Page:The Enfranchisement of Women, the law of the land.pdf/8

8 a trade; and the wheel of fortune so turned, that the knowledge stood one of them in good stead in his extremity. Fathers scarcely do their duty to their children and to society who do not so change the habits of public opinion and the current of custom as to smooth the way for females to enter upon the pursuit of trades and professions, without suffering impediment from the prejudices of fixed but illfounded ideas of their proper sphere or mental capability. To this end no means could be more conducive than their introduction to and exercise of those political functions of citizenhood which form the outward sign of civil competency, and impart a status that may help them in their conflict with our settled but too sophisticated habits. It is my abiding conviction, that by having "cabined, cribbed, confined" more than one-half of our subjects in the moral zenana, the conventional nunnery of our national prejudices, and cramping their minds, as the Chinese do their feet, so that intellectually we try to make them totter when nature bids them walk as freely as their gaolers, we are depriving the nation of a power, which, if wisely and trustingly developed, would add immeasurably to its inventive enterprise and progressive energy. I have already touched, in this connection, on the part nature and necessity assigned to women in the formation of the physical constitution, the personal habits, the moral and mental character of the rising generation. It is to the gifts and faculties of the mother that we trace the genius and proclivities of the child. Can we gather grapes from thorns? The education of the nursery does not mean merely pap and caudle, or the offices of the wet and dry nurse. In spite of all our prejudices we are compelled, by the very necessities of our domestic arrangements, to delegate the most important functions of the instructor—those which mould the wax of humanity while yet it is molten, and bend the twig while yet it is lithe—to the nurse and the wife, whom yet we fail to prepare by our social culture for their momentous task. They are to educate our children—but who educates the educators? "Women," observes Lord Kaimes, "destined by nature to take the lead in educating children, would no longer be the greatest obstruction to good education by their ignorance, frivolity, and disorderly manners. Even upon the breast infants are susceptible of impressions and the mother hath