it so very much; but it bears hard on us poor women. Life here in
America is perfect slavery to women,--a perfect dead grind. You see
there's no career at all for a married woman in this country, as there
is in France. Marriage there opens a brilliant prospect before a girl:
it introduces her to the world; it gives her wings. In America, it
is clipping her wings, chaining her down, shutting her up,--no more
gayety, no more admiration; nothing but cradles and cribs, and bibs
and tuckers, little narrowing, wearing, domestic cares, hard, vulgar
domestic slaveries: and so our women lose their bloom and health and
freshness, and are moped to death."

"I can't see the thing in that light, Mrs. Follingsbee," said old Mrs.
Ferguson. "I don't understand this modern talk. I am sure, for one, I
can say I have had all the career I wanted ever since I married. You
know, dear, when one begins to have children, one's heart goes into
them: we find nothing hard that we do for the dear little things. I've
heard that the Parisian ladies never nurse their own babies. From my
very heart, I pity them."

"Oh, my dear madam!" said Mrs. Follingsbee, "why insist upon it that a
cultivated, intelligent woman shall waste some of the most beautiful
years of her life in a mere animal function, that, after all, any
healthy peasant can perform better than she? The French are a
philosophical nation; and, in Paris, you see, this thing is all
systematic: it's altogether better for the child. It's taken to the
country, and put to nurse with a good strong woman, who makes that her
only business. She just lives to be a good animal, you see, and so is
a better one than a more intellectual being can be; thus she gives the
child a strong constitution, which is the main thing."

"Yes," said Miss Letitia; "I was told, when in Paris, that this system
is universal. The dressmaker, who works at so much a day, sends her
child out to nurse as certainly as the woman of rank and fashion.
There are no babies, as a rule, in French households."

"And you see how good this is for the mother," said Mrs. Follingsbee.
"The first year or two of a child's life it is nothing but a little
animal; and one person can do for it about as well as another: and all
this time, while it is growing physically, the mother has for art, for
self-cultivation, for society, and for literature. Of course she keeps
her eye on her child, and visits it often enough to know that all goes
right wi