her mission, 1. At home.
Her mission is in the home. Her training must fit her for the home,
whether she serves as a wife or as a domestic. Her life is a success
when she makes home a pleasure and a joy to those to whom the home
properly belongs. It is for this reason that there is deep concern on
the part of many thoughtful minds because the drift of the times is
against educating women for the home. Of the women who are compelled
to earn their own subsistence many prefer the factory and the store to
the work in the family, and, as a result, there are large numbers of
young women who cannot make a loaf of bread or cook a meal, who would
not hesitate to become wives of working-men, who expect to find in
them a helpmeet in building a home like that which blessed their
childhood. The result is dissatisfaction and recrimination, leaving
the wife for the club, and turning from the joys of the home to the
revel of jovial companions.

The same is true of the class of young ladies who know something of
music, vocal and instrumental. They can dance. They have studied
drawing sufficiently to be able to sketch a few flowers and figures.
Perhaps they can speak French and translate German. They know in what
position to sit, and how to move gracefully. All very well these
things in their places, and fitted to increase the charm of manner
when the eyes are lighted up by the informing soul; not undeserving
notice either in their influence upon man, when they are accompanied
by something better, for, amid all the weighty cares of life, he
is sometimes in the mood when such things do please; but sadly
over-estimated when they are made the sole substance and end of a
woman's education. They might nearly all be done by a being without
a soul. They do nothing to draw out the noble qualities of her deep
womanly nature. They leave her altogether unfitted for her peculiar
mission of a wife and mother.

Now, there are times when a woman, despite her imperfect education,
acquires after marriage the knowledge which fits her for the duties
appertaining to wifehood. But where nature yields to such training,
the woman fails both in filling her sphere and in fulfilling her
mission, and falls beneath her true position as the helpmeet of man.
How bitter his disappointment, who, having been smitten by these
gewgaw attractions, and having put faith in the mother of the child
that with this outward attraction she had corresponding qualifications
to f