things, have their hands full. As, on this point, I may differ from some of
my readers, let me explain precisely what I mean.

As I write, there are at work, in another part of the house, two
paper-hangers, a man and his wife, each forty-five or fifty years of age.
Their children are grown up, and some of them married: they have a daughter
at home, who is old enough to do the housework, and leave the mother free.
There is no way of organizing the labors of this household better than
this: the married pair toil together during the day, and go home together
to their evening rest. A happier couple I never saw; it is a delight to see
them cheerily at work together, cutting, pasting, hanging: their life seems
like a prolonged industrial picnic; and if I had the ill-luck to own as
many palaces as an English duke I should keep them permanently occupied in
putting fresh papers on the walls.

But the merit of this employment for the woman is that it interferes with
no other duty. Were she a young mother with little children, and obliged by
her paper-hanging to neglect them, or to leave them at a "day-nursery," or
to overwork herself by combining too many cares, then the sight of her
would be very sad. So sacred a thing is motherhood, so paramount and
absorbing the duty of a mother to her child, that in a true state of
society I think she should be utterly free from all other duties,--even, if
possible, from the ordinary cares of housekeeping. If she has spare health
and strength to do these other things as pleasures, very well; but she
should be relieved from them as duties. And as to the need of
self-support, I can hardly conceive of an instance where it can be to the
mother of young children anything but a disaster. As we all know, this
calamity often occurs; I have seen it among the factory operatives at the
North, and among the negro women in the cotton-fields at the South: in both
cases it is a tragedy, and the bodies and brains of mother and children