This influence of the social transition bears upon all women:  there is another which especially touches wives and mothers.  In European countries, the aim at anything like gentility implies keeping one or more domestics to perform house-hold labors; but in our Free States every family aims at gentility, while not one in five keeps a domestic.  The aim is not a foolish one, though follies may accompany it,—­for the average ambition of our people includes a certain amount of refined cultivation;—­it is only that the process is exhausting.  Every woman must have a best-parlor with hair-cloth furniture and a photograph—­book; she must have a piano, or some cheaper substitute; her little girls must have embroidered skirts and much mathematical knowledge; her husband must have two or even three hot meals every day of his life; and yet her house must be in perfect order early in the afternoon, and she prepared to go out and pay calls, with a black silk dress and a card-case.  In the evening she will go to a concert or a lecture, and then, at the end of all, she will very possibly sit up after midnight with her sewing-machine, doing extra shop-work to pay for little Ella’s music-lessons.  All this every “capable” New-England woman will do, or die.  She does it, and dies; and then we are astonished that her vital energy gives out sooner than that of an Irishwoman in a shanty, with no ambition on earth but to supply her young Patricks with adequate potatoes.

Now it is useless to attempt to set back the great social flood.  The New-England housekeeper will never be killed by idleness, at any rate; and if she is exposed to the opposite danger, we must fit her for it, that is all.  There is reason to be hopeful; the human race as a whole is tending upward, even physically, and if we cannot make our girls healthy quite yet, we shall learn to do it by-and-by.  Meanwhile we must hold hard to the conviction, that not merely decent health, but even a high physical training, is a thing thoroughly practicable for both sexes.  If a young girl can tire out her partner in the dance, if a delicate wife can carry her baby twice as long as her athletic husband, (for certainly there is nothing in the gymnasium more amazing than the mother’s left arm,) then it is evident that the female frame contains muscular power, or its equivalent, though it may take music or maternity to bring it out.  But other inducements have proved sufficient, and the results do not admit of question.  The Oriental bayaderes, for instance, are trained from childhood as gymnasts:  they carry heavy jars on their heads, to improve strength, gait, and figure; they fly kites, to acquire “statuesque attitudes and graceful surprises”; they must learn to lay the back of the hand flat against the wrist, to partially bend the arm in both directions at the elbow, and, inclining the whole person backward from the waist, to sweep the floor with the hair.  So, among ourselves, the great athletic resources of the female frame are vindicated by every equestrian goddess of the circus, every pet of the ballet.  Those airy nymphs have been educated for their vocation by an amount of physical fatigue which their dandy admirers may well prefer to contemplate through the safe remoteness of an opera-glass.