Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/242

She thought the speediest solution of the vexed problem of prostitution was profitable work for the rising generation of girls. The best legislation on the social vice was in removing the legal disabilities that cripple all their powers. Woman, in order to be equally independent with man, must have a fair and equal chance. He is in nowise restricted from doing, in every department of human exertion, all he is able to do. If he is bold and ambitious, and desires fame, every avenue is open to him. He may blend science and art, producing a competence for his support, until he chains them to the car of his genius, and, with Fulton and Morse, wins a crown of imperishable gratitude If he desires to tread the path of knowledge up to its glorious temple-summit, he can, as he pleases, take either of the learned professions as instruments of pecuniary independence, while he plumes his wings fur a higher and higher ascent. Not so with woman. Her rights are not recognized as equal; her sphere is circumscribed — not by her ability, but by her sex. If, perchance, her taste leads her to excellence, in the way they give her leave to tread, she is worshiped as almost divine; but if she reaches for laurels they have in view, the wings of her genius are clipped because she is a woman.

Dr. Harriot K. Hunt, of Boston, the first woman who practiced medicine in this country, spoke on the medical education of women.

Sarah Tyndale, a successful merchant in Philadelphia, on the business capacity of woman.

Antoinette L. Brown, a graduate of Oberlin College, and a student in Theology, made a logical argument on woman's position in the Bible, claiming her complete equality with man, the simultaneous creation of the sexes, and their moral responsibilities as individual and imperative.

The debates on the resolutions were spicy, pointed, and logical, and were deeply interesting, continuing with crowded audiences through two entire days. In these debates Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Wendell Phillips, William Henry Channing, Ernestine L. Rose, Frederick Douglass, Martha Mowry, Abby Kelly and Stephen Foster, Elizabeth B. Chase, James N. Buffam, Sojourner Truth, Eliab Capron, and Joseph C. Hathaway, took part. As there was no phonographic reporter present, most of the best speaking, that was extemporaneous, can not be handed down to history.

Among the letters to the Convention, there was one quite novel and interesting from Helene Marie Weber,^[1] a lady of high literary character, who had published numerous tracts on the Rights of Woman. She contended that the physical development of woman was impossible in her present costume, and that her consequent enfeebled condition made her incapable of entering many of the most profitable employments in the world of work. Miss Weber exem-

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1. See Appendix.