The existence of woman is a fact: it is equally a fact that everything that exists has some work to do in the order of the universe. God himself, in a few simple words, stated what her work was: “Let us make him a help like unto himself” (Gen. ii. 18). The words indeed are so simple that they hardly arrest attention, yet in them lies the whole relation of woman to man. She is to be _a help_; but no restrictive detail is added, so that it is clearly open to her to help man intellectually, religiously, morally, as well as domestically. She is to be _like_ unto him; that is, emphatically not masculine, not a creature that is a _mere_ copy or reproduction of himself, but _like_ unto him, that is, sufficiently like to understand him, sufficiently unlike to love him. Again, no precise relation in which she is to stand to man is defined: she may therefore be a help as a wife, mother, sister, in the domestic circle; she may be a help as a consecrated virgin, as an adviser, as an intercessor, in the religious order; she may be a help as a governor, a regent, a queen, in the political order: lastly, she may be a help as a friend and confidant in the social order.
Now, having seen that God distinctly gave woman a mission, as he has to every animate and inanimate creature, we must suppose that he has also provided her with the means of fulfilling it. We look around us to see how he has done so, and whether, when the means were at hand, woman used them to her own distinction and advantage. In one place and under one set of circumstances alone do we find that it was so, and this not by exception, but by rule. This place is the Catholic Church; these circumstances are her laws and her history. The reason why it remained for our times to form “_women’s rights_” associations, is simply that women’s wrongs have, under the influence of the Reformation, been so shamefully multiplied. The present movement is a reaction against the Protestant atmosphere of repression which has suffocated woman’s highest aspirations for three hundred years. The tribute unconsciously paid to the Catholic Church by the Anglican communities of monks and sisters is a proof of the wisdom of the old church in regard to its treatment of women. Sensitive, enthusiastic, earnest souls found themselves without the outward means of satisfying their craving after a more perfect life; others with superabundance of energy and devotion, with the gift of tending the sick or instructing the young, found themselves confined to the circle of their own unaided efforts and unorganized activity. They hailed “sisterhoods” as the newly opened gates of heaven, not knowing that sisterhoods were no new invention, but had their source in the very beginnings of the days of which the then unwritten Gospels became the after-history.