Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/105

Rh things! He must be rather a confident professor who thinks a woman cannot do what he can. I rejoice at the introduction of women into common schools, academies, and high schools; and I thank God that the man who has done so much for public education in Massachusetts is presently to be the head of a college in Ohio, where women and men are to study together, and where a woman is to be professor of Latin and Natural History. These are good signs.

The business of public lecturing, also, is quite important in New England, and I am glad to see that woman presses into that, not without success.

The work of conducting a journal, daily, weekly, or quarterly, woman proves that she can attend to quite as decently, and as strongly too, as most men.

Then there are what are called the professions—medicine, law, and theology.

The profession of medicine seems to belong peculiarly to woman by nature; part of it exclusively. She is a nurse, and half a doctor, by nature. It is quite encouraging that medical schools are beginning to instruct women, and special schools get founded for the use of women; that sagacious men are beginning to employ women as their physicians. Great good is to be expected from that.

As yet, I believe, no woman acts as a lawyer. But I see no reason why the profession of law might not be followed by women as by men. He must be rather an uncommon lawyer who thinks no feminine head could compete with him. Most lawyers that I have known are rather mechanics at law than attorneys or scholars at law; and in the mechanical part woman could do as well as man—could be as good a conveyancer, could follow precedents as carefully, and copy forms as nicely. And in the higher departments of legal work, they who have read the plea which Lady Alice Lisle made in England, when she could not speak by attorney, must remember there is some eloquence in woman's tongue which courts find it rather hard to resist. I think her presence would mend the manners of the court—of the bench not less than of the bar.

In the business of theology, I could never see why a