crifice is unappreciated,
where faithful and prudent industry is accepted as a labor of duty, and
not as a labor of love, where she is simply regarded as his
housekeeper, and not as his devoted helpmate, where his presence alone
is sufficient to cast gloom and fear over the entire household. Woman
was made to bless mankind, but also to be blessed in return; to make
society better for forming a part thereof, but also to receive some
recognition for her work.

Endurance is woman's prerogative. Suffering is her heirloom.
Disasters, which would crush the spirit of man, often turn her heart to
steel, and she performs deeds grand and heroic. Disheartened by
continuous neglect, she will make heroic efforts to throw her influence
all the more affectionately over her home. Wounded deeper and ever
deeper, she will toil on, hiding from the world the pangs of wounded
affection, "as the wounded dove will clasp its wings to its side and
cover and conceal the arrow that is preying on its vitals." But the
shafts of continuous neglect will pierce her heart at last--a husband's
continuous neglect extinguish, at last, the sacred flame upon the
domestic hearth. She, too, finds home irksome. She, too, learns to
find more pleasure abroad than in her home. She, too, thinks light of
liberties and indiscretions. The grown children learn to emulate their
parents' example, and seek their pleasures also abroad. The little
children are left to servants to finish the corruption begun by
parents. And so the home, the very spot designed by God to become the
chief school of human virtue, the seminary of social affections, the
keystone of the whole fabric of society, the germ-cell of civilization,
becomes a hotbed of corruption, and almost as often on account of a
husband's neglect and sins, as on account of a wife's ignorance or
frailties or failings. Our stock of advice to wives and mothers seems
inexhaustible. Almost every one of the stronger sex has his fling at
woman, and his remedy to offer, which, if immediately followed, will at
once eradicate unhappiness in marriage, decrease the number of
divorces, and lessen vice and crime in society.

Might not a little advice be also profitable to man? Is there not room
for improvement in the stronger sex as well as in the weaker? Reform
in the one sex will be of little benefit unless there is reform in the
other sex as well. Our husbands and our fathers, too, need reforming,
and that refo