Only a Flock of Women.
Diaz, Mrs. A. M. Only a Flock of Women. Boston: D. Lothrop Company, 1893.
8vo.; hinges tender; brown cloth, stamped with elaborate design of female teacher instructing students; covers lightly worn, rippled, soiled; else a very good copy.
First edition of this uncommon collection of radical essays on women’s rights. In Only a Flock of Women—the title refers to the derogatory way in which men talk about women’s gatherings, as in: “Only a flock of women met to talk” (p. 1)—Diaz rallies for the legal, spiritual, and intellectual equality of women and children with men:
Man and woman started the world together; how did man range so far ahead? Also, if she is as smart as he, and intelligent and all that, why has he been on hand from generation to generation to do all the inventing, and to work out systems of philosophy, and gather up learning, and she been standing back so satisfied to let him do it? Why does he mark out her sphere for her? Why not she his for him?... (p. 39)
At the time publication, Diaz was in a frenzy of political activity: she helped found the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, served as President of the Belmont, Massachusetts Woman’s Suffrage League, and was one of the earliest members of the Bellamy national movement of the late 1880s which proposed to ameliorate class and gender antagonism through state socialism.
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