I am in currently finishing up a paper on Abby H. Price, a mid-19th Universalist socialist, anti-slavery and women’s rights activist who was part of the utopian community Hopedale. While digging through the Practical Christian, Hopedale’s newspaper, I found this gem by Price awhile back. I feel inspired to share it this afternoon:
The masculine and feminine characteristics were beautifully blended in Christ, an should they blend in harmonious action in the church. The world needs a varied ministry. Minds are so constituted as to need not merely intellectual instruction, but the strength imparted by an earnest sympathy, born of a like experience. No one can demonstrate by college lore the weight of a mother’s responsibility. No man, not even the kindest father, can fully apprehend the wearisome cares, and the anxious tremblings of a mother’s souls. The scholar can prepare sound and logical discourses. He may talk eloquently about a mother’s responsibility. He can urged upon her the strong motive to faithfulness, and tell her what her children should be in all life’s aspects. She hears the good counsel with more or less of the feeling and thought “You cannot know of what you are talking.” The weakness physical and mental induced by maternity in present organization of society, he cannot fully appreciate. Let then, every relation and each sex have its representative teacher.
from “Woman,” by Abby Price in The Practical Christian, October 23, 1852
