The question is, Is it wise for boys and girls to pursue the same studies in the more difficult branches of knowledge?  I would withhold no study from a woman on the ground of assumed intellectual inferiority.  I believe that a woman can grasp any subject as well as a man can, so far and so long as her physical strength will permit her to make exhaustive researches.  There are some studies which task the physical strength of men to its utmost tension.  If any woman has equal physical power with men to master certain subjects, let her pursue them; for success, even with men, depends upon physical endurance as well as brain-power.  And thus the question is one of physical strength and endurance; and women must settle for themselves whether they can run races with men in studies in which only the physically strong can hope to succeed.

Then, again, I would educate women with reference to the sphere in which they must forever move,—­a sphere settled by the eternal laws of Nature and duty, against which it is folly to rebel.  Does any one doubt or deny that the sphere of women is different from the sphere of men?  Can it be questioned that a class of studies pursued by women who are confined for a considerable period of life to domestic duties,—­like the care of children, and the details of household economy, and attendance on the sick, and ornamental art labors,—­should not be different from those pursued by men who undertake the learned professions, and the government of the people, and the accumulation of wealth in the hard drudgeries of banks and counting-houses and stores and commercial travelling?  There is no way to get round this question except by maintaining that men should not be exempted from the cares and duties which for all recorded ages have been assigned to women; and that women should enter upon the equally settled sphere of man, and become lawyers, politicians, clergymen, members of Congress and of State legislatures, sailors, merchants, commercial travellers, bankers, railway conductors, and steamship captains.  I once knew the discontented wife of an eminent painter, with a brilliant intellect, who insisted that her husband should leave his studio and spend five hours a day in the drudgeries of the nursery and kitchen to relieve her, and that she should spend the five hours in her studio as an amateur,—­that they thus might be on an equality!  The husband died in a mad-house, after dying for a year with a broken heart and a crushed ambition.  He was obliged to submit to his wife’s demand, or fight from morning to night and from night to morning; and as he was a man of peace, he quietly yielded up his prerogative.  Do you admire the one who prevailed over him?  She belonged to that class who are called strong-minded; but she was perverted, as some noble minds are, by atheistic and spiritualistic views, and thought to raise women by lifting them out of the sphere which God has appointed.