are being more and more transferred to arms of brass and iron,--when
Rochester grinds the flour, and Lowell weaves the cloth, and the fire on
the hearth has gone into black retirement and mourning,--when the wiser
a virgin is, the less she has to do with oil in her lamp,--when the
needle has made its last dying speech and confession in the "Song of
the Shirt," and the sewing-machine has changed those doleful marches to
delightful measures,--how is it possible for the blindest to help seeing
that a new era is begun, and that the time has come for woman to learn
the alphabet?

Nobody asks for any abolition of domestic labor for women, any more than
of outdoor labor for men. Of course, most women will still continue to
be mainly occupied with the indoor care of their families, and most men
with their external support. All that is desirable for either sex is
such an economy of labor, in this respect, as shall leave some spare
time, to be appropriated in other directions. The argument against each
new emancipation of woman is precisely that always made against the
liberation of serfs and the enfranchisement of plebeians,--that the new
position will take them from their legitimate business. "How can he [or
she] get wisdom that holdeth the plough, [or the broom,]--whose talk
is of bullocks [or of babies]?" Yet the American farmer has already
emancipated himself from these fancied incompatibilities, and so will
the farmer's wife. In a nation where there is no leisure-class and no
peasantry, this whole theory of exclusion is an absurdity. We all have a
little leisure, and we must all make the most of it. If we will confine
large interests and duties to those who have nothing else to do, we must
go back to monarchy at once; if otherwise, then the alphabet, and its
consequences, must be open to woman as to man. Jean Paul says nobly, in
his "Levana," that, "before and after being a mother, a woman is a human
being, and neither maternal nor conjugal relation can supersede the