She to whom the place of presiding Pythoness seemed to have been, by general understanding, assigned, now solemnly arose, amidst a sudden pause of shrill-tongued clatter. She was very tall—nearly six feet. Her straight figure would have seemed voluptuously rounded, but that the loose-folded and wilted oval of her face suggested that the plump bust, with its close, manly jacket of black velvet, buttoned down in front, might owe something of its elastic seeming roundness to those conventionalities, à la modiste, and otherwise, against which her principles most vehemently protested. Her flaxen hair emulated the classic tie of any Venus of them all, on the back part of the head; while the effulgence of sunny curls flooded the very crow’s-feet in the corners of her great, cold, dead, grey eyes.
She shook her curls slightly, and spoke:—
“My sisters, we have come together this afternoon, not to talk about abstractions of right and wrong to our sex; for, upon all these elementary subjects, our minds are fully made up—all those inductive processes of which the human intellect is capable, our minds have already passed through. Our opinions are irrevocably formed, our conclusions absolute! Woman is oppressed by man. She is denied her just rights. She is taxed, yet denied the privilege of representation. She is a slave, without the privileges of slavery! for, in the old slave-states, the possession of twenty, or thirty, or forty slaves gives to their master the faintly-representative privilege of an additional vote, while, to our tyrants, though each may hold, in reality, a dozen wives, the law grants nothing! Leaving us, in fact, not even the ‘shadow of a shade’ of a social or civil existence! We are thus reduced to a condition of insignificance, in relation to the active affairs of life and the world, that we have determined to be, both incongruous and insufferable.
“Man, our time-out-of-mind despot, has determined to reduce us to, and hold us within, the sphere of mere wet-nurses to his insolent and bifurcate progeny;—we must, forsooth, spawn for him, and then dedicate our lives to educating his procreative vices into what he calls manhood! We are wearied with the dull, stale, commonplace of nursery-slops, and of the fractious squallings of our embryo tyrants! Man must learn to nurse his own monsters, and we will nurse ours! We have declared our independence of his tyranny; our great object is to displace him from his seat of power! For six thousand years he has been our despot—our ruthless and unscrupulous tyrant! We have therefore a settlement to make with him—a long arrearage of accounts to be rendered.
“But we are weak, while he is strong! He possesses the physical force, and all the guarantees of precedence since time began, while we have only our own weaknesses to fall back upon—what they, in their surfeited rhythm, style ‘witching graces,’ and ‘nameless charms!’
“Well, we must use these against our obese foe as best we may. We must clip the claws and teeth of the lion, at any rate; and, in consideration that the whole World of Past and Present is arraigned against us, we must accept as our motto, that of the only man who ever deserved to be a woman, Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits,
“‘The end justifies the means.’”
A small noise—a scarcely sensible “teetering” of pedal extremities upon the thin carpet, followed this “stern demonstration” of “woman’s rights,” from the accepted Priestess of the conventicle; when various exclamations arose from different parts of the room, such as—
“Right! right! End justifies the means, in dealing with the brutes!”
“They give us no quarter, and we will give them none!”