IS DEDICATED TO THE

SUFFRAGETTES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

In the following pages, I have endeavored to present to the reader, as far as the limits of a single volume would permit, from a variety of sources, sketches of the lives of women, rendered illustrious by their heroism and their virtues.

To carry out this intention, then, to the letter, I ought, perhaps, to have omitted the sketch of Semiramis, who is described by one of her historians, as "a monster, possessed of every vice;" but she lived so far back in the ages of the world, that this account of her appears, to us, to be merely suppositious, and I have chosen to introduce her here, as an example of the indomitable courage and bravery, of purpose and action, sometimes displayed by woman, when placed in a situation to call. them forth. That Semiramis lived in an idolatrous age, and was, like those of the time in which she flourished, a believer in the pagan doctrine of fatalism, will account for her seemingly puerile abandonment of her ambitious career, and cowardly submission to what she believed to be the incontrovertible decree of Destiny.

M. E. H.