ed by jeremiads, nor by lectures to young women,
no, nor even by brilliant editorials. So long as women believe that
inglorious ease is better than work, so long as they are taught that
they are born to be the gentle dependents of a stronger being, so long
as courage and capacity are held to be "strong-minded," so long as the
range of employments for women is narrow, and the standard of wages
lower than men's, so long they will seek in marriage a home, a larger
liberty of action, an establishment, a servant who shall supply them
with money and insure them ease without effort of their own.

Men take the business opening which seems most congenial and most
profitable. Women do the same thing, and their choice naturally falls
upon marriage as altogether the most promising speculation of their very
small list. The remedy seems to be to give women as thorough mental
training as men receive, to make their training tend as directly to the
business of earning their bread and their pretty feminine adornments,
and for the same work to pay them the same wages. If it be objected that
fashionable women will not work, let it be answered that work itself
would be fashionable if it were held to be a dignity, and not a
drudgery, and that the really fine and thoughtful leaders of society
could easily establish the new order of things. In an aristocratic
country, where labor is the badge of caste, it would be difficult to
make it honorable. In a democracy like our own, it is the most
contemptible snobbishness which frowns on the honest earning of money.

The accusation of prodigal and senseless expenditure in dress must stand
unrefuted. Sums which would adorn our cities with pleasure-gardens, with
libraries, with galleries of art, are spent on perishable gauds that
have not even beauty to commend them. Charities might be founded, lives
be enriched with travel, all lands laid under contribution with the
money that every year flows into Stewart's drawers, and the strong-boxes
of fashionable dress-makers. But the jewelled prodigals who spend it are
not more selfish, perhaps, than we plain folks who carp.

Again, it is a mistake. They have the money. They mean to secure all the
pleasure that money can buy. They have that feminine sensuousness which
delights in color, and odor, and richness of fabric. Their sense of
beauty is untaught. A little lower in the scale of civilization they
would pierce their noses, and dye their finger-nails, and w