Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/138

 1 3 o IN TROD UC TION

As to the so-called accomplishments, if she is good for anything, her first baby will drive them all out of her head. The better sort of men recognize this law every- where, and we may perceive their taste in the kind of women they love, who are never learned nor disputative, but always domestic and of gentle dispositions, as well as neat in dress and person. Now I lay much of this woman's rights business to a disposition natural to Repub- lics to over-educate or rather falsely educate the female sex, by which their heads become turned, their natural dis- positions perverted ; they become undomestic, unfeminine, ambitious, and repulsive, the competitors rather than the lovers of men. Many of them know Latin, but not how to make a loaf of bread. Some, inclined to fashionable vices, spend their lives at watering and such-like places, and resemble in time a sort of damaged goods which have for long been put up at auction without bidders. Others by their shoes, tight dresses, close stoves, air-tight rooms, balls, late suppers, endless sitting, and other indolence, ruin themselves in such numbers that the health of Ameri- can women is a proverb for its badness. Can such per- sons either love or become mothers .? I do not object to an education in languages and elements of sciences for women, but only for social purposes, and not that they may become learned.

Now this war and dire necessity are likely to prove the natural and the only possible cure for all these things, and perhaps in this will lie its chief advantages. The late Mar- garet Fuller was a good specimen of a woman crammed with book learning, which was of course ill enough di- gested. Naturally tough as a washerwoman, ill habits both of study and thought broke up her health and pro- duced a real imbecihty. She became contentious, sarcas-

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