women and hen-pecked husbands. The
principle will gain more strength from the character of the arguments
of its opponents than from any number of Bloomer conventions. The
modern idea of the fashionable belle, floating like a bird of paradise
through the soiree; the impersonation of motion and grace in the
ball-room, indulging alternately in syncope and rapture over the
marvelous adventures and despair of the hero of a mushroom romance,
her rapid transition from one excitement to another, to fill up the
dreary vacuum of life, provoking as it does the secret derision of
sensible men; all this comes from that legislation, from that public
opinion, which drives women away from real life; from the discussion
of questions in which her happiness and destiny are involved. A
senseless, though a false fondness, denies her a participation in all
questions of the actual world around her. The novel writers therefore
create a fictitious world, filled with fantastic and hollow
characters, for her to range in. Awhile she believes she is an angel,
till some unfortunate husband finds her to be a moth on his fortune,
and a baleful shadow stretching across his pathway, without curiosity
or interests in all those practical realities, which the world,
outside of her charmed existence, is attending to. These are the
abortions of a false public opinion. For ages they have been regarded
as the natural results of female organism. Hence, woman has become
famed as a gossip, because she would degrade herself by discussing
Judge A.'s qualifications for Judge of Probate, though Judge A. may
yet appoint a guardian for her children. In the sewing society, she
sews scandal, or reads brocades, silks, and crinolines, because it
would be extremely coarse and vulgar in her to read the statutes of
Wisconsin, where her rights of person and property, marriage and
divorce, are regulated. In those statutes she would find that though
$350,000 are appropriated to build a University, she is as effectually
excluded from that institution as though it was a convent of monks. So
there is some inconvenience at last in being regarded as a _bona-fide_
angel, for angels have no use for Universities. Some indignant
school-ma'am begins to suspect the hollow compliments of moon-struck
admirers, and demands a direct voice in the laws which provide for the
mutual improvement of her sex. But the grave doctor of law puts on his
spectacles, and tells her she is fully and exactly re