"The men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry,
'A woman's function plainly is ... to talk.'""What
He doubts is, whether we can do the thing
With decent grace we've not yet done at all.
Now do it.""Bring your statue:
You have room.""None of us is mad enough to say
We'll have a grove of oaks upon that slope,
And sink the need of acorns."
Preface.
It is due to myself to say, that the manner in which the Autobiography is subordinated to the general subject in the present volume, and also the manner in which it is veiled by the title, are concessions to the modesty of her who had the best right to decide in what fashion I should profit by her goodness, and are very far from being my own choice.
Caroline H. Dall.
49. Bradford Street, Boston,
Oct. 30, 1860.
Practical Illustration of "Woman's Right to Labor"
It never happens that a true and forcible word is spoken for women, that, however faithless and unbelieving women themselves may be, some noble men do not with heart and hand attempt to give it efficiency.
If women themselves are hard upon their own sex, men are never so in earnest. They realize more profoundly than women the depth of affection and self-denial in the womanly soul; and they feel also, with crushing certainty, the real significance of the obstacles they have themselves placed in woman's way.
Reflecting men are at this moment ready to help women to enter wider fields of labor, because, on the one side, the destitution and vice they have helped to create appalls their consciousness; and, on the other, a profane inanity stands a perpetual blasphemy in the face of the Most High.
I do not exaggerate. Every helpless woman is such a blasphemy. So, indeed, is every helpless man, where helplessness is not born of idiocy or calamity; but society neither expects, provides for, nor defends, helpless men.