What, then, is the will of God, so indicated? Regarded as the two halves of humanity, men and women are alike and equal. Their unlikeness, when regarded as male and female, cannot destroy this primary and fundamental equality, or vitiate any of the rights it involves. Consequently, whatever belongs to humanity proper, belongs equally to men and to women. Woman has an equal claim with man to every thing permanently connected with the fulfilment of the human destiny; that is, the full and harmonious exercise of the faculties of human nature. The division into male and female, affecting not their equality of rights, merely gives special fitnesses and duties to each. Unquestionably, the higher nervous development and maternal offices of woman relatively fit her for tenderness and domesticity: the coarser muscular development and adventurousness of man relatively fit him for hardihood and publicity. But this can furnish no ground for subjecting one, and enthroning the other. It is a reason for their equal co-operation in assimilating each other's best qualities for their mutual and common perfection. Every thing that is good should be granted to both: whatever is evil should not be sought by either.
The true social desideratum at last is, not that women, equally with men, assume the exercise of authority; but that men, equally with women, forego the exercise of authority. The genuine perfection of humanity, instead of being the enforced obedience of one half to the other half, is the spontaneous obedience of both halves to the law of God. The incomplete statement of Paul, "I suffer not a woman to usurp authority," is supplemented by the far deeper word of Christ, "Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you: whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant." This is the ideal of the future--that man shall no more have authority to command than woman, everybody doing right voluntarily, under the intrinsic sway of morality. Politics is the reign of force by legislative sanctions: morality is the reign of affection by social sanctions. The latter is pre-eminently the sphere of woman. Is it her sole sphere, or is she also called to enter the other sphere?