The disinherited women.

I come to speak to you today of the disinherited women, still so numerous, but whose number, we acknowledge with satisfaction, is well reduced, considering what existed some scores of years ago.

These disinherited women are our mothers, our daughters, our sisters. Formerly they occupied themselves with painful labors. Beasts of burden, machines for procreating, vanquished and put on the blacklist like a thing, they seemed to embody by their sufferings all the brutalities of the master, all the powers of strength over weakness.

The Middle Ages still bring back to our memory their sorrowful past and their continual submission.

Today, however, they are respected and loved, for instruction has spread and man begins to appreciate at its just value the companion who helps him to cross the trials of life with such solicitude and tender, delicate care.

Yes, in spite of the irritating education that our mothers and our sisters receive, despite that inoculation of thoughts opposed to those of man, woman is profoundly changing. Although she obeys a prejudice rooted in age-old habits; although her beliefs are not ours and often the homeland, the future, progress, and liberty are for them a dead letter; despite that enervating education, everything is being transformed around us. Our inner being grows calm, and the new generation, thanks to the maternal dispositions, will be stronger, more resolute, a lover of the arts, of industry, of peace, of fraternity, and of solidarity. Let there be opened in your cities courses, gatherings, intelligent works, for the halls are too small. Our companions thirst for literature, for the sciences, for astronomy; they love the vibrant and forceful word of the lecturers, a word often inspired, which does not fall on barren ground, know it well, because the children gather the fruits of these beautiful and comforting evening gatherings.

At last the hour of redemption has come for them. Mothers! they must live again in their children; they must give an account of their works to society and, like the valiant, they wish to know and to be strangers to nothing; they are our equals and must complete us. Let us ask for them the thrice-holy support of all human knowledge placed within their reach.

Who, then, could better understand Spiritism than women? For man, they have the intimate proof of his strength, of his right; what was a presentiment becomes a reality; for him, they learn the purpose of their long stages through Humanity and, in view of the spiritist sanction, they are the good workers of the new work. The family is the future, and our mothers will transform this beloved family into a focus of union, of love, of benevolence, and of forgiveness. Through the family, there will be a profound revolution in the world of thought, and the disinherited will accomplish the final work for the great benefit of Humanity. Bernard.