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169 Unhappy Girls Upon a candid examination, I believe it would be found that there is more down-right misery among young women, between the ages of eighteen and thirty, than among any other class of people. So far from this being a surprising condition of things, the wonder is rather that it should be so seldom credited, so imperfectly understood, and so unwisely received by the more fortunate portions of the world. The ordinary lot of the ordinary young woman is one of the most miserable and unnatural things in comfortably civilized life; and society will never adjust its distorted angles with any approach to proportion till some radical change is effected in it. “You are quite right,”writes a friend.¹ “I have known women myself who have repeatedly refused to marry because they will not reproduce in the lives of their daughters the sufferings of their own early years.” A wide-eyed creature, with a smile like a wild-brier bud, and a voice like a canary’s, comes peeping over your shoulder to read these words; and you lift, perhaps, your fond paternal eyes: “Unhappy girls, indeed! What will you do with her?”What I do with wild-briers and canaries— nothing more. You show me the joy of birds and roses—only that. I grant you the charm of a perfume and the strength of song—nothing else. Your little daughter is happy as babies and bees are happy—not otherwise. Let her hum about your declining days and coo in your fond ears. It almost seems as if bird or bee or baby would do as well. But let her be. Perhaps the world has need of her. I admit her as I admit a kitten. But it is not with her that I have to deal. She does not happen very often. More generally the kitten answers in her stead. She is not the ordinary girl. Let me say, in passing, that a young woman who really finds in the common lot of young women genuine happiness does so in one of two 170 Essays ways. Either she is too frivolous to appreciate anything truer, deeper, more worthy—in other words, she does not know any better than to like it; or she gains, by means of that sheer sacrifice of self-culture and self-reliance, which is inculcated upon her as the chief end of woman,² around which all the sanctities of her affections and authorities of her religion are trained to grow, the compensation which always attends the dignity of even mistaken service. She is happy by simple virtue of self-abnegation. The h[e]ight and depth, the why and wherefore, the whither and where, do not concern her. She may have wasted her life; but, having lost it, she has gained it.³ She may have misplaced it; but, having missed it, she has found it. In short, she is happy because she does not know that she ought not to be. “God’s sacred pity touched the grand mistake.”4 But yet it is not with her that I have to deal. She is not the ordinary girl.The ordinary girl, I repeat, is an unhappy creature. If any man doubt this, let him try it. Let him pause in his education four years, five, six before he ought. Let him come home from the school-room with his young head half full of the love of great deeds and great men, great principles and great facts, and his young heart high with great hopes and dreams. (The smallest of us see this world so large when we step into it, like the burning face of a magnified moon, seen through a forest on an eastern hill!) Let him put away his books upon the shelf; he may quite as well.To-morrow his mother will make cake, and he shall stone the raisins. No, nor need he take them down the next day. Why, my dear sir, there is pickling on Wednesday! Will he snatch an hour to refresh his Horace?5 But it is washing-day. Will he secure that last review of Darwin before the magazine goes to Cousin Maria?6 There is nobody to set the table, my dear. Can’t you just step down? Will he be off for a tramp in the woods on this wiry morning, every vein aglow and every nerve in tension for a breath of wild life to strike him...

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