she have cook and housemaid they are to go also, and number her
two to one, anyway; probably on election day, which they would
make a holiday, they would--as at other crises, of birth,
sickness, death, house-cleaning, which should occur in no
first-class families--come down upon her with their appropriate
_coup d'etat_, and "leave;" making the State-stroke, in this
instance, of scoring three votes, two dropped and one lost, for
the irrepressible side.

How will it be when Norah, and Maggie, and Katie have not only
their mass and confession, their Fourth-of-July and Christmas,
their mission-weeks, their social engagements and family plans,
and their appointments with their dress-makers, to curtail your
claims upon their bargained time and service, but their share in
the primary meetings and caucuses, committees, and torch-light
processions, and mass meetings? For what shall prevent the
excitements, the pleasurings, the runnings hither and thither,
that men delight in from following in the train of politics and
parties with the common woman? Perhaps it may even be discovered,
to the still further detriment of our already painfully hampered
and perplexed domestic system, that the pursuit of fun, votes,
offices, is more remunerative, as well as gentlewomanly--as
Micawber might express it--than the cleansing of pots and pans,
the weekly wash, or the watching of the roast. Perhaps in that
enfranchised day there will be no Katies and Maggies' and the
Norahs will know their place no more. Then the enlightened
womanhood may have to begin at the foundation and glorify the
kitchen again. And good enough for her, in the wide as well as
primitive sense of the phrase, and a grand turn in the history
that repeats itself toward the old, forgotten, peaceful side of
the cycle it may be!

But the argument does not rest upon any such points as these. It
rests upon the inside nature of a woman's work; upon the need
there is to begin again to-day at the heart of things and make
that right; upon the evident fact that this can be done none too
soon or earnestly, if the community and the country are not to
keep on in the broad way to a threatened destruction; and upon the
certainty that it can never be done unless it is done by woman,
and with all of woman's might. Not by struggles for new and