Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/96

92 function does not consume all her time or talent. She knows how to perform much of her household work as a manufacturer weaves cotton, or spins hemp, or forges iron—with other machinery, by other hands. She is the housekeeping head; and after she has kept house as wife and as mother, and has done all, she has still energies to spare.

That is a large class of women: it is a great deal larger than men commonly suppose. It is continually enlarging, and you see why. When all manufactures were domestic, when every garment was made at home, every web woven at home, every thread spun at home, every fleece dyed at home; when the husband provided the wool or the sheepskin, and the wife made it a coat; when the husband brought home a sack of corn on a mule's back, and the wife pounded it in a mortar, or ground it between two stones, as in the Old Testament—then the domestic function might well consume all the time of a very able-headed woman. But nowadays, when so much work is done abroad; when the flour-mills of Rochester and Boston take the place of the pestle and mortar and the hand-mill of the Old Testament; when Lowell and Lawrence are two enormous Old Testament women, spinning and weaving year out and year in, day and night both; when so much of woman's work is done by the butcher and the baker, by the tailor, and the cook, and the gas-maker, and she is no longer obliged to dip or mould with her own hands every candle that “goeth not out by night,” as in the Old Testament woman's housekeeping—you see how very much of woman's time is left for other functions. This will become yet oftener the case. Ere long much lofty science will be applied to housekeeping, and work be done by other than human hands, in the house, as out of it. And accordingly, you see that the class of women not wholly taken up by the domestic function will get larger and larger.

III. Then there is a third class of women, who have no taste and no talent for the domestic function. Perhaps these are exceptional women; some of them exceptional by redundance—they have talents not needed in this function; others are exceptional by defect—with only a common talent, they have none for housekeeping. It is as cruel a