Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

[236] Alumnae promises a vast deal further in the same direction. The whole course of later American history has been perceptibly affected by the fact that Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote “Uncle Tom's cabin ;” the whole relation between the white race on this continent and the aborigines is being influenced by the fact that Helen Jackson wrote “A century of Dishonor” and “Ramona.” We cannot, if we would, keep woman's hand off the helm, since even the Greek orator Demosthenes confessed that measures which the statesman had meditated for a year might be overturned in a day by a woman. But it is for us to decide whether this power shall be exercised by an enlightened mind or an unenlightened one-by Madame Roland or Theroigne de Mericourt.

Finally, let us meet the objection on its most familiar ground, and assume that all the main work of the world is to be done by men. Who are to bear or rear those men? Women. In every land that missionaries visit it is found, first or last, to be quite useless to educate only the men. Take men of any race at the time when they pass out of the care of women, and you take them too late. Their characters are already formed, and have been formed mainly by the other sex. Hence everywhere we see missionaries establishing schools for women in order to teach men. The South Sea Islanders have a proverb--