Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

[58] that, in case of hardship, she knew twenty different ways of making a living. Then, apart from poverty, think of other risks of life! The most petted girl may marry some frontier army officer, and find herself some day with her husband shot down at her side by Indian arrows, she being left alone with her children among savages far worse than the Arabs whom Mrs. Stone dreaded. Who has ever gone by night into the suffocating steerage, or on board the stifling emigrant train, without a thrill of admiration for the obscure and nameless women who pilot their crying children through that prolonged ordeal of misery, while the easier lot of the husband is to sit and smoke with his mates? Look at the lives of these women after they have reached their Western destination, their enormous, unrelieved labors, their unknown and often thankless toils! Again, who can protect the most favored woman against disease? We daily see that the physicians cannot.

It seems to me that if we recognized more distinctly in our training that girls as well as boys need strength of will, we should be more sure of developing that quality, and it would also be more harmonious when it came. Neither a tree nor a character can show much grace if it has to fight its way by inches against cold and storm. It is not necessary to choose between the gnarled oak and the clinging vine; there is something intermediate.