THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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be to me and I to my wife? ” Since I began to listen to the story of woman’s wrongs and woman’s rights, the world is turned topsy-turvy. I am morally sea-sick. ’Tis a state of transition with women, answers this modern American Katharina, with her pale, striking features, a skin like dough, gray, thoughtful eyes, her chest flat, her movements and her whole bearing full of unrest, and these hinting subtly at suppressed powers, and whether she condemn a philosophy or dismiss a lover to arrange her hair, it is done alike with the same careless air of superiority. This modern Kate grows courteously satirical when she talks of her grandmother’s days, but one notices that this same charming woman on examining some old ivory miniature grows annoyed to find the features of those last century dames as refined as their own, and the vehicle of as subtle and strong minds. “ Strange,” says the nineteenth century woman, as she puts them away, “that these faces could have been content with a life of serfdom— mere housekeepers.” “But, Kate,” says our modern Petruchio, “men are mulish; these same domestic women are here in the nineteenth century. They won’t die out; they won’t be weeded out. This domestic woman is a great stumbling block in your modern woman’s way. Man treats you precisely as the Chinese would were you a missionary, would receive your new spiritual deity—that is to say, with all politeness, with uplifted hands and drooping eyes of adoration, and then go home and plump on their knees before their own private little gods behind the kitchen door. This same old-fashioned domestic woman lives and moves and has her being in her home! Really, Kate, how long is this transition to last? Whose fault is it that it lasts so long?” “ Petruchio, as you are one of those men who come in with the mob at the end of a reform, I advise you to shut your ears to the tumult, and attend only to your business.” “ But how can I shut my ears? The air is filled with the protests of women. Do tell what it is they want. What is it that they do not want? What is it that is needed in the right training of girls that is not needed just as imperatively in the right training of boys? What makes the difference then between the position in the world of young men and young women when we men have always granted, and always will, that neither sex is naturally the superior nor the inferior of the other in essentials? ”

“ The difference,” says Katharina, “ lies wholly in the idea that underlies the teaching of each, for from the day the boy chips the shell until he dies he is taught, he breathes it in the air, he learns it by perpetual hard experience, that she is to be taken care of all her days. Nearly every girl in our fashionable boarding schools and in our public schools has the day, when the prince will arrive and carry her off, fixed in her horizon like the light to which the mariner steers. What marriage means, what it im­plicates of duty to herself, to her husband, and to her possible children, she never thinks, nor is she required to think.”

“ It seems strange to me, Kate, that women will submit to live with us men when they are feeling that we are depriving them of their rights, and that man is the enemy of woman’s best advancement. If we were told the history of any race which for three thousand years had lived in daily intercourse with another with a chance for the same culture, with the same language, seated side by side in perfect social equality, and which had yet remained in a state of subjection, debarred from rights which they had held to be theirs, we should be apt to decide sharply enough that the rights are not fitted to them by nature, or that their cowardice and hesitation to grasp their rights deserved the serfdom. There have been women soldiers, judges, merchants in every country and in every age, women who were leaders in the state in war or in intrigue, and the readiness with which the ground was ceded to them, the applause with which their slightest merit was welcomed, proved how easily climed was the path they trod, and how accessible to every woman if she had chosen to climb it. It was not altogether the fault of the obdurate rock that it hid for so many years the gifts of manhood from the boy Theseus, but his own flaccid muscles and uncertain will which failed to over­turn it. When the hour came to use them, the rock was put aside, the golden sandals and magic sword, which were to make his path easy and clear to him, lay underneath.”

“ The transcendental inspiration you men have in guessing why God ever made