Would it be so invariably easy a thing for a home-keeper to do, at the one opportunity of the year, or the four years, on a particular day, her duty in this matter?  It is easy to say that it takes no more time than a hundred other things that some do; but setting apart all the argument that previous time and strength must have been spent in properly qualifying, how many of the hundred other things are done now without interruption, postponement, hindrance, through domestic contingencies? or are there a hundred other things done when the home contingencies are really met by a woman?  A woman’s life is not like a man’s.  That a man’s life may be—­that he may transact his out-door business; keep his hours and appointments; may cast his vote on election day; may represent wife and children in all wherein the community cares for, or might injure him and them—­the woman, some woman, must be at the home post, that the home order may go on, from which he derives that command of time, and freedom from hindering necessities, which leave him to his work.  And so, as the old proverb says, while man’s work is from sun to sun—­made definite, a matter to which he can go forth, and from which he can come in—­a woman’s work, of keeping the place of the forthgoing and incoming, is never done, from the very nature and ceaseless importance of it.

Must she go to the polls, sick or well, baby or no baby, servant or no servant, strength or no strength, desire or no desire?  If 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