Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/40

 "Normal Woman," of being unsexed by knowledge and liberty, as if by nature women were unwomanly, and nothing but the stern restraints of darkness and bondage could keep them natural. In asking that these restraints should be removed, women are demanding the only conditions under which any really scientific generalisations can be made about woman's sphere and woman's nature.

As lately as the middle of the nineteenth century, Mrs. Norton wrote:—

"He has made me dream that it was meant for a higher and stronger purpose, that gift which came not from man but from God! It was meant to enable me to rouse the hearts of others, to examine into all the gross injustice of these laws, to ask the nation of gallant gentlemen whose countrywoman I am, for once to hear a woman's pleading on the subject. Not because I deserve more at their hands than other women. Well I know, on the contrary, how many hundreds, infinitely better than I,—more pious, more patient, and less rash under injury,—have watered their bread with tears! My plea to attention is, that in pleading for myself I am able to plead for all these others. Not that my sufferings or my deserts are greater than theirs, but that I combine, with the fact of having suffered wrong, the power to comment on and explain the cause of that wrong, which few women are able to do."

Mrs. Norton knew what was the state of the law, having suffered cruelly from it, and there was, in her day, very little chance of any women knowing the law, except through just such personal bitter