Coverdale’s view of Zenobia and women reformers

“…women, however intellectually superior, so seldom disquiet themselves about the rights or wrongs of their sex, unless their own individual affections chance to lie in idleness, or to be ill at ease. They are not natural reformers, but become such by the pressure of exceptional misfortune. I could measure Zenobia’s inward trouble, by the animosity with which she now took up the general quarrel of woman against man.”
–The Blithedale Romance (126)