But in the very beginning a great difficulty meets the mother of the girl who seeks to train her up into glad, free acceptance of life, for instead of general rejoicing in the birth of her child, too often there is a wail of discontent over the hapless infant who is "not a boy." It is an idea very deeply grounded in our social feeling, that it is a misfortune and an indignity to be a woman. True, all men do not, like the Jews in the old service, insultingly thank God that he has not made them women, while the meek woman plaintively thanks God that he has made her at all. But how constantly is the thought and feeling expressed, that the boy is a more welcome comer into the family circle than the girl, and that the woman is to have a hard fate in life. And if the popular idea of woman be true, is it not a great calamity to be born a girl? "If man must work, and woman must weep," who would not choose the former lot? It is a very common thing to hear women wish most earnestly from their earliest to their latest hour of life, that they had been born men. It is very rarely that the youngest boy wishes to be a girl, or that men covet the vaunted privileges of womanhood. Margaret Fuller alludes feelingly to this prevailing sentiment in her noble _Essay on Woman_, and quotes Southey the despairing cry of the Paraguay Woman, "lamenting that her mother did not kill her the hour she was born--her mother, who knew what the life of a woman must be." And yet, it seems to me, any woman is entirely unfit to educate her daughter who has not so sifted her life experience, so learned the meaning of her creation, so separated the accidents and follies of to-day from the divine purpose, as to read clearly the meaning of life, and to accept for her daughter, as for herself, the great fact of her womanhood; not with submission merely, but with a joyful recognition of its wonderful possibilities and its supreme glories. That this is possible to achieve, I might bring the testimony of women speaking from the midst of suffering and anguish, and yet rejoicing in the spiritual ideal of womanhood. Mrs. Eliza Farnham has done great service by her eloquent vindication of the claims of womanhood, which she bases on very noble spiritual truths. But too often the high estimate of woman is placed on purely aesthetic and sentimental grounds, and does not satisfy the demands either of mind or heart in the hour of trial, or the practical common sense applied to daily life. It hardly strengthens a woman, to be told that women are more angelic by nature, more amiable, more religious, and more holy than men, when she is suffering from excessive nervous irritability, from neglected solitude, from want of employment suited to her feeble powers, or from the unused energies of mind and body which are devouring her day by day--to be called an angel, when she is only a drudge, is not consoling.