“So I returned, and considered
all the oppressions that are done under the
sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed,
and they had no comforter; and on the side of their
oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.” ECCLES.
iv: 1.
Very long ago the needle was busy.
It was considered honorable for women to toil in olden
time. Alexander the Great stood in his palace
showing garments made by his own mother. The finest
tapestries at Bayeux were made by the queen of William
the Conqueror. Augustus, the Emperor, would not
wear any garments except those that were fashioned
by some member of his royal family. So let the
toiler everywhere be respected!
The needle has slain more than the
sword. When the sewing-machine was invented some
thought that invention would alleviate woman’s
toil and put an end to the despotism of the needle.
But no; while the sewing-machine has been a great
blessing to well-to-do families in many cases, it
has added to the stab of the needle the crush of the
wheel; and multitudes of women, notwithstanding the
re-enforcement of the sewing-machines, can only make,
work hard as they will, between two dollars and three
dollars per week.
The greatest blessing that could have
happened to our first parents was being turned out
of Eden after they had done wrong. Adam and Eve,
in their perfect state, might have got along without
work, or only such slight employment as a perfect
garden with no weeds in it demanded. But as soon
as they had sinned, the best thing for them was to
be turned out where they would have to work. We
know what a withering thing it is for a man to have
nothing to do. Old Ashbel Green, at fourscore
years, when asked why he kept on working, said:
“I do so to keep out of mischief.”
We see that a man who has a large amount of money
to start with has no chance. Of the thousand
prosperous and honorable men that you know, nine hundred
and ninety-nine had to work vigorously at the beginning.
But I am now to tell you that industry is just as
important for a woman’s safety and happiness.
The most unhappy women in our communities to-day are
those who have no engagements to call them up in the
morning; who, once having risen and breakfasted, lounge
through the dull forenoon in slippers down at the
heel and with disheveled hair, reading Ouida’s
last novel, and who, having dragged through a wretched
forenoon and taken their afternoon sleep, and having
passed an hour and a half at their toilet, pick up
their card-case and go out to make calls, and who
pass their evenings waiting for somebody to come in
and break up the monotony. Arabella Stuart never
was imprisoned in so dark a dungeon as that.
There is no happiness in an idle woman.
It may be with hand, it may be with brain, it may
be with foot; but work she must, or be wretched forever.
The little girls of our families must be started with
that idea.
The curse of American society is that
our young women are taught that the first, second,
third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, tenth, fiftieth,
thousandth thing in their life is to get somebody to
take care of them. Instead of that, the first
lesson should be how under God they may take care
of themselves. The simple fact is that a majority
of them do have to take care of themselves, and that,
too, after having, through the false notions of their
parents, wasted the years in which they ought to have
learned how successfully to maintain themselves.
We now and here declare the inhumanity, cruelty, and
outrage of that father and mother who pass their daughters
into womanhood, having given them no facility for
earning their livelihood. Madame de Stael said:
“It is not these writings that I am proud of,
but the fact that I have facility in ten occupations,
in any one of which I could make a livelihood.”
You say you have a fortune to leave them. Oh,
man and woman, have you not learned that like vultures,
like hawks, like eagles, riches have wings and fly
away? Though you should be successful in leaving
a competency behind you, the trickery of executors
may swamp it in a night? or some officials in our churches
may get up a mining company and induce your orphans
to put their money into a hole in Colorado, and if
by the most skillful machinery the sunken money can
not be brought up again, prove to them, that it was
eternally decreed that that was the way they were to
lose it, and that it went in the most orthodox and
heavenly style. Oh, the damnable schemes that
professed Christians will engage in until God puts
His fingers into the collar of the hypocrite’s
robe and strips it clear down to the bottom!
You have no right, because you are well off, to conclude
that your children are going to be as well off.
A man died leaving a large fortune. His son fell
dead in a Philadelphia grog-shop. His old comrades
came in and said as they bent over his corpse:
“What is the matter with you, Boggsey?”
The surgeon standing over him said: “Hush
ye! He is dead!” “Oh, he is dead,”
they said. “Come, boys; let us go and take
a drink in memory of poor Boggsey!” Have you
nothing better than money to leave your children?
If you have not, but send your daughters into the
world with empty brain and unskilled hand, you are
guilty of assassination, homicide, regicide, infanticide.
There are women toiling in our cities
for two and three dollars per week who were the daughters
of merchant princes. These suffering ones now
would be glad to have the crumbs that once fell from
their fathers’ table. That worn-out, broken
shoe that she wears is the lineal descendant of the
twelve-dollar gaiters in which her mother walked;
and that torn and faded calico had ancestry of magnificent
brocade that swept Broadway clean without any expense
to the street commissioners. Though you live
in an elegant residence and fare sumptuously every
day, let your daughters feel it is a disgrace to them
not to know how to work. I denounce the idea prevalent
in society that, though our young women may embroider
slippers and crochet and make mats for lamps to stand
on without disgrace, the idea of doing anything for
a livelihood is dishonorable. It is a shame for
a young woman belonging to a large family to be inefficient
when the father toils his life away for her support.
It is a shame for a daughter to be idle while her
mother toils at the wash-tub. It is as honorable
to sweep the house, make beds or trim hats as it is
to twist a watch-chain.
As far as I can understand, the line
of respectability lies between that which is useful
and that which is useless. If women do that which
is of no value, their work is honorable. If they
do practical work, it is dishonorable. That our
young women may escape the censure of doing dishonorable
work, I shall particularize. You may knit a tidy
for the back of an arm-chair, but by no means make
the money wherewith to buy the chair. You may
with a delicate brush beautify a mantel ornament,
but die rather than earn enough to buy a marble mantel.
You may learn artistic music until you can squall
Italian, but never sing “Ortonville” or
“Old Hundred.” Do nothing practical
if you would in the eyes of refined society preserve
your respectability. I scout these fine notions.
I tell you a woman, no more than a man, has a right
to occupy a place in this world unless she pays a rent
for it.
In the course of a life-time you consume
whole harvests and droves of cattle, and every day
you live, breathe forty hogsheads of good, pure air.
You must by some kind of usefulness pay for all this.
Our race was the last thing created the
birds and fishes on the fourth day, the cattle and
lizards on the fifth day, and man on the sixth day.
If geologists are right, the earth was a million of
years in the possession of the insects, beasts, and
birds before our race came upon it. In one sense
we were innovators. The cattle, the lizards, and
the hawks had pre-emption right. The question
is not what we are to do with the lizards and summer
insects, but what the lizards and summer insects are
to do with us. If we want a place in this world,
we must earn it. The partridge makes its own
nest before it occupies it. The lark by its morning
song earns its breakfast before it eats it, and the
Bible gives an intimation that the first duty of an
idler is to starve when it says: “If he
will not work, neither shall he eat.” Idleness
ruins the health; and very soon nature says: “This
man has refused to pay his rent, out with him!”
Society is to be reconstructed on the subject of woman’s
toil. A vast majority of those who would have
woman industrious shut her up to a few kinds of work.
My judgment in this matter is that a woman has a right
to do anything that she can do well. There should
be no department of merchandise, mechanism, art, or
science barred against her. If Miss Hosmer has
genius for sculpture, give her a chisel. If Rosa
Bonheur has a fondness for delineating animals, let
her make “The Horse Fair.” If Miss
Mitchell will study astronomy, let her mount the starry
ladder. If Lydia will be a merchant, let her
sell purple. If Lucretia Mott will preach the
Gospel, let her thrill with her womanly eloquence the
Quaker meeting-house.
It is said, If woman is given such
opportunities she will occupy places that might be
taken by men. I say, If she have more skill and
adaptedness for any position than a man has, let her
have it! She has as much right to her bread,
to her apparel, and to her home, as men have.
But it is said that her nature is so delicate that
she is unfitted for exhausting toil. I ask in
the name of all past history what toil on earth is
more severe, exhausting, and tremendous than that
toil of the needle to which for ages she has been subjected?
The battering-ram, the sword, the carbine, the battle-ax,
have made no such havoc as the needle. I would
that these living sepulchers in which women have for
ages been buried might be opened, and that some resurrection
trumpet might bring up these living corpses to the
fresh air and sunlight.
Go with me and I will show you a woman
who by hardest toil supports her children, her drunken
husband, her old father and mother, pays her house
rent, always has wholesome food on her table, and when
she can get some neighbor on the Sabbath to come in
and take care of her family, appears in church with
hat and cloak that are far from indicating the toil
to which she is subjected. Such a woman as that
has body and soul enough to fit her for any position.
She could stand beside the majority of your salesmen
and dispose of more goods. She could go into
your wheelwright shops and beat one half of your workmen
at making carriages. We talk about woman as though
we had resigned to her all the light work, and ourselves
had shouldered the heavier. But the day of judgment,
which will reveal the sufferings of the stake and
Inquisition, will marshal before the throne of God
and the hierarchs of heaven the martyrs of wash-tub
and needle. Now, I say if there be any preference
in occupation, let women have it. God knows her
trials are the severest. By her acuter sensitiveness
to misfortune, by her hour of anguish, I demand that
no one hedge up her pathway to a livelihood.
Oh! the meanness, the despicability of men who begrudge
a woman the right to work anywhere in any honorable
calling!
I go still further and say that woman
should have equal compensation with men. By what
principle of justice is it that women in many of our
cities get only two thirds as much pay as men, and
in many cases only half? Here is the gigantic
injustice that for work equally well, if
not better, done, woman receives far less compensation
than man. Start with the National Government.
Women clerks in Washington get nine hundred dollars
for doing that for which men receive eighteen hundred
dollars. The wheel of oppression is rolling over
the necks of thousands of women who are at this moment
in despair about what they are to do. Many of
the largest mercantile establishments of our cities
are accessory to these abominations, and from their
large establishments there are scores of souls being
pitched off into death, and their employers know it.
Is there a God? Will there be a judgment?
I tell you, if God rises up to redress woman’s
wrongs, many of our large establishments will be swallowed
up quicker than a South American earthquake ever took
down a city. God will catch these oppressors
between the two millstones of his wrath and grind them
to powder.
Why is it that a female principal
in a school gets only eight hundred and twenty-five
dollars for doing work for which a male principal gets
sixteen hundred and fifty dollars? I hear from
all this land the wail of womanhood. Man has
nothing to answer to that wail but flatteries.
He says she is an angel. She is not. She
knows she is not. She is a human being who gets
hungry when she has no food, and cold when she has
no fire. Give her no more flatteries; give
her justice! There are sixty-five thousand sewing-girls
in New York and Brooklyn. Across the sunlight
comes their death groan. It is not such a cry
as comes from those who are suddenly hurled out of
life, but a slow, grinding, horrible wasting-away.
Gather them before you and look into their faces,
pinched, ghastly, hunger-struck! Look at their
fingers, needle-pricked and blood-tipped! See
that premature stoop in the shoulders! Hear that
dry, hacking, merciless cough! At a large meeting
of these women held in a hall in Philadelphia, grand
speeches were delivered, but a needle-woman took the
stand, threw aside her faded shawl, and with her shriveled
arm hurled a very thunder-bolt of eloquence, speaking
out the horrors of her own experience.
Stand at the corner of a street in
New York at six or seven o’clock in the morning
as the women go to work. Many of them had no breakfast
except the crumbs that were left over from the night
before, or the crumbs they chew on their way through
the street. Here they come! The working-girls
of New York and Brooklyn. These engaged in head
work, these in flower-making, in millinery, in paper-box
making; but, most overworked of all and least compensated,
the sewing-women. Why do they not take the city
cars on their way up? They can not afford the
five cents. If, concluding to deny herself something
else, she gets into the car, give her a seat.
You want to see how Latimer and Ridley appeared in
the fire. Look at that woman and behold a more
horrible martyrdom, a hotter fire, a more agonizing
death. Ask that woman how much she gets for her
work, and she will tell you six cents for making coarse
shirts and find her own thread.
Years ago, one Sabbath night in the
vestibule of this church, after service, a woman fell
in convulsions. The doctor said she needed medicine
not so much as something to eat. As she began
to revive, in her delirium she said, gaspingly:
“Eight cents! Eight cents! Eight cents!
I wish I could get it done, I am so tired. I wish
I could get some sleep, but I must get it done.
Eight cents! Eight cents! Eight cents!”
We found afterward that she was making garments for
eight cents apiece, and that she could make but three
of them in a day. Hear it! Three times eight
are twenty-four. Hear it, men and women who have
comfortable homes! Some of the worst villains
of our cities are the employers of these women.
They beat them down to the last penny and try to cheat
them out of that. The woman must deposit a dollar
or two before she gets the garments to work on.
When the work is done it is sharply inspected, the
most insignificant flaws picked out, and the wages
refused and sometimes the dollar deposited not given
back. The Women’s Protective Union reports
a case where one of the poor souls, finding a place
where she could get more wages, resolved to change
employers, and went to get her pay for work done.
The employer says: “I hear you are going
to leave me?” “Yes,” she said, “and
I have come to get what you owe me.” He
made no answer. She said: “Are you
not going to pay me?” “Yes,” he
said, “I will pay you,” and he kicked her
down-stairs.
Oh, that Women’s Protective
Union, 19 Clinton Place, New York! The blessings
of Heaven be on it for the merciful and divine work
it is doing in the defense of toiling womanhood!
What tragedies of suffering are presented to them
day by day! A paragraph from their report:
“’Can you make Mr. Jones pay me?
He owes me for three weeks at $2.50 a week, and I
can’t get anything, and my child is very sick!’
The speaker, a young woman lately widowed, burst into
a flood of tears as she spoke. She was bidden
to come again the next afternoon and repeat her story
to the attorney at his usual weekly hearing of frauds
and impositions. Means were found by which Mr.
Jones was induced to pay the $7.50.”
Another paragraph from their report:
“A fortnight had passed, when she modestly hinted
a desire to know how much her services were worth.
‘Oh, my dear,’ he replied, ’you are
getting to be one of the most valuable hands in the
trade; you will always get the very best price.
Ten dollars a week you will be able to earn very easily.’
And the girl’s fingers flew on with her work
at a marvelous rate. The picture of $10 a week
had almost turned her head. A few nights later,
while crossing the ferry, she overheard the name of
her employer in the conversation of girls who stood
near: ’What, John Snipes? Why, he
don’t pay! Look out for him every time.
He’ll keep you on trial, as he calls it, for
weeks, and then he’ll let you go, and get some
other fool!’ And thus Jane Smith gained her
warning against the swindler. But the Union held
him in the toils of the law until he paid the worth
of each of those days of ‘trial.’”
Another paragraph: “Her
mortification may be imagined when told that one of
the two five-dollar bills which she had just received
for her work was counterfeit. But her mortification
was swallowed up in indignation when her employer
denied having paid her the money, and insultingly
asked her to prove it. When the Protective Union
had placed this matter in the courts, the judge said:
’You will pay Eleanor the amount of her claim,
$5.83, and also the costs of the court.’”
How are these evils to be eradicated?
Some say: “Give woman the ballot.”
What effect such ballot might have on other questions
I am not here to discuss; but what would be the effect
of female suffrage on women’s wages? I
do not believe that woman will ever get justice by
woman’s ballot. Indeed, women oppress women
as much as men do. Do not women, as much as men,
beat down to the lowest figure the woman who sews
for them? Are not women as sharp as men on washer-women
and milliners and mantua-makers? If a woman asks
a dollar for her work, does not her female employer
ask her if she will not take ninety cents? You
say, “Only ten cents difference.”
But that is sometimes the difference between heaven
and hell. Women often have less commiseration
for women than men. If a woman steps aside from
the path of rectitude, man may forgive woman
never! Woman will never get justice done her
from woman’s ballot. Neither will she get
it from man’s ballot. How then? God
will rise up for her. God has more resources
than we know of. The flaming sword that hung at
Éden’s gate when woman was driven
out will cleave with its terrible edge her oppressors.
But there is something for women to
do. Let young people prepare to excel in spheres
of work, and they will be able after awhile to get
larger wages. Unskilled and incompetent labor
must take what is given: skilled and competent
labor will eventually make its own standard.
Admitting that the law of supply and demand regulates
these things, I contend that the demand for skilled
labor is very great and the supply very small.
Start with the idea that work is honorable, and that
you can do some one thing better than anybody else.
Resolve that, God helping, you will take care of yourself.
If you are after awhile called into another relation
you will all the better be qualified for it by your
spirit of self-reliance, or if you are called to stay
as you are, you can be happy and self-supporting.
Poets are fond of talking about man
as an oak and woman the vine that climbs it; but I
have seen many a tree fall that not only went down
itself, but took all the vines with it. I can
tell you of something stronger than an oak for an
ivy to climb on, and that is the throne of the great
Jéhovah. Single or affianced, that woman is strong
who leans on God and does her best. Many of you
will go single-handed through life, and you will have
to choose between two characters. Young woman,
I am sure you will turn your back upon the useless,
giggling, irresponsible nonentity which society ignominiously
acknowledges to be a woman, and ask God to make you
an humble, active, earnest Christian. What will
become of that womanly disciple of the world?
She is more thoughtful of the attitude she strikes
upon the carpet than how she will look in the judgment;
more worried about her freckles than her sins; more
interested in her apparel than in her redemption.
The dying actress whose life had been vicious said:
“The scene closes draw the curtain.”
Generally the tragedy comes first and the farce afterward;
but in her life it was first the farce of a useless
life and then the tragedy of a wretched eternity.
Compare the life and death of such
a one with that of some Christian aunt that was once
a blessing to your household. I do not know that
she was ever asked to give her hand in marriage.
She lived single, that, untrammeled, she might be
everybody’s blessing. Whenever the sick
were to be visited or the poor to be provided with
bread she went with a blessing. She could pray
or sing “Rock of Ages” for any sick pauper
who asked her. As she got older there were many
days when she was a little sharp, but for the most
part auntie was a sunbeam just the one
for Christmas Eve. She knew better than any one
else how to fix things. Her every prayer, as
God heard it, was full of everybody who had trouble.
The brightest things in all the house dropped from
her fingers. She had peculiar notions, but the
grandest notion she ever had was to make you happy.
She dressed well auntie always dressed
well; but her highest adornment was that of a meek
and quiet spirit, which, in the sight of God, is of
great price. When she died you all gathered lovingly
about her; and as you carried her out to rest, the
Sunday-school class almost covered the coffin with
japónicas; and the poor people stood at the end
of the alley, with their aprons to their eyes, sobbing
bitterly, and the man of the world said, with Solomon:
“Her price was above rubies;” and Jesus,
as unto the maiden in Judea, commanded, “I say
unto thee, Arise!”