Page:About people (IA aboutpeople00well).pdf/140

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ABOUT PEOPLE.

just themselves to it. The simple fact is that women have found that they can have occupation, respectability, and even dignity disconnected from the home. The tendency is, that, in the discovery of this possibility, they are losing somewhat of filial tenderness, of the loyalty of kinship, and of close, concentrated affection, and acquiring more of self-assertion and universal expansiveness.

The day of religious diaries and confessions is past; but a moral and intellectual self-consciousness remains, fostered by our system of education and public examination, which is much to be deplored. Very few are free from it, for it is an indigenous product, and only by education can be altered into the educated unconsciousness of middle life, or stamped out by rare buoyancy of health and spirits. What was woman made for? was the former question; and the quick answer came, For the glory of God and the solace of man. Now the question reads, as put by the teacher and so-