Woman is more intuitive. She sees, seizes upon, grasps, where man toils to question, investigate, prove, demonstrate. She is touched by the secret springs of life, and vibrates in response, like the Æolian harp.
“When men are as good as their obituaries, and when women are as good as men think they are, the recording angel in heaven can take his long needed vacation.”
The woman movement indicates that women ought to have an opportunity to become “as good as men think they are.” It is impossible that men shall hold a higher ideal of woman than it is possible for woman to become. But first she must be free. Free to think, act, live, study, experiment, exercise judgment, assume and be held to responsibilities. She does not need man’s protection except that he shall protect her from himself, i. e., protect her from the invasion and intrusion of his wishes, opinion, and will, his dictation and demand.
Equality before the law is a right principle and therefore should obtain, especially under our Constitution. But what woman needs is personal freedom to be the most womanly woman.
Under legal disability, marital subjection, and ecclesiastically assigned inferiority, woman has been bred to servility in mind and morals. She does not need training in the tricks of caucus and wire-pulling politics, but she does need freedom and choice of action that will give her the powers of her own mind and nature in full possession, as a woman.
She does not need that men shall instruct her what a woman ought to be, but she needs to be let alone to find out for herself this precious and important knowledge.
It is not an incident or an accident that the agitation of woman’s advancement and the agitation of industrial reform are simultaneous movements. The priority of woman’s demand for equal rights before the law in this country, has placed woman in literature, on the platform, in the press, and even in the political field of action, in the position of co-worker with man to achieve the highest outcome and greatest blessing of civilization, the right of every person to an opportunity to achieve subsistence, and the right of every worker to the full reward of his labor.
Already in Kaweah Colony in California, woman is an equal participator in the administration of affairs. She has equal opportunity to achieve subsistence and equal pay for her labor.
The star of equity, justice, and fraternity, is shining in the west. When the fraternal order of society is established, woman as mother will be, in her training and her conception of her high office, and in the position and advantage provided for her, exalted as the artist of humanity.
She will be so furnished mentally, and so provided for materially, that she can furnish to her babes what no textbooks, or Scripture, or statutes can convey to them. The mother who can recite to her children the songs of the American poets, the character of Dickens, and Eliot, and Scott, who can portray the noble characters of Lincoln and Lucretia Mott, who is able to devote the time required to entertain her children, will become the most effective moral educator.