But if a young woman is qualified like Frances E. Willard to better the world by public life-work, or like Florence Nightingale or Jane Addams to relieve the suffering of thousands, then she should not confine herself to the limited sphere of one household.  I believe in the call of capacity for usefulness in both sexes.  There are men who are called to be cooks; they know the art of the caterer.  There are men fitted to be dressmakers; they know the colors that blend and the styles which give beauty to dress.  There are women who are fitted for science, literature and medicine.  Some of the best cooks we have are men; some of the best writers and speakers are women.  Abraham Lincoln never did more by his proclamation to free the slave, than did Harriet Beecher Stowe with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”  William E. Gladstone never did more to endear himself to the people of Ireland by his advocacy of the home-rule, than has Lady Henry Somerset endeared herself to the common people of the “United Kingdom,” by turning away from the wealth, nobility and aristocracy of England to devote her great heart, gifted brain and abundant means to the elevation of the masses, the reformation of the wayward, and the relief of the poor.

There is a fitness that must not be ignored.  Frances E. Willard would never have made a dressmaker.  It is said she did not know when her own dress fit, or whether becoming; she depended upon Anna Gordon to decide for her.  But by the music of her eloquence and the rhythm of her rhetoric, she could send the truth echoing through the hearts of her hearers like the strain of a sweet melody.  Worth, of Paris, France, would not have made an orator, but he could design a robe to please a princess and make a dress to fit “to the queen’s taste.”  Then let Worths make dresses, and Frances E. Willards charm the world by their eloquence.

Yonder is a boy.  His soul is full of music; his fingers are as much at home on the key-board of a piano as a mocking-bird in its own native orange grove.  His sister is a mathematician; she solves a problem in mathematics as easily as her brother plays a piece of music.  Because one is a boy and the other a girl, don’t make the girl teach music and the boy mathematics.  What God has joined together in fitness, let not false education put asunder.

Recently I read of a man whose father left him a large business.  Though an exemplary man he could not make ends meet in a business out of which his father had made a fortune.  The man worried himself into nervous prostration.  While he remained at home for rest, his wife took charge of the business and made of it a great success.  I say let that woman run the business and the man take care of his nerves.