Her education must fit her for a home and for home work.  Let a man learn that he married a toy, a plaything, a lay figure, useful only for the purposes of exhibiting his taste in jewelry and dress, who desires to be petted and fondled, to be caressed and flattered, but who is incapable of doing anything to contribute to his happiness at home or to his influence abroad, and he comes to feel that she is an encumbrance.  If he clings to the old love, and cherishes the old conviction, he learns to treat his wife as a plaything, and to forget her as a helpmeet.  He thinks of her as of a toy, which may be used or cast aside at pleasure.  She knows and feels the lack of his love.  If she becomes dissatisfied, and refuses to make the effort to become a helpful wife and a loving companion, or to be influenced by the law of charity; if she determines to seek happiness in obtaining the admiration of others, which once unwittingly came from her husband; then is she probably ruined, and becomes a “body of death” fastened to one who looks forward to the grave as a refuge and a release, or who finds in the society of other women that pleasure which is denied him at home.  Perhaps nothing is more disgusting than to see an empty brain hidden behind a pretty face, or an empty heart concealed beneath costly drapery.  A woman who is handsome and is illiterate, who is incapable of speaking entertainingly, is far more homely than a plain face in front of a well cultivated intellect; and a plain dressed woman, with a heart full of love, is to be preferred to a splendidly dressed form which is destitute of soul.  Jewels, laces, and silks are not a fit dress for a corpse, and yet a heartless woman is to a man who knows her as soulless as an inanimate body coffined for the tomb.  Having thus briefly considered the necessity of linking woman’s work and mission together, let us define her work, and consider what is her mission.

Woman has work to do.  Though idleness does not destroy her as it does a man, yet it does not become her.  Merely to display her charms for the admiration of others cannot be the destiny of one created with a woman’s hand and head, and endowed with woman’s soul.  From the nature of the case, her work should be womanly in its character; that which is within doors rather than without; which belongs to the ornamental rather than to the mechanical.  There is no sense in woman’s working in the field while man measures tapes or counts thimbles, or in his doing other in-door work for which woman’s light touch renders her better qualified.  When we look at women who have become coarse in the expression of their features, and ungainly in form and movement, through the weight of their daily toil, we see the folly of those who would make the woman the equal, or the rival, instead of the helpmeet of man; and feel indignation that, since many of our women must earn their own livelihood, we have not a more natural division of labor, which would assign to man the heavier, and to woman the lighter