our so unprofitable. In Boston, Massachusetts, a woman is paid
ninepence (sixpence English) for making a shirt.--In England, besides
these occupations, others are opening; and, what is of yet greater
consequence, the public mind is awakening to the necessity of enlarging
the sphere of female industry. Some of the inferior branches of the fine
arts have lately offered profitable employment to many women. The
commercial adversity to which the country has been exposed from time to
time, has been of service to the sex, by throwing hundreds and thousands
of them upon their own resources, and thus impelling them to urge claims
and show powers which are more respected every day.--In France this is
yet more conspicuously the case. There, women are shopkeepers,
merchants, professional accountants, editors of newspapers, and employed
in many other ways, unexampled elsewhere, but natural and respectable
enough on the spot.

Domestic morals are affected in two principal respects by these
differences. Where feminine occupations of a profitable nature are few,
and therefore overstocked, and therefore yielding a scanty maintenance
with difficulty, there is the strongest temptation to prefer luxury with
infamy to hardship with unrecognized honour. Hence arises much of the
corruption of cities,--less in the United States than in Europe, from
the prevalence of marriage,--but awful in extent everywhere. Where vice
is made to appear the interest of large classes of women, the observer
may be quite sure that domestic morals will be found impure. If he can
meet with any society where the objects of life are as various and as
freely open to women as to men, there he may be sure of finding the
greatest amount of domestic purity and peace; for, if women were not
helpless, men would find it far less easy to be vicious.

The other way in which domestic morals are affected by the scope which
is allowed to the powers of women, is through the views of marriage
which are induced. Marriage is debased by being considered the one
worldly object in life,--that on which maintenance, consequence, and
power depend. Where the husband marries for connexion, fortune, or an
heir to his estate, and the wife for an establishment, for consequence,
or influence, there is no foundation for high domestic morals and
lasting peace; and in a country where marriage is made the single aim of
all women, there is no security against the influence of some of these
motives e