Some day, you will discover that you are "grown up," and if you have learned what you could and helped when you could, you will discover, too, that you have the gift and power to make a home--that you are a woman, who is not a stone but a hearth.
"The lot has fallen unto me in a fair ground, yea, I have a goodly heritage."
THERE is a deep surprise and joy in these words, which grows to exultation. They might have been spoken by one who had climbed a height to look for the first time on the place where henceforth his life and work were to be, and saw in the curve of many-folded, blue hills, white roads with crops warming in the fields on either hand, woods and streams, laden orchards, and vines in garlands.
"It is a fair ground." Then--"yea, I have a goodly heritage." There is joy in beauty, and in possession--and more than that. There is exultation in the vision of seed-time and harvest, of growing beauty and usefulness, of life renewed; and in the strength and power to work for all this and to achieve it.
It is not fanciful to say that a woman may regard her heritage in some such way as this. The childhood, and the homes of the world are hers, and her work is the making of men and women. If she chooses to say that God has exalted His handmaiden, who is able to deny it?
The particular work of women is not just like any other work; indolence and failure in doing it, however, have been too often excused on account of this fact. Their work is yearly becoming more and more allied with other commercial, intellectual and moral activities. Even their housekeeping is no longer a disagreeable thing kept out of sight as much as possible, as the plumbing used to be. Its varied problems are being recognized and studied. Nobody denies that they are difficult, but it is not reasonable to suppose that they are the most difficult in the world, nor that they are unsolvable. One reason why they are difficult is that they are an attempt to establish order and law, without destroying individuality and freedom; and another reason is that the housewife exercises her profession chiefly for the benefit of her own family. If the physician had to doctor himself, the preacher preach to his wife, and the teacher teach his own children, their professions might be in as much confusion as the housekeeping profession is. The efforts to do away with these difficulties by having families live together, eat together, or do anything else in a wholesale way, have not succeeded and have led in a wrong direction. What is wanted is a way to preserve the separate family and the separate family home, not a way to make them into something else.