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= BIOGRAPHY. 85
and advantage of society, when in a more mature age they
began to act, if coming out of the first mentioned institu-
tion, as well educated mothers and teachers; or, if out
of the latter,as men in the state. And how beneficially
would not such an education in the country influence the
children’s health both of body and mind! ‘
But I was of opinion that these gifted women ought not
to be too young; that they should be from thirty to forty
years old; that they ought likewise to be distinguished by
capacity and experience as well as in a moral point of
view. ‘They would then have sufficient time to prepare
themselves for their important mission, and I imagined that
this preparation could be compassed in a practical way by
the experience which they could gain as teachers in pri-
vate families or in good boarding-schools. In these also
unmarried women would have an ample field for a noble
and blessed activity, provided they understood the word
education in its spiritual and moral sense, and did not con-
found or consider it equivalent with mere teaching and
acquiring knowledge, — which, of course, they would have
to impart to the young.
Nobody understood better than Fredrika, as will be
seen by her previous writings and by her active life, how
to estimate in its full significance woman’s mission to be
the mother and educator of the human race ; but, after her
return from America, her predominating thought was how
she might be able to secure liberty and an unrestricted
sphere of activity for Swedish women. She remarked, that
a number of functions belong to human life, which cannot
be said to be either fatherly or motherly, but which —- as
she maintained — the “fatherly” had in all times undi-
videdly taken upon itself. She seemed to understand the
reason. Man is superior to woman in physical strength,
and as long as people lived for the most part in a kind of
savage state, man was woman’s natural master, and woman
merely a part of the man. But now, Fredrika argued,
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