ough it has brought numerous
advantages to her sons, it has produced but the simplest changes in
_her_ social and domestic condition. She is still the crude, rude,
ignorant mother. Remote from cities, the dweller still in the old
plantation hut, neighboring to the sulky, disaffected master-class,
who still think her freedom was a personal robbery of themselves,
none of the 'fair humanities' have visited her humble home. The
light of knowledge has not fallen upon her eyes. The fine
domesticities which give the charm to family life, and which, by
the refinement and delicacy of womanhood, preserve the civilization
of nations, have not come to _her_. She has still the rude, coarse
labor of men. With her rude husband, she still shares the hard
service of a field-hand. Her house, which shelters, perhaps, some
six or eight children, embraces but two rooms. Her furniture is of
the rudest kind. The clothing of the household is scant and of the
coarsest material; has oft-times the garniture of rags, and for
herself and offspring is marked, not seldom, by the absense {106}
of both hats and shoes. She has rarely been taught to sew, and the
field-labor of slavery times has kept her ignorant of the habitudes
of neatness and the requirements of order. Indeed, coarse food,
coarse clothes, coarse living, coarse manners, coarse companions,
coarse surroundings, coarse neighbors, both white and black, yea,
everything coarse, down to the coarse, ignorant, senseless
religion, which excites her sensibilities and starts her passions,
go to make up the life of the masses of black women in the hamlets
and villages of the South. This is the state of black womanhood.

"And now look at the _vastness_ of this degradation. If I had been
speaking of the population of a city, or town, or even a village,
the tale would be a sad and melancholy one. But I have brought
before you the condition of _millions of women_. And when you think
that the masses of these women live in the rural districts; that
they grow up in rudeness and ignorance; that their former masters
are using few means to break up their hereditary degradation, you
can easily take in the pitiful condition of this population and
forecast the inevitable future to multitudes of females, unless a
mighty special effort is made for the improvement of the black
womanhood of the South.

"I am anxious for a permanent and uplif