Women of the middle ranks—in their relation with domestic life and private society.

While people generally admit that woman cannot, in present circumstances, participate in the movements of public life, or feel an interest in the struggles of industrial morality, or sympathise in the general progress of civilization, they fall back on the belief that there is much left in what is termed her peculiar sphere,—in the retirement of home, in household duties, in the companionship of her own sex, in the intercourse of private society. Passing from youth to womanhood, people find the evils of woman’s position to culminate. The evil is for the most part to be traced, in the vast mass of the middle classes, to diversity of occupation, giving rise to mental divergence so wide and deep, that in seven-eighths of life the sexes are strangers to each other. Business occupation in the middle ranks tends very naturally to absorb the mind and care.