86 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



I am careful to say that woman has no grievance against man, 

 I do not say she has no grievance. In common with all sentient 

 creatures she does complain of the hard conditions of universal 

 existence conditions which it has been the long, slow effort of 

 what we call civilization to amend and improve. The special 

 hardship of the lot appointed to her by Nature is, that the pains, 

 burdens, and weary cares that parentage imposes upon each gen- 

 eration, in order to provide for the succession of the race, have 

 been unequally and cruelly laden upon one of the sexes. Through 

 the long uncivilized ages, before man had wrung from niggard 

 Nature any material comforts, any security against impending 

 death, any leisure for thought, culture, or enjoyment, the condi- 

 tions of the male and female were more nearly balanced in what 

 each was called to endure. If on the latter fell the pangs of child- 

 birth, and the long vigils of nurture for the feeblest younglings 

 among living creatures, on the former came the brunt of inter- 

 necine battles with fierce brutes and fiercer fellow-men. Civiliza- 

 tion increasing the leisure, lightening the toil of man, and reliev- 

 ing him in a large degree from the wars in which he was mutilated 

 and slain, has not been able, in any appreciable degree, to redeem 

 woman from the primitive sufferings by which she consecrated 

 her motherhood ; and so the unequal fortunes of the two branches 

 of the human race have become under the improved fortunes of 

 the race more pronounced. 



Woman does not put this into her bill of grievances, nor with 

 her instinctive delicacy is she likely to do so. Symptoms that in- 

 dicate disease sometimes mislead as to the character and actual 

 seat of the disease. What woman will not ask for herself the re- 

 spect and sense of justice of man must award her, and that is the 

 complete sovereignty over all those functions engaged in the per- 

 petuation of the race, insured by physical structure itself to the 

 females of the inferior orders of living creatures. Woman has 

 earned by her sufferings, by the enormous surplus of her contribu- 

 tion of time and strength and feeling to the maintenance of the 

 family life, the right to control it, to initiate by her selection and 

 the promptings of her own sentiments and preferences all its per- 

 mitted intimacies. But all this, so difficult to formulate, must be 

 left out in a discussion of a distinct though related subject. 



Leaving out, then, whatever offense a cruel Nature has com- 

 mitted against woman, let us see if men have fairly acquitted 

 themselves of their natural obligations to her. Take the present 

 legal status of woman. Since men began to make laws they have 

 made them for women, and in what situation has their deliberate 

 sense of justice left women before the law ? One after the other 

 they have obliterated from the statute book all laws that dis- 

 criminated against women in respect to their personal rights, and 



