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 she] get wisdom that holdeth the plough, [or the broom,]—­whose talk is of bullocks [or of babies]?” Yet the American farmer has already emancipated himself from these fancied incompatibilities, and so will the farmer’s wife.  In a nation where there is no leisure-class and no peasantry, this whole theory of exclusion is an absurdity.  We all have a little leisure, and we must all make the most of it.  If we will confine large interests and duties to those who have nothing else to do, we must go back to monarchy at once; if otherwise, then the alphabet, and its consequences, must be open to woman as to man.  Jean Paul says nobly, in his “Levana,” that, “before and after being a mother, a woman is a human being,