does not just now circulate very freely as currency. Even literature in
America is utterly second to oratory as a means of immediate influence. Of
all sway, that of the orator is the most potent and most perishable; and
the student and the artist are apt to hold themselves aloof from it, for
this reason. But it is the one means in America to accomplish immediate
results, and women who would take their rights must take them through
talking. It is the appointed way.

Under a good old-fashioned monarchy, if a woman wished to secure anything
for her sex, she must cajole a court, or become the mistress of a monarch.

That epoch ended with the French Revolution. When Bonaparte wished to
silence Madame de Staël, he said, "What does that woman want? Does she want
the money the government owes to her father?" When Madame de Staël heard of
it, she said, "The question is not what I want, but what I think."
Henceforth women, like men, are to say what they think. For all that
flattery and seduction and sin, we have substituted the simple weapon of
talk. If women wish education, they must talk; if better laws, they must
talk. The one chief argument against woman suffrage, with men, is that so
few women even talk about it.

As long as the human voice can effect anything, it is the duty of women to
use it; and in America, where it effects everything, they should talk all
the time. When they have obtained, as a class, absolute equality of rights
with men, their appeals on this subject may cease, and they may accept, if
they please, that naughty masculine definition of a happy marriage,--the
union of a deaf man with a dumb woman.