Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/273

Rh obliged to confess that there are in the West many women who in no respects correspond to the ideal which the cultivation of the New World requires them to attain to, women whose thoughtlessness, insipidity, vanity, and pretension, make the spectator pause and ask himself, how far that great freedom, which is early permitted to young women, is in accordance with the higher development of her being.

The better class see this misdirection in a portion of their sex, and deplore it deeply. I would not on their account have this freedom circumscribed in the least degree, I would give merely a higher object and consciousness. That which woman requires is not a less, but on the contrary, a higher esteem for home and her vocation; a higher comprehension of the human work and worth to which she is called. It is only a higher consciousness which can save her from her egotistical littleness.

As a general rule it may be said that the citizeness is not as yet fully awakened within the community of the New World; as in the Old World, she still slumbers lulled by the old cradle-song, and by the little voice which prevents her listening to the great voice, and by the liking which men have for the merely agreeable and outwardly attractive in the sex.

It is from this defective consciousness of a higher vocation, that the influence of woman within the home, and on the education of the child is still, in general, far from what it might be, and what it needs to be in this country where the power of conscience and of the inner law ought to be strengthened tenfold, in the same degree as the outward are less restrictive upon the wishes and the whims of the individual. The American woman is married young, and when she is scarcely past the years of childhood; she soon has children of her own, and shows her maternal love principally by spoiling them, by indulging all their whims and wishes, as she herself was indulged and