themselves designed by God to be or to do. They grumble
at having children, and at the toil and anxiety which a family entails;
they think themselves degraded to the level of servants if they have to
do any practical housework whatever; they assert their equality with
man, and express their envy of his life, yet show themselves incapable
of learning the first lesson set to men, that of doing what they do not
like to do. What, then, do they want? What do they hold themselves made
for?

Certainly some of the more benevolent sort carry their energies out of
doors, and leave such prosaic matters as savory dinners and fast
shirt-buttons for committees and charities, where they get excitement
and _kudos_ together. Others give themselves up to what they call
keeping up society, which means being more at home in every person's
house than their own; and some do a little weak art, and others a little
feeble literature; but there are very few indeed who honestly buckle to
the natural duties of their position, and who bear with the tedium of
home work as men bear with the tedium of office work. The little
royalty of home is the last place where a woman cares to shine, and the
most uninteresting of all the domains she seeks to govern. Fancy a
high-souled creature, capable of aesthetics, giving her mind to soup or
the right proportion of chutnee for the curry! Fancy, too, a brilliant
creature foregoing an evening's conversational glory abroad for the sake
of a prosaic husband's more prosaic dinner! He comes home tired from
work, and desperately in need of a good dinner as a restorative; but the
plain cook gives him cold meat and pickles, or an abomination which she
calls hash, and the brilliant creature, full of mind, thinks the desire
for anything else rank sensuality.

It seems a little hard, certainly, on the unhappy fellow who works at
the mill for such a return; but women believe that men are made only to
work at the mill that they may receive the grist accruing, and be kept
in idleness and uselessness all their lives. They have no idea of
lightening the labor of that mill-round by doing their own natural work
cheerfully and diligently. They will do everything but what they ought
to do; they will make themselves doctors, committee-women, printers,
what not, but they won't learn cooking, and they won't keep their own
houses. There never was a time when women were less the helpmates of men
than they are at present; when there was