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 ...

CONCERNING HUSBANDS AND WIVES. 7

671

"Youthful reader, passing by,
Wbat you are now so once was 1;
As I arn now So you must be;
Therefore prepare to follow me."1
The wife's addition suggested a little doubt as to her husband's destination:
"To follow you I'm not content,
Until I know which way you went."
She certainly had the last word in the controversy, which
is said to be very dear to the heart of women.
To-day we do not live under the laws of feudalism, nor
those of the Orient. And in our country, in this latter half
of the nineteenth century, the notoriously bad husband receives as severe condemnation from men as from women.
The old common law declared that the husband and wife
were one, and that one the husband, but this legal fiction
has given place to a nobler estimate of women. The tendency of legislation is to lift the wife to the plane of equality with the husband, so that they shall stand in law as two
legal halves of one whole, neither being superior nor
inferior, but each the complement of the other. And this
is the outcome of a better comprehension of woman's
nature.
Woman has attributes of her own, as woman - as man
has of his own, as man. If man is force, woman is attraction. If man is the head, woman is the heart. If man is
logic, woman is intuition. If man is ambition, woman is
aspiration. If man is wisdom, woman is love. If man is
scientific, woman is artistic. If "cman is inductive, seeing
facts, woman is deductive, seeing truth." Only through