ht and feeling expressed,
that the boy is a more welcome comer into the family circle than the
girl, and that the woman is to have a hard fate in life. And if the
popular idea of woman be true, is it not a great calamity to be born a
girl? "If man must work, and woman must weep," who would not choose the
former lot? It is a very common thing to hear women wish most earnestly
from their earliest to their latest hour of life, that they had been
born men. It is very rarely that the youngest boy wishes to be a girl,
or that men covet the vaunted privileges of womanhood.

Margaret Fuller alludes feelingly to this prevailing sentiment in her
noble _Essay on Woman_, and quotes Southey the despairing cry of the
Paraguay Woman, "lamenting that her mother did not kill her the hour she
was born--her mother, who knew what the life of a woman must be."

And yet, it seems to me, any woman is entirely unfit to educate her
daughter who has not so sifted her life experience, so learned the
meaning of her creation, so separated the accidents and follies of
to-day from the divine purpose, as to read clearly the meaning of life,
and to accept for her daughter, as for herself, the great fact of her
womanhood; not with submission merely, but with a joyful recognition of
its wonderful possibilities and its supreme glories.

That this is possible to achieve, I might bring the testimony of women
speaking from the midst of suffering and anguish, and yet rejoicing in
the spiritual ideal of womanhood. Mrs. Eliza Farnham has done great
service by her eloquent vindication of the claims of womanhood, which
she bases on very noble spiritual truths. But too often the high
estimate of woman is placed on purely aesthetic and sentimental grounds,
and does not satisfy the demands either of mind or heart in the hour of
trial, or the practical common sense applied to daily life. It hardly
strengthens a woman, to be told that women are more angelic by nature,
more amiable, more religious, and more holy than men, when she is
suffering from excessive nervous irritability, from neglected solitude,
from want of employment suited to her feeble powers, or from the unused
energies of mind and body which are devouring her day by day--to be
called an angel, when she is only a drudge, is not consoling.

The work must be begun early in life, and the mind of the girl must be
braced by a recognition of natural law to the acceptance of all the
conditions of her nature.