and less valued, because less helpful, all the time. One can count on one's fingers the American women of to-day who are known outside of their own circle, while a certain lower stratum of the sex is sinking ever deeper and deeper in the mire of shame and degradation. Before they can be raised out of it, all must be lifted up, for the lowest of us are in the abyss chiefly because the highest of us are scarcely above the surface.
What force is to accomplish this upheaval? Certainly nothing from without,—for the mass is too enormous,—though some seem to think so, and by way of ropes and pulleys are begging men for the vote, for employment, for "justice." Men do not agree to their demands, but in their own fashion they are talking about it. Doctors, clergymen, essayists, editors,—all are trying their pens at the "woman question," scolding, arguing, sneering; but they make nothing of it; they leave it all confusion and darkness as they found it; while, if the great novelists draw a grand heroine, it is only to overwhelm her with failure and despair, killing her off or sending her into a sisterhood at the end of the book, because there is actually no place for her on the face of the earth. Hawthorne, Goethe, George Eliot, Richter, De Stael, George Sand, Thackeray, Dickens, Kingsley, with the whole host of lesser ones, who echo the pagan strain on their small trumpets,—they all will let no woman be happy or successful except the good and sweet little darlings who walk in the orthodox "feminine" path, and are not sure whether their souls are their own or their husbands'. Charles Reade, strange to say, seems to have more discrimination, and to fancy, with Spenser and Shakespeare, that, when God sends a noble woman into the world, doubtless there is some noble work that he desires her to do there.
The Sphinx must speak for herself.
I believe devoutly that there is such a work for gifted women, and that it is the leadership and guidance of the
