a worthy
career, my young friends had their objections ready. No one had ever been
so poor, so ill educated, so utterly without power to help herself, as
they; and, provoking as these objections were, I felt that they had force.
My young friends were not great geniuses: they were ordinary women, who
should enter the ordinary walks of life with the ordinary steadfastness
and devotion of men in the same paths; nothing more. What I wanted was an
example,--not too stilted to be useful,--a life flowing out of
circumstances not dissimilar to their own, but marked by a steady will, an
unswerving purpose. As I looked back over my own life, and wished I could
read them its lessons,--and I looked back a good way; for I was very
young, when the miserable destitution of a drunkard's wife, whom I
assisted, showed me how comfortable a thing it was to rest at the mercy of
the English common law,--as I looked back over my long interest in the
position of woman, I felt that my greatest drawback had been the want of
such an example. Every practical experiment that the world recorded had
been made under such peculiar circumstances, or from such a fortuitous
height, that it was at once rejected as a lesson.

One thing I felt profoundly: as men sow they must reap; and so must women.
The practical misery of the world--its terrible impurity will never be
abated till women prepare themselves from their earliest years to enter
the arena of which they are ambitious, and stand there at last mature and
calm, but, above all, _thoroughly trained_; trained also at _the side of
the men_, with whom they must ultimately work; and not likely, therefore
to lose balance or fitness by being thrown, at the last moment, into
unaccustomed relations. A great deal of nonsense has been talked lately
about the unwillingness of women to enter the reading-room of the Cooper
Institute, where men also resort.

"A woman's library," in any city, is one of the partial measures that I
deprecate: so I only partially rejoice over the late establishment of such
a library in New York. I look upon it as one of those half-measures which
must be endured in the progress of any desired reform; and, while I wish
the Cooper Institute and its reading-room God-speed with every fibre of my
consciousness, I have no words with which to express my shame at the
mingled hypocrisy and indelicacy of those who object to use it. What woman
stays at home from a ball because she will meet men the