Anna J. Cooper (Anna Julia), 1858-1964. A Voice from the South_

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• Anna Julia Cooper's "A Voice From the South: Electronic Edition" is supported by funding from the Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition.

• Text scanned and images scanned by Robin Roenker.

• Text encoded by Andrew Leiter.

• Electronic edition is part of the UNC-CH digitization project, Documenting the American South.

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• Library of Congress Subject Headings, 21st edition, 1998

• Languages Used: English, French, Italian, Arabic, Latin, German, Greek

• LC Subject Headings:

  • African American women -- Southern States -- History -- 19th century.

  • African American women -- Southern States -- Social conditions -- 19th century.

  • African Americans -- Southern States -- History -- 19th century.

  • African Americans -- Religion -- History -- 19th century.

  • Women -- Southern States -- History -- 19th century.

  • Women -- United States -- History -- 19th century.

  • Southern States -- Race relations -- History -- 19th century.

  • United States -- Race relations -- History -- 19th century.

• Revision History:

  • 2000-06-06, Celine Noel and Wanda Gunther revised TEIHeader and created catalog record for the electronic edition.

  • 2000-03-24, Jill Kuhn, project manager, finished TEI-conformant encoding and final proofing.

  • 2000-02-23, Andrew Leiter finished TEI/SGML encoding

  • 2000-03-06 Robin Roenker finished scanning (OCR) and proofing.

Title Page Verso

• A VOICE FROM THE SOUTH. BY A BLACK WOMAN OF THE SOUTH.

• COPYRIGHT 1892 BY ANNA JULIA COOPER.

• "WITH REGRET I FORGET IF THE SONG BE LIVING YET, YET REMEMBER, VAGUELY NOW, IT WAS HONEST, ANYHOW."

• TO BISHOP BENJAMIN WILLIAM ARNETT, WITH PROFOUND REGARD FOR HIS HEROIC DEVOTION TO GOD AND THE RACE -- both in Church and in State,--and with sincere esteem for his unselfish espousal of the cause of the Black Woman and of every human interest that lacks a Voice and needs a Defender, this, the primary utterance of my heart and pen, IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.

Contents

• PART FIRST. SOPRANO OBLIGATO.

  • WOMANHOOD A VITAL ELEMENT IN THE REGENERATION AND PROGRESS OF A RACE . . . . . 9

  • THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMAN . . . . . 48

  • "WOMAN VS. THE INDIAN" . . . . . 80

  • THE STATUS OF WOMAN IN AMERICA . . . . . 127

• PART SECOND. TUTTI AD LIBITUM.

  • HAS AMERICA A RACE PROBLEM; IF SO, HOW CAN IT BEST BE SOLVED? . . . . . 149

  • THE NEGRO AS PRESENTED IN AMERICAN LITERATURE . . . . . 175

  • WHAT ARE WE WORTH? . . . . . 228

  • THE GAIN FROM A BELIEF . . . . . 286

Our Raison D'Etre

• The South remains Silent in the American Conflict.

• The Negro is a muffled strain in the Silent South.

• The Black Woman is the mute and voiceless note of that muffled chord.

• Attorneys have analyzed and dissected, theorized and synthesized with ignorance of counsel from the black client.

• One important witness, the Black Woman, has not yet been heard from.

• The American people are conscientiously committed to a fair trial and ungarbled evidence.

• It is essential that truth from each standpoint be presented at the bar.

• The voice of one who "lives there" has not been represented.

• Not many can more sensibly realize and more accurately tell the weight and the fret of the "long dull pain" than the open-eyed but hitherto voiceless Black Woman of America.

• The objectivity of the men serves to cloud their vision and relieve the smart and deaden the pain for them.

• Their voice is not always temperate and calm, and at the same time radically corrective and sanatory.

• Caucasian barristers are not to blame if they cannot quite put themselves in the dark man's place, neither should the dark man be expected to reproduce the exact Voice of the Black Woman.

• Her calorimeter may well be studied in the interest of accuracy and fairness in diagnosing a "puzzling" case.

• These broken utterances can help to a clearer vision and a truer pulse-beat in studying our Nation's Problem.

Soprano Obligato

• For they the Royal-hearted Women are Who nobly love the noblest, yet have grace For needy, suffering lives in lowliest place; Carrying a choicer sunlight in their smile, The heavenliest ray that pitieth the vile.

• Though I were happy, throned beside the king, I should be tender to each little thing With hurt warm breast, that had no speech to tell Its inward pangs; and I would sooth it well With tender touch and with a low, soft moan For company. --George Eliot.

Womanhood A Vital Element In The Regeneration And Progress Of A Race

• Read before the convocation of colored clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church at Washington, D. C., 1886.

• Modern civilization has derived its noble and ennobling ideal of woman from Christianity and the Feudal System.

• In Oriental countries woman has been uniformly devoted to a life of ignorance, infamy, and complete stagnation.

• The Chinese shoe of to-day does not more entirely dwarf, cramp, and destroy her physical powers, than have the customs, laws, and social instincts, which from remotest ages have governed our Sister of the East, enervated and blighted her mental and moral life.

• Mahomet makes no account of woman whatever in his polity.

• The Koran tried to address itself to the needs of Arabian civilization as Mahomet saw them.

• The Arab was a nomad, and home to him meant his present camping place.

• As a personality, an individual soul, capable of eternal growth and unlimited development, and destined to mould and shape the civilization of the future to an incalculable extent, Mahomet did not know woman.

• There was no hereafter, no paradise for her.

• The heaven of the Mussulman is peopled by houri, a figment of Mahomet's brain, partaking of the ethereal qualities of angels, yet imbued with the vices and inanity of Oriental women.

• The harem here, and--"dust to dust" hereafter, this was the hope, the inspiration, the summum bonum of the Eastern woman's life!

• The result on the life of the nation is exemplified by the "Unspeakable Turk," the "sick man" of modern Europe.

• Private life of the Turk is vilest of the vile, unprogressive, unambitious, and inconceivably low.

• Turkey has produced most brilliant minds, but these minds were not the normal outgrowth of a healthy trunk - they seemed ephemeral excrescencies which shoot far out with all the vigor and promise of strong branches; but soon alas fall into decay and ugliness because there is no soundness in the root, no life-giving sap, permeating, strengthening and perpetuating the whole.

• The home life is impure!

• When we look for fruit, like apples of Sodom, it crumbles within our grasp into dust and ashes.

• It is pleasing to turn from this effete and immobile civilization to a society still fresh and vigorous, whose seed is in itself, and whose very name is synonymous with all that is progressive, elevating and inspiring, viz., the European bud and the American flower of modern civilization.

• Satisfaction in American institutions rests not on the fruition we now enjoy, but springs rather from the possibilities and promise that are inherent in the system, though as yet, perhaps, far in the future.

• "Happiness consists not in perfections attained, but in a sense of progress, the result of our own endeavor under conspiring circumstances toward a goal which continually advances and broadens and deepens till it is swallowed up in the Infinite."

• We have not yet reached our ideal in American civilization.

• Here in America is the arena in which the next triumph of civilization is to be won; and here too we find promise abundant and possibilities infinite.

• The hope for our country primarily and fundamentally rests chiefly on the homelife and on the influence of good women in those homes.

• Macaulay: "You may judge a nation's rank in the scale of civilization from the way they treat their women."

• Emerson: "I have thought that a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women."

• This high regard for woman, this germ of a prolific idea which in our own day is bearing such rich and varied fruit, was ingrafted into European civilization from two sources, the Christian Church and the Feudal System.

• Habits of life and modes of thought to which Feudalism gave rise materially fostered and developed it; for they gave us chivalry, than which no institution has more sensibly magnified and elevated woman's position in society.

• Tacitus dwells on the tender regard for woman entertained by these rugged barbarians before they left their northern homes to overrun Europe.

• Old Norse legends, and primitive poems, all breathe the same spirit of love of home and veneration for the pure and noble influence there presiding--the wife, the sister, the mother.

• The settled life of the Middle Ages is "oozing out" from the plundering and pillaging life of barbarism and crystallizing into the Feudal System.

• The spirit of Christianity had not yet put the seal of catholicity on this sentiment at the time.

• Chivalry was but the toning down and softening of a rough and lawless period.

• Respect for woman, the much lauded chivalry of the Middle Ages, meant respect for the elect few among whom they expect to consort.

• The idea of the radical amelioration of womankind, reverence for woman as woman regardless of rank, wealth, or culture, was to come from the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

• The Christian Church by the licentiousness of its chosen servants invaded the household and established too often as vicious connections those relations which it forbade to assume openly and in good faith.

• "Thus, the religious corps became as numerous, as searching, and as unclean as the frogs of Egypt, which penetrated into all quarters, into the ovens and kneading troughs, leaving their filthy trail wherever they went."

• Chaucer satirizes the Friars: 'Women may now go safely up and doun, In every bush, and under every tree, Ther is non other incubus but he, And he ne will don hem no dishonour.'

• Henry, Bishop of Liege, could unblushingly boast the birth of twenty-two children in fourteen years.

• Christ gave ideals not formulæ.

• The Gospel is a germ requiring millennia for its growth and ripening.

• With all the strides our civilization has made from the first to the nineteenth century, we can boast not an idea, not a principle of action, not a progressive social force but was already mutely foreshadowed, or directly enjoined in that simple tale of a meek and lowly life.

• By laying down for woman the same code of morality, the same standard of purity, as for man; by refusing to countenance the shameless and equally guilty monsters who were gloating over her fall; graciously stooping in all the majesty of his own spotlessness to wipe away the filth and grime of her guilty past and bid her go in peace and sin no more; and again in the moments of his own careworn and footsore dejection, turning trustfully and lovingly, away from the heartless snubbing and sneers, away from the cruel malignity of mobs and prelates in the dusty marts of Jerusalem to the ready sympathy, loving appreciation and unfaltering friendship of that quiet home at Bethany; and even at the last, by his dying bequest to the disciple whom he loved, signifying the protection and tender regard to be extended to that sorrowing mother and ever afterward to the sex she represented;--throughout his life and in his death he has given to men a rule and guide for the estimation of woman as an equal, as a helper, as a friend, and as a sacred charge to be sheltered and cared for with a brother's love and sympathy, lessons which nineteen centuries' gigantic strides in knowledge, arts, and sciences, in social and ethical principles have not been able to probe to their depth or to exhaust in practice.

• The union of the Barbaric and the Christian forces was not long delayed after the Fall of the Empire.

• The Church saw the barbarian, little more developed than a wild beast, and forbore to antagonize and mystify his warlike nature by a full blaze of the heartsearching and humanizing tenets of her great Head.

• She said little of the rule "If thy brother smite thee on one cheek, turn to him the other also;" but thought it sufficient for the needs of those times, to establish the so-called "Truce of God" under which men were bound to abstain from butchering one another for three days of each week and on Church festivals.

• Next she took advantage of the barbarian's sensuous love of gaudy display and put all her magnificent garments on.

• It is said that Romanism gained more in pomp and ritual during this trying period of the Dark Ages than throughout all her former history.

• The result was she carried her point.

• Once more Rome laid her ambitions hand on the temporal power, and allied with Charlemagne, aspired to rule the world through a civilization dominated by Christianity and permeated by the traditions and instincts of those sturdy barbarians.

• Here was the confluence of the two streams we have been tracing, which, united now, stretch before us as a broad majestic river.

• In regard to woman it was the meeting of two noble and ennobling forces, two kindred ideas the resultant of which, we doubt not, is destined to be a potent force in the betterment of the world.

• After our appeal to history comparing nations destitute of this force and so destitute also of the principle of progress, with other nations among whom the influence of woman is prominent coupled with a brisk, progressive, satisfying civilization, -if in addition we find this strong presumptive evidence corroborated by reason and experience, we may conclude that these two equally varying concomitants are linked as cause and effect; in other words, that the position of woman in society determines the vital elements of its regeneration and progress.

• This is so from the nature of the case, because it is she who must first form the man by directing the earliest impulses of his character.

• Byron and Wordsworth were both geniuses and would have stamped themselves on the thought of their age under any circumstances; and yet we find the one a savor of life unto life, the other of death unto death. "Byron, like a rocket, shot his way upward with scorn and repulsion, flamed out in wild, explosive, brilliant excesses and disappeared in darkness made all the more palpable."*

• Wordsworth lent of his gifts to reinforce that "power in the Universe which makes for righteousness" by taking the harp handed him from Heaven and using it to swell the strains of angelic choirs.

• Woman, Mother,--your responsibility is one that might make angels tremble and fear to take hold!

• To trifle with it, to ignore or misuse it, is to treat lightly the most sacred and solemn trust ever confided by God to human kind.

• The training of children is a task on which an infinity of weal or woe depends.

• The lace and the diamonds, the dance and the theater, gain a new significance when scanned in their bearings on such issues.

• The vital agency of womanhood in the regeneration and progress of a race, as a general question, is conceded almost before it is fairly stated.

• Moses and the Prophets have already in Dr. Crummell made the point, that "Cursed is he that cometh after the king?"

• There is need to add a plea for the Colored Girls of the South: - that large, bright, promising fatally beautiful class that stand shivering like a delicate plantlet before the fury of tempestuous elements, so full of promise and possibilities, yet so sure of destruction; often without a father to whom they dare apply the loving term, often without a stronger brother to espouse their cause and defend their honor with his life's blood; in the midst of pitfalls and snares, waylaid by the lower classes of white men, with no shelter, no protection nearer than the great blue vault above, which half conceals and half reveals the one Care-Taker they know so little of.

• A race cannot be purified from without.

• We must go to the root and see that it is sound and healthy and vigorous.

• True progress is never made by spasms.

• Real progress is growth.

• There is something to encourage and inspire us in the advancement of individuals since their emancipation from slavery.

• That the Negro has his niche in the infinite purposes of the Eternal, no one who has studied the history of the last fifty years in America will deny.

• The race is just twenty-one years removed from the conception and experience of a chattel, just at the age of ruddy manhood.

• Here is the vulnerable point, not in the heel, but at the heart of the young Achilles; and here must the defenses be strengthened and the watch redoubled.

• Now the fundamental agency under God in the regeneration, the re-training of the race, as well as the ground work and starting point of its progress upward, must be the black woman.

• Every attempt to elevate the Negro, whether undertaken by himself or through the philanthropy of others, cannot but prove abortive unless so directed as to utilize the indispensable agency of an elevated and trained womanhood.

• We too often mistake individuals' honor for race development and so are ready to substitute pretty accomplishments for sound sense and earnest purpose.

• A stream cannot rise higher than its source.

• As the whole is sum of all its parts, so the character of the parts will determine the characteristics of the whole.

• Most of the unsatisfaction from our past results arises from just such a radical and palpable error, as much almost on our own part as on that of our benevolent white friends.

• The Negro is constitutionally hopeful and proverbially irrepressible; and naturally stands in danger of being dazzled by the shimmer and tinsel of superficials.

• The late Martin R. Delany used to say when honors of state fell upon him, that when he entered the council of kings the black race entered with him.

• Not by pointing to sun-bathed mountain tops do we prove that Phoebus warms the valleys.

• Only the BLACK WOMAN can say "when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me."

• There is a call for workers, for missionaries, for men and women with the double consecration of a fundamental love of humanity and a desire for its melioration through the Gospel; but superadded to this we demand an intelligent and sympathetic comprehension of the interests and special needs of the Negro.

• We need men who can let their interest and gallantry extend outside the circle of their aesthetic appreciation; men who can be a father, a brother, a friend to every weak, struggling unshielded girl.

• We need women who are so sure of their own social footing that they need not fear leaning to lend a hand to a fallen or falling sister.

• We need men and women who do not exhaust their genius splitting hairs on aristocratic distinctions and thanking God they are not as others; but earnest, unselfish souls, who can go into the highways and byways, lifting up and leading, advising and encouraging with the truly catholic benevolence of the Gospel of Christ.

• Flexibility and aggressiveness are not such strong characteristics of the Church to-day as in the Dark Ages.

• As a Mission field for the Church the Southern Negro is in some aspects most promising; in others, perplexing. Not aliens in language and customs, nor in associations and sympathies, naturally of deeply rooted religious instincts and taking most readily and kindly to the worship and teachings of the Church, surely the task of proselytizing the American Negro is infinitely less formidable than that which confronted the Church in the Barbarians of Europe.

• Thinking colored men almost uniformly admit that the Protestant Episcopal Church with its quiet, chaste dignity and decorous solemnity, its instructive and elevating ritual, its bright chanting and joyous hymning, is eminently fitted to correct the peculiar faults of worship the rank exuberance and often ludicrous demonstrativeness of their people.

• Yet, the Church, claiming to be missionary and Catholic, urging that schism is sin and denominationalism inexcusable, has made in all these years almost no inroads upon this semi-civilized religionism.

• Harvests from this over ripe field of home missions have been gathered in by Methodists, Baptists, and not least by Congregationalists, who were unknown to the Freedmen before their emancipation.

• The clergy numbers less than two dozen priests of Negro blood and we have hardly more than one self-supporting colored congregation in the entire Southland.

• The organization known as the A. M. E. Church has 14,063 ministers, itinerant and local, 4,069 self-supporting churches, churches, 4,2754,275 Sunday-schools, with property valued at 7,772,284, raising yearly for church purposes 1,427,000.

• Representative colored men, professing that in their heart of hearts they are Episcopalians, are actually working in Methodist and Baptist pulpits; while the ranks of the Episcopal clergy are left to be filled largely by men who certainly suggest the propriety of a "perpetual Diaconate" if they cannot be said to have created the necessity for it.

• A certain Southern Bishop of our Church reviewing the situation, whether in Godly anxiety or in "Gothic antipathy" I know not, deprecates the fact that the colored people do not seem drawn to the Episcopal Church, and comes to the sage conclusion that the Church is not adapted to the rude untutored minds of the Freedmen, and that they may be left to go to the Methodists and Baptists whither their racial proclivities undeniably tend.

• A Black woman of the South would beg to point out two possible oversights in this southern work which may indicate in part both a cause and a remedy for some failure. The first is not calculating for the Black man's personality; not having respect, if I may so express it, to his manhood or deferring at all to his conceptions of the needs of his people.

• The second important oversight is not developing Negro womanhood as an essential fundamental for the elevation of the race, and utilizing this agency in extending the work of the Church.

• Macaulay somewhere criticizes the Church of England as not knowing how to use fanatics, and declares that had Ignatius Loyola been in the Anglican instead of the Roman communion, the Jesuits would have been schismatics instead of Catholics; and if the religious awakenings of the Wesleys had been in Rome, she would have shaven their heads, tied ropes around their waists, and sent them out under her own banner and blessing.

• The “thus far and no farther” pattern cannot be fitted to any growth in God’s kingdom.

• The universal law of development is “onward and upward.”

• A perpetual colored diaconate, carefully and kindly superintended by the white clergy; congregations of shiny faced peasants with their clean white aprons and sunbonnets catechised at regular intervals and taught to recite the creed, the Lord's prayer and the ten commandments--duty towards God and duty towards neighbor, surely such well tended sheep ought to be grateful to their shepherds and content in that station of life to which it pleased God to call them.

• It is a mistake to suppose that the Negro is prejudiced against a white ministry.

• The Negro could be brought near to his white priest or bishop, he is not suspicious.

• There must be something of human nature in it, the same as that which brought about that "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us" that He might "draw" us towards God.

• Men are not "drawn" by abstractions.

• Only sympathy and love can draw, and until our Church in America realizes this and provides a clergy that can come in touch with our life and have a fellow feeling for our woes, without being imbedded and frozen up in their "Gothic antipathies," the good bishops are likely to continue "perplexed" by the sparsity of colored Episcopalians.

• The race cannot be effectually lifted up till its women are truly elevated.

• Special organizations such as Church Sisterhoods and industrial schools be devised to meet her pressing needs in the Southland.

• So far as I am informed the Church has made no motion towards carrying out Dr. Crummell's suggestion.

• The denomination which comes next our own in opposing the proverbial emotionalism of Negro worship in the South, and which in consequence like ours receives the cold shoulder from the old heads, resting as we do under the charge of not "having religion" and not believing in conversion the Congregationalists have quietly gone to work on the young, have established industrial and training schools, and now almost every community in the South is yearly enriched by a fresh infusion of vigorous young hearts, cultivated heads, and helpful hands that have been trained at Fisk, at Hampton, in Atlanta University, and in Tuskegee, Alabama.

• These young people are missionaries actual or virtual both here and in Africa.

• They have learned to love the methods and doctrines of the Church which trained and educated them; and so Congregationalism surely and steadily progresses.

• I would ask in all earnestness, does not this force potential deserve by education and stimulus to be made dynamic? Is it not a solemn duty incumbent on all colored churchmen to make it so? Will not the aid of the Church be given to prepare our girls in head, heart, and hand for the duties and responsibilities that await the intelligent wife, the Christian mother, the earnest, virtuous, helpful woman, at once both the lever and the fulcrum for uplifting the race.

• We must either break away from dear old landmarks and plunge out in any line and every line that enables us to meet the pressing need of our people, or we must ask the Church to allow and help us, untrammelled by the prejudices and theories of individuals, to work aggressively under her direction as we alone can, with God's help, for the salvation of our people.

• The time is ripe for action. Self-seeking and ambition must be laid on the altar. The battle is one of sacrifice and hardship, but our duty is plain.

• Nature's cells are all little workshops for manufacturing sunbeams, the product to be given out to earth's inhabitants in warmth, energy, thought, action.

• Having passed through your drill school, will you refuse a general's commission even if it entail responsibility, risk and anxiety, with possibly some adverse criticism?

• "In ordinary, we have a snappish criticism which watches and contradicts the opposite party. We want the will which advances and dictates acts]. Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself, shall not be defended. Complaining never so loud and with never so much reason, is of no use. What cannot stand must fall; and the measure of our sincerity and therefore of the respect of men is the amount of health and wealth we will hazard in the defense of our right."

The Higher Education Of Women

• In 1801, Silvain Marechal published a book in Paris entitled "Shall Woman Learn the Alphabet," which proposed a law prohibiting the alphabet to women.

• In 1833, one solitary college in America decided to admit women within its sacred precincts, and organized a "Ladies' Course" as well as the regular B. A. or Gentlemen's course.

• Today there are one hundred and ninety-eight colleges for women, and two hundred and seven coeducational colleges and universities in the United States alone offering the degree of B. A. to women, and sending out yearly into the arteries of this nation a warm, rich flood of strong, brave, active, energetic, well-equipped, thoughtful women--women quick to see and eager to help the needs of this needy world--women who can think as well as feel, and who feel none the less because they think--women who are none the less tender and true for the parchment scroll they bear in their hands--women who have given a, deeper, richer, nobler and grander meaning to the word "womanly" than any one-sided masculine definition could over have suggested or inspired--women whom the world has long waited for in pain and anguish till there should be at last added to its forces and allowed to permeate its thought the complement of that masculine influence which has dominated it for fourteen centuries.

• Since the idea of order and subordination succumbed to barbarian brawn and brutality in the fifth century, the civilized world has been like a child brought up by his father. It has needed the great mother heart to teach it to be pitiful, to love mercy, to succor the weak and care for the lowly.

• Whence came this apotheosis of greed and cruelty? Whence this sneaking admiration we all have for bullies and prize-fighters? Whence the self-congratulation of “dominant” races, as if “dominant” meant “righteous” and carried with it a title to inherit the earth? Whence the scorn of so-called weak or unwarlike races and individuals, and the very comfortable assurance that it is their manifest destiny to be wiped out as vermin before this advancing civilization?

• As if the possession of the Christian graces of meekness, non-resistance and forgiveness, were incompatible with a civilization professedly based on Christianity, the religion of love!

• Delightful reflection for "the dwellers where day declines." A spectacle to make the gods laugh, truly, to see the scion of an upstart race by one sweep of his generalizing pen consigning to annihilation one-third the inhabitants of the globe a people whose civilization was hoary headed before the parent elements that begot his race had advanced beyond nebulosity.

• We Westerners are like Longfellow's Iagoo.

• The world of thought under the predominant man-influence, unmollified and unrestrained by its complementary force, would become like Daniel's fourth beast: “dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly;” “it had great iron teeth; it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it;” and the most independent of us find ourselves ready at times to fall down and worship this incarnation of power.

• There is, then, a real and special influence of woman. An influence subtle and often involuntary, an influence so intimately interwoven in, so intricately interpenetrated by the masculine influence of the time that it is often difficult to extricate the delicate meshes and analyze and identify the closely clinging fibers. And yet, without this influence so long as woman sat with bandaged eyes and manacled hands, fast bound in the clamps of ignorance and inaction, the world of thought moved in its orbit like the revolutions of the moon; with one face (the man's face) always out, so that the spectator could not distinguish whether it was disc or sphere.

• Transmit the potential forces of her soul into dynamic factors that has given symmetry and completeness to the world's agencies.

• Mercy, the lesson she teaches, and Truth, the task man has set himself, should meet together: that righteousness, or rightness, man's ideal, -and peace, its necessary 'other half,' should kiss each other.

• Religion, science, art, economics, have all needed the feminine flavor; and literature, the expression of what is permanent and best in all of these, may be guaged at any time to measure the strength of the feminine ingredient.

• The law of love is shut out from the affairs of men after the feminine half of the world's truth is completed.

• The key-note of the literature of these days is compassion for the poor and unfortunate and, as Bellamy has expressed it, “indignant outcry against the failure of the social machinery as it is, to ameliorate the miseries of men!”

• Christianity is being brought to the bar of humanity and tried by the standard of its ability to alleviate the world's suffering and lighten and brighten its woe.

• There is a feminine as well as a masculine side to truth; that these are related not as inferior and superior, not as better and worse, not as weaker and stronger, but as complements complements in one necessary and symmetric whole.

• As the man is more noble in reason, so the woman is more quick in sympathy.

• As he is indefatigable in pursuit of abstract truth, so is she in caring for the interests by the way striving tenderly and lovingly that not one of the least of these 'little ones' should perish.

• Both are needed to be worked into the training of children, in order that our boys may supplement their virility by tenderness and sensibility, and our girls may round out their gentleness by strength and self-reliance.

• A nation or a race will degenerate into mere emotionalism on the one hand, or bullyism on the other, if dominated by either exclusively.

• The feminine factor can have its proper effect only through woman's development and education so that she may fitly and intelligently stamp her force on the forces of her day, and add her modicum to the riches of the world's thought.

• Higher education for women is not a modern idea, and that, if that is the means of setting free and invigorating the long desired feminine force in the world, it has already had a trial and should, in the past, have produced some of these glowing effects.

• It was possible, down to the middle of our own century, only to a select few; and that the fashions and traditions of the times were before that all against it.

• There were not only no stimuli to encourage women to make the most of their powers and to welcome their development as a helpful agency in the progress of civilization, but their little aspirations, when they had any, were chilled and snubbed in embryo, and any attempt at thought was received as a monstrous usurpation of man's prerogative.

• During his last visit to America in '82 or '83, Matthew Arnold lectured before a certain co-educational college in the West.

• As to the result to women, this is the most serious argument ever used against the higher education. If it interferes with marriage, classical training has a grave objection to weigh and answer. For I agree with Mr. Allen at least on this one point, that there must be marrying and giving in marriage even till the end of time.

• Neither is she compelled to look to sexual love as the one sensation capable of giving tone and relish, movement and vim to the life she leads.

• She has remaining the mellow, less obtrusive, but none the less enchanting and inspiring light of friendship, and into its charmed circle she may gather the best the world has known.

• Here, at last, can be communion without suspicion; friendship, without misunderstanding; love without jealousy.

• As many resources as men, as many activities beckon her on. As large possibilities swell and inspire her heart.

• The question is not now with the woman “How shall I so cramp, stunt, simplify and nullify myself as to make me eligible to the honor of being swallowed up into some little man?” but the problem, I trow, now rests with the man as to how he can so develop his God-given powers as to reach the ideal of a generation of women who demand the noblest, grandest, and best achievements of which he is capable; and this surely is the only fair and natural adjustment of the chances.

• Nature never meant that the ideals and standards of the world should be dwarfing and

SEP:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anna-julia-cooper/