The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Hundreds of street-tramping orphan girls, with surroundings more
unfriendly to female purity than those of this foundling, have been
taken from the lowest haunts of a shocking city-life by the same noble
charity, and introduced into peaceful country homes, where they have
grown up to be respectable members of society. In this emigration effort
women have been conspicuous actors. In England they have been equally
prominent in promoting the emigration of nearly half a million of
unmarried females to the various colonies. They publish books, and
pamphlets, and magazines, and newspapers, in advocacy of the movement.
Educated and intellectual ladies leave wealthy homes and accompany their
emigrants on voyages of thousands of miles, to see that they are
comfortably cared for.
It would seem that in the ordering of Divine Providence there will
always be a multitude of women who do not marry. It is shown by the
census of every country in which the population is numbered
periodically, that there is an excess of females. In England there are
thirty women in every hundred who never marry, and there are three
millions who earn their own living. It is there contended that all
effort is improper which is directed toward making celibacy easy for
women, and that marriage, their only true vocation, should be promoted
at any cost, even at that of distributing through the colonies England's
half million of unmarried ones. Some declare that it is impossible to
make the labor of single women remunerative, or their lives free and
happy. But if the occupations of women were raised and diversified as
much as they might be, such impossibility would of itself be impossible.
If it is to be granted that a woman possesses only inferior powers, let
her be taught to use such powers as she has.
I doubt not that He who created woman has some mission, some purpose,
for those who, in His divine ordering, remain single. There is a church
which has taken note of this great fact, and devotes its single women to
cloisters or to hospitals, sometimes to useful objects, sometimes to
improper ones,--but seeing that they are a numerous class, it has
specifically appropriated them. I presume the lesson of a single life,
the necessity of living alone, must be a difficult one to learn. The
heart, the young heart always, is perpetually seeking for something to
love. Amid the duties of the household, around the domestic fireside,
this loving spirit has room for growth, expansion, and intensity. The
soft tendrils which it is ever throwing out find gentle objects to which
they may cling with indissoluble attachment. Solitude is fatal to the
household affections. The single woman lives in a comparative
solitude,--a solitude of the heart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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