THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
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eternal night, says the voice of an enlightened Conscience, along with that venerable mantle of ancient-received-opinion worn full of holes. Yet these are but adjuncts of the great underlying cause that has put the burden of subjection upon woman’s back, tying it there, as this author has expressed it—with the broad band of inevitable necessity—until she is the creature you find her, the natural product of her condition, the fruit of an environment forages—the ages of dominion of muscular force, from which she is now, in this last quarter of the nineteenth century, being slowly emancipated; her bonds have been cut asunder by the knife of mechanical invention and “ she knows she might now rise.”
“ Take the shoes of Dependence off thy feet,” says the voice of Reason, of Nature, of Revelation, and of God. Then, and then only, may woman rightly distinguish between truth and error, love and passion, duty and selfishness, right and wrong, and step by step grow into a realizing sense and wider knowledge of her possibilities for usefulness and her sacred obligations to the race.
That in the annals of time woman once stood noble and free, the recognized equal of man intellectually and economically, ample testimony is to be found in ancient customs, in the early languages, in history and revelation. That ’twas not man’s province in the primitive ages of civilization to assign woman a position inferior to his own, is evidenced by a universal goddess—worship—from time immemorial. Says a writer in the Atlantic Moiithly , a few years since: “The mysteries of this goddess, the worship of this great nature mother, is not more wonderful for its antiquity than for its prevalence as regards space. She was the Isis of Egypt, the Demeter of Greece, the Ceres of Rome, the Cybele of Phrygia, the Disa of the Norse, and was worshiped by the Suevi, the Muscovite and the Celt. She swayed the ancient world from the southeast corner of Egypt and India to Cornwall and Scandinavia on the west, everywhere the Mater Dolorosa. And still she reigns, the ideal type of suffering and purity, in the Madonna, the mother of Jesus. If all ancient rulers believed in the inequality of the sexes, what led that great king of Egypt, who brought his fabulous land into the comity of nations, to name as his successor neither of his brilliant sons, who had rendered such marked service in his Asiatic conquests, but his one daughter Hatasu, his counselor in affairs of state, his chief advisor in the work of adorning his great capitol—Thebes—the “City of Monuments? ” ’Twas this woman’s brain that evolved the present system of foreign commerce in all of its essential details, and caused to be built a fleet of ships for that purpose which, laden with gifts for other nations, sailed away, as much the wonder of that early age as was the celebrated barge of Egypt’s latest queen when obeying the mandate of Rome’s triumvir.
Or what means the story of Deborah, divinely called to take the leadership in her country’s emergency? She was a wife; why should she order an army to the front and plan a great campaign? Said Barak, at the head of his army, “ If thou wilt go with me then I wall go, but if thou wilt not go with me then I will not go.” “ She arose and went.” A nation was redeemed and delivered, and, says the inspired writer, “ Under the beneficent rule of this female judge, the land had rest for forty years.” To such as believe in the inherent inferiority of woman, what a picture is this! The great Israelitish general reverently bowing before a female judge and commander, listening to words of wisdom that would guide a nation to victory.
And again, if ’tis woman’s sphere to be a clinging dependent, and that by Divine decree, why that careful record about Solomon’s virtuous woman, to be found in the last chapter of Proverbs, from which a text for this address may well be chosen?
This perfect woman, a model for all time, so strong, so self-reliant, that husband and children could safely depend upon her in every emergency, w'as far from the ideal type of a clinging vine—a dependent housewife. Though ’tis plain that her domestic duties were none the less faithfully performed because she went out into the world of trade and commerce as a producer—a live factor in this great organic, busy, human world. “ She considereth a field and buyeth it,” “ With the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.” No mention is made of her asking her husband’s advice or