realities and forces? Try your own life
by this; remember that mere external is falsehood and death. The
letter killeth. Give up all that is only of the appearance--or
even chiefly so, in conscious delight and motive--in person,
surrounding pursuit. Let your self-presentation, your home-making
and adorning, your social effort and interest, your occupation
and use of talent, all shape and issue for the things that are
essentially and integrally good, and that the world needs to have
prevail. Until you can do this, and induce such doing, it is of
little use to clamor for mere outward right, or to contend that it
would be rightly applied.

Work as you will, and widely as you can, for schools, in
associations, in everything whose end is to teach, enlighten,
enlarge women, and so the world. Help and protect the industries
of women; but keep those industries within the guiding law of
woman-life. Do not throw down barriers that take down safeguards
with them; that make threatening breaches in the very social
structure. If women must serve in shops, demand and care for it
that it shall be in a less mixed, a more shielded way than now.
The great caravansaries of trade are perilous by their throng,
publicity, and weariness. There used to be women's shops; choice
places, where a woman's care and taste had ruled before the
counters were spread; where women could quietly purchase things
that were sure to be beautiful or of good service; there were not
the tumult and ransacking that kill both shop-girl and shopper
now.

This is one instance, and but one, of the rescuing that ought
to be attempted. There ought at least to be distinct women's
departments, presided over by women of good, motherly tone and
character, in the places of business which women so frequent, and
where the thoughtful are aware of much that makes them tremble.
And surely a great many of the girls and women who choose
shop-work, because they like its excitement, ought rather to be in
homes, rendering womanly service, and preparing to serve in homes
of their own--leaving their present places to young men who might
perhaps begin so to earn the homes to offer them. Will not this
apply all the way up, into the arts and the professions even?
There must needs be exceptional women perhaps; there are, and will
be, time