Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/137

 THE RANDALL FAMILY 1 29

men — as if strength and courage in the male, and feeble- ness, modesty, even timidity in the female, were not the soul and substance of solid attachment between the sexes ! True, there are cases where the man looks up to the wife and is even the younger, and where the wife looks down on, perhaps pets, the husband — where the woman yields the support and the man lives on the woman's money. But the relation is ridiculous for both, and I should respect a man who inclined to avoid an engagement with a woman he loves, if richer than he, unless she con- sented to arrange that the full benefits of her own fortune should be first settled upon herself.

However, we have at last grown so effeminate that the men leave the farms to measure tape by the yard and to become fortune-hunters, and scarcely any one will marry save to acquire property thereby — an evil ever enhanced by the ever increasing extravagance of all classes. But the woman's rights societies will not mend the matter ; they only make it worse. If any of them have married sneaks, let them get divorced. If the trouble of others grows simply from being old maids — that they may scratch round till they claw up husbands, is the worst wish I wish them. But their present unamiable attitude is the very last that will obtain them such.

This reminds me of certain errors here prevalent con- cerning education. One of these is a disposition to make them learned. Women are incapable of great concentra- tion of mind, and the attempt to produce it, if successful, is an injury to their constitutions. Such females are apt to be childless. Now a good education I take to be that which enables people to do the duties they are destined to perform. Hence a knowledge of housekeeping is the essential and the attractive part of a woman's education.

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