This voluntary course is easily extended to include drawing, an art which is closely connected with taste in dress; but I would not have them taught landscape and still less figure painting.  Leaves, fruit, flowers, draperies, anything that will make an elegant trimming for the accessories of the toilet, and enable the girl to design her own embroidery if she cannot find a pattern to her taste; that will be quite enough.  Speaking generally, if it is desirable to restrict a man’s studies to what is useful, this is even more necessary for women, whose life, though less laborious, should be even more industrious and more uniformly employed in a variety of duties, so that one talent should not be encouraged at the expense of others.

Whatever may be said by the scornful, good sense belongs to both sexes alike.  Girls are usually more docile than boys, and they should be subjected to more authority, as I shall show later on, but that is no reason why they should be required to do things in which they can see neither rhyme nor reason.  The mother’s art consists in showing the use of everything they are set to do, and this is all the easier as the girl’s intelligence is more precocious than the boy’s.  This principle banishes, both for boys and girls, not only those pursuits which never lead to any appreciable results, not even increasing the charms of those who have pursued them, but also those studies whose utility is beyond the scholar’s present age and can only be appreciated in later years.  If I object to little boys being made to learn to read, still more do I object to it for little girls until they are able to see the use of reading; we generally think more of our own ideas than theirs in our attempts to convince them of the utility of this art.  After all, why should a little girl know how to read and write!  Has she a house to manage?  Most of them make a bad use of this fatal knowledge, and girls are so full of curiosity that few of them will fail to learn without compulsion.  Possibly cyphering should come first; there is nothing so obviously useful, nothing which needs so much practice or gives so much opportunity for error as reckoning.  If the little girl does not get the cherries for her lunch without an arithmetical exercise, she will soon learn to count.

I once knew a little girl who learnt to write before she could read, and she began to write with her needle.  To begin with, she would write nothing but O’s; she was always making O’s, large and small, of all kinds and one within another, but always drawn backwards.  Unluckily one day she caught a glimpse of herself in the glass while she was at this useful work, and thinking that the cramped attitude was not pretty, like another Minerva she flung away her pen and declined to make any more O’s.  Her brother was no fonder of writing, but what he disliked was the constraint, not the look of the thing.  She was induced to go on with her writing in this way.  The child was fastidious and vain; she could not bear her sisters to wear her clothes.  Her things had been marked, they declined to mark them any more, she must learn to mark them herself; there is no need to continue the story.