to the care of others, as queen-bees give their
young to the workers. Yet no woman
who does her duty faithfully to her husband
and children, will find her time unemployed,
or her life incomplete. The education of her
children alone would sufficiently employ any
true hearted woman; for education is not a
matter of school-hours, but of that subtle
influence of example which makes every
moment a seed-time of future good or ill.
And the woman who is too gifted, too
intellectual, to find scope for her mind and heart
in the education of her child, who pants for a
more important work than the training of an
immortal soul, who prefers quarter-decks and
pulpits to a still home and a school-desk, is
not a sea captain, nor a preacher by
mission—she is simply not a woman. She is
a natural blunder, a mere unfinished sketch;
fit neither for quarter-decks nor for home,
able neither to command men nor to educate
children.

But the true Woman, for whose ambition a
husband's love and her children's adoration
are sufficient, who applies her military
instincts to the discipline of her household, and
whose legislative faculties exercise themselves
in making laws for her nursery; whose
intellect has field enough for her in
communion with her husband, and whose heart
asks no other honours than his love and
admiration; a woman who does not think it
a weakness to attend to her toilette, and who
does not disdain to be beautiful; who believes
in the virtue of glossy hair and well-fitting
gowns, and who eschews rents and ravelled
edges, slipshod shoes, and audacious make-
ups; a woman who speaks low, and who
does not speak much; who is patient and
gentle, and intellectual and industrious; who
loves more than she reasons, and yet does not
love blindly; who never scolds, and rarely
argues, but who rebukes with a caress, and
adjusts with a smile: a woman who is the
wife we all have dreamt of once in our lives,
and who is the mother we still worship in the
backward distance of the past: such a woman
as this does more for human nature, and
more for woman's cause, than all the sea
captains, judges, barristers, and members of
parliament put together—God-given and God-
blessed as she is! If such a wife as this has
leisure which she wishes to employ actively,
she will always find occupation, and of a right
kind too. There are the poor and the sick
round her home; she will visit them, and
nurse them, and teach their children, and
lecture their drunken husbands; she will
fulfil her duty better thus than by walking
the hospitals, or preaching on Sundays! There
are meetings to attend also, and school
committees, and clothing-clubs and ragged schools
to organise; and her voice will sound more
sweet and natural there than when shrieking
through a speaking-trumpet or echoing in
court. And there are books to read, and then
to discuss by the fireside with her husband,
when he comes home in the evening—though
perhaps his attention may sometimes wander
from the subject to her little foot, peeping
out from under the flounces over the fender,
or to the white hands stitching so busily,—and
is not this better than a public lecture in a
Bloomer costume? And then, perhaps, she
can help her husband in his profession, write
out a clear manuscript for his editor, or copy
a deed, find out references and mark them for
him, or perhaps correct his sermon, to the
general advantage of his congregation,—
which, we contend, is a fitter occupation than
arguing divorce cases in a wig and blue bag,
or floundering in the quagmires of theology
in bands and a scholar's hood. Our natural
woman, too, loves her children, and looks
after them; but the babies of our emancipated
woman belong as much to the state as to her,
and as much to chance as to either. Our
natural woman plays with her children, and
lets them pull down her thick hair into a
curtain over her face, and ruffle even her
clean gown with their tiny hands: but the
emancipated woman holds baby-playing a
degradation, and resigns it to servants and
governesses.

Give us the loving, quiet wife, the good
mother, the sweet, unselfish sister; give us
women beautiful and womanly, and we will
dispense with their twelve years' service on
board a brig, or two or three years' close
attendance in a dissecting-room. Give us
gentlewomen, who believe in milliners, and
know the art of needlework; who can sew on
buttons and make baby-clothes; who, while
they use their heads, do not leave their hands
idle; who while claiming to be intellectual
beings, claim also to be natural and loving
beings—nay, even obedient and self-sacrificing
beings, two virtues of the Old World which our
Transatlantic Utopians count as no virtues at
all. Oh, Transatlantic Utopians! Leave
nature's loveliest work alone! Let women
have their rights, in Heaven's name, but do
not thrust them into places which they cannot
fill, and give them functions they cannot
perform—except to their own disadvantage,
and the darkening of the brightest side of
this world. Reflect (if ye ever do reflect)
on the destiny of woman, which nature has
graven on her soul and body; a wife, a
mother, a help-meet and a friend; but not by
mind or by person ever meant to be an inferior
man, doing his work badly while neglecting
her own. The shadow of man darkens the
path of woman, and while walking by his
side, she yet walks not in the same light with
him. Her home is in the shade, and her
duties are still and noiseless; his is in the
broad daylight, and his works are stormy and
tumultuous; but the one is the complement
of the other, and while he labours for her she
watches for him, and energy and love leave
nothing incomplete in their lives. Rest in
the shade, dear woman! Find your happiness
in love, in quiet, in home activity and in