If we look about us, we find that in our cities, especially, this is
producing some very sad results. Some of the men are getting very
impatient at the increasing demands of women for attention, for place,
and for consideration; and, on merely selfish grounds, it is hardly
doubtful whether our women in the upper and middle classes do not demand
too much. It is evident that, as society is constituted, man is the
working and woman, generally, the ornamental portion, of it, at least in
those classes to which Providence or society has given what we call
comfortable circumstances. Woman may do, and does do, a great deal of
unpleasant, tiresome work; she fritters away her time upon occupations
which require "frittering;" but beyond that she does not do the "paying"
work. The husband, or houseband, still produces the money. He is the
poor, plain, working bee; and the queen bee too often sits in regal
state in her comfortable hive while he is toiling and moiling abroad.
It results from the different occupations of the two sexes, that the
husband comes home too often worried, cross, and anxious; that he finds
in his wife a woman to whom he can not tell his doubts and fears, his
humiliations and experience. She, poor woman, with little sense of what
the world is, without any tact, may bore him to take her to fresh
amusements and excitements; for, while he has been expending both brain
and body, she has been quietly at home. A certain want of tact, not
unfrequently met with in wives, often sets the household in a flame of
anger and quarreling, which might be avoided by a little patience and
care on the part of the wife.
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