Woman Has Justified HerselfBy Lady Morgan(English. From “Woman and Her Master,” published in Paris, in a “Collection of Ancient and Modern British Authors,” 1840.)
By Lady Morgan
(English. From “Woman and Her Master,” published in Paris, in a “Collection of Ancient and Modern British Authors,” 1840.)
Notwithstanding her false position, woman has struggled through all disabilities and degradations, has justified the intentions of Nature in her behalf, and demonstrated her claim to share in the moral agency of the world. In all outbursts of mind, in every forward rush of the great march of improvement she has borne a part; permitting herself to be used as an instrument, without hope of reward, and faithfully fulfilling her mission, without expectation of acknowledgment. She has, in various ages, given her secret service to the task-master, without partaking in his triumph, or sharing in his success. Her subtlety has insinuated views which man has shrunk from exposing, and her adroitness found favor for doctrines which he had the genius to conceive, but not the art to divulge. Priestess, prophetess, the oracle of the tripod, the sibyl of the cave, the veiled idol of the temple, the shrouded teacher of the academy, the martyr or missionary of a spiritual truth, the armed champion of a political cause, she has been covertly used for every purpose, by which man, when he has failed to reason his species into truth, has endeavoredto fanaticize it into good; whenever mind has triumphed by indirect means over the hearts of the masses.
In all moral impulsions, woman has aided and been adopted; but, her efficient utility accomplished, the temporary part assigned her for temporary purposes performed, she has ever been hurled back into her natural obscurity, and conventional insignificance.... Alluded to, rather as an incident, rather than a principle in the chronicles of nations, her influence, which cannot be denied, has been turned into a reproach; her genius, which could not be concealed, has been treated as a phenomenon, when not considered as a monstrosity!
But where exist the evidences of these merits unacknowledged, of these penalties unrepealed? They are to be found carelessly scattered through all that is known in the written history of mankind, from the first to the last of its indited pages. They may be detected in the habits of the untamed savage, in the traditions of the semi-civilized barbarian! And in those fragments of the antiquity of our antiquity, scattered through undated epochs,—monuments of some great moral debris, which, like the fossil remains of long-imbedded, and unknown species, serve to found a theory or to establish a fact.
Wherever woman has been, there has she left the track of her humanity, to mark her passage—incidentally impressing the seal of her sensibility and wrongs upon every phase of society, and in every region, “from Indus to the Pole.”