In an 1855 editorial in her magazine The Kaleidoscope, Virginia’s Rebecca Hicks asked her readers to question the validity of traditional perceptions of gender, especially in regard to intellectual ability: “Why all this ado about the natural superiority of men’s minds? They are sometimes superior, I grant, but that they are often hopelessly inferior, nobody with a pair of eyes in his head, can ever pretend to deny. Men are sometimes stupid, and women are sometimes wonderfully gifted, and there’s no use in denying it, and all we ask of the men is to stand back and give us fair play.” Hicks denied that significant, inherent intellectual differences existed between men and women and instead attributed disparities in accomplishments to discrimination and cultural biases. “The man who would deny to women,” Hicks asked in another editorial, “the cultivation of her intellect ought, for consistency, to shut her up in a harem.” Her frustrations with gender inequality came through the pages of her magazine clearly. “In what, besides physical strength, are we inferior to man? Can any one tell us where his domain ends, and ours begins? What has he done, with all his advantages, that we have not done with all our disadvantages?”