titute to its
lust. I cannot forget that it is such Southern gentlemen into whose
hands smug Northern hypocrites of today are seeking to place our women's
eternal destiny,--men who insist upon withholding from my mother and
wife and daughter those signs and appellations of courtesy and respect
which elsewhere he withholds only from bawds and courtesans.

The result of this history of insult and degradation has been both
fearful and glorious. It has birthed the haunting prostitute, the
brawler, and the beast of burden; but it has also given the world an
efficient womanhood, whose strength lies in its freedom and whose
chastity was won in the teeth of temptation and not in prison and
swaddling clothes.

To no modern race does its women mean so much as to the Negro nor come
so near to the fulfilment of its meaning. As one of our women writes:
"Only the black woman can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet,
undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing
or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with
me.'"

They came first, in earlier days, like foam flashing on dark, silent
waters,--bits of stern, dark womanhood here and there tossed almost
carelessly aloft to the world's notice. First and naturally they assumed
the panoply of the ancient African mother of men, strong and black,
whose very nature beat back the wilderness of oppression and contempt.
Such a one was that cousin of my grandmother, whom western Massachusetts
remembers as "Mum Bett." Scarred for life by a blow received in defense
of a sister, she ran away to Great Barrington and was the first slave,
or one of the first, to be declared free under the Bill of Rights of
1780. The son of the judge who freed her, writes:

"Even in her humble station, she had, when occasion required it, an
air of command which conferred a degree of dignity and gave her an
ascendancy over those of her rank, which is very unusual in persons
of any rank or color. Her determined and resolute character, which
enabled her to limit the ravages of Shay's mob, was manifested in
her conduct and deportment during her whole life. She claimed no
distinction, but it was yielded to her from her superior
experience, energy, skill, and sagacity. Having known this woman as
familiarly as I knew either of my parents, I cannot believe in the
moral or physical inferiority of the race to which she belonge