[24] I do not dwell upon this watch factory in the text, because, although fifty women are at work with one hundred and fifty men, they are only "tending machines;" so that, although employment is open, a career can hardly be said to be. The watches made at Waltham by machinery are said to be so superior to all others, that they are used by preference on the race-courses to time the horses. Men and women do not compete with each other there; but both are at service, with a steam-engine for their master.
For the first two months, the women earn two dollars and fifty cents a week; for the third, three dollars; and, after that, four dollars. The men earn from five shillings to two dollars a day. It seems that no special skill is required in the women, while the men in a few departments are still paid according to their ability. The steam-engine, it appears, has not yet learned how to cook dials! In this case, the operator must hold the dial, turning it evenly, as if he were a smoke-jack, which requires judgment and "faculty"!
[25] Livingstone's "Africa." Paul Kane's "Travels in the North-west."
[26] I am happy to find, on the authority of the "London Athenæum," that this statement was, when I wrote it, untrue. "Germany," it says, on the 23d of July, 1859,—"Germany has lost one of her most famed and eminent female scholars. Frau Dr. Heidenreich, née Von Siebold, died at Darmstadt a fortnight ago. She was born in 1792, studied the science of midwifery at the Universities of Göttingen and Giessen, and took her doctor's degree in 1817; not, honoris causâ, by favor of the Faculty, but, like any other German student, by writing the customary Latin dissertation, as well as by bravely defending, in public disputation, a number of medical theses. After that, she took up her permanent abode at Darmstadt, indefatigable in the exercise of her special branch of science, and universally honored as one of its first living authorities."
"Universally honored as one of its first living authorities," that was what I was in search of; and French and German papers confirm the statement. Dr. Heidenreich came of a family highly distinguished in her specialty. It was ancient and noble: she was a baroness in her own right. All readers of English works on midwifery know the authority given to the name of Von Siebold. Her father founded the famous hospital at Berlin; and her brother, still living, stands high in medical fame, having written the best history of midwifery extant.
Rosa Bonheur, also, is as unquestionably at the head of her department as Sir Edmund Landseer. The three pictures Boston has had a chance to see this autumn ought to fill every woman's bosom with a glow of honest pride.
I can find no better place than this, perhaps, to introduce the following facts, to which my attention has been directed by the kindness of Miss Mary L. Booth, of New York.
In the History of Southold, N.Y.,—one of the oldest towns in the United States,—it appears that women have practised there as "doctresses" and "midwives" from the first settlement of the country. From 1740 to the present time,—more than one hundred years,—the town of Southold has had a trustworthy female physician. The first of these, Elizabeth King, who practised from 1740 until her death in 1780, attended at the birth of more than one thousand children.
During this time,—from 1760 to 1775,—a Mrs. Peck was also known in the same town as an excellent midwife. The direct successor of Mrs. King was, however, a Mrs. Lucretia Lester, who practised from 1745 to 1779. Of her my authority says, "She was justly respected as nurse and doctress to the pains and infirmities incident to her fellow-mortals, especially her own sex;" a remark which shows she attended both. "She was, during thirty years, conspicuous as an angel of mercy; a woman whose price was beyond rubies. It is said she attended at the birth of thirteen hundred children, and, of that number, lost but two."
A Mrs. Susannah Brown practised from 1800 to 1840, and attended at the birth of fourteen hundred children. From the number of patients these women must have had, it would seem as if they were sustained by the whole neighborhood. The book just published speaks highly of them, as what Henry Ward Beecher would call a "means of grace," and pleads, from the precedent, for the education of women to medicine.