the material compulsions which controlled the world. How
could the Jews, for instance, elevate woman? They could not spare her
from the wool and the flax and the candle that goeth not out by night.
In Rome, when the bride first stepped across her threshold, they did
not ask her, Do you know the alphabet? they asked simply, Can you spin?
There was no higher epitaph than Queen Amalasontha's,--_Domum servavit,
lanam fecit_. In Boeotia, brides were conducted home in vehicles whose
wheels were burned at the door, in token that they were never to leave
the house again. Pythagoras instituted at Crotona an annual festival
for the distaff; Confucius, in China, did the same for the spindle; and
these celebrated not the freedom, but the serfdom, of woman.

And even into modern days this same tyrannical necessity has lingered.
"Go spin, you jades! go spin!" was the only answer vouchsafed by the
Earl of Pembroke to the twice-banished nuns of Wilton. And even now,
travellers agree that throughout civilized Europe, with the partial
exception of England and France, the profound absorption of the mass of
women in household labors renders their general elevation impossible.
But with us Americans, and in this age, when all these vast labors
are being more and more transferred to arms of brass and iron,--when
Rochester grinds the flour, and Lowell weaves the cloth, and the fire on
the hearth has gone into black retirement and mourning,--when the wiser
a virgin is, the less she has to do with oil in her lamp,--when the
needle has made its last dying speech and confession in the "Song of
the Shirt," and the sewing-machine has changed those doleful marches to
delightful measures,--how is it possible for the blindest to help seeing
that a new era is begun, and that the time has come for woman to learn
the alphabet?

Nobody asks for any abolition of domestic labor for women, any more than
of outdoor labor for men. Of course, most women will still continue to
be mainly occupied with the indoor care of their families, and most men
with their external support. All that is desirable for either sex is
such an economy of labor, in this respect, as shall leave some spare
time, to be appropriated in other directions. The argument against each
new emancipation of woman is precisely that always made against the
liberation of serfs and the enfranchisement of plebeians,--that the new
position will take them from their legitimate business. "How can he [or