Women of suitable social and moral character might be trained, in connection with school studies,
to be superior seamstresses and mantua-makers, and thus be enabled to gain liberal wages.
If young ladies knew how much usefulness and comfort may be connected with this domestic art, they would seek it with more interest than any school study. The scarcity of well-trained mantua-makers in all parts of the land has made my early training in this art a great blessing to me and to many others whom I have been thus enabled to aid and to teach; and there is no branch of school training that can be made so directly available in promoting economy, comfort, and usefulness.
Women trained to fit young boys for college, in private families or in small neighborhood schools, would command very high remuneration in many quarters. Every young girl whose means will allow it ought to be prepared for this duty.
Pupils who have a decided talent for either music, drawing, or other fine arts, might have a special training for one of these professions; while those without any such tastes or aptitudes should be dissuaded from wasting time, labor, and money,
as is so absurdly and widely practiced, in learning to play the piano and acquiring other accomplishments never pursued in after-life. Nine tenths of young girls thus instructed lose all they learn in a very short period.
Some pupils have fine voices and a talent and taste for elocution, and such might be trained for teachers of this art or for public readings.
Some pupils have talents that prepare them to excel in authorship, and to such an appropriate and more extensive literary culture could be afforded.
The art of book-keeping and of quick and legible penmanship insures remunerative employment; and many other specialties might be enumerated in which, during school-days, a woman might be trained to a self-supporting profession. And every woman should be trained for all the duties that may in future life be demanded as wife, mother, nurse, and school-teacher, if not in the ordinary school, in a separate professional school.
When institutions are endowed to train women for all departments connected with the family state, domestic labor, now so shunned and