How natural to see woman waited on by man!  Sir Walter Raleigh was praised because he cast his cloak into the mud to save the foot of his Queen from being soiled.  As noble acts have been performed by many men, times without number.  The uprising of gentlemen in the cars when a tired woman enters with a child; the disposition to lighten her cares and sweeten her joys, is everywhere considered manly.

Education is essential for her.  She is the educator of the home, for she is its soul.  If one must be ignorant, let it be the man, and not the woman.  Many of our most intelligent men have had cultured mothers.  Very few sons ever grew to be learned whose mothers cared not for books.  This fact is appreciated, and leads us naturally to conclude that if woman lacks social respect it is her own fault.  If a woman prefers superficiality to thoroughness; music, drawing, and dress, to a knowledge of housework, an acquaintance with literature, and the endowments of common sense, simply because brainless men are disposed to seek out the effeminate and the frail in preference to the rugged and the well-endowed, then she must suffer the consequences.  If a young lady, compelled to toil for support, will prefer the factory or the store, with its hot air and depressing associations, to work in the home, because she hopes in the store or factory to secure the hand and heart of a husband sooner than elsewhere, she must suffer accordingly.  But if woman will unite in securing a reform in this direction,—­if the pure and the virtuous will say, Such a life as is offered me in the family is in harmony with my future well-being, and I will scorn the allurements elsewhere held out, and fit myself, by study, for companionship with the noble of the land, she will succeed.  If woman will respect herself, she will be respected.

It is not by clamoring for rights that have been conferred upon others; it is not by restless discontent, by partisan appeals, by stepping out of her God-given sphere, and by attempting to destroy the network of holy influences by which he ever has surrounded her; it is not by ridiculing marriage and casting scorn on motherhood, that she is to obtain the blessings she courts, but by tranquilly laboring under this heaven-imposed law of obedience.  Woman’s weakness is transmuted into strength when she opens her nature to the influences of love, and when she consecrates herself to the happiness of others.  Then it is she obtains a moral and spiritual power to which man is glad to do homage.  Ambition, pride, wilfulness, or any earthly passion, will distort her being.  She struggles all in vain against a divine appointment.  It is from the soul of meekness that the true strength of womanhood is derived; and it is because it has its root in such a soil that it has a growth so majestic, showering its blessing and fruits upon the world.