Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 22.djvu/72

 inspired voice, and on the stage the great actresses are equal to the great actors. The doctrine no longer prevails that the only thing woman can do is to bear children, rock the cradle, and attend to the kitchen, fowls and washing. While I do not want her to unsex her- self, I will say, whatever she wants to do in the struggle for bread and life, lend her a helping hand, and bid her " God speed! " And the man who grudges her this should swap his trousers for her bal- moral.

I claim for Camp Pickett the paternity of the first public expres- sion in form of a Confederate woman's monument. On the i6th of January, 1890, in an address made by me. upon the presentation of General Pickett's portrait to this camp by Mrs. Jennings, as my re- marks, published in the Richmond Dispatch of xyth of January, 1890, will show, I urged that steps be taken to erect a monument to the women of the Southern Confederacy, and you applauded the suggestion. Hut this idea, and the execution of it, is something in which none of us should claim exclusive glory and ownership. The monument should be carried not alone upon the shoulders of the infantry, artillery, cavalry, engineers and sailors of the Confederacy, but should be urged forward by the hearts and hands of the whole South. And wherever a northern man has a southern wife (and a good many northern men of taste have them) let him help, too, for God never gave him a nobler or richer blessing. The place for such a monument, it seems to me, should be by the side of the Confede- rate soldier on Libby Hill. It is not well for a man to be alone, nor woman either. To place her elsewhere would make a perpetual stag of him, and a perpetual wall-flower of her. Companions in glory and suffering; let them go down the corridors of time side by side, the representatives of a race of heroes and heroines.

It has been truly said by Guizot in his history of civilization that as the women of a nation are elevated so the nation is elevated, and that the social and moral condition of woman measures the march of civilization.

Let us prove the truth of the great philosopher's words in all the coming years of our united land. The time is most propitious for our resolution and action. We live now with our faces to the rising sun. Behind us are the joys, griefs and glories of the past, check- ered with light and shade. Before us are the hopes, fortunes and splendors of our future,, bright and dazzling in our front. Peace has its victories no less than war.