... Feminism is a tree, and woman suffrage merely one of its many branches. Some of these branches are essential to the life of the tree, others are not. Some grow strong and put forth shoots in their turn, others blossom prematurely, wither young, and drop from the trunk. Meanwhile the tree towers up into the sun with its crown of sturdy growths, and its abortive shoots lie forgotten in the shadow below, leaving hardly a scar upon the great stem to mark their death. Only few people see this tree as a unit. All who do know that woman suffrage is one of its essential growths. But the majority still concentrate their gaze upon one branch or another, whichever seems to them most fair, and the parent tree is lost to sight amid the multiplicity of its offspring’s leaves. Suffrage has rallied to its march thousands of conservative women who are indifferent, or even opposed, to some newer branches of the tree, while those who are absorbed in certain later and eccentric growths are sometimes amusingly contemptuous of the older limbs. They forget that the topmost crown could not flourish if the wide boughs below did not help the tree to breathe. They are sometimes, too, in danger of forgetting that if the great roots of the trees were not anchored deep in the soil of woman’s nature itself, in her motherhood, her strong tenderness, and her service, the whole growth would perish.
[1] Frederick A. Stokes Co.
Woman Has Justified Herself
By Lady Morgan
(English. From “Woman and Her Master,” published in Paris, in a “Collection of Ancient and Modern British Authors,” 1840.)
Notwithstanding her false position, woman has struggled through all disabilities and degradations, has justified the intentions of Nature in her behalf, and demonstrated her claim to share in the moral agency of the world. In all outbursts of mind, in every forward rush of the great march of improvement she has borne a part; permitting herself to be used as an instrument, without hope of reward, and faithfully fulfilling her mission, without expectation of acknowledgment. She has, in various ages, given her secret service to the task-master, without partaking in his triumph, or sharing in his success. Her subtlety has insinuated views which man has shrunk from exposing, and her adroitness found favor for doctrines which he had the genius to conceive, but not the art to divulge. Priestess, prophetess, the oracle of the tripod, the sibyl of the cave, the veiled idol of the temple, the shrouded teacher of the academy, the martyr or missionary of a spiritual truth, the armed champion of a political cause, she has been covertly used for every purpose, by which man, when he has failed to reason his species into truth, has endeavored to fanaticize it into good; whenever mind has triumphed by indirect means over the hearts of the masses.
In all moral impulsions, woman has aided and been adopted; but, her efficient utility accomplished, the temporary part assigned her for temporary purposes performed, she has ever been hurled back into her natural obscurity, and conventional insignificance.... Alluded to, rather as an incident, rather than a principle in the chronicles of nations, her influence, which cannot be denied, has been turned into a reproach; her genius, which could not be concealed, has been treated as a phenomenon, when not considered as a monstrosity!
But where exist the evidences of these merits unacknowledged, of these penalties unrepealed? They are to be found carelessly scattered through all that is known in the written history of mankind, from the first to the last of its indited pages. They may be detected in the habits of the untamed savage, in the traditions of the semi-civilized barbarian! And in those fragments of the antiquity of our antiquity, scattered through undated epochs,—monuments of some great moral debris, which, like the fossil remains of long-imbedded, and unknown species, serve to found a theory or to establish a fact.
Wherever woman has been, there has she left the track of her humanity, to mark her passage—incidentally impressing the seal of her sensibility and wrongs upon every phase of society, and in every region, “from Indus to the Pole.”