Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/213



We had inherited from our founder, continued the president, a care for the honour and the interests of woman, and a charge to give to her all possible help, in her battle with society for equality of rights with the man. Well, the woman has fought her battle, and has gained it; and society is all the better for the victory, in the interests alike of its business, its science, and its higher social concernments. He went on to say that, if the moral fibre of society had been distinctly strengthened by that reformed university life, to which allusion has been already made, yet further and yet more directly was this the case in all those educational and other arrangements, which now freely permitted the ministration of woman in all the delicate duties of her own sex's needs. The husband of to-day would as soon think of exposing the grace and purity of his young wife, in the honours and pangs of her maternity, to the indiscriminate gaze of the streets, as of exposing her to any one not of her own sex within the hallowed precincts of her chamber. In this direction alone there was thus an appreciable step of moral elevation along society's entire line.