A girl may enjoy
biography, history, travels, and science and yet not have a taste for
the best reading, that is, for true literature. She needs essays,
novels, and especially poetry. She needs to be able to decide what is
best and what is not; she must learn to respond to beauty and truth, and
to repel what is false and ugly. This is the practical education,
because it bears upon both happiness and character. It is practical as
it makes the most of life not only for the woman herself, but for those
about her. Bear in mind always that we have supposed her to have a high
character and a perfectly trained will. Such reading will develop her
judgment as to what is right.

But some women like to read too well. Their will is not perfectly
trained, and they would rather think out a domestic problem than act it
out. The education of books alone is so one-sided that we cannot
consider it practical; it must be supplemented by cooking and sewing.

At our present stage of progress cooking is more important than sewing.
Sewing can be more easily put out of the house than cooking; and in any
emergency sewing may be neglected from week to week without serious
consequences, while cooking must go on every day. Moreover, cooking is
by far the more healthful occupation, and one of the aims of a practical
education is to make healthy women.

I do not glorify cooking. I do not think a good cook is the highest type
of woman. I do not even think it is the duty of every woman to cook. But
cooking is certainly practical, ninety-nine women in a hundred have
occasion some time in their lives for this accomplishment, and if they
are married it is nearly indispensable for them to have a knowledge of
it for the comfort of their families.

Few women are born to be cooks, but most intelligent women can learn to
cook. It saves immense labor, however, if as girls they learn the art.
It is singular that so many who fancy they want to be chemists hate the
idea of going into their own kitchens to work. It is possibly because
they cannot choose their own hours for cooking. Cooking certainly
develops the mind as much as chemical experiments, and at the end of the
process you have something of direct service to mankind, which may or
may not be the case with work done in the laboratory.

Cooking, sewing, and housekeeping are essential for any woman, married
or unmarried, who wishes to make a home, and a home is the practical
goal of the majority of women