The True Woman

The true woman, for whose ambition a husband’s love and her children’s education are sufficient, who applies her military instincts to the discipline of her household, and whose legislatives exercise themselves in making laws for her nursery; whose intellect has field enough for her in communion with her husband, and whose heart asks no other honours than his love and admiration; a woman who does not think it a weakness to attend to her toilet, and who does not disdain to be beautiful, who believes in the virtue of glossy hair and well fitting gowns, and who eschews rents and revelled edges, slipshod shoes and audacious make-ups; a woman who speaks low, and does not speak much; who is patient and gentle, and intellectual and industrious; who loves more than she reasons, and yet does not love blindly; who never scolds and never argues, but adjusts with a smile; such a woman is the wife we have all dreamed of once in our lives, and is the mother we still worship in the backwood distance of the past.

Charles Dickens.