from
Cape Horn to California, would have failed in the effort, for all her
heroism, if she had not, unlike most of her sex, been taught to use her
Bowditch. Florence Nightingale, when she heard of the distresses in the
Crimea, did not, as most people imagine, rise up and say, "I am a woman,
ignorant, but intuitive, with very little sense or information, but
exceedingly sublime aspirations; my strength lies in my weakness; I can
do all things without knowing anything about them." Not at all.
During ten years she had been in hard training for precisely such
services,--had visited all the hospitals in London, Edinburgh, Dublin,
Paris, Lyons, Rome, Brussels, and Berlin.--had studied under the Sisters
of Charity, and been twice a nurse in the Protestant Institution at
Kaiserswerth. Therefore she did not merely carry to the Crimea a
woman's heart, as her stock in trade, but she knew the alphabet of
her profession better than the men around her. Of course, genius and
enthusiasm are, for both sexes, elements unforeseen and incalculable;
but, as a general rule, great achievements imply great preparations and
favorable conditions.

To disregard this truth is unreasonable in the abstract and cruel in its
consequences. If an extraordinary male gymnast can clear a height of ten
feet with the aid of a spring-board, it would be considered slightly
absurd to ask a woman to leap eleven feet without one; yet this is
precisely what society and the critics have always done. Training and
wages and social approbation are very elastic spring-boards, and the
whole course of history has seen these offered bounteously to one sex
and as sedulously withheld from the other. Let woman consent to be a
doll, and there was no finery so gorgeous, no baby-house so costly, but
she might aspire to share its lavish delights;--let her ask simply for
an equal chance to learn, to labor, and to live, and it was as if that
same doll should open its lips, and propound Euclid's forty-seventh
proposition. While we have all deplored the helpless position of
indigent women, and lamented that they had no alternative beyond the
needle, the wash-tub, the school-room, and the street, we have yet
resisted their admission into every new occupation, denied them
training, and cut their compensation down. Like Charles Lamb, who atoned
for coming late to the office in the morning by going away early in the
afternoon, we have, first, half educated women, and then, to restore
t