one. And here comes up again the barbaric element—the predominance of physical force. "Shall this softer, gentler, more fragile creature be the equal of the ruder, stouter man?" "Yes," says your Christianity, "She is a divine institution, as you are; she desires the same culture, the same respect, the same authority." "No," says your barbarism, "I can oppress her, and I will. We won't call it oppression, if you please. We'll call it protection. I'll keep her money, and her children, and her body, and her soul. I'll keep them all for her. She can ask me for what she wants. I shall always know whether it is best for her to have it or no."
Now, here it is true physical ascendency of the man which renders the assumption of this position possible. Great as this power is, he has taken pains to increase it by an immense array of aids and appliances. He has kept the woman ignorant of all the technologies of the world. Fatal renewal of the Hebrew myth, he has eaten of the tree of knowledge, has kept the fruit for himself. Society can not be governed without law and logic. The use of these the man has monopolized, encouraging in the woman the natural gifts and accomplishments which give him most delight—dress and dance, and the sweet voice and graceful manner, and, above all the ready acquiescence in his sovereign pleasure. But let her ask him for the methods by which she may analyze his actions and his intuitions, and he says, "No." No college door shall open for her, no nursery of law, medicine or theology. Philosophy, the science of sciences—which Dictrina taught to Socrates, who teaches it to the world to-day—that would give her the key to all the rest. She may get it, if she can.
We have brought our theoretical woman up to the period of marriage and maternity. Here the intensity of personal feeling and interest monopolize her. Her nursery is full of pains and pleasures, but its delights predominate, and though she will need more than ever the help of outside culture and sympathy, she is yet tied by her affections even more than by her duties to a centre of feeling too intense to generate a wide circle. Here, too, the enforced inequality of institutions pursues her. The children, born at such cost of suffering, are not hers in the eye of the law. The right to them which nature puts primarily in the mother, society has long vested almost absolutely in the father. In case of any difference between them he will say, "I am the father—my will must be obeyed." And what he will say in private the law will say in public. Mrs. Stone records a piteous case in which an unborn child was willed by its dying father to relatives in a foreign country in which the widowed mother suffered the pains of childbirth, that other hearts than hers might be gladdened by her dearly-bought treasure. This young woman was described as in a maze of bewilderment at the presence on the statute-book of a law so miraculously wicked. We all hope that in such laws there comes a great deal of dead letter, but the dead letter itself stinks and is corrupt. The book of justice should be purged of such unhallowed corpses.
In the nursery the mother is called upon to set forward the same injustice which presided over her own education. "Preaching down a daughter's heart," the beautiful phrase of Tennyson, becomes the duty of every woman who finds in her daughter saliency of intellect and individuality of will. Mediocrity is the standard! "Seek not, my child, to go beyond it. Thou