This is but a very mild statement of the social fictions under which
woman is now suffering in mind, body, and estate; but it is valuable as
coming from a witness who hopes that some less radical remedy than
female suffrage will be found for existing evils. If the remedy lies
with woman herself, as all admit, how can we expect her to act
efficiently until she is a modifying force in legislation?

PAGE 65.

"_Unions, no priest, no church can sanctify._"

"The most absurd notions," says J. A. St. John, "have prevailed on the
subject of matrimony. Marriage, it is said, is a divine institution,
therefore marriages are made in heaven; but the consequence does not at
all follow; the meaning of the former proposition simply being that God
originally ordained that men and women should be united in wedlock; but
that he determined what particular men and women should be united, every
day's experience proves to be false. It is admitted on all hands that
marriage is intended to confer happiness on those who wed. Now, if it be
found that marriage does not confer happiness on them, it is an
undoubted proof that they ought not to have been united, and that the
sooner they separate the better; but from accepting this doctrine some
persons are deterred by misrepresentations of scripture, others by views
of policy, and others again by an entire indifference to human
happiness. They regard men and women as mere animals, and, provided they
have children, and rear them, nothing more."

"It is incredible," says Milton, "how cold, how dull, and far from all
fellow-feeling we are, _without the spur of self-concernment_!"

PAGE 72.

"_Behold the world's ideal of a wife!_"

"All women," says John Stuart Mill, "are brought up from their very
earliest years in the belief that their ideal character is the very
opposite to that of man; not self-will and self-government by
self-control, but submission and yielding to the control of others....
What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial
thing,--the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural
stimulation in others."

The cowardice that is looked upon as disgraceful in a man is regarded by
many as rather honorable than otherwise in a woman. False notions,
inherited from chivalrous times, and growing out of the state of
subjection in which woman has been bred, have generated this
inconsistency. The truth is that courage is honorable to both sexes; to
a Gr