The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

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THE STORY OF MY LIFE.

its current may carry them, we can expect nothing better of
them as they hasten on to the final goal. It is not easy to
teach the adult of twenty-one the simple art of reading;
and much more hopeless is the attempt to galvanize into life
the atrophied mental and moral natures of mature men
or women. I determined, if possible, to reach our young
women, and entitled my first lecture, " What shall we do with
our daughters?" I advocated the thorough physical training
of our young girls; equal education - not necessarily the
same - with young men in colleges and universities; that
every girl should be equipped for the future of life with a
trade, a profession, or a remunerative vocation, and that the
doors of trades, paying employments, and suitable business
should be open to them; that they should receive the most
careful moral culture, and the wisest domestic training, as
they are to be the wives and mothers of the future; and
that they should be given an equal legal status with young'
men by the American government.
Feeling that I had " received a call" to this work, to
quote the phrase of the clerical profession, I was constrained to speak more freely and fully than had been customary. This brought upon me some small unfavorable
criticism in the beginning of my platform career But I
was so confident that I was right, that I received it without
reply, giving it no attention whatever, and continued to say
what I believed ought to be said. I have delivered this lecture over eight hundred times in twenty-five years, and in
every part of the country from Maine to Santa Barbara. It
has been published in book form, and even now is called for,
on an average, a dozen times a year, and is yearly revised,
and re-shaped to adapt it to the changing conditions and
circumstances of women, in this latter half of the nineteenth
century.