Two Final Considerations.
At the close of these papers I would say to the women who may have been so kind as to read them, that I place little stress on the particular plan they propose. Co-operative Housekeeping may be wholly practicable or wholly visionary. But two things women must do somehow, as the conditions not only of the future happiness, progress, and elevation of their sex, but of its bare respectability and morality.
1st. They must earn their own living.
2d. They must be organized among themselves.
To accomplish these imperative results in the quickest and easiest way has alone been my object in trying to stimulate them to throw themselves, as it were, upon their own resources; that is, combine together on the capital furnished them by men for their domestic expenditures, on such a system as to bring a part, at least, of the retail trade into their hands, and so gain the independent and responsible handling of money, with all its incalculable stimulus to invention, enterprise, and independence of thought.
One question is. Is such a feminine development possible? for to many the dream will seem as extravagant as an opium vision. I answer, to those who know that to the faint beginnings of trade among the squalid serfs of the Dark Ages Europe owes her powerful middle class, her commerce, her manufactures, her constitutional liberties, her greatest geniuses,—ourselves, her mighty offspring,—my imaginings concerning the future unfolding of womanhood will seem reasonable enough. Close-shut bud that it has remained amid the national storms of ages, who can tell, indeed, what forms and colours it will assume when at length the Sun of Righteousness pours down upon it unintercepted his gracious beams!
