The call of woman, in this age, then, is not to be a brawling politician, clamoring for her share in the authorities and honors of the world, launching jokes, sarcasms, and sneers to the right and the left. Clearly, her genuine work, beyond the family circle, is to set an example of modest devotion to personal improvement and the social weal. Sir Philip Sidney describes a horseman who "stirred the bridle so gently, that it did rather distil virtue than use violence." That is, in some sense, a type of the proper power of woman. It is her heavenly mission to influence by yielding, rule by obeying, conquer by surrender, and put the crowning grace of joy and glory on her sex by ministering to the hurts and wants of humanity. Kindled by her example, and compensated by her smile, man will aspire to complete his highest destiny. Her destiny will be fulfilled with his, and in it; his in hers, and with it. They cannot be really separated; since woman as the inspirer and rewarder of man, in the most intense action at the top of society, moulds him by her ideal of him reflected in his imagination. Womanhood is by no means to be personified in the exclusive aspect of a nurse; but as artist, teacher, law-giver, queen, as well. The just personification of womanhood must include the total aspects and offices of humanity. She has as good a claim as man to them all. But let no hasty advocate insist on adding to the totality of true and permanent features in that personification, any of those vicious, accidental, and temporary features incident to the imperfect stages through which humanity has been passing, and is still passing, in its progressive evolution.
There is one respect, not often thought of, in which the various ethnic pantheons, from those of the rawest barbarism to those of the most intellectual civilization, possess deep interest and instructiveness. Their leading personages, gods and goddesses, reveal to us the chief types of human character from which they were created. The heavens and hells of mythology are the higher and lower reflections, or upward and downward echoes, of the earth; and the supernatural beings who people them are idealizations of men and women, more or less richly draped with attributes suggested by the phenomena of the universe. The groups of feminine figures furnished by mythology, therefore, afford a most striking exhibition of the typical groups of women which must have been known in the mythological ages of the world. Conceived in this way, with what thoughtfullness we should contemplate the Graces, the Muses, the Furies, the Fates, Nemesis, Vesta, Fortuna, Diana, Eris, Ceres, the majestic port of Juno, the frosty splendor of Minerva, the melting charm of Venus, the snaky horror of Medusa, Egvptian Isis, throned among the stars, and Scandinavian Hela, crouching in her grisly house!