“My dearest Emmy,—­No answer from you?  How unkind!  But still I continue to give you my ideas of the moment from this.  What do we want?  A writer in one of the frivolous sheets which are called newspapers on this side of the Channel, has been giving himself great airs; looking out of his window, with two or three touches of his pen he dismisses the poor women who pass under his balcony, and closes the casement with the conviction that woman’s rights and wrongs are put away for another generation.  Foolish women!  They are plentiful enough, and they muster in fair numbers at the Wauxhall meetings which have been going on here, to the infinite amusement of the superior creatures who drink absinthe, smoke cigars, and gamble, hours after we silly things have gone to bed.  I am not writing to deny woman’s weakness, nor her vanity, nor the ridiculous exhibition she makes of herself when she takes to “orating”—­as the Yankees say—­and lecturing, and dressing herself up in her brother’s clothes.  Do you think, my dear Emmy, there are many women foolish enough to applaud Dr. Mary Walker because she dresses like an overgrown school-girl, and shows her trousers?  What is she like in society?  Neither man nor woman.  But how many have imitated her?  How many women in England, France, and America have taken to the platform?  One would think that all womankind was in a state of revolution, and about to make a general descent upon the tailors and tobacconists, turning over the lords of the creation to the milliners and the baby-linen warehouses.  This is just the way men argue, and push themselves out of a difficulty.  This French philosophical pretender, who has been observing us from his window (I can’t imagine where he lives), describes one or two social monstrosities—­with false complexions, hair, figure,—­and morals; brazen in manner, defiant in walk—­female intellectual all-in-alls.  His model drives, hunts, orates, passes resolutions, dissects—­in short does everything except attend to baby.  This she leaves to the husband.  He takes the pap-bowl, and she shoulders the gun.  He looks out the linen while she sharpens her razors.  The foolish public laugh all along the boulevards, and say what a charming creature a woman will be when she drives a locomotive, commands a frigate, and storms a citadel!

“Every time a meeting is convened at the Wauxhall to consider how the amount of female starvation or misery may be reduced, the philosopher throws his window open again, and grins while he caricatures, or rather distorts and exaggerates to positive untruth.  M. Gill gets fresh food.  The chroniqueurs invent a series of absurdities, which didn’t happen yesterday, as they allege.  I am out of patience when I see all this mischievous misrepresentation, because I see that it is doing harm to a very just and proper cause.  We are arguing for more work for our poor sisters who have neither father, husband, brother, nor fortune to depend upon; and these French