this class have very little to do except to give birth to their
children, and go through the established routine of dinners and calls.
If there is any complaint respecting the work they have to do, it is of
the deficit, and the inferior health of the women between their
school-days and their wifehood is to be accounted for by the want of
occupation and independence. They have no more to do, and no more chance
to exercise their wills, than during the first six years of their
lives.

After the early years of marriage the health almost uniformly improves,
and by the time they are forty or forty-five, they have usually attained
a ripe perfection of health, which gives them a physical superiority
over the men for the remaining twenty-five or thirty-five years of their
lives, and also over the women who have remained unmarried.

The sentiments that pervade, and the circumstances that control our
life, and the habits they engender, are very different. It is not
possible for us to have habits whose regularity shall so nearly convert
them into instincts as is the case with the English. We have to make our
lives out of the conditions about us, and these conditions change year
by year. The opportunities for acquiring wealth and social distinction
are so great that they stimulate us to great exertion.

Our schools give all classes an opportunity for education, and by
associating the poorer classes with the wealthier, implant in the
former, tastes for the life of the latter, and a keen ambition to attain
it, and this imposes upon the latter the necessity of struggling to
maintain their position. All our men are over-active; our girls are
educated along with the boys, and they not only acquire equal mental
power, but common intellectual tastes. Men and women are able to be, and
are, the companions of each other.

Our girls have a longing for an active life not felt by the girls in any
other country. Wives share the hopes, fears, and anxieties of their
husbands. They are eager to gain wealth and friends as a means to
improve their social position. They economize in the family expenditure;
they employ few or no servants, and do plain sewing, dressmaking, and
millinery. Education and a varied experience gives our women a
"faculty" for doing anything, and there is no national sentiment in the
matter of either health or respectability to keep then from doing
everything. As fast as the daughters grow up, they are drawn into this
cease