Another cause of the scattering, unmethodical supply may have been the vagueness of the demand. America was not quite sure what it was proper to expect of “the female writer”; and perhaps that lady herself had a lingering feudal idea that she could hold literary territory only on condition of stout pen-service in the cause of the domestic virtues and pudding. “In those days,” says Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “it seemed to be held necessary for American women to work their passage into literature by first compiling a cookery-book.” Thus we have Mrs. Child’s “Frugal Housewife”; and we find clever Eliza Leslie of Philadelphia, putting forth “Seventy-five Receipts,” before she ventures upon her humorous and satirical “Pencil Sketches.” The culinary tradition was carried on, somewhat later, by Catherine Beecher, with her “Domestic Receipt Book”; and we have indeed most modern instances, in the excellent “Common Sense Series” of the novelist “Marion Harland,” and in Mrs. Whitney’s “Just How.” Perhaps, however, it is not fancy that these wear the kitchen apron with a difference. In addition to lack of training, and to the vague nature of the public demand, a third cause operated against symmetrical artistic development among the women of those electric days preceding the Civil War. That struggle between the art-instinct and the desire for reform, which is not likely to cease entirely until the coming of the Golden Year, was then at its height. Both men and women were drawn into the maelstrom of the anti-slavery conflict; yet to a few men the artist’s single aim seemed still possible: to Longfellow, to Hawthorne. Similar examples are lacking among contemporary women. Essential womanhood, “das Ewigweibliche,” seems at this point unusually clear in the work of women; the passion for conduct, the enthusiasm for abstract justice, not less than the potential motherhood that yearns over all suffering. The strong Hebraic element in the spiritual life of New England women, in particular, tended to withdraw them from the service of pure art at this period. “My natural inclinations,” wrote Lydia Maria Child, “drew me much more strongly toward literature and the arts than toward reform, and the weight of conscience was needed to turn the scale.”