vent her house from
becoming anything and everything except a home.

While studying language, I observed that most of my mistakes in grammar
occurred in the feminine gender, and thinking over the cause of it, it
dawned upon me that, belonging to the masculine sex, I was in the habit
of thinking in that gender, and that my teachers were men, and that my
text-books and grammars had been written by men, and that the masculine
gender predominated so strongly in the exercises, that it was but
natural for me to make the greatest number of mistakes in the gender to
which the least attention had been given. When dealing with the social
and domestic question, the unbiased among us can not but observe a
similar failing. Many a serious mistake has been made by man when
speaking or writing concerning women, because our speakers and writers
and preachers and teachers belonged from the very beginning of
civilization, almost exclusively to the masculine sex, a sex which has
never tired in exalting itself at the expense of the weaker sex, in
emphasizing woman's inferiority to man, in asserting its rights, and in
complaining about its wrongs, and as woman did not write or speak for
herself, we have heard but little of her side of the story, know next
to nothing of her just rights and of her grievous wrongs, seldom dream
that she, too, has rights that must be respected, and suffers wrongs
that must be corrected.

The universities, colleges and all great institutions of learning of
this and other lands refused, until quite recently, to recognize woman
as a human being possessing a mind in need of training, and therefore
excluded her from their privileges, and the order of Odd-Fellows
partook of the same spirit and excluded the better half of the human
race from its lodge-rooms. Man had ever been a selfish, conceited,
cowardly tyrant from the day in which our father Adam disgraced his sex
by taking without question the forbidden fruit; and, after eating it,
crying with selfish, pusillanimous cowardice: "The woman thou gavest to
be with me gave me of the tree and I did eat," and he has always sought
to make and keep woman an inferior, dependent, submissive slave. To
this end he has striven to keep her in ignorance, exclude her from all
the avenues of knowledge, and then, because she did not possess the
knowledge that he had forbidden her, proclaimed throughout the world
that she was mentally inferior to man, and in consequence unfit to