Page:Women of distinction.djvu/449

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WOMEN OF DISTINCTION.
367

rial, the effort to repress powerful intellect, magnificent genius, because found in her person, has not always been successful. What a loss to the world had not Mrs. Stowe taken up her pen to depict the horrors of slave life, yet probably she would have darned a greater number of stockings and sewed on more buttons had she desisted from such labors. Nor would we have had Lucretia Mott withhold herself from public life, from her platform efforts as temperance reformer and anti-slavery agitator. "Something God had to say, to her" and through her to an erring people.

Woman moulds and fashions society. Man's chivalrous deference gives her a pre-emiinence and an influence here which carry with them a proportionally great responsibility. The better the training she has received the better enabled will she be to perform the social duties devolving upon her. The more effectual the intellectual armor in which she encases herself the more prepared will she be to engage in the skirmishes of mind. Men adapt themselves to their company, and conversation in society does not rise above the level of its women. It is necessary, then, that woman be ready to meet man upon equal intellectual ground, that her mental equipment be not inferior to his own. We would not have social converse composed exclusively of discussions on the "ologies" or made up of quotations from the "little Latin and less Greek" learned in the schools, but the discipline gained by such scholastic training makes one undeniably brighter, wittier, more entertaining, capable of wielding a greater influence for good. The salons of