Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

[20] to her by a penny subscription had she not refused it. That of Clara Barton, or Dorothea Dix, or Mary Livermore, or Jean Lander, or Mother Bickerdyke, in our own civil war. That of many a worker in the Associated Charities of our large cities, or of those special organizations which were almost always carried on, thirty years ago, under the official leadership and treasurership of men, but which have been steadily falling, more and more, during that period, into the hands of women. That of many a woman of society, so called, who recognizes in “society” itself a sphere for conscientious duty — so that the tone of a whole town or city may sometimes be said to be kept up or let down according as the leading “society woman” is a person of character or a doll. That of many a woman in some log-cabin on the frontier, whose society consists in a dozen children of her own and perhaps two or three more taken in from charity; the woman who, nameless and noteless, maintains that average quality among our American people which can always be relied upon to send from obscurity a Lincoln or a Grant in time of imminent need. Beyond all these, perhaps, in total influence ranks the great army of women teachers, spreading their unseen and daily labors through every school district from Cape Cod to the Golden Gate; smoothing the waste places, equalizing all our civilization, doing the most for the