Читать книгу Sketches in Canada, and rambles among the red men - Mrs. (Anna) Jameson - Страница 14

No; women need in these times character beyond everything else; the qualities which will enable us to endure and to resist evil; the self-governed, the cultivated, active mind, to protect and to maintain ourselves. How many wretched women marry for a maintenance! How many wretched women sell themselves to dishonour for bread!—and there is small difference, if any, in the infamy and the misery! How many unmarried women live in heart-wearing dependence;—if poor, in solitary penury, loveless, joyless, unendeared;—if rich, in aimless, pitiful trifling! How many, strange to say, marry for the independence they dare not otherwise claim! But the more paths opened to us, the less fear that we should go astray.

Surely, it is dangerous, it is wicked, in these days, to follow the old saw, to bring up women to be "happy wives and mothers;" that is to say, to let all their accomplishments, their sentiments, their views of life, take one direction, as if for women there existed only one destiny—one hope, one blessing, one object, one passion in existence. Some people say it ought to be so, but we know that it is not so; we know that hundreds, that thousands of women are not happy wives and mothers—are never either wives or mothers at all. The cultivation of the moral strength and the active energies of a woman's mind, together with the intellectual faculties and tastes, will not make a woman a less good, less happy wife and mother, and will enable her to find content and independence when denied love and happiness.