Explore "A Voice from the South" by Anna Julia Cooper on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
For they the Royal-hearted Women are / Who nobly love the noblest, yet have grace / For needy, suffering lives in lowliest place; / Carrying a choicer sunlight in their smile, / The heavenliest ray that pitieth the vile. / Though I were happy, throned beside the king, / I should be tender to each little thing / With hurt warm breast, that had no speech to tell / Its inward pangs; and I would soothe it well / With tender touch and with a low, soft moan / For company. / - George Eliot
The two sources from which, perhaps, modern civilization has derived its noble and ennobling ideal of woman are Christianity and the Feudal System.