Rochester grinds the flour and Lowell weaves
the cloth, and the fire on the hearth has gone into black retirement and
mourning; when the wiser a virgin is, the less she has to do with oil in
her lamp; when the needle has made its last dying speech and confession in
the "Song of the Shirt," and the sewing-machine has changed those doleful
marches to delightful measures,--how is it possible for the blindest to
help seeing that a new era is begun, and that the time has come for woman
to learn the alphabet?

Nobody asks for any abolition of domestic labor for women, any more than of
outdoor labor for men. Of course, most women will still continue to be
mainly occupied with the indoor care of their families, and most men with
their external support. All that is desirable for either sex is such an
economy of labor, in this respect, as shall leave some spare time to be
appropriated in other directions. The argument against each new
emancipation of woman is precisely that always made against the liberation
of serfs and the enfranchisement of plebeians,--that the new position will
take them from their legitimate business. "How can he [or she] get wisdom
that holdeth the plough [or the broom],--whose talk is of bullocks [or of
babies]?" Yet the American farmer has already emancipated himself from
these fancied incompatibilities; and so will the farmer's wife. In a nation
where there is no leisure class and no peasantry, this whole theory of
exclusion is an absurdity. We all have a little leisure, and we must all
make the most of it. If we will confine large interests and duties to those
who have nothing else to do, we must go back to monarchy at once. If
otherwise, then the alphabet, and its consequences, must be open to woman
as to man. Jean Paul says nobly, in his "Levana," that, "before and after
being a mother, a woman is a human being, and neither maternal nor conjugal
relation can supersede the human responsibility, but must become its means
and instrument." And it is good to read the manly speech, on this subject,
of John Quincy Adams, quoted at length in Quincy's life of him, in which,
after fully defending the political petitions of the women of Plymouth, he
declares that "the correct principle is that women are not only justified,
but exhibit the most exalted virtue, when they do depart from the domestic
circle, and enter on the concerns of their country, of humanity, and of
their God."

There are duties devolving on e