But with all her liking for needle-work, and with all the use that she made of her skill in the art, she did feel very keenly how much her time and strength had been wasted in childhood upon the practice of this mechanical occupation that should have been employed in the cultivation of her mental powers. A girl then was required to become a proficient in the making of every kind of garment. It was considered a good test of her capacity to know at an early age how to cut out and put together a shirt for her father; drawing threads to cut it by, and drawing threads to do the rows of fine stitching by, and stitching evenly and regularly, only two threads of the finest material being taken for each stitch! The expenditure of time out of a girl's life, involved in making her capable of doing all this, was something shocking. In these days, when the development of the means of communication has made division of labor more generally practicable than of old, and when nearly all men and women, from the richest to the artizan classes, wear garments made chiefly by machinery, I doubt if many readers can be got to realize how much a girl's intellectual training was diminished when Harriet Martineau was a child by the vast amount of time consumed in training her as a seamstress. Harriet was taught how to make all her own clothes, even to covering shoes with silk for dancing, and to plaiting straw bonnets. It is as though every boy were taught in his school-life to be a thorough carpenter, so as to be able, in youth, to turn out, unaided, any article of furniture. It is obvious how much time such technical training must swallow up. To conceive how a girl was held back by it, we must ask ourselves: What was her brother doing while she was learning needle-work? The matter did not end with the waste of time alone. Health, strength and nerve-force--in a word, _power_--was squandered upon it to a degree truly lamentable. Harriet Martineau's testimony[2] upon this point may be taken, because of her real fondness for the employment and the skill which she displayed in it: [2] _Household Education_, p. 286.