2.—“... she to shape her own career be free ...”
“Not less wrong—perhaps even more foolishly wrong—is the idea that woman is only the shadow and attendant image of her lord, owing him a thoughtless and servile obedience, and supported altogether in her weakness by the pre-eminence of his fortitude. This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors, respecting her who was made to be the helpmate of man. As if he could be helped effectively by a shadow, or worthily by a slave.”—John Ruskin (“Of Queens’ Gardens,” p. 125).
4.—“Free mistress of her person’s sacred plan.”
Eliza W. Farnham (in “Woman and Her Era,” Vol. II., p. 92) clearly enunciates the depth of degradation and slavery from which woman’s person must be freed:—“When this mastery is established, and ownership of her becomes a fixed fact, she who was worshipped, vowed to as an idol, deferred to as a mistress, required to conform herself to nothing except the very pleasant requirement that she should take her own way in everything; to come and go, to accept or reject, to do or not, at her own supreme pleasure—this being may find herself awaking in a state of subjection which deprives her of the most sacred right to her own person—makes her the slave of an exacting demand that ignores the conditions, emotions, susceptibilities, pains, and pleasures of her life, as tyrannically and systematically as if she were indeed an insensate chattel.”
Happily, as far as England is concerned, our law no longer lends its power to enforce such a position.
5.—“Free human soul ...”
Woman’s deep and wholesome impulse and yearning for individual freedom and selfdom is well-spoken in the following lines, by an anonymous writer; touchingly shown also is the unsufficingness to her soul of even the most honeyed of unequal positions:—
“Oh, to be alone!
To escape from the work, the play,
The talking every day;