Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

[35] families heaped vicariously on their devoted heads, to say nothing of looking after the white cravats, and the digestion, and the weekly sermons of the reverend spouse; these farmers' wives, with twenty hungry haymakers for whom to make pies in summer, and the milk of twenty cows to be cared for all the year round; these widows, who have “known better days,” but have never yet known a worse day than that on which they first undertook to make a living by keeping boarders; these elder sisters, who sit up half the night writing stories for the newspapers in order that their only brother may go to college and learn to play football-can any human being conjecture a work more beneficent than to organize a society to provide vacations for such as these? Yet nobody attempts it.

Supposing this indifference to be surmounted, and a society established to supply saints with vacations, what kind of edifices would it need? Perhaps like those of rich Jews in medieval cities, humble and unpretending without — for the purpose, in this case, of warding off book-peddlers and subscription-agents-but full of lavish delights within. Like some of the old Jewish abodes in Frankfort, they should be difficult of access, and approachable only by winding passages full of pitfalls. Yet they should be near to sunny thoroughfares, and be well furnished with windows through which glimpses of