"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 Staël 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 Eden'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 Jehovah. 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
japonicas; 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!"