It is this consciousness which renders almost of solemn import the efforts
of the individual female after physical or mental self-culture and
expansion; this, which fills with a lofty enthusiasm the heart of the young
girl, who, it may be, in some solitary farm-house, in some distant wild of
Africa or America, deep into the night bends over her books with the
passion and fervour with which an early Christian may have bent over the
pages of his Scriptures; feeling that, it may be, she fits herself by each
increase of knowledge for she knows not what duties towards the world, in
the years to come. It is this consciousness of great impersonal ends, to
be brought, even if slowly and imperceptibly, a little nearer by her
action, which gives to many a woman strength for renunciation, when she
puts from her the lower type of sexual relationship, even if bound up with
all the external honour a legal bond can confer, if it offers her only
enervation and parasitism; and which enables her often to accept poverty,
toil, and sexual isolation (an isolation even more terrible to the woman
than to any male), and the renunciation of motherhood, that crowning
beatitude of the woman's existence, which, and which alone, fully
compensates her for the organic sufferings of womanhood--in the conviction
that, by so doing, she makes more possible a fuller and higher attainment
of motherhood and wifehood to the women who will follow her. It is this
consciousness which makes of solemn importance the knock of the humblest
woman at the closed door which shuts off a new field of labour, physical or
mental: is she convinced that, not for herself, but in the service of the
whole race, she knocks.

It is this abiding consciousness of an end to be attained, reaching beyond
her personal life and individual interests, which constitutes the religious
element of the Woman's Movement of our day, and binds with the common bond
of an impersonal enthusiasm into one solid body the women of whatsoever
race, class, and nation who are struggling after the readjustment of woman