Fatal Consequences of a conventional Standard of Feminine Development.
"I am often complimented on my accomplishments," once said the exceptional woman just described, "but I ought much rather to be praised for my domestic acquirements. For my music and drawing never gave me any trouble,—indeed, I could not help doing them,—but O, what toil and tears it cost me to learn to plan and cut out my children's clothes!"
She laughed pleasantly as she said it, and seemed quite unconscious of the pitiful waste it was. And yet Nature herself protested against making this woman a housekeeper. Even when a child, owing probably to hereditary heart-disease, she did not love to run and skip like other children, and as a matron, walking seemed unnatural and even painful to her. She had not, therefore, that active habit of body which characterizes the true housewife, and enables her to keep constant watch over servants, closets, attics, and cellars. But she was a fearless and beautiful horse-woman, and, could she have followed the bent of perhaps her strongest inclination, and been a physician, then instead of spending her days between her bedroom and sitting-room, sewing and teaching her young children, she might have ridden or driven about, keeping her body healthy in the fresh air, her mind cheerful and active in ministering to her fellow-women, and so have run a long career of usefulness and happiness both to herself and the community.
Doctresses versus Doctors.
Nothing will ever make me believe that God meant men to be the ordinary physicians of women and babies. A few masculine experts might be tolerated in special institutions, so that cases of peculiar danger and difficulty might not be left, as they are now, to the necessarily one-sided treatment of a single sex; but, in general, if ever a created being was conspicuously and intolerably out of his natural
