against existing wrong any less incumbent: but they obscure the truth;
they needlessly complicate the duty.

Perplexed and anxious, I have often felt that what I needed most was an
example to set before young girls,--an example not removed by superiority
of station, advantage of education, or unwonted endowment, beyond their
grasp and imitation.

There was Florence Nightingale. But her father had a title: it was fair
to presume that her opportunities were titled also. All the girls I knew
wished they could have gone to the Crimea; while I was morally certain,
that the first amputation would have turned them all faint. There was
Dorothea Dix: she had money and time. It was not strange that she had
great success; for she started, a monomaniac in philanthropy, from the
summit of personal independence. Mrs. John Stuart Mill: had she ever
wanted bread? George Sand: the woman wasn't respectable. In short,
whomsoever I named, who had pursued with undeviating perseverance a worthy
career, my young friends had their objections ready. No one had ever been
so poor, so ill educated, so utterly without power to help herself, as
they; and, provoking as these objections were, I felt that they had force.
My young friends were not great geniuses: they were ordinary women, who
should enter the ordinary walks of life with the ordinary steadfastness
and devotion of men in the same paths; nothing more. What I wanted was an
example,--not too stilted to be useful,--a life flowing out of
circumstances not dissimilar to their own, but marked by a steady will, an
unswerving purpose. As I looked back over my own life, and wished I could
read them its lessons,--and I looked back a good way; for I was very
young, when the miserable destitution of a drunkard's wife, whom I
assisted, showed me how comfortable a thing it was to rest at the mercy of
the English common law,--as I looked back over my long interest in the