P.50: It was not only my art-love which must be sacrificed to my duty as a wife, but my literary tastes must go with it. "The husband is the head of the wife." To be head, he must be superior. An uncultivated husband could not be the superior of a cultivated wife. I knew from the first that his education had been limited, but thought the defect would be easily remedied as he had good abilities, but I discovered he had no love for books. His spiritual guides derided human learning and depended on inspiration. My knowledge stood in the way of my salvation, and I must be that odious thing--a superior wife--or stop my progress, for to be and appear were the same thing. I must be the mate of the man I had chosen; and if he would not come to my level, I must go to his. So I gave up study and for years [1836-1839] did not read one page in any book save the Bible. My religious convictions I could not change, but all other differences should disappear.

P.94: My style I caught from my crude, rural surroundings, and was familiar to the unlearned, and I was not surprised to find the letters [denouncing the Mexican War] eagerly read. The [Pittsburgh Commercial] Journal announced them the day before publication, the newsboys cried them, and papers called attention to them, some by daring to indorse, but more by abusing Mr. Riddle for publishing such unpatriotic and "incendiary rant." . . . No western Pennsylvanian woman had ever broken out of woman's sphere. All lived in the very centre of that sacred enclosure, making fires by which husbands, brothers and sons sat reading the news; each one knowing she had a soul, because the preacher who made his bread and butter by saving it had been careful to inform her of its existence as a preliminary to her knowledge of the indispensable nature of his services.

Pp 101 and ff -- account of Swisshelm's crusade for married women's property rights, arising out of her husband's insistence she allow him to put her inheritance (from her mother) into his mill property (which would go, in the event of his death, to his brothers).

P.111 [apropos her conduct as publisher of the Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter]: Any attempt to aid business by any feminine attraction was to my mind revolting in the extreme, and certain to bring final defeat. In nothing has the church of Rome shown more wisdom than in the costume of her female missionaries. When a woman starts out in the world on a mission, secular or religious, she should leave her feminine charms at home. Had I made capital of my prettiness, I should have closed the door of public employment to women for many a year, by the very means which now makes them weak, underpaid competitors in the great workshop of the world.

P.112; While preparing matter for the first number of the Visitor [sic], I had time to think that so far as any organization was concerned, I stood alone. I could not work with Garrison on the ground that the Constitution was pro-slavery, for I had abandoned that in 1832, with our church split on it and I went with the New School, who held that it was then anti slavery. The Covenanters, before it was adopted, denounced it as a "Covenant with death and an agreement with hell." I had long ago become familiar with the arguments on that side, and I concluded they were fallacious, and could not go back to them even for a welcome into the abolition ranks.

The political action wing of the anti-slavery party had given formal notice that no woman need apply for a place among them. True, there was a large minority who dissented from this action, but there was division enough, without my furnishing a cause for contention. So I took pains to make it understood that I belonged to no party. . . . I was like the Israelites in the days when there was no king, and "every man did that which was right in his own eyes."[Judges, 17:6 [King James' Version]: "In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes."

P. 121: . . . the Visiter took the ground that if the Bible did sanction slavery [which Swisshelm denied], the bible must be wrong, since nothing could make slavery right.