This drove the Protestant world to the other extreme, so that no provision at all has been made for the single woman. In most cases she must marry, or have no profession that leads to independence, honor, and wealth. To fit young men for their professions, thousands and millions are every year provided, securing by endowments the highest
class of teachers, in addition to every advantage of libraries, apparatus, and buildings. But woman's profession has no such provisions made for its elevated duties.
In the Roman Catholic Church the woman of high position, culture, and benevolence, is honored above all others if she remains single and devotes her time and wealth to orphans, to nurse the sick, to reclaim the vicious, and to provide for the destitute. She becomes a lady abbess, or the head of some sisterhood, where high position, influence, and honor, are her reward.
And the priesthood of that Church employ all their personal and official influence to lead women of benevolence and piety to devote time, property, and prayers, to the salvation of their fellow-creatures from diseases of body, ignorance, and sin.
But Protestant women, as yet, have been influenced to endow institutions for men, rather than for their own sex. The writer obtained from the treasurers of only six institutions for men the following statement of benefactions from women:
Miss Plummer, to Cambridge University, to endow one professorship, gave $25,000; Mary Townsend, for the same, $25,000; Sarah Jackson, for the same, $10,000; other ladies, in sums over $1,000, to the same, over $30,000. To Andover Professional School of Theology ladies have given over $65,000, and, of this, $30,000 by one lady. In Illinois, Mrs. Garretson has given to one
professional school $300,000. In Albany, Mrs. Dudlay has given, for a scientific institution for men, $105,000. To Beloit College, Wisconsin, property has been given, by one lady, valued at $30,000.
Thus half a million has been given by women to these six colleges and professional schools, and all in the present century. The reports of similar institutions for men all over the nation would show similar liberal benefactions of women to endow institutions for the other sex, while for their own no such records appear. Where is there a single endowment from a woman to secure a salary to a woman teaching her own proper profession?
It is the depressed and suffering condition of our sex, here indicated, which is the exciting cause of the agitation to gain woman suffrage. To me, success in this effort appears not as a remedy, but rather as a curse. But there are favorable results involved in this agitation that deserve consideration. One is, the exhibition of the moral power now held by women in our nation. For if women urging measures so contrary to our customs and prejudices—not to say so contrary to common sense and the Bible—with many prominent leaders so destitute of discretion and political foresight, yet can move society
so powerfully, what could not be accomplished by the organized influence and action of that vast majority of intelligent women opposed to such innovations?