Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/57

 fined honorable position, which they can abdicate, should they ever think it necessary, or into which they can step temporarily, waiting for marriage or any other settlement in life.

The so-thought normal condition of woman—that of waiting from the age of puberty in listless idleness, or at best, taking a feeble part in the round of househoid duties, until some one chooses to admire and ask her to share his fortunes—has about it something almost as degrading as is the condition of a Georgian girl, standing in the slavemarket and waiting for the lordly Turk, her purchaser. The young man of the same lustrum is occupying no such false and undignified position. He is under no such uncertainty of fortune, but is busy at his trade, his business, or profession.

That the doubt thus hanging over her future should give, at times, an unfortunate turn to the mind of an American girl, and cause her to pay more regard to the attentions of the young men whom she meets than to her own subjective fitness for her future duties, and that she should learn to look upon matrimony with something of the excitement of a gambler, is but the moral result of her unstable position.

But once employ her time; mark out a path in which she can advance to some goal of feminine honor; give her a career, in which healthy excitement can be induced; and if "he comes not," she will no longer be "aweary," but can wait in happy independence until her master chooses to be lonely, leaves his bachelor pleasures, and saunters in to win her; and she can be far more critical in her choice, besides.

There is also a class of young women—orphans, and the like—who need protection, as well because of their poverty, as that there is no special guardian to bestow upon them that care which all girls absolutely require. The position of many becomes more and more painful as years slip by, and no admirer carries them off. The helplessness of needlewomen, of female teachers, and of all those classes whom misfortune has thrown upon their own resources, has become so great an evil that already philanthropy is beginning to think in that behalf; and "Ladies' Relief," "Female Co-operative," and other associations are being established in order to lessen the 'harshness that colors the prospect to those who are cast out by poverty to struggle for themselves.

The fact that the evil is so widespread, and that every class of society is interested in remedying it, encourages the belief that some united effort might be organized, against which unreasonable opposition from prejudice would be powerless.

There is one method that classes suffering from an evil always adopt, and one, in which lay part of the success of the early Christian church. Community life has always been a favorite dogma of the Greek and Latin Christians. It was no doctrine of self-abnegation that first made the Church a family, but the helpless and despised condition of the New Faith. The organization grew as much out of the necessity for combined effort on the part of the proscribed religionists to have a means of subsistence, as from the sympathy and fellowship taught by the apostles. The early missions of the church too, were in many instances centres of an increasing civilization of a secular character, as well as outposts of a new faith.

A convent in the middle ages did not mean altogether a fortress, in which Christianity, as a dogma, entrenched itself; but it was commonly a school of practical art. Monks were not only and not always preachers of the Word: they were masons, carpenters, weavers, scribes, farmers, physicians, and even lawyers; in short, they were of every