They lived lives of constant service, within the narrow confines of a home.

Their labor was given to those they loved, and the reward they looked for was purely a spiritual reward.
A thousand generations of service, unpaid, loving, intimate, must have left the strongest kind of a mental habit in its wake.

Women, when they emerged from the seclusion of their homes and began to mingle in the world procession, when they were thrown on their own financial responsibility, found themselves willy nilly in the ranks of the producers, the wage earners; when the enlightenment of education was no longer denied them, when their responsibilities ceased to be entirely domestic and became somewhat social, when, in a word, women began to _think_, they naturally thought in human terms.

They couldn't have thought otherwise if they had tried.
They might have learned, it is true.

In certain circumstances women might have been persuaded to adopt the commercial habit of thought.