Some of the best girls have been those who came directly from the ship,
with no preparation but docility and some natural quickness. The hardest
cases to be managed are not of those who have been taught nothing, but
of those who have been taught wrongly--who come self-opinionated, with
ways which are distasteful, and contrary to the genius of one's
housekeeping. Such require that their mistress shall understand at least
so much of the actual conduct of affairs as to prove to the servant that
there are better ways than those in which she has been trained.
So much has been said of the higher sphere of woman, and so much has
been done to find some better work for her that, insensibly, almost
every body begins to feel that it is rather degrading for a woman in
good society to be much tied down to family affairs; especially since
in these Woman's Rights Conventions there is so much dissatisfaction
expressed at those who would confine her ideas to the kitchen and
nursery.
Yet these Woman's Rights Conventions are a protest against many former
absurd, unreasonable ideas--the mere physical and culinary idea of
womanhood as connected only with puddings and shirt-buttons, the
unjust and unequal burdens which the laws of harsher ages had cast
upon the sex.
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