You offer them a high education in vain till you add to it the stimulus of a free career. In this lecture, I undertake to prove to you, that a large majority of women stand in such relations to their employers, that they are compelled to death or a life of shame. Why not choose death, then?
So I asked once of a woman thus pressed to the wall. "Ah, madam!" she answered, "I chose it long ago for myself; but what shall I do for my mother and child?"
The superior has a right to every advantage which he can honestly gain, as well as the inferior; but he has no right to increase any natural difference in his favor, if he believe it to exist, by laws or customs which cripple the inferior. If, as political economists tell us, it is chiefly by man, collectively taken, that the property of society is created; and if, on that very ground, man's interest has the first claim to consideration,—does it not follow, that every friend of woman will try to induce her to become a capitalist, and open to her, as her first path to safety, the way to honorable independence? And, in this connection, I must repeat what some of you have often heard me say, that a want of respect for labor, and a want of respect for woman, lies at the bottom of all our difficulties, low wages included.
I will not admit that the argument of the political economist has, as yet, any rightful connection with the price of woman's work. "The price of labor will always rise or fall," he says, "as the number of laborers is small or large; and it is because there are too many women for a few avenues of labor that the wages are so low." If man believes this, let him help us to open new avenues, and so reduce the number in any one. But I claim that he has increased the natural difference in his own favor, supposing that there be any such, by laws and customs which cripple woman; and that his own lust of gain stands in the way of her daily bread. Just so in hydraulics, men tell us, that water rises everywhere to the level of its source; but you may raise it a thousand feet higher by the aid of your forcing-pump, or drop it from a siphon a thousand feet below. And a forcing-pump and a siphon has man imposed upon the natural currents of labor. If, in my correspondence with employers last winter, one man told me with pride that he gave from eight to fifty cents for the making of pantaloons, including the heaviest doeskins, he forgot to tell me what he charged his customers for the same work. Ah! on those bills, so long unpaid, the eight cents sometimes rises to thirty, and the fifty cents always to a dollar or a dollar and twenty-five cents.
The most efficient help this class of workwomen could receive would be the thorough adoption of the cash system, and the establishment of a large workshop in the hands of women consenting to moderate profits, and superintended by those whose position in society would win respect for labor. When I said, six months ago, that ten Beacon-street women, engaged in honorable work, would do more for this cause than all the female artists, all the speech-making and conventions, in the world, I was entirely in earnest.
It is pretty and lady-like, men think, to paint and chisel: philanthropic young ladies must work for nothing, like the angels. Let them, when they rise to angelic spheres; but, here and now, every woman who works for nothing helps to keep her sister's wages down,—helps to keep the question of death or dishonor perpetually before the women of the slop-shop.
Why? Because she helps to depress the estimate of woman's ability. What is persistently given for nothing is everywhere thought to be worth nothing. I throw open a door here for some stifled sufferer at the West End: let her open a clothing establishment, and employ her own sex; let her make money by it, and watch for the end. When an Employment Society or a Needle-woman's Friend becomes bankrupt in purse, it is bankrupt in morals and argument as well. The wheels of the world move on the grooves of good management, of success. Set these once firmly underneath, and the outcry against our moral Fultons will be hushed.
In country villages and farming districts, there is a great deal of harmful competition with the girls of the slop-shops, which can never be ended until it is considered respectable for women openly to earn money. The stitching of wallets, hat-linings, and shoe-bindings, the more delicate labor on linen collars and shirt-bosoms, is carried on now not merely by so-called benevolent societies who want to build churches, lecture-rooms, and so on, but by rich farmers' wives, who keep or do not keep servants, in the long, summer afternoons and winter evenings, because it is work that can be done privately, and is sought to supply them with jewelry and dress. If they will not educate their minds by profitable reading, it is earnestly to be desired they should work, but openly, for money, and at such trades as naturally fall to their lot. Herb and fruit drying, distilling, preserving, pickling, market-gardening, may yet lay the foundations of ample fortune for many a woman. I have passed a summer amid lovely landscapes, where the women found neither fruit nor vegetables for their table, but let the brown earth plead to them in vain; while they stitched, stitched, stitched the long hours away, every broken needle bearing witness against the broken lives of women who needed in distant cities, where they stood homeless and starving, the work their sisters pilfered, sitting at their ease beside the hearth-stone. Their ignorance was their excuse. Let it not be ours.
And, first, for a few general statements.
An indispensable requisite for what the Germans call a "bread study" is, that, for average talent, it should command moderate success. "Of all causes of prostitution in Paris," says Duchâtelet, "and probably in all great towns, none is so active as the want of work, or inadequate remuneration. What are the earnings of our laundresses, seamstresses, and milliners? Compare the price of labor with the price of dishonor, and you will cease to be surprised that women fall. Out of 5,183 prostitutes in Paris, I found that 2,696 had been driven to the streets by starvation; and 89, to feed starving parents or children. That is 300 over one-half of the whole number."