ABSTRACT
Mrs Josiah Conder was there, however, and prefaces her comments about the incident by describing the American women pejoratively as untidy, with creased, limp clothing, soiled collars and dirty nails, and adds: 'I believe, too, the object of the "fair visitors" is, in part, to waken the ladies of England to a sense of their "rights" ... If we are thus to start out of our spheres, who is to take our place? ... Are the gentlemen kindly to officiate for us?' (quoted in Tyrrell, 192). Mrs Conder is already using Sarah Lewis's word sphere, which along with mission and influence Lewis caused to be redefined in conjunction with the modifier woman's, in her popular work Woman's Mission (1839), a translation from Louis Aime Martin's De {'education des meres de famille, ou la civilisation du genre humain par les femmes (1834), although some
sections on French manners and morals are omitted, and in other parts Aime Martin's text is developed and extended with ideas of Lewis's own (Helsinger et al., I: 3-5). George Eliot found, on reading the original French, 'the real Greece whence Woman's Mission has only imported to us a few marbles' (Haight, I: 72). Sarah Lewis sees women as 'the prime agents of God in the regeneration of mankind' and writes that while the intellectual kingdom has been won by men who should be allowed to enjoy it 'in peace and triumph', proclaims that as God's missionaries, the 'moral world is ours' (quoted in Helsinger et al., I: 6-7). Women's mission depends then on disseminating Christian values and culture, particularly as the basis of their childrens' education. While Lewis claims that moral and intellectual equality is established (contradicting her previous assertion that men have won the intellectual ground), she admits that it is inconsistent to 'condemn women to obscurity', and it is also apparently inconsistent 'to recommend at the same time expansion of views and contraction of operation; to awaken the sense of power, and to require that the exercise of it be limited' (quoted in Helsinger et al., I: 8). But she overcomes this difficulty by adding that 'morally speaking' there are 'no small duties' (quoted in Helsinger et al., I: 9).
