Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 July 1879 — Women’s Courage. [ARTICLE]

Women’s Courage.

In his address at the semi-centennial celebration of Abbot Female Academy, at Andover, Mass., last week, the Rev. Dr. Richard S. Storrs said: “ Then, courage, I think, is a noble feminine grace—courage and self-devotion. We are so accustomed to associate courage with physical strength that we do not often, perhaps, or always think of it as pre-eminently a feminine grace when the feminine nature has been fully unfolded and trained, but it is. The reckless rapture of self-forgetfulness— that which dominates and inspires persons and nations; that which is sovereign over obstacle and difficulty and peril and resistance—it has belonged to woman’s heart from the beginning. In the early pagan time, in the Christian development, in mission and in martyrdoms, it has been shown, in the medieval age as well as in our own time, in Harriett Newell and Florence Nightingale, in Ann Haseltine, as truly and as vividly as in any Hebrew Adassa or in any French Joan of Arc. You remember the Prussian women after the battle of Jena, when Prussia seemed trampled into the bloody mire under the cannon bf Napoleon and the feet of the horses and men in his victorious armies. Prussian women, never losing their courage, flung their ornaments of gold and jewelry into the treasury of the state, taking back the simple cross of Berlin iron which is now the precious heirloom in so many Prussian families, bearing the inscription, ‘ I gave gold for iron.’ That is the glory of womanhood. That passion, its forgetfulness, that supreme self-devotion with which she flings herself into the championship of a cause that is dear and sacred and trampled under foot—it is her crown of renown; it is her staff of power, and I do not wonder that, almost while we are speaking and listening here, the Prussians and the Germans are all marching in festival procession under the lindens of Berlin, celebrating, not the memory of the moral grace, the moral beauty and power which came into the Government of Prussia when the young German girl, who has been since the honored and illustrious Queen and Empress, gave her hand to the German officer. It is a memory of the past—it is a prophecy for the future.” The gallery of the Paris Louvre seems to be a school of morals as well as of art. A mother, in showing her little boy the Yenus of Milo, was asked by him, “ What did they cut her arms off for? ” “Bepause she put her fingers in the sugar bowl,” was the reply. Little Jacky secretly resolves to be no longer liable to such a terrible infliction.