A correspondent, whose style, by the way, is quaint enough to be printed with black-letter, thus favors us with his protest against certain merely 'bread-and-butter' notions of Woman:
I object to the current newspaper 'Advice for Girls.' A woman may know how to cook, sweep, sew, tend babies; but is this what a young man—Spanish, virgen—most looks, or cares for, or thinks of, when he seeks life-companionship—a Somebody to get him dinner, tidy his room, fasten his shirt-buttons, and bear him children? 'Tis not for spread tables, kept house, mended clothes, nor pleasure, that the young man's soul thirsts. For sympathy, for love, for the object of his manliness, for its complement, for his wife—and not a servant, nor a mistress.
He does indeed holily choose the mother of their little ones, but newspaper-notice hints nothing of that; it teaches bodily, not spiritually, and simply trains up a female able to bear offspring of healthy flesh.
However, the husband requires a lover fit to join with him in spirit also, for the total benefit of posterity.
The education which best suits a woman, then, is it carnal or soulful? to make a kitchen-drudge or a soft-eyed maiden? a prudent housewife or a thoughtful heartsweet? 'a special breeder' (Pope) or a trusted bosomer? Cattle and machinery are for this labor-saving. The true end of woman is feminity. Therefore, if she is any brighter and heartsomer for playing in the fields, any more pensive and sober for meditating there, who shall deny her God's free air and sunshine?
If she is more delicate and softer to handle the light embroidery, or plan the curious patchwork, who shall restrict her busy ingenuity to garments of wear—coarse jackets, trowsers, shirts?
If she is more earnest and devoted for loving and suffering through a romance, who shall hinder from reading and writing, or limit the one to Pilgrim's Progress, the other to a letter, or confine her pity to street-beggars, for whom alms-giving is act of charity not more than tears are for imagined woes?
If she is more winning and tender by dwelling with old friendships and memorable passages of trial or happiness, who shall fetter her thoughts to the selfish indifference of the present, or the dull routine of daily toil called duty?
If she is gentler and meeker, purer and loftier, Christlier, for contemplating God and the angels, who can bind her conscience to worship her husband or 'God in him'? (Milton.)