Weary of Constraint

Work! We know the word has not a pleasant sound to many ears, that
it seems to include degradation, and a kind of social slavery, and
lies away down in a region to which your fine, cultivated,
intellectual woman cannot descend without, in her view, soiling her
garments. But for all this, it is alone in daily useful work of mind
or hands, work in which service and benefits to others are involved,
that a woman (or a man) gains any true perfection of character. And
this work must be her own, must lie within the sphere of her own
relations to others, and she must engage in it from a sense of duty
that takes its promptings from her own consciousness of right. No
other woman can judge of her relation to this work, and she who
dares to interfere or turn her aside should be considered an
enemy--not a friend.

No wonder, if this be true, that we have so many women of taste,
cultivation, and often brilliant intellectual powers, blazing about
like comets or shooting stars in our social firmament. They attract
admiring attention, excite our wonder, give us themes for
conversation and criticism; but as guides and indicators while we
sail over the dangerous sea of life, what are they in comparison
with some humble star of the sixth magnitude that ever keeps its
true place in the heavens, shining on with its small but steady ray,
a perpetual blessing? And so the patient, thoughtful, loving wife
and mother, doing her daily work for human souls and bodies, though
her intellectual powers be humble, and her taste but poorly
cultivated, fills more honorably her sphere than any of her more
brilliant sisters, who cast off what they consider the shackles by
which custom and tyranny have bound them down to mere home duties
and the drudgery of household care. If down into these they would
bring their superior powers, their cultivated tastes, their larger
knowledge, how quickly would some desert homes in our land put on
refreshing greenness, and desolate gardens blossom like the rose! We
should have, instead of vast imaginary Utopias in the future, model
homes in the present, the light and beauty of which, shining abroad,
would give higher types of social life for common emulation.