IS IT TOO LATE FOR WOMEN TO BEGIN?
And is it any better with the married woman? Take one of small means. Much of the work about her home which servants might do, could she employ them, she bravely does herself; willing to make ten times this sacrifice, if need be, for those dearest to her. Follow her throughout the day, especially where there are children: there is an almost endless round of duties; many of them not laborious, to be sure, or calling for much muscular strength; but keeping the mind under a strain until they are done; difficult to encompass because difficult to foresee. In the aggregate they are almost numberless. A man can usually tell in the morning most of what is in front of him for the day—indeed, can often plan so as to say beforehand just what he will be at each hour. But not so the housewife, and mother of young children. She is constantly called to perform little duties, both expected and unexpected, which cannot fail to tell on a person not strong. A healthy child a year old will often weigh twenty pounds; yet a woman otherwise weak will carry that child on her left arm, several times a day, up one or more flights of stairs, till you would think she would drop from exhaustion. Let sickness come, and she will often seem almost tireless, so devotedly will she keep the child in her arms. While children are, of course, carried less when they begin to walk; many a child two, or even three years old, is picked up by the mother, not a few times a day, even though he weighs thirty or forty pounds instead of twenty. Now for this mother to have handled a dumbbell of that weight would have been thought foolish and dangerous; for nothing about her suggested strength equal to that performance. And yet the devotion of a weak mother to her child is quite as great as that of a strong one. Is it any wonder that this overdoing of
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