10
THE BATTALION.
and endurance, with the moral power to dare and do, with
great strength of purpose, and with sympathies so boundless
as to embrace every form and degree of human suffering.
With these moral qualities southern women are as richly en
dowed as their sisters in other parts of the world.
As a physical force woman has always ranked below man,
and has no ambition to outrank him. Nevertheless,in all the
endowments which make up strength of character and moral
force women is the peer of man, and if true to herself and
God, she holds in her heart a reserved force which neither
death nor danger can daunt.
In times when heroism came of physical powers, man was
a hero and woman a slave. And, true to her nature, she
made a virtue of necessity, accepted the situation, and en
dorsed her own sorrows and her own degradation. But as
this is an age in which educational and moral forces outrank
the physical, as we are nearing a reign of thought and virtue,
woman is taking her rightful place by the side of man, where
she was placed by the creator when from His plastic hand she
came in her highest state of purity and delicacy. Woman
lost her empire of equality when men began to prey upon
each other, when “might was right” and brute force bravery.
But as the kingdom of mind is established the reasons of
her subjection disappear, and as new avenues open to a man
and his sphere widens, and the fact that she moves in a wi
der sphere no more unsexes her than the widening sphere of
man unsexes nim. Both must be subject to the respective
laws of their sex, and woman is no more degraded and hu
miliated by being subject to the laws of her womanhood than
man is degraded by being subject to the laws of his manhood.
In the vast world of thought, and in the vast world of moral
force, the physical inability is not disparaging. So in the
new era now ushering in, woman is being restored to her
rightful place as the equal of man.
It is granted that in all the qualities of head and heart that
make woman the peer of man the women of the south are up
to the highest standard. What reasons, then, remain why