Genre:

Essay

Subjects:

Gender, Education, Reading, Horticulture, Human Development, Societies

    Insists that there are 'few people who have not some ability enough for the pursuit of some natural science—botany, geology, entomology' which would 'fill up their otherwise vacant hours'. Advises women who 'grow tired' of trying to sing to 'go into your father's or brother's library, and select therefrom–not a last year's magazine, in order to look for a "pretty story"–but a set of those uninviting, stern-looking books [...]—history, biography, logic, law, theology, metaphysics–and you cannot go amiss'. (247) Discussing women's 'self sacrificing nature', notes that 'inferior animals are deficient in that faculty which produces self-love' and asks whether women belong more 'to the inferior than man does' (248). Describes how women engage in 'working whims' such as a 'horticultural mania' in which a whole neighbourhood sets about 'digging, raking, pruning'. Adds that sometimes 'an entire locality becomes astronomical, or geological, or botanical, or chemical', and describes how such activities frequently cause physical injury to its women practitioners, and how, within months, only a few 'have any taste or talent for such study'. (249)