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 ...

618 WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUR DAUGHTERS?
wrong and slavery are being displaced, and reason and justice are being recognized as the rule of life. Science is
extending immeasurably the bounds of knowledge and
power; art is refining life, giving to it beauty and grace;
literature bears in her hands whole ages of comfort and
sympathy, industry, aided by the hundred-handed elements
of nature, is increasing the world's wealth, and invention is
economizing its labor The age looks steadily to the
redressing of wrong, to the righting of every form of error
and injustice; and the tireless and prying philanthropy,
which is almost omniscient, is one of the most hopeful characteristics of the time.
It could not be possible in such an era, but that women
should share in the justice and kindliness with which the
time is fraught. A great wave is lifting them to higher
levels. The leadership of the world is being taken from the
hands of the brutal and low, and the race is making its way
to a higher ideal than once it knew. It is the evolution of
this tendency that is lifting women out of their subject
condition, that is emancipating them from the seclusion of
the past, and adding to the sum total of the world's worth
and wisdom, by giving to them the cultivation human
beings need. The demand for their education,- technical
and industrial, as well as intellectual,- and for their civil
and political rights, is being urged each year by an increasing host, and with more emphatic utterance.
The doors of colleges, professional schools, and universities,
closed against them for ages, are opening to them. They
are invited to pursue the same courses of study as their
brothers, and are graduated with the same diplomas.
Trades, businesses, remunerative vocations, and learned professions seek them; and even the laws, which are the last to
feel the change in public opinion,--usually dragging a