 say impotent, for I observe
that to such grievances as society cannot readily cure, it usually forbids
utterance, on pain of its scorn: this scorn being only a sort of tinselled cloak
to its deformed weakness. People hate to be reminded of ills they are unable or
unwilling to remedy: such reminder, in forcing on them a sense of their own
incapacity, or a more painful sense of an obligation to make some unpleasant
effort, troubles their ease and shakes their self-complacency. Old maids, like
the houseless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation
in the world: the demand disturbs the happy and rich: it disturbs parents. Look
at the numerous families of girls in this neighbourhood: the Armitages, the
Birtwhistles, the Sykes. The brothers of these girls are every one in business
or in professions; they have something to do: their sisters have no earthly
employment, but household work and sewing; no earthly pleasure, but an
unprofitable visiting; and no hope, in all their life to come, of anything
better. This stagnant state of things makes them decline in health: they are
never well; and their minds and views shrink to wondrous narrowness. The great
wish - the sole aim of every one of them is to be married, but the majority will
never marry: they will die as they now live. They scheme, they plot, they dress
to ensnare husbands. The gentlemen turn them into ridicule: they don't want
them; they hold them very cheap: they say - I have heard them say it with
sneering laughs many a time - the matrimonial market is overstocked. Fathers say
so likewise, and are angry with their daughters when they observe their
manoeuvres: they order them to stay at home. What do they expect them to do at
home? If you ask, - they would answer, sew and cook. They expect them to do
this, and this only, contentedly, regularly, uncomplainingly all their lives
long, as if they had no germs of faculties for anything else: a doctrine as
reasonable to hold, as it would be that the fathers have no faculties but for
eating what their daughters cook, or for wearing what they sew. Could men live
so themselves? Would they not be very weary? And, when there came no relief to
their weariness, but only reproaches at its slightest manifestation, would not
their weariness ferment in time to frenzy? Lucretia, spinning at midnight in the
midst of her maidens, and Solomon's virtuous woman, are often quoted as patterns
of what the
