170 wisconsiijt academy sciences, arts, and letters. 



allies of personal attractiveness. The surpi'ise is, that, with any 

 moral sense left, she should not repudiate the putting of things 

 beautiful and appropriate, as aiding the expression of intrinsic 

 beauty and worth, in the place of these. Nevertheless, this is 

 done, and to such an extent that, just as the connection between 

 taste and morals disappears in modern feminine apparel, it reap- 

 pears in the spectacle of a very low standard of personal apprecia- 

 tion, expressing itself in the deformities of fashion. It is not 

 mereh'' the empty head ot the votary of conventional extremes 

 that measures the folly and wickedness of training up childhood 

 to such maidenhood; it is in the exhibition of moral unfitness su- 

 perinduced upon womanhood itself, and finding its moral expres- 

 sion in her attire, where the womanly art of decoration becomes 

 artifice. 



As life advances, the position and language of institutions re- 

 affirm to woman the humiliating proposition of her youth. At 

 the threshold of all higher power and privilege, she is met with 

 the denial of right, or the denial of capacit3\ There is not an in- 

 stitution, of the highest grade of its kind, in the world where a 

 woman can go for instruction, upon an equality with man; and in 

 those approximating this rank, where she finds admission, it is also 

 to find the atmosphere and hindrance of his supercilious toleration. 



In the language of the law, she finds herself ranking first in the 

 list of natural and convicted incapables — "women, children, crimi- 

 nals, idiots and slaves." Moses placed her in the category of sub- 

 stance — property — and there she remains. Not long since I saw in 

 an American newspaper an advertisement of the escape of a wife 

 who had been left as security for the payment of money, with no- 

 tice of penalties for harboring her. The property and the husband 

 are one, and not the husband and wife; for does not their relation 

 terminate upon the death of either, while the husband and his 

 horse go on together beyond the solemn event ? 



In regard to the ownership of children, not the slave-mother 

 alone, but Caesar's wife may miss the infant from her side and 

 Caesar make no answer. Moses inaugurated this also, and time has 

 meddled bat little with the policy. 



In literature it is the same, and yet worse of the kind. The 

 voice of institutions and of law can be somewhat escaped, invading 

 the home buc occasionally. But literature, which is a woman's re- 



