Laura E. Richards, Maud Howe, Florence Howe Hall, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910, in two volumes, with portraits and other illustrations: volume 1

“ [360] showing me a world of thought and character. The new domain was that of true womanhood, woman no longer in her ancillary relation to man, but in direct relation to the divine plan and purpose, as a free agent fully sharing with man every human right and every human responsibility. This discovery was like the addition of a new continent to the map of the world. It did not come all at once. In my philosophizing I at length reached the conclusion that woman must be the moral and spiritual equivalent of man. How otherwise could she be entrusted with the awful and inevitable responsibilities of maternity? The Civil War came to an end, leaving the slave not only emancipated but endowed with the full dignity of citizenship. The women of the North had greatly helped to open the door which admitted him to freedom and its safeguard, the ballot. Was the door to be shut in their face?”

When this new world of thought, this new continent of sympathy was opened to her, she was nearly fifty years old. “Oh! Had I earlier known,” she exclaims, “the power, the nobility, the intelligence which lie within the range of true womanhood, I had surely lived more wisely and to better purpose.”

Speaking of this new interest in her life, her old friend Tom Appleton (who had not the least sympathy with it) once said, “Your mother's great importance to this cause is that she forms a bridge between the world of society and the world of reform.”

She soon found that she was not alone in her questioning; similar thoughts to hers were germinating