What a Woman Can Do

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Dec 13, 1883

What a Woman Can Do.

As a wife and mother, woman can make the fortune and happiness of her husband and children; and, if she did nothing else, surely this would be sufficient destiny. By her thrift, prudence, and tact, she can secure to her partner and to herself a competence in old age, no matter how small their beginning or how adverse a fate may be theirs. By her cheerfulness she can restore her husband's spirit, shaken by the anxiety of business. By her tender care she can often restore him to health, if disease has overtasked his powers. By her counsel and love she can win him from bad company, if temptation in an evil hour has led him astray. By her examples, her precepts, and her sex's insight into character, she can mold her children, however adverse their dispositions, into noble men and women. And, by leading in all things a true and beautiful life, she can refine, elevate, and spiritualize all who come within reach; so that, with others of her sex emulating and assisting her, she can do more to regenerate the world than all the statesmen or reformers that ever legislated.

She can do much, alas! perhaps more, to degrade man if she chooses to do it. Who can estimate the evils that woman has the power to do? As a wife she can ruin herself by extravagance, folly, or want of affection. She can make a demon or an outcast of a man who might otherwise become a good member of society. She can bring bickerings, strife, and discord into what has been a happy home. She can change the innocent babes into vile men, and even into vile women. She can lower the moral tone of society itself, and thus pollute legislation at the spring-head. She can, in fine, become an instrument of evil instead of an angel of good.

Instead of making flowers of truth, purity, beauty, and spirituality spring up in her footsteps, till the earth smiles with a loveliness that is almost celestial, she can transform it to a black and arid desert, covered with the scorn of all evil passion, and swept by the bitter blast of everlasting death. This is what woman can do for the wrong as well as for the right. Is her mission a little one? Has she no worthy work as has become the cry of late? Man may have a harder task to perform, a rougher road to travel, but he has none loftier or more influential than woman's.—Selected.