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 ...

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUR DAUGHTERS? 617
husband's creature, servant, slave." To Diderot, the French
philosopher, even in the eighteenth century, she was only a
"courtesan"; to Montesquieu, an "attractive child"; to
Rousseau, "an object of pleasure to man." To Michelet,
nearly a century later, she was a "natural invalid." Mme.
de Stael wrote truly, " that, of all the faculties with which
Nature has gifted woman, she had been able to exercise
fully but one,- the faculty of suffering."
The contemptuous opinion entertained of woman in the
past has found expression, not alone in literature, but also
in unjust laws and customs. " In marriage she has been a
serf; as a mother she has been robbed of her children; in
public instruction she has been ignored; in labor she has
been a menial, and then inadequately compensated; civilly
she has been a minor, and politically she has had no existence. She has been the equal of man only when punishment and the payment of taxes were in question."
Born and bred for generations under such conditions of
hindrance, it has not been possible for women to rise much
above the arbitrary standards of inferiority persistently set
before them. Here and there through the ages, some
woman, endowed with phenomenal force of character, has
towered above the mediocrity of her sex, hinting at the
qualities imprisoned in the feminine nature. It is not
strange that these instances have been rare; it is strange,
indeed, that women have held their own during these ages
of degradation. And as, by a general law of heredity, "the
inheritance of traits of character is persistent in proportion
to the length of time they have been inherited," it is easy to
account for the conservatism of women to-day, and for the
indifference, not to say hostility, with which many regard
the movements for their advancement.
For humanity has moved forward to an era where