ilization you are behind us, in this matter of courageous benevolence how far are you before us!"
Since that time women have fairly entered the field as students of medicine and as physicians, as editors and lecturers, engaged in schools of design, and in the taking of daguerres, as well as in some other works of art, and in holding Conventions in several of the States of our Union for the advocacy of our entire claims. A National Society has been formed; and the proceedings of these Conventions and Society meetings have been fairly reported, and have received favorable notices in many of the papers of this country, as well as in the Westminster Review in England.
Frances D. Gage said that allusion had been made in the address to the popular sentiment, that men are what their mothers made them. She repelled this sentiment as an indignity to her sex. What mother, she asked, ever taught her son to drink rum, gamble, swear, smoke, and chew tobacco? The truth was, that the boy was virtually taught to regard his mother as inferior, and that it was not manly to follow her instructions. When he left the hearth-stone he was beyond her reach. He found men, and those, too, in elevated stations, addicted to vulgar and vicious practices, and he was liable, in forgetfulness of all that his mother had taught him, to fall into such habits himself. Men allowed grog-shops to be set up on the street corners, and permitted gambling-houses to exist, to tempt the boy from the path of virtue; and when the mothers asked for the abatement of these evils, they were told to keep in their sphere. In the town where she resided (McConnellsville, Morgan Co., Ohio), the women sent a large petition to the court asking that grog-shops might not be licensed. The judge thereupon remarked that "woman's place was in the nursery and the parlor, and that when she interfered with public affairs, or set herself up as an instructor of the courts, she was out of her sphere." Thus men perpetuate institutions which undermine the influence of the mothers, and corrupt the morals of the sons. The boys were, therefore, in many cases, what men made them. True, there were some cases in which the mother, by superior power, shaped the destiny of her sons, in spite of adverse influences. Such eases were not the rule, but the exception. Mothers, generally, could not exert their full influence over their sons, unless they were permitted to stand by them as the equals of their fathers in all relations of life.
The following address, written by Ann Preston, and adopted as an exposition of the principles and purposes of the Convention, was impressively read by the author:
ANN PRESTON'S ADDRESS.
The question is repeatedly asked by those who have thought but little upon the subject of woman's position in society, "What does woman want more than she possesses already? Is she not beloved, honored, guarded, cherished? Wherein are her rights infringed, or her liberties curtailed?"
Glowing pictures have been drawn of the fitness of the present rela-