your physical organs to have room for healthy life, that your minds may expand. Work all you can to stop these egotistical dolts from legislating for us without our aid! They cannot do it justly, or with any good to the world.
If Solomons and Davids read what I have written, they will cry with true Pharisaical screech—a tone too familiar to our ears—"Shameful, that woman should meddle in such unwomanly matters! Down with her! Respectability, tread upon her! Avoid her! She is dangerous, &c.!" And so she is, to all that is exoterically good—but so false and foul within.
It is time to throw aside artificial modesty, all of you! I tell you, women, it is woman's duty to try to save, help and raise woman—it matters not how fallen. You know too well such wrongs exist. To feign ignorance and practise indolence of thought is not virtue. If any of you are really ignorant of the deplorable sink into which so many thousands of our sex have been plunged, and from which they now find it impossible to rise, seek the truth for yourselves. It is right you should know it; and as you value the purity and welfare of your daughters, and your spirit's happiness when it shall have left its present abode, do your best to redeem and comfort those poor creatures. Not with vicious dogmas, or wearying, witless traditions of our ape-like ancestors, but with woman's pitying, helping love for the helpless and defenceless. Remember they are women, with woman's feelings—having woman's nature to suffer and endure heroically. Alas, so crushed!—But only crushed. They could rise from all their sad mistakes and wretchedness if you would but hold a hand to them. And you, especially, who possess wealth and influence with, happily for yourselves, time to effect such good work. You are the women
