- For shape,
can it be called, 'that shape hath none?'
Business of various kinds, they might likewise pursue, if they
were educated in a more orderly manner, which might save many from
common and legal prostitution. Women would not then marry for a
support, as men accept of places under government, and neglect the
implied duties; nor would an attempt to earn their own subsistence,
a most laudable one! sink them almost to the level of those poor
abandoned creatures who live by prostitution. For are not milliners
and mantua-makers reckoned the next class? The few employments open to
women, so far from being liberal, are menial; and when a superiour
education enables them to take charge of the education of children
as governesses, they are not treated like the tutors of sons, though
even clerical tutors are not always treated in a manner calculated
to render them respectable in the eyes of their pupils, to say nothing
of the private comfort of the individual. But as women educated like
gentlewomen, are never designed for the humiliating situation which
necessity sometimes forces them to fill; these situations are
considered in the light of a degradation; and they know little of
the human heart, who need to be told, that nothing so painfully
sharpens sensibility as such a fall in life.
Some of these women might be restrained from marrying by a proper
spirit or delicacy, and others may not have had it in their power to
escape in this pitiful way from servitude; is not that government then
very defective, and very unmindful of the happiness of one half of its
members, that does not provide for honest, independent women, by
encouraging them to fill respectable stations? But in order to
render their private virtue a public benefit, they must have a civil
existence in the state, married or single; else we shall continually
see some worthy woman, whose sensibility has been rendered painfully
acute by undeserved contempt, droop like 'the lily broken down by a
plow-share.
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