Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

[63] she now has ten small classes in that difficult art, and receives from them a fair compensation. There are women who are so well known among their friends for their especial skill in tennis-playing or skating or swimming that they would find it easy to form classes for these accomplishments if they went into the matter with energy. Of course the work must be done, if undertaken, in a perfectly business-like way — no fine-lady dawdlin ; it must be simply trying to earn an honest penny by the thing a woman knows, instead of apprenticing herself to stenography or to type-writing, which she does not know. The list could easily be extended. In the large community where I live there is absolutely no one to teach a young girl to ride on horseback — a thing which an accomplished horsewoman could do as well as a man. Last year I knew a young girl who, having mechanical aptitude, bought a jig-saw, and had to search through the whole neighborhood, and almost give up in despair, before she could find any one to teach her how to use it; yet she would willingly have paid for the instruction. Even in a thing so universal as crochet, I am told that there is always a demand for some one who knows the very newest stitches.

All such suggestions as these are apt to be misconstrued; the adviser is supposed to have given the absurd assurance that such enterprises will find