Show the sense of the tasks you set your little girls, but keep them busy.  Idleness and insubordination are two very dangerous faults, and very hard to cure when once established.  Girls should be attentive and industrious, but this is not enough by itself; they should early be accustomed to restraint.  This misfortune, if such it be, is inherent in their sex, and they will never escape from it, unless to endure more cruel sufferings.  All their life long, they will have to submit to the strictest and most enduring restraints, those of propriety.  They must be trained to bear the yoke from the first, so that they may not feel it, to master their own caprices and to submit themselves to the will of others.  If they were always eager to be at work, they should sometimes be compelled to do nothing.  Their childish faults, unchecked and unheeded, may easily lead to dissipation, frivolity, and inconstancy.  To guard against this, teach them above all things self-control.  Under our senseless conditions, the life of a good woman is a perpetual struggle against self; it is only fair that woman should bear her share of the ills she has brought upon man.

Beware lest your girls become weary of their tasks and infatuated with their amusements; this often happens under our ordinary methods of education, where, as Fenelon says, all the tedium is on one side and all the pleasure on the other.  If the rules already laid down are followed, the first of these dangers will be avoided, unless the child dislikes those about her.  A little girl who is fond of her mother or her friend will work by her side all day without getting tired; the chatter alone will make up for any loss of liberty.  But if her companion is distasteful to her, everything done under her direction will be distasteful too.  Children who take no delight in their mother’s company are not likely to turn out well; but to judge of their real feelings you must watch them and not trust to their words alone, for they are flatterers and deceitful and soon learn to conceal their thoughts.  Neither should they be told that they ought to love their mother.  Affection is not the result of duty, and in this respect constraint is out of place.  Continual intercourse, constant care, habit itself, all these will lead a child to love her mother, if the mother does nothing to deserve the child’s ill-will.  The very control she exercises over the child, if well directed, will increase rather than diminish the affection, for women being made for dependence, girls feel themselves made to obey.

Just because they have, or ought to have, little freedom, they are apt to indulge themselves too fully with regard to such freedom as they have; they carry everything to extremes, and they devote themselves to their games with an enthusiasm even greater than that of boys.  This is the second difficulty to which I referred.  This enthusiasm must be kept in check, for it is the source of several vices commonly found among women,