Woman's Profession as Mother and Educator, with Views in Opposition to Woman Suffrage

by Catharine Esther Beecher

But every opening for a school-teacher has scores, and sometimes hundreds, of applicants, while often the protracted toils in unventilated and crowded school rooms destroy health. To keep boarders demands capital to start, and an experience and training in household management and economy rarely taught to the daughters of wealth. In this country housework is dishonorable, and rich men make no attempts to train their daughters to any other business that would be a resort in poverty.

Few can realize the perils which threaten our country from the present condition of women. The grand instrumentality, not only for perpetuating our race, but for its training to eternal blessedness, is the family state, and in this woman is the chief minister. As the general rule, man is the laborer out of the home, to provide for its support, while woman is the daily minister to train its inmates. But there are now many fatal influences that combine to unfit her for these sacred duties. Not the least of these is the decay of female health, engendering irritable nerves in both mother and offspring, and thus greatly increasing the difficulties of physical and still more of moral training.

The factory girls, and many also in shops and stores, must stand eight and ten hours a day, often in a poisonous

atmosphere, causing decay of constitution, and forbidding healthful offspring. The sewing-machine lessens the wages of needlewomen, while employers testify that those who use it for steady work become hopelessly diseased, and cannot rear healthy children. In the more wealthy circles, the murderous fashions of dress make terrible havoc with the health of young girls, while impure air, unhealthful food and condiments, lack of exercise, and over-stimulation of brain and nerves, are completing the ruin of health and family hopes.

The state of domestic service is another element that is undermining the family state. Disgraced by the stigma of our late slavery, and by the influx into our kitchens of ignorant and uncleanly foreigners, American women forsake home circles for the unhealthful shops and mills.

Then the thriftless young housekeepers from boarding-school life have no ability either to teach or to control their incompetent assistants, while ceaseless "worries" multiply in parlor, nursery, and kitchen. The husband is discouraged by the waste and extravagance, and wearied with endless complaints, and home becomes any thing but the harbor of comfort and peace.

Add to all this, the now common practice which destroys maternal health and unborn offspring—the loose teachings of free love—the unfortunate influence of spiritualism, so called—the fascinations of the demi-monde for the rich, and of lower haunts for the rest, with the poverty of

thousands of women who but for desperate temptations would be pure, and the extent of the malign influences undermining the family state—that chief hope of our race—is appalling.

Woman, in the Protestant world, is educated only for marriage, hoping to have some one to work for her support, and, when this is not gained, little else is provided.

The Roman Catholic Church, while it honored the institution of marriage as a sacrament, and upheld its sanctity, yet taught that woman had a still higher ministry; and for this, large endowments, comfortable positions, and honorable distinction, were provided. The women who devoted their time and wealth and labors to orphans, to the sick, and to the poor, were honored above married women as saints, who not only laid up treasures in heaven for themselves, but also a stock of merits to supply the deficiencies of others. The idea of self-sacrifice and self-denial in that church was so honored as to run into mischievous extremes, so that rich establishments of celibates of both sexes multiplied all over Christendom till they became burdens and pests.