Page:Co-operative housekeeping.djvu/86

73

N the last chapter I suggested that, in place of such invalid or incapable housekeepers as could not be depended upon in a responsible co-operative organization, the unmarried women of the community could profitably be employed. But there is another and very different class for whom they could also act as substitutes. I mean those women who are unfitted, both by talent and the modern education, for any of the duties and triumphs of practical housewifery, and who now, compelled by conventionality or poverty to a never-ending round of distasteful occupation, sigh bitterly indeed in the ear of Heaven over their ignoble captivity, but are unheard and unheeded by all the world beside. These unfortunates, if liberated from the prison of the household and freed from the fetters of the needle, the broom, and the receipt-book, would play the same noble part among women that the masculine leaders of knowledge, of art, of government, and of morality have enacted among men.

I knew a woman once, gifted so extraordinarily by God that she might have been a florist, a musician, an artist, a physician, a teacher, an evangelist,—since to the mastery of any one of these callings she could have brought nearly