can only give him an order for a single
"Light of the World."

One field of art, indeed, woman claims for her own. Man may build
churches as long as he leaves woman to decorate them. A crowning
demonstration of her aesthetic faculties meet us on every festival in
wreath and text and monogram, in exquisitely moulded pillars turned into
grotesque corkscrews, in tracery broken by strips of greenery, in paper
flowers and every variety of gilt gingerbread. But it may be questioned
whether art is the sole aim of the ecclesiastical picnic out of which
decorations spring. The chatty groups dotted over the aisle, the
constant appeals to the curate, the dainty little screams and giggles as
the ladder shakes beneath those artistic feet, the criticism of cousins
who have looked in quite accidentally for a peep, the half-consecrated
flirtations in the vestry, ally art even here to those practical
purposes which aesthetic woman never forgets. Were she, indeed, once to
forget them, she might become a Dr. Mary Walker; she might even become a
George Sand. In other words, she might find herself an artist, loving
and studying art for its own sake, solitary, despised, eccentric, and
blue. From such a destiny aesthetic woman turns scornfully away.

WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK?

This is a question which one half the world is asking the other half,
with very wild answers as the result. Woman's work seems to be in these
days everything that it was not in times past, and nothing that it was.
Professions are undertaken and careers invaded which were formerly held
sacred to men, while things are left undone which, for all the
generations that the world has lasted, have been naturally and
instinctively assigned to women to do. From the savage squaw gathering
fuel or drawing water for the wigwam, to the lady giving up the keys to
her housekeeper, housekeeping has been considered one of the primary
functions of women. The man to provide, the woman to dispense; the man
to do the rough initial work of bread-winning, whether as a half-naked
barbarian hunting live meat, or as a city clerk painfully scoring lines
of rugged figures, the woman to cook the meat when got, and to lay out
to the best advantage for the family the quarter's salary gained by
casting up ledgers, and writing advices and bills of lading.

Take human society in any phase we like, we must come down to these
radical conditions; and any system which ignores this division of labor,