ave seen it among the factory operatives at the
North, and among the negro women in the cotton-fields at the South: in both
cases it is a tragedy, and the bodies and brains of mother and children
alike suffer. That the mother should bear and tend and nurture, while the
father supports and protects,--this is the true division.

Does this bear in any way upon suffrage? Not at all. The mother can inform
herself upon public questions in the intervals of her cares, as the father
among his; and the baby in the cradle is a perpetual appeal to her, as to
him, that the institutions under which that baby dwells may be kept pure.
One of the most devoted young mothers I ever knew--the younger sister of
Margaret Fuller Ossoli--made it a rule, no matter how much her children
absorbed her, to read books or newspapers for an hour every day; in order,
she said, that she should be more to them than a mere source of physical
nurture, and that her mind should be kept fresh and alive for them. But to
demand in addition that such a mother should earn money for them is to ask
too much; and there is many a tombstone in New England, which, if it told
the truth, would tell what comes of such an effort.

THOROUGH

"The hopeless defect of women in all practical matters," said a shrewd
merchant the other day, "is that it is impossible to make them thorough."
It was a shallow remark, and so I told him. Women are thorough in the
things which they have been expected to regard as their sphere,--in their
housekeeping and their dress and their social observances. There is nothing
more thorough on earth than the way housework is done in a genuine New
England household. There is an exquisite thoroughness in the way a
milliner's or a dressmaker's work is done,--a work such as clumsy man
cannot rival, and can hardly estimate. No general plans his campaigns or
marshals his armies better than some women of society--the late Mrs. Paran
Stevens, for instance--manage the circles of which they are the centre. Day
and night, winter and summer, at city or watering-place, year in and year
out, such a woman keeps open house for her gay world. She has a perpetual
series of guests who must be fed luxuriously, and amused profusely; she
talks to them in three or four languages; at her entertainments she notes
who is present and who absent, as carefully as Napoleon watched his
soldiers; her interchange of cards, alone, is a thing as complex as the
army muster-roll