Woman was created to be a wife and a mother; that is her destiny. To
that destiny all her instincts point, and for it nature has specially
qualified her. Her proper sphere is home, and her proper function is the
care of the household, to manage a family, to take care of children, and
attend to their early training. For this she is endowed with patience,
endurance, passive courage, quick sensibilities, a sympathetic nature,
and great executive and administrative ability. She was born to be a
queen in her own household, and make home cheerful, bright, and happy.
There it is that she is really great, noble, almost divine.

Now the general complaint is that the greater part of our Public
School-girls are not fit to be good wives, mothers and housekeepers. As
wives, they forget what they owe to their husbands, are capricious and
vain, often light and frivolous, extravagant and foolish, bent on having
their own way, though ruinous to the family, and generally contriving,
by coaxings, blandishments, or poutings, to get it. They hold obedience
in horror, and seek only to govern their husbands and all around them.

As mothers, they not only neglect, but disdain, the retired and simple
domestic virtues, and scorn to be tied down to the modest but essential
duties--the drudgery, they call it--of mothers; they manage to be
relieved of household cares, especially of child-bearing, and of the
duty of bringing up children. They repress their maternal instincts, and
the horrible crime of infanticide before birth now becomes so fearfully
prevalent, that the American nation is actually threatened with
extinction. If they condescend to have one or two children, they set
them an ill example; for if children see that their mother, as a wife,
forgets to honor and obey her husband, and always wants to have her own
way with him, they soon lose all respect for her, and insist on having
their own way with her, and usually succeed.

As housekeepers they devote their time to pleasure or amusement, wasting
their life in luxurious ease, in reading sentimental or sensational
novels, or in following the caprices of fashion; thus they let the
household go to ruin, and the honest earnings of the husband becomes
speedily insufficient for the family expenses, and he is sorely tempted
to provide for them by rash speculation or by fraud, which, though it
may be carried on for a while without detection, is sure to end in
disgrace and ruin at last.

There