For my part, when you speak of the individuality of one who is truly married being inevitably lost, I think you mistake.  If there ever was any individuality it will remain.  I don’t believe it is necessary for development that the individual must always force itself upon us.  We naturally fall into the habits and frequently the train of thought of those we love and I like the expression “we” rather than “I.”  I never feel that my interests and actions can be independent of the dear ones with whom I am surrounded.  Even the one who seems to be most absorbed may, in reality, possess the strongest soul.  This standing alone is not natural and therefore can not be right.  I am sure one of these days you will view this matter from a different standpoint.

Miss Anthony so far yielded as to reply:  “Institutions, among them marriage, are justly chargeable with many social and individual ills but, after all, the whole man or woman will rise above them.  I am sure my ‘true woman’ never will be crushed or dwarfed by them.  Woman must take to her soul a purpose and then make circumstances conform to this purpose, instead of forever singing the refrain, ‘if and if and if!’” But later when one woman failed to keep a lecture engagement because her husband wanted her to go somewhere with him, and another because her husband was not willing she should leave home, she again poured out her sorrows to her friend: 

There is not one woman left who may be relied on, all have “first to please their husband,” after which there is but little time or energy left to spend in any other direction.  I am not complaining or despairing, but facts are stern realities.  The twain become one flesh, the woman, “we”; henceforth she has no separate work, and how soon the last standing monuments (yourself and myself, Lydia), will lay down the individual “shovel and de hoe” and with proper zeal and spirit grasp those of some masculine hand, the mercies and the spirits only know.  I declare to you that I distrust the power of any woman, even of myself, to withstand the mighty matrimonial maelstrom!

But how did I get into this dissertation?  If to you it seems morbid, pardon the pen-wandering.  In the depths of my soul there is a continual denial of the self-annihilating spiritual or legal union of two human beings.  Such union, in the very nature of things, must bring an end to the free action of one or the other, and it matters not to the individual whose freedom has thus departed whether it be the gentle rule of love or the iron hand of law which blotted out from the immortal being the individual soul-stamp of the Good Father.  How I do wish those who know something of the real social needs of our age would rescue this greatest, deepest, highest question from the present unphilosophical, unspiritual discussers.

As might be expected, the legacy of $5,000 brought not only a flood of requests from all parts of the