His companion now proceeded with great animation to follow up the favorable opening thus effected, with a rapid and pathetic sketch, in outline, of her sad and suffering life.
She had been married by her parents to a sordid lout of a Quaker, in New England, whose horrid barbarities and persecutions had finally compelled the weak and hitherto unresisting woman to seek a separation, the scandal of which had roused against her the relentless animosity of the whole body of New England Quakers, who finally carried their brutal persecution to the extreme of assisting her yet more brutal husband, in robbing her of her dear and only child, under the plea that she was neither a suitable nor capable person to have charge of it. That, after a long period, spent by the distracted mother in roaming up and down the land, in search of aid and comfort, she had at length succeeded in enlisting some noble and benevolent souls in her cause, who finally rescued the child, by strategy or force, and restored it to its weeping mother’s arms.
In addition to this sad tale of suffering connected with her private history, which was most skilfully and artistically worked up, she had another, of public martyrdom, which was, to Manton, far more impressive.
Through obscurity and poverty, this resolute and daring woman had dedicated herself to the amelioration of the physical evils of her helpless sex. She had, with unflagging ardor, studied the books of anatomical science, the diseases of her sex, and the wisest means of cure. And thus, in addition to having been the first woman in New England to publicly assert that there is no true marriage but in love, she had also led the way in announcing to women their sanitary duties to themselves; that they must learn to heal their bodies, and leave the other sex to take care of their own diseases; that delicacy as well as utility prompted this course.
This idea at once met the approbation of Manton, to whom its assertion was comparatively novel, but who had always deeply felt the lamentable helplessness of woman, and the unnatural relation of the male members of the profession to them.
The brave and hearty manner in which this singular woman had evidently breasted alone the popular prejudice, in a cause which he saw, at a glance, to be so just and nobly utilitarian, for the first time moved his sympathies somewhat in her favor, in spite of his contempt and disgust for women who ventured beyond their sphere.
The vocation of a learned nurse to diseased persons of her own sex, was clearly to him not beyond the proper sphere of woman, but a most important, legitimate, and—however little recognised, conventionally—the most honorable and useful. He could not but respect the woman, whatever her eccentricities might be, who could be brave and true enough to assert effectively to her sex, the natural and inevitable mandate, “Know thyself!”
There was something chivalrous in the thought—a generous daring, a martyr spirit, that could not fail to arrest a nature in itself, rashly scornful of all that was merely conventional, and whose untamed, half-savage soul rejoiced in all novelties that expressed to him a higher utility than mere forms conveyed.
The walk was continued for hours; and still further to try her nerves, during this long conversation, Manton turned through many intricacies into the most darkened labyrinths of the vice-profaned metropolis.
The woman never flinched; nothing seemed to appal her, and, as they threaded rapidly the dingy alleys of the “Five Points,” she had an acute theory or a daring speculation for each evil, the external form of which they successively encountered.