Girls, I advise you to use the fork in eating such things as can be eaten best with it, unless you wish to make issue with a false and arbitrary test of gentility.
There are table habits, vital in their importance. I may here name the practice of eating only simple food, with great deliberation, maintaining, during the meal, your legitimate share in the conversation, and constantly watching for opportunities to assist those about you.
CONSERVATISM IS FASHIONABLE.
Nothing is more fashionable than conservatism. Slavery—what a hot- bed of sensualism! What a pandemonium of cruelty and crime!
All over the North the merchant, the politician, and the clergyman pledged each other to silence. It was the fashion.
A few brave souls protested. Sneers and ridicule followed them. Ah, can it be believed,—the blue-eyed daughters of New England joined in the sneers. They drew aside their skirts as they passed the champions of liberty and virtue. No other memory connected with the antislavery revolution is so hard for me to bear. If only they, hearing the cry of agony from their outraged sisters in the South, had listened, sympathized, and, in their own gentle way, striven to help the torn and bleeding ones, I could bear the memory of the brutal indifference of men.
"WOMAN'S RIGHTS" ARE UNFASHIONABLE.
In most of the states women have no legal claim to their own children. In several of them the father may, in his will, commit the little ones to the care of strangers, and the mother can only weep and moan.
In many of the states the wife has no right to the property which her father gave her, or to that which she has earned with her own hands.
In not one of the states can a woman express her opinion or wish at the ballot box. Her person, her property, her claim to her children, —everything she holds most dear in this life, is controlled by the ballot box. The most ignorant foreigners are invited to it; our mothers and wives are forbidden.