"If I have read history correctly the best of women have been most virtuously bold and have been seen as public teachers. All public reforms are moral proceedings. All useful public teachings are moral proceedings, and in all such proceedings women, while their manners are mild and becoming, can never be wrong. The propriety of the thing will rest upon the way of doing it. The great fault I find in woman is that inanity in character which places them below the line of equality with men. Alive to female influence in the propagation and maintenance of opinion, I find my reason in paying them every proper compliment and attention, and I hold in contempt that contracted mind that would so narrow their sphere of usefulness as to represent them as criminals in publicity, or make it a crime to appear in public with them. This state of things has partly arisen from the circumstance that past politics have consisted of an advocacy of men rather than of principles, that there has not been in reality any code of morals existing, and that religion hitherto has been a prevailing and epidemic disease among the human race. It is impossible to describe what the high state of man and woman will be without religion, with a good code of morals, with good laws, with good and cheap government; and when party contentions are swallowed up in the advocacy of good principles. Female efforts can never be more usefully applied than toward the improvement of the human race. And nothing can be effectually done in the way of moral and physical improvement without the assistance of women.* I feel the necessity of a constant appeal on this point, and am not for treating women as the mere breeding machines for the human race, and men as the directing lords of the aggregate machinery. There is no kind of equality more deniably advantageous for the welfare of the human race than the equality of the sexes. The present (1828) general character of woman is that of a gaudily dressed doll, a toy made up as a plaything rather than as a companion for man. In the aggregate there exists no such a quality as female mind. There are men who think this is the most fit state for the female race to be kept. I think differently, knowing that woman is the mother, the nurse, the general instructress of the man, knowing that the mind of the man is in a great measure formed by that of the woman. I would have the woman most perfect as an essential preliminary to the greater perfection of man. I know no proper regulation with relation to the principle of knowledge, but that of the most unlimited acquirement that is possible to the acquisition of either sex. To say that this and the other point of knowledge is improper for the attention of woman, is to assume a tyrannical judgment and to put her below the pale of human equality. For a woman to be content under that pale of equality is to exhibit mental degradation."