I know a minister who is a good man, but his strength is in his limbs.  He’s an athlete, but turn him loose in a field as full of ideas as a clover field of blossoms, and he can’t preach a good sermon.  Let Dr. Anna Shaw enter the same field and she will gather blossoms of thought faster than you can store them away in your mind.  Some one in my presence may believe the man should keep on preaching and Anna Shaw go to the sewing-room and run a sewing machine; but I say if the man’s strength is in his limbs, and Doctor Shaw’s in her head, let the preacher run the sewing machine and Doctor Shaw preach the gospel of righteousness, temperance and judgment to come.  If God fitted Anna Shaw’s brain and tongue for the platform, it would be unwomanly in her to make herself the pedal power of a sewing machine.  We want successful, useful men and women; and in fields for which God has fitted woman, don’t be afraid to give her the freest, broadest liberty, or be uneasy about her unsexing herself.  She has entered two hundred fields in the last one hundred years.  Yes, I guess one more field must be added, for I saw a woman a few years ago in an occupation I had never seen one engaged in before.  In a city where I lectured a beautiful, intelligent young lady was running the elevator of a hotel, and I was completely “taken up” by her.

Of all the new fields entered by woman you cannot point to one where she has degraded her womanhood, or one that has not been blessed by the touch of her influence.

It is true there are fanatics among women as there are among men, but if the extreme woman goes too far, the average woman will call a halt every time.  Fifteen years ago I could stand on Michigan Avenue, Chicago, in the evening and within a half hour count twenty young women, dressed in bloomers, riding bicycles.  Now one may go to Chicago, spend a year and not see one.  Woman is safe enough.

Some are uneasy lest woman will go beyond her sphere, but I am not so much disturbed about the future of woman as I am of man.  Upon virtue and intelligence depends the future of this republic.  Have men all the virtue?  Go to the saloons; are they frequented by women?  No; men.  Go to the gambling halls; are they crowded with women?  No; men.  Go to the jails and penitentiaries; are they full of women?  No; men.  Go to the churches; are they crowded with men?  No; mostly by women.  What about intelligence?  Have men all the intelligence?  Two girls graduate from high schools to one boy.  I am glad to be living now; one hundred years hence, if I were to be born again, I would want to be a girl.  Woman goes to the door of death to give life to man and man should be willing to let her seek out her own sphere for usefulness.