cabbages. They are to mingle with the
passions and violences of men by way of
asserting their equality, and to take part in
their vices by way of gaining their rights.
They are to be barristers, too, with real blue
bags, pleading for murderers and sifting the
evidence of divorce cases; offices, no doubt,
highly conducive to their moral advancement
and the maintenance of their purity, but such
as we, being of the old-fashioned and
eminently unenlightened school, would rather
not see our wives or daughters engaged in.
Of doctoresses we will say nothing. The care
and the cure of the sick belong to women, as
do all things gentle and loving. And
though we can scarcely reconcile it with our
present notions of the fitness of things, that a
gentlewoman of refinement and delicacy should
frequent dissecting-rooms among the crowd of
young students, and cut up dead bodies and
living ones as her mother cut out baby-clothes,
yet the care of the sick is so holy a duty, that
if these terrible means are necessary, they are
sanctified by the end, and God prosper those
who undertake them! But they are not
necessary. Women are better as medical
assistants than as independent practitioners;
their services are more valuable when obeying
than when originating orders; and as
nurses they do more good than as doctors.
Besides, it would be rather an inconvenient
profession at times. A handsome woman,
under forty—or over it—would be a dangerous
doctor for most men; and, as specialities in
medicine are quackeries, it would be humbug
and affectation to shrink from any cases. For,
admitting the principle that woman's mission
—at least one of them—is to doctor, it must
be extended in practice to all alike. And we
may imagine various circumstances in which
a young doctress would be somewhat
embarrassing, if not embarrassed; yet what are we
to do when all the doctors are driven out of
the field, and we have no choice left us? And
if women are to be our doctors, will they be
only old women, and ugly ones—will there
never be bright eyes or dimpled cheeks among
them? It might be very delightful to be
cured by a beautiful young woman, instead of
by a crabbed old man, yet for prudence sake
we should recommend most wives and mothers
to send for the crabbed old man when their
sons and husbands are ill, and to be
particularly cautious of feminine M.D.'s in
general.

One or two points of human nature the
Public Functionists and emancipated women
either sink or pervert. The instincts above
all. The instinct of protection in man and
the instinct of dependence in woman they
decline to know anything about; they
see nothing sacred in the fact of maternity,
no fulfilment of natural destiny in
marriage, and they find no sanctifying power in
the grace of self-sacrifice. These are in their
eyes the causes of woman's degradation. To
be equal with man, she must join in the strife
with him, wrestle for the distinctions, and
scramble for the good places. She must no
longer stand in the shade apart, shedding the
blessing of peace and calmness on the
combatants, when they return home, heated and
weary, but she must be out in the blazing sun,
toiling and fighting too, and marking every
victory by the grave-stone of some dear
virtue, canonised since the world began.
Homes deserted, children—the most solemn
responsibility of all— given to a stranger's
hand, modesty, unselfishness, patience,
obedience, endurance, all that has made
angels of humanity must be trampled
under foot, while the Emancipated Woman
walks proudly forward to the goal of the
glittering honours of public life, her true
honours lying crushed beneath her, unnoticed.
This these noisy gentry think will elevate
woman.

Women have grave legal and social
wrongs, but will this absurd advocacy of
exaggeration remedy them? The laws which deny
the individuality of a wife, under the shallow
pretence of a legal lie; which award different
punishments for the same vice; the laws which
class women with infants and idiots, and which
recognise principles they neither extend nor act
on; these are the real and substantial Wrongs
of Women, which will not, however, be
amended by making them commanders in the
navy or judges on the bench. To fling them
into the thick of the strife would be but to
teach them the egotism and hardness, the
grasping selfishness, and the vain-glory of
men, which it has been their mission, since
the world began, to repress, to elevate, to
soften, and to purify. Give woman public
functions, and you destroy the very springs of
her influence. For her influence is, and must
be, moral more than intellectual—intellectual
only as filtering through the moral nature;
and if you destroy that moral nature, if you
weaken its virtues and sully its holiness, what
of power or influence remains? She will
gain place and lose power; she will gain
honours and lose virtues; when she has pushed
her father or her son to the wall, and usurped
the seats consecrated by nature to them alone.
Yes, by nature; in spite of the denial of the
Public Functionists. Her flaccid muscles,
tender skin, highly nervous organisation, and
aptitude for internal injury, decide the
question of offices involving hard bodily labour;
while the predominance of instinct over
reason, and of feeling over intellect, as a rule,
unfits her for judicial or legislative command.
Her power is essentially a silent and unseen
moral influence; her functions are those of a
wife and mother. The emancipatists rate these
functions very lightly, compared with the
duty and delight of hauling in main-top-sails
or speechifying at an election. They seem to
regard the maternal race as a race apart, a
kind of necessary cattle, just to keep up the
stock; and even of these natural drudges the
most gifted souls may give up their children