Inexpensive Topics

Carlyle’s works, it is true, have not the stereotyped success which we call classic. They are a rich but inexpensive entertainment, at which we are not concerned lest the host has strained or impoverished himself to feed his guests. It is not the most lasting word, nor the loftiest wisdom, but rather the word which comes last.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

The training and education of the girl of the present have seldom been discussed except from one standpoint—her suitable preparation for becoming an economical housekeeper, an inexpensive wife, a willing and self-forgetful mother, a cheap, unexacting, patient, unquestioning, unexpectant, ministering machine. The girl’s usefulness to herself, to her sex and race, her preferences, tastes, happiness, social, intellectual or financial prosperity, hardly have entered into the thought upon this question.
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)