manifold arts, all tending to thwart the Divine laws of their being, coupled with the selfishness and inanity of their lives, they succeed in bringing themselves to a state of physical disability which one of our prolific great-grandmothers would have been horrified to behold!
The root of the whole matter lies in the purposeless drift of everything which has been wont to enter into a woman's training. She has been made to feel that "woman should be protected from the rude battle of life by the work and labor of man," and these women have boiled down the sentiment into a selfish disregard of every obligation which they owe to the world. They most decidedly approve of all the limitations to "woman's sphere." They marry because they want to be taken care of, and their estimate of the value of life lies in the getting of the greatest amount of creature comfort with the least possible personal outlay; so "Bacon, for want of a mother, is not born." Not, however, because "the woman who should have been his mother is a distinguished collegian," but because she will have none of him; and his unwelcome existence is cut short long before it is time for him to appear upon this mundane sphere.
The poor woman has the same aversion to having a family that the rich one has, and for much the same reasons. Trouble and expense are to be avoided, and, worse than all, it is unfashionable to have a large family. I well remember hearing in my childhood a healthy young married woman held up to ridicule because she had so many children. Strange to say, her husband was commiserated in the same breath as a much-afflicted individual! At length, in an evil hour, the poor wife listened to an evil counselor, and the handsome, rosy-cheeked woman was from that time only a sallow, sad-eyed wreck of her former self. But she was no longer a target for the idle jests of her neighbors; the cradle was empty, and ever after remained so.
This is the kind of sentiment which openly or covertly prevails with us, and this is the Moloch to which are being sacrificed not only the health of so many of our women, but the lives of unborn millions who should stand crowned the sons and daughters of our glorious land.
It is in the higher, broader education of women that our hope for the future lies. The alarmists who cry that women will not marry if educated know full well that they are firing blank cartridges into empty space. There will always be plenty of women with brains and plenty also without brains from whom to choose, so that no man need go without a wife. If he prefers one who has a knowledge of Greek verbs stowed away somewhere in the neighborhood of an adorable pair of eyes, so much the better for him, for no amount of education will ever prevent a woman from marrying the man of her heart when he appears; and her education will be the best surety of her marriage resulting in all that which a true marriage should bring.
I do not mean to say that every girl should have a college education. What I do mean is, that the colleges are becoming centers for
