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The first serious essay I ever attempted was on ‘The Motherhood of the Race, or Spiritual Maternity’—that great fact of universal love and service which is the formative principle striving to express itself in the lower physical manifestations.

The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism. That the honourable term ‘female physician’ should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become a noble position for women.

Being at that time a reader of Swedenborg, and strongly impressed by his vivid representations of the unseen world, I finally determined to do what I could to ‘redeem the hells,’ and especially the one form of hell thus forced upon my notice.

My journals of those days, 1845, are full of the various difficulties encountered as this determination took root.

I find it written:—

Doctor Muzzey (a well-known Cincinnati doctor) was horrified at the idea of a woman’s going to the Parisian schools, which he visited some years ago; and he declares that the method of instruction was such that no American or English lady could stay there six weeks.