positions with which the sexes started in the American wilderness.
If this latter, what then is the real root of the matter?
The answer is that the times are changed and women are changed, but the Old World masculine and feminine prejudices and conventionalities have not changed with them. Because women once found an ample sphere and an absorbing vocation within the walls of their homes, it is believed that they can find them there still, though that vocation has been taken almost entirely away, and to their larger mental growth that sphere is narrowing fearfully round them. A great revolution has come about inwardly in ourselves and outwardly in our surroundings, but we have not attempted any adjustment of the new conditions. Hence society has lost its balance, and everything is dislocated. There is no well-ordered and comfortable arrangement for us, no definite and necessary work at once suited to our taste and commensurate with our ability. The favourite theory of our nature and destiny, and the one on which the current unsystem of feminine education is principally based, is that "a true woman" should be a harmonious melange of everything in general and nothing in particular. Social opinion hardly leaves one a choice between eccentricity and triviality. Thus every year it is harder for thoughtful and earnest women to find their true places in life, and half the time they are discouraged, and wonder what they were made for.
I for one, say that this state of things is no longer to be endured. There must be some work in the world for educated women! Why, then, do we not search for it day and night until we find it?
Ah, if the finding it were all, we should not have very far to look; for let us consider only the three great types of production before mentioned,—agricultural, manufacturing and distributing.
It is evident that the first of these affords no sphere for educated, nor indeed for any women. Out-of-door labour, except a little of the least and lightest,—gardening,—-
