POLITICAL EIGHTS AND DUTIES OF WOMEN. 93 



recuperation and supply. In the healthy normal society — such 

 as man establishes wherever he can — the true order seems to be 

 that " man must work and woman must weep " — unless a cheer- 

 ful temperament shall convert her weeping into a song, while 

 waiting on the weariness of her yoke-fellow with affection and 

 the ministry of a lighter service. 



How few men in all civilized countries are from youth to old 

 age exempt from the absorbing, imperious, ever-recurring neces- 

 sity of earning the daily sustenance of themselves, of their wives, 

 of the children they have dared to summon into a world bristling 

 with hard conditions — a responsibility that sobers so many lives, 

 and issues so often in insanity, suicide, or crime ! If a census- 

 taker should visit any day the homes of the well-to-do people of 

 this or any other Eastern or Western American city, how would 

 he be likely to find the sexes — of course, with the exceptions of idle 

 men and too hard-working women — respectively employed ? The 

 men rise in the morning — some it may be leisurely and late — 

 and go to their shops, their stores, their offices, their out-of-doors 

 employments, spending the whole day in absorbing labor, the 

 fruit of which tells directly upon the family income. If this 

 mode of life, which becomes habit and routine, is ever inter- 

 rupted, it is by some errand of business to Washington, to some 

 commercial city, to the West, and, for a favored few, a genuine 

 vacation of relaxation for two weeks at the mountains or the 

 seaside. The women, after the oversight of the female laborers 

 who perform the tasks of cook and chambermaid, and needle- 

 work largely of an ornamental kind, pass the day in reading 

 the magazines, the current novels, in the amateur practice of 

 music or some other fine art, and in making and receiving 

 social calls. 



The understanding that custom has established in New Eng- 

 land is, that when there are boys and girls in any well-condi- 

 tioned family, the boys shall pass directly from school into some 

 employment for wages, that shall occupy every working day of 

 their lives ; and that the girls shall be at liberty to cultivate their 

 tastes and enjoy the pleasures of refined society, and be main- 

 tained by the labor past, present, and future of their fathers, their 

 husbands, their brothers, or their sons. This is an arrangement 

 that the modern man, following his controlling sentiments, has 

 voluntarily made, and one that he insists shall be maintained. 

 Accident, calamity, very often incapacity or vice, make men fail 

 in the accomplishment of their generous purpose, and throw upon 

 women unnaturally and abnormally the sterner cares and toils 

 of earning the common livelihood. Men are defeated sometimes 

 in realizing the careers that seemed open to their ambition ; but 

 these are exceptional cases, and social laws and tendencies are not 



