instance, elevate woman? They could not spare her from the wool and the
flax, and the candle that goeth not out by night. In Rome, when the bride
first stepped across her threshold, they did not ask her, Do you know the
alphabet? they asked simply, Can you spin? There was no higher epitaph than
Queen Amalasontha's,--_Domum servavit, lanam fecit_. In Boeotia, brides
were conducted home in vehicles whose wheels were burned at the door, in
token that they were never to leave the house again. Pythagoras instituted
at Crotona an annual festival for the distaff; Confucius, in China, did the
same for the spindle; and these celebrated not the freedom, but the
serfdom, of woman.

And even into modern days this same tyrannical necessity has lingered. "Go
spin, you jades! go spin!" was the only answer vouchsafed by the Earl of
Pembroke to the twice-banished nuns of Wilton. Even now, travellers agree
that throughout civilized Europe, with the partial exception of England and
France, the profound absorption of the mass of women in household labors
renders their general elevation impossible. But with us Americans, and in
this age, when all these vast labors 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