our faculties without being called strong-minded, and indulge all our tastes without being deemed extravagant,—a sunny and tranquil orb of order and perfumed beauty,—no rival, but the fair satellite of man's darksome earth, whose perfection and indispensableness, could he suppose it possible, he would be the first to confess and to desire. This feminine world, which has never yet been, but which must some day be, if there is any hope for women, will begin to emerge out of chaos as soon as we co-operate in the daily work and the great business of our lives,—housewifery?
For this is to us what agriculture is to men,—our indispensable function to the race, to be done first and before all, whatever else be neglected, and what true women do not slight for their own families even at the cost of their rarest gifts or most cherished aspirations. But just as the rude soil-scratching of the barbarian cultivator cannot be named in the same day with the high modern farming now developing through science and the mechanic arts, so neither will the artistic and perfect combinations of co-operative housekeeping, with all the added scope and power that feminine genius in other departments could give it, condescend to compare even with the very best that the most thorough housewife can do alone under the present expensive dislocated and harassing system. To use the strongest American expression of condemnation, it is "behind the age;" and we women who carry it on and who suffer from it are behind the age, with it.
Strangely enough, men are so far from perceiving this to be the real cause of the mysterious dead-weight which ever pulls back society against their herculean efforts, that they want us, not only to be behind the age, but if possible to lose sight of it altogether; for they are constantly preaching to us to go back to the habits and traditions of our grandmothers, to have "calicoes for our best gowns," "do all our own work," "get up with the sun," and so on. But how can we go back? Read only the descriptions of the incredible marvels of embroidery, lace, silk, feather-
