NEW LECTURES.
This lecture had been prepared during the early months of the year and the closing months of 1852. She delivered it on many occasions in subsequent years in various parts of the country, rewriting it several times in whole or in part for that purpose. Towards the closing years of her life she revised it once more, fully setting forth her ideas and convictions on the subject of woman suffrage; and in this completed form it is printed in full in the Appendix of this work. It is believed to be one of the strongest arguments that has ever been written in favor of woman’s right to the ballot. Mrs. Bloomer also prepared lectures on woman’s right to employment and education as fully in all respects as that enjoyed by the other sex. These lectures, she delivered to audiences in different parts of the country as occasion offered. They were radical in their claims for equality for woman in all the employments and acquirements of life with man, for at that time this claim was only just beginning to be discussed. No colleges were then open to women. No universities offered her the literary advantages of their halls and lecture rooms, and the general opinion was entertained among the mass of the people that the three studies of reading, writing and arithmetic were enough for her. So also there was little for women to do but to sew and stitch, and occasionally teach school for wages far below those paid to men. There were no women lawyers, no women preachers, except among the Quakers, no typewriters, no clerks in the stores, no public offices filled by women. Mrs. Bloomer in her lectures insisted that all this was wrong. She argued that the schoolroom, the workshop, the public office, the lawyer’s forum and the sacred desk should be opened to her sex on entire equality with man. These were then unpopular doctrines to promulgate either in the public press or on the lecturer’s platform; but Mrs. Bloomer was spared long enough to see her rather radical ideas on this subject brought into practical application, for at the end of 1894 woman’s right to both education and employment on an equality with man had come to be almost universally recognized.