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 ...

616 WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUR DAUGHTERS?
The first was an old-time adage, endorsed by Shakspeare, believed in by the world, and quoted in that day very
generally. It is not yet entirely obselete. "Frailty, thy
"name is Woman." Underneath it, and unlike it, was the
other,-"The Earth waits for her Queen." The first
described woman as she has been understood in the past;
as she has masqueraded in history; as she has figured
in literature; as she has, in a certain sense, existed.
The other prophesied of that grander type of woman,
towards which to-day the whole sex is moving,-consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly,because the current sets that way, and there is no escape
from it.
No one who has studied history, even superficially, will
for a moment dispute the statement, that, during the years
of which we have had historic account, there has brooded
very steadily over the female half of.the human family an
air of repression, of limitation, of hindrance, of disability, of
gloom, of servitude. If there have been epochs during
which women have been regarded equal to men, they have
been brief and abnormal: Among the Hindoos, woman
was the slave of man, forbidden to speak the language of
her master, and compelled to use the patois of slaves.
The Hebrews pronounced her an after-thought of the Deity,
and the mother of all evil. The Greek law regarded her as
a child, and held her in life-long tutelage. The Greek philosophers proclaimed her a " monster," "an accidental production." Mediaeval councils declared her unfit for instruction. The early Christian fathers denounced her as a " noxious animal," a " painted temptress," a "necessary evil," a
"desirable calamity," a "domestic peril." From the English Heptarchy to the Reformation, the law proclaimed the
wife to be "in all cases, and under all circumstances, her