the discouragement. The more obstacles the more glory, if society would
only pay in proportion to the labor; but it does not. Women, being
denied not merely the antecedent training which prepares for great
deeds, but the subsequent praise and compensation which follow them,
have been weakened in both directions. The career of eminent men
ordinarily begins with colleges and the memories of Miltiades, and ends
with fortune and fame; woman begins under discouragement, and ends
beneath the same. Single, she works with half-preparation and half-pay;
married, she puts name and wages into the keeping of her husband,
shrinks into John Smith's "lady" during life, and John Smith's "relict"
on her tombstone; and still the world wonders that her deeds, like her
opportunities, are inferior.

Evidently, then, the advocates of woman's claims--those who hold
that "the virtues of the man and the woman are the same," with
Antisthenes,--or that "the talent of the man and the woman is the same,"
with Socrates in Xenophon's "Banquet"--must be cautious lest they
attempt to prove too much. Of course, if women know as much as men
without schools and colleges, there is no need of admitting them to
these institutions. If they work as well on half-pay, it diminishes the
inducement to give them the other half. The safer position is, to claim
that they have done just enough to show what they might have done under
circumstances less discouraging. Take, for instance, the common remark,
that women have invented nothing. It is a valid answer, that the only
tools habitually needed by woman have been the needle, the spindle, and
the basket, and tradition reports that she herself invented all three.
In the same way it may be shown that the departments in which women have
equalled men have been the departments in which they have had equal
training, equal encouragement, and equal compensation,--as, for
instance, the theatre. Madame Lagrange, the _prima donna_, after years