style of figure is not quite so attractive as I have seen, and I
know that wherever there is an extraordinary tax upon muscle there
is an extraordinary repression of mind and blunting of the
sensibilities, but it must be remembered that we are talking about
rights, now. I claim and maintain, (I may as well come out with
the whole of it,) that a woman has a right to do any thing she
chooses to do, with perhaps the unimportant exception of becoming
the father of a family.

The truth is that women have never had a fair chance. They can do
any thing they are trained to do. The proper physical culture of
woman, carried on through a competent number of generations, would
develop her beyond all our present conceptions. She would be
likely to arrive at a high condition of muscle and a low condition
of mind, very unlike our present idea of the noblest type of
womanhood; but very possibly our ideals of womanhood are
conventional, or traditional. She has hands, and has a right to
use them; a tongue, and the right to wag it in her own way;
powers corresponding to those of man in all important respects,
and the right to develop and employ them according to her taste
and choice. I deny, to man, the privilege of defining the rights
and duties of woman. A woman is mistress of her own actions and
judge of her own powers and aptitudes; and if any woman thinks
that she can do a man's work better than what society considers
her own, then she has an undeniable right to do it, if she can get
it to do, and is willing to accept the work with the conditions
that attend it.

I am a firm believer in "woman's rights"--especially her right to
do as she pleases. It is possible that, before the law, she is not