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Sanitary and Social Lectures, etc by Charles Kingsley
page 61 of 220 (27%)
Capital, Profit, Price, Value, Labour, Wages, and of the relation
between those two last. In a word, they must know a little
political economy. Nay, I sometimes think that the mistress of
every household might find, not only thrift of money, but thrift
of brain; freedom from mistakes, anxieties, worries of many kinds,
all of which eat out the health as well as the heart, by a little
sound knowledge of the principles of political economy.

When we consider that every mistress of a household is continually
buying, if not selling; that she is continually hiring and
employing labour in the form of servants; and very often, into the
bargain, keeping her husband's accounts: I cannot but think that
her hard-worked brain might be clearer, and her hard-tried desire
to do her duty by every subject in her little kingdom, might be
more easily satisfied, had she read something of what Mr. John
Stuart Mill has written, especially on the duties of employer and
employed. A capitalist, a commercialist, an employer of labour,
and an accountant--every mistress of a household is all these,
whether she likes it or not; and it would be surely well for her,
in so very complicated a state of society as this, not to trust
merely to that mother-wit, that intuitive sagacity and innate
power of ruling her fellow-creatures, which carries women so nobly
through their work in simpler and less civilised societies.

And here I stop to answer those who may say--as I have heard it
said--That a woman's intellect is not fit for business; that when
a woman takes to business, she is apt to do it ill, and
unpleasantly likewise, to be more suspicious, more irritable, more
grasping, more unreasonable, than regular men of business would
be: that--as I have heard it put--"a woman does not fight fair."
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