the larger world always tend to conservatism. Noah Webster, in "A
Letter to Young Ladies," published in Boston, in 1790, declared that
they "must be content to be women; to be mild, social and sentimental."
Three years later the "Letters to a Young Lady," by the Reverend John
Bennett, were republished in Philadelphia, after going through several
London editions. He placed the qualities to be cultivated in this order:
"A genteel person, a simple nature, sensibility, cheerfulness, delicacy,
softness, affability, good manners, regular habits, skill in fancy work,
and a fund of hidden genteel learning." Through the first half of the
nineteenth century these ideals struggled along parallel with the new
ideas that were everywhere springing up from the colonial forest
experiences of the last two generations.

As conservers of morals and as leaders in higher ideals of life, the
advanced women of America came early face to face with two outgrown
abuses. One of these was human slavery and the other was intemperance.
In attacking these abuses, women had to break with all the traditions
that defined their position.

The wealthy and intelligent Englishwoman, Frances Wright, who came to
this country in 1818 to attack slavery, found herself doubly opposed
because she was a woman speaking in public. Had not St. Paul declared:
"It is a shame for women to speak in the church"? Lucretia Mott, born in
the Society of Friends in Nantucket, had escaped the full force of this
injunction, but even she found, when she attacked slavery in public,
that she had invaded a world sacred to men, and she was sternly warned
back. Miss Susan B. Anthony also began her public life as a teacher and
a temperance reformer. It was only when she found herself helpless, in
presence of the prejudices against her sex, that she turned her
attention to freeing women from all purely sex limitation in public