AN EARNEST APPEAL TO WOMEN.

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 3826, 2 April 1881, Page 4

AN EARNEST APPEAL TO WOMEN.

Miss Frances Power Cobbe, one of the most earnest workers in the cause of the higher education of women, has recently published a volume of lectures delivered "by her, which are full of thought. The following eloquent appeal is only one of many passages worthy of quotation from a book that cannot fail to make a strong impression upon all who read it:—"Let me, if I may, without presumption, speak to the young ones among you, as a woman who has borne somewhat of the battle and heat of the day. Awake to recognise your true rank in creation, your noble destination. Laugh at the doctrjne that you are a sortof moon,with no raison d'etre but to go circling round a very earthly planet: or a kind of parasite—ivy, or honeysuckle in the forest. You may be—you probably a?'e—less strong, less clever, less rich, and less well educated thantnost of the men about you. But moral rank; does not depend on these things. You are a rational, free agent, a child of God, destined to grow nearer to Him and more like Him through the ages of your immortality. As such you are the equal (ebenwurdig, as people say of royal alliances) with the loftiest of created beings, not one of whom can have a higher destiny. Cast them aside, for shame's sake, the faults and follies which have accumulated around our womanhood through the long centuries of the minority of our sex. Little girls may fitly play with toys, and dress dolls, and chatter in the nursery for hours over some weighty concern of the baby house; but it is a pitiful sight to see. grown women making all life a child's play. Eise, I pray you, to the true dignity of a human being to whom petty feelings and small vanities and servile wheedling tricks must be repugnant and abominable. Eespect yourself too much to dress like a doll or a peacock, or to betray that you must have spent hours in devising the trimming of a gown. And respect other women also, and never join men in sneering at the deplorable weaknesses which have followed from their wretched circumstances and education. When I see in the street a poor, thread-bare, broken-spirited woman, wearing that- peculiar look of .patient, hopeless ,endurance which belongs to women only, to trodden down wives or starving widows, my heart aches for the hapless creature,

"But when I see another woman, healthy and prosperous as the world goes abasing herself to the mean artifices and cajolings, the wheedlings and subterfuges which some wives use to manage their husbands, when I hear her tell lies to her lord and master to avert his wrath or to hide from him her most innocent actions, then my heart burns with indignation, not so much against the woman herself, as against the dead weight of the lifelong oppression which has. warped her into this pitiful, superannuated school girl. I cannot laugh at these things. I cannot heap scorn on such women. I scorn too much the whole theory of woman's life which has made them what they are."— Saturday Advertiser.