from writing her a letter of approval and encouragement. In return I received the following:
Philadelphia, August 12, 1848.
My whole life is devoted unreservedly to the service of my sex. The study and practice of medicine is in my thought but one means to a great end, for which my very soul yearns with intensest passionate emotion, of which I have dreamed day and night, from my earliest childhood, for which I would offer up my life with triumphant thanksgiving, if martyrdom could secure that glorious end: the true ennoblement of woman, the full harmonious development of her unknown nature, and the consequent redemption of the whole human race. "Earth waits for her queen." Every noble movement of the age, every prophecy of future glory, every throb of that great heart which is laboring throughout Christendom, call on woman with a voice of thunder, with the authority of a God, to listen to the mighty summons to awake from her guilty sleep, and rouse to glorious action to play her part in the great drama of the ages, and finish the work that man has begun.
Most fully do I respond to all the noble aspirations that fill your letter. Women are feeble, narrow, frivolous at present: ignorant of their own capacities, and undeveloped in thought and feeling; and while they remain so, the great work of human regeneration must remain incomplete; humanity will continue to suffer, and cry in vain for deliverance, for woman has her work to do, and no one can accomplish it for her. She is bound to rise, to try her strength, to break her bonds; not with noisy outcry, not with fighting or complaint; but with quiet strength, with gentle dignity, firmly, irresistibly, with a cool determination that never wavers, with a clear insight into her own capacities, let her do her duty, pursue her highest conviction of right, and firmly grasp whatever she is able to carry.
Much is said of the oppression woman suffers; man is reproached with being unjust, tyrannical, jealous. I do not so read human life. The exclusion and constraint woman suffers, is not the result of purposed injury or premeditated insult. It has arisen naturally, without violence, simply because woman has desired nothing more, has not felt the soul too large for the body. But when woman, with matured strength, with steady purpose, presents her lofty claim, all barriers will give way, and man will welcome, with a thrill of joy, the new birth of his sister spirit, the advent of his partner, his co-worker, in the great universe of being.
