Of course, we are to have no patience with it, and to refuse utterly to entertain a remonstrance so beneath propriety.
The object of my whole life has been to inspire in women a desire for thorough training to some special end, and a willingness to share the training of men both for specific and moral reasons. Only by sharing such training can women be sure that they will be well trained; only by God-ordained, natural communion of all men and women can the highest moral results be reached.
"Free labor and free society:" I have said often to myself, in these two phrases lies hidden the future purification of society. When men and women go everywhere together, the sights they dare not see together will no longer exist.
Fair and serene will rise before them all heights of possible attainment; and, looking off over the valleys of human endeavor together, they will clear the forest, drain the morass, and improve the interval stirred by a common impulse.
When neither has any thing to hide from the other, no social duty will seem too difficult to be undertaken; and, when the interest of each sex is to secure the purity of the other, neither religion nor humanity need despair of the result.
It was while fully absorbed in thoughts and purposes like these, that, in the autumn of 1856, I first saw Marie Zakrzewska.[[1]] During a short visit to Boston (for she was then resident in New York), a friend brought her before a physiological institute, and she addressed its members.
She spoke to them of her experience in the hospital at Berlin, and showed that the most sinning, suffering woman never passed beyond the reach of a woman's sympathy and help. She had not, at that time, thoroughly mastered the English language; though it was quite evident that she was fluent, even to eloquence, in German. Now and then, a word failed her; and, with a sort of indignant contempt at the emergency, she forced unaccustomed words to do her service, with an adroitness and determination that I never saw equalled. I got from it a new revelation of the power of the English language. She illustrated her noble and nervous thoughts with incidents from her own experience one of which was told in a manner which impressed it for ever on my consciousness.
"Soon after I entered the hospital," said Marie, "the nurse called me to a ward where sixteen of the most forlorn objects had begun to fight with each other. The inspector and the young physicians had been called to them, but dared not enter the mêlée. When I arrived, pillows, chairs, foot-stools and vessels had deserted their usual places; and one stout little woman, with rolling eyes and tangled hair, lifted a vessel of slops, which she threatened to throw all over me, as she exclaimed, 'Don't dare to come here, you green young thing!'
"I went quietly towards her, saying gently, 'Be ashamed, my dear woman, of your fury.'
"Her hands dropped. Seizing me by the shoulder she exclaimed, 'You don't mean that you look on me as a woman?'