The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, August, 1864, page 100 by Various Authors
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nd regulates the spheres, his condition is determined by hers; that wherever she has been a slave, he has been a tyrant, and that all oppression and injustice practised upon her has been sure in the end to rebound upon himself. If there is one thing more than another which, at any given period and in any particular nation, has pointed to the true state of society along the scale of advancement, it has been the degree of woman's elevation; the undercurrents of history have all set steadily and significantly in the direction of the truth, which the world has been slow to accept and make use of, indeed, that society nears perfection only in the proportion in which woman has been honored and enfranchised; in which she has had opportunity and encouragement to work and act in her own proper and lawful sphere.
Those who have gone the farthest in claiming special rights for woman have generally based their demands upon a virtual abandonment of the idea of sex, except in a physical sense. Here is a primary, fundamental error. There is unquestionably a sex of mind, of soul, and he who ignores or denies this is, it seems to me, studying his subject without the key which alone will unlock it.
Another error which many of the advocates of woman's rights have fallen into, is that of assuming that those conditions are weaknesses, disabilities, which God and nature have attested to be her crowning glory and power. Or, rather, this second error results naturally and most logically from the still more vital one of assuming that her sphere is intended to be no way different from man's.
And still another, equally false and mischievous, would place her in antagonism to man upon the question of comparative excellence and of precedence in the scale of being.
A brief analysis of some of the points of difference between the mind masculine and the mind feminine will show the futility of confounding the two, or of drawing any useless or invidious comparisons. They are as distinct in their no