be a wife, habitually deprive them of the pecuniary and
educational advantages of men, exclude them absolutely from very many of
the employments in which they might earn a subsistence, encumber their
course in others by a heartless ridicule or by a steady disapprobation,
and consign, in consequence, many thousands to the most extreme and
agonizing poverty, and perhaps a still larger number to the paths of
vice.

"At the same time a momentous revolution, the effects of which can as
yet be but imperfectly descried, has taken place in the chief spheres of
female industry that remain. The progress of machinery has destroyed its
domestic character. The distaff has fallen from the hand. The needle is
being rapidly superseded, and the work which, from the days of Homer to
the present century, was accomplished in the centre of the family, has
been transferred to the crowded manufactory."

The necessity of those reforms which many noble women are now urging
upon public attention is clearly set forth in eloquent facts like these.

PAGE 198.

"_Is against nature._"

A curious instance of the temerity with which flagrant errors are
pressed into the service of criticism is presented in some remarks in
the _N. Y. Nation_. "There is probably," it says, "no incident of
woman's condition which is more clearly natural than her passivity in
all that relates to marriage. In waiting to be wooed, she not only
complies with one of the conventional proprieties, but obeys what
appears to be a law of sex, _not amongst human beings only, but among
all animals_."

These remarks have been adopted by many American journalists, and have
been accepted perhaps by many readers as settling the whole question
with scientific accuracy and force, so far as analogies drawn from the
habits of the lower animals can settle it. But if the critic, while
buttering his daily bread or putting cream into his daily coffee, had
acquainted himself with the habits of the useful animal to which he is
indebted, he would never have been guilty of so prodigious a blunder. So
far from passively "waiting to be wooed," the cow, when the sexual
impulse is awakened, will disturb the whole neighborhood by her
bellowings. Should the critic reply that this is because she is kept in
an unnatural state of restraint, such reply would add only additional
force to the contradiction of the argument which he would offer.

Other examples in abundance, in confutation of his assump