destroys womanly beauty and delicate proportions, and with these the very essence of the feminine idea. Not brawny strength, but subtile grace, harmony, and skill, contain the secret of our influence; and hence, in those countries where women work in the fields, they are observed to receive but little masculine respect and consideration.
The second type of production, though once our own, ought also to be out of the question; for though all women who sew are in so far manufacturing producers, yet, as sewing cannot possibly employ the higher faculties of the mind, for an educated woman to make herself a factory operative or a seamstress is as great a waste as if an educated man were to devote his life to digging or wood-sawing. The most precious labour to society is brain labour, because thought alone can energize matter and muscle, and wield the forces of nature for the increase of human comfort and happiness. The man or woman, therefore, who from talent or education is capable of giving brain labour to the world, and chooses instead to give the muscular or manual labour that ignorant persons can perform equally well, robs society of the thought-power that it needs, and the great unthinking mass of the only work that it can do. Educated women, then, should seek to produce, not with their hands, but with their heads, by the better organization of the millions of ignorant women who are already manufacturing producers,—the factory operatives, seamstresses, and servants of the civilized world. It should be a social axiom, that, wherever women work, there certainly is a feminine sphere; and in accordance with this idea all the feminine productions of the farm—butter, cheese, the canning, preserving, and pickling of fruits and vegetables, and the making of domestic wines—should appropriately be superintended by women, because women are the workers. The same is of sewing in every department, and also of much of the spinning and weaving in the large mills. The melancholy deterioration observable in the women operatives of England and the Continent could never have taken place if the
