stract principles of right and wrong. Its
solution must be obtained from physiology, not from ethics or
metaphysics. The question must be submitted to Agassiz and Huxley, not
to Kant or Calvin, to Church or Pope. Without denying the self-evident
proposition, that whatever a woman can do, she has a right to do, the
question at once arises, What can she do? And this includes the
further question, What can she best do? A girl can hold a plough, and
ply a needle, after a fashion. If she can do both better than a man,
she ought to be both farmer and seamstress; but if, on the whole, her
husband can hold best the plough, and she ply best the needle, they
should divide the labor. He should be master of the plough, and she
mistress of the loom. The _quaestio vexata_ of woman's sphere will be
decided by her organization. This limits her power, and reveals her
divinely-appointed tasks, just as man's organization limits his power,
and reveals his work. In the development of the organization is to be
found the way of strength and power for both sexes. Limitation or
abortion of development leads both to weakness and failure.

Neither is there any such thing as inferiority or superiority in this
matter. Man is not superior to woman, nor woman to man. The relation
of the sexes is one of equality, not of better and worse, or of higher
and lower. By this it is not intended to say that the sexes are the
same. They are different, widely different from each other, and so
different that each can do, in certain directions, what the other
cannot; and in other directions, where both can do the same things,
one sex, as a rule, can do them better than the other; and in still
other matters they seem to be so nearly alike, that they can
interchange labor without perceptible difference. All this is so well
known, that it would be useless to refer to it, were it not that much
of the discussion of the irrepressible woman-question, and many of the
efforts for bettering her education and widening her sphere, seem to
ignore any difference of the sexes; seem to treat her as if she were
identical with man, and to be trained in precisely the same way; as if
her organization, and consequently her function, were masculine, not
feminine. There are those who write and act as if their object were to
assimilate woman as much as possible to man, by dropping all that is
distinctively feminine out of her, and putting into her as large an
amount of masculineness as