Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/72

 Florence Fensham, Dean of American College for Girls in Constantinople; Women in Germany, Antoine Stolle.

When the report for Porto Rico was made Miss Shaw supplemented it with a graphic account of a trip to the West Indies with Mrs. Lydia Avery Coonley Ward of Chicago, which she had just finished, telling of the position of women, the marriage laws, etc. The work of the National Council of Women was presented by the Rev. Anna Garlin Spencer (R. I.); the report of the affiliated Friends' Equal Rights Association by Mrs. Mariana W. Chapman (N. Y.), its president.

The Sunday afternoon services in the church were conducted by the Rev. Anna Garlin Spencer, assisted by the Rev. Olympia Brown and the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw. Mrs. Spencer first defined the ideal of womanly character held by the older poets and philosophers, quoting Milton's line describing Adam and Eve: "He for God only; she for God in him," and the expression used by the hard, old father of Tennyson's "Princess": "Man to command and woman to obey." She then expressed the modern ideal as that of devotion to the same essentials but different in expression. "Woman is not called to a new kingdom but to a larger occupancy of that which has been hers from the beginning. The woman with the child in her arms was the beginning of the family; the hearth fire and the altar fire grew from this; the elder child teaching the younger was the beginning of the school. We are making over all these inherited traditions and inherited tendencies and socializing them.The ideal woman is no longer a far-away Madonna with her feet on the clouds; she is as divine but she is human. What means the humanizing of religion and the passing of harsh, old creeds but that a greater, more human, more womanly influence is felt in all the relations of life."