And many a Superior has refused to admit a _Postulant_ who
appeared to have no better "vocation" or reasons for offering herself
than these.
It is true _we_ make "no vows." But is a "vow" necessary to convince us
that the true spirit for learning any art, most especially an art of
charity, aright, is not a disgust to everything or something else? Do
we really place the love of our kind (and of nursing, as one branch of
it,) so low as this? What would the Mere Angelique of Port Royal, what
would our own Mrs. Fry have said to this?
NOTE.--I would earnestly ask my sisters to keep clear of both the
jargons now current everywhere (for they _are_ equally jargons); of
the jargon, namely, about the "rights" of women, which urges women
to do all that men do, including the medical and other professions,
merely because men do it, and without regard to whether this _is_
the best that women can do; and of the jargon which urges women to
do nothing that men do, merely because they are women, and should be
"recalled to a sense of their duty as women," and because "this is
women's work," and "that is men's," and "these are things which
women should not do," which is all assertion and nothing more.
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