of women
anti-domestic. It seems as if the world never could advance except
like ships under a head wind, tacking and going too far, now in
this direction and now in the opposite. Our common-school system
now rejects sewing from the education of girls, which very properly
used to occupy many hours daily in school a generation ago. The
daughters of laborers and artisans are put through algebra,
geometry, trigonometry, and the higher mathematics, to the entire
neglect of that learning which belongs distinctively to woman. A
girl cannot keep pace with her class if she gives any time to
domestic matters, and accordingly she is excused from them all
during the whole term of her education. The boy of a family, at an
early age, is put to a trade, or the labors of a farm; the father
becomes impatient of his support, and requires of him to care for
himself. Hence an interrupted education,--learning coming by
snatches in the winter months, or in the intervals of work. As the
result, the females in our country towns are commonly, in mental
culture, vastly in advance of the males of the same household; but
with this comes a physical delicacy, the result of an exclusive use
of the brain and a neglect of the muscular system, with great
inefficiency in practical domestic duties. The race of strong,
hardy, cheerful girls, that used to grow up in country places, and
made the bright, neat, New England kitchens of old times,--the
girls that could wash, iron, brew, bake, harness a horse and drive
him, no less than braid straw, embroider, draw, paint, and read
innumerable books,--this race of women, pride of olden time, is daily
lessening; and in their stead come the fragile, easily fatigued,
languid girls of a modern age, drilled in book-learning, ignorant
of common things. The great danger of all this, and of the evils
that come from it, is that society by and by will turn as blindly
against female intellectual culture as it now advocates it, and,
having worked disproportionately one way, will work disproportionately
in the opposite direction."

"The fact is," said my wife, "that domestic service is the great
problem of life here in America; the happiness of families, their
thrift, well-being, and comfort, are more affected by this than by any
one thing else. Our girls, as they have been brought up, cannot
perform the labor of their own families, as in those simpler,
old-fashioned days you tell of; and, what is worse, they have no
prac