interest in political
questions, and have more frequently spoken and written on such themes,
than on those merely religious. This may be attributed, in a measure,
to the fact that the tendency of woman's mind, at this stage of her
development, is toward practical, rather than toward speculative
science.

Questions of political economy lie within the realm of positive
knowledge; those of theology belong to the world of mysteries and
abstractions, which those minds, only, that imagine they have
compassed the known, are ambitious to enter and explore. And yet, the
quickening power of the Protestant Reformation roused woman, as well
as man, to new and higher thought. The bold declarations of Luther,
placing individual judgment above church authority, the faith of the
Quaker that the inner light was a better guide than arbitrary law, the
religious idealism of the Transcendentalists, and their teachings that
souls had no sex, had each a marked influence in developing woman's
self-assertion. Such ideas making all divine revelations as veritable
and momentous to one soul, as another, tended directly to equalize the
members of the human family, and place men and women on the same plane
of moral responsibility.

The revelations of science, too, analyzing and portraying the wonders
and beauties of this material world, crowned with new dignity, man and
woman,--Nature's last and proudest work. Combe and Spurzheim, proving
by their Phrenological discoveries that the feelings, sentiments, and
affections of the soul mould and shape the skull, gave new importance
to woman's thought as mother of the race. Thus each new idea in
religion, politics, science, and philosophy, tending to individualism,
rather than authority, came into the world freighted with new hopes of
liberty for woman.

And when in the progress of civilization the time had fully come for
the recognition of the feminine element in humanity, women, in every
civilized country unknown to each other, began simultaneously to
demand a broader sphere of action. Thus the first public demand for
political equality by a body of women in convention assembled, was a
link in the chain of woman's development, binding the future with the
past, as complete and necessary in itself, as the events of any other
period of her history. The ridicule of facts does not change their
character. Many who study the past with interest, and see the
importance of seeming trifles in helping forward gr