that the sphere of women _is_ different from the sphere of men? Can it
be questioned that a class of studies pursued by women who are confined
for a considerable period of life to domestic duties,--like the care of
children, and the details of household economy, and attendance on the
sick, and ornamental art labors,--should not be different from those
pursued by men who undertake the learned professions, and the government
of the people, and the accumulation of wealth in the hard drudgeries of
banks and counting-houses and stores and commercial travelling? There is
no way to get round this question except by maintaining that men should
not be exempted from the cares and duties which for all recorded ages
have been assigned to women; and that women should enter upon the
equally settled sphere of man, and become lawyers, politicians,
clergymen, members of Congress and of State legislatures, sailors,
merchants, commercial travellers, bankers, railway conductors, and
steamship captains. I once knew the discontented wife of an eminent
painter, with a brilliant intellect, who insisted that her husband
should leave his studio and spend five hours a day in the drudgeries of
the nursery and kitchen to relieve her, and that she should spend the
five hours in her studio as an amateur,--that they thus might be on an
equality! The husband died in a mad-house, after dying for a year with a
broken heart and a crushed ambition. He was obliged to submit to his
wife's demand, or fight from morning to night and from night to morning;
and as he was a man of peace, he quietly yielded up his prerogative. Do
you admire the one who prevailed over him? She belonged to that class
who are called strong-minded; but she was perverted, as some noble minds
are, by atheistic and spiritualistic views, and thought to raise women
by lifting them out of the sphere which God has appointed.

If, then, there be distinct spheres, divinely appointed, for women and
for men, and an education should be given to fit them for rising in