has been
living from the time of their introduction into America, a period of
more than two hundred years, in a state of unlettered rudeness. The
Negro all this time has been an intellectual starveling. This has been
more especially the condition of the black woman of the South. Now and
then a black man has risen above the debased condition of his people.
Various causes would contribute to the advantage of the _men_: the
relation of servants to superior masters; attendance at courts with
them; their presence at political meetings; listening to table-talk
behind their chairs; traveling as valets; the privilege of books and
reading in great houses, and with indulgent masters--all these served to
lift up a black _man_ here and there to something like superiority. But
no such fortune fell to the lot of the plantation woman. The black woman
of the South was left perpetually in a state of hereditary darkness and
rudeness.

* * * * *

In her girlhood all the delicate tenderness of her sex was rudely
outraged. In the field, in the rude cabin, in the press-room, in the
factory, she was thrown into the companionship of coarse and ignorant
men. No chance was given her for delicate reserve or tender modesty.
From her girlhood she was the doomed victim of the grossest passions.
All the virtues of her sex were utterly ignored. If the instinct of
chastity asserted itself, then she had to fight like a tigress for the
ownership and possession of her own person; and, ofttimes, had to suffer
pains and lacerations for her virtuous self-assertion. When she reached
maturity all the tender instincts of her womanhood were ruthlessly
violated. At the age of marriage--always prematurely anticipated under
slavery--she was mated, as the stock of the plantation were mated, _not_
to be the companion of a loved and chosen husband, but to be the breeder
of human cattle, for the fiel