against her! The oppressed Italian peasant, the Russian serf, the
Spanish or American black, all, if they are only of the male sex, may
make their wrongs public, may even resist oppression to the death, and
be applauded for so doing. But let a woman speak so that she can be
heard, no matter how great the outrages from which she has suffered, let
her couch her timid complaint in ever such delicate language, and what a
storm of invective is hurled at her! The very act of complaining is
declared--by the advocates of her inferiority--to be in itself unwifely,
_indecent_. "A woman's voice has no business to be heard outside of her
own house; nor _there_, if her lord decrees otherwise," say they. It is
asserted that she has been induced to give publicity to her
sorrows--indeed, has _occasioned them_--by peevishness or imprudence, or
by something worse; and thus, by an, unfair, sometimes an altogether
_false_, issue being raised, the unhappy victim not merely of
oppression, but of downright brutality, is shut off from justly merited
sympathy. And women, too, who are more fortunately situated, in
possessing somewhat kinder husbands, or in being possessed by them,
shaping their views according to those entertained by the sterner sex,
unite with them in the condemnation of a sorrow-stricken sister; and,
instead of making her burden lighter, contribute to increasing its
weight. Such women having never felt the iron pierce their own souls,
can not realize the woes of those in whose bosoms the barb is rankling
at every pulsation, and they weakly fancy that the sorrows of those
suffering ones are but the inventions of an ill-ordered mind, or, at
most, that the picture has been overdrawn.

Unkind men are not the only class, however, who assert the inferiority
of the gentler sex. If they were, they might be disposed of in a very
summary manner. There is another class not less dangerous, not less
tyrannical or less arrogant, though somewhat more plausible. These