I need only remind you of the formal petition sent in at the time of the opening of the School of Design at Marlborough House, to entreat the Government not to instruct and aid women, lest the poor, helpless men should starve! A similar prejudice, much more active than any in America, prevents English women from qualifying themselves as physicians. Dr. Spencer, of Bristol, really educated his daughter as an accoucheuse; but the prejudice was so strong that she was not allowed to practise, and became a governess instead. The same prejudice kept the English Army suffering for months, while it delayed the departure of female nurses to the Crimea.
In Staffordshire, women are employed to paint crockery and china, which they can do with more taste and grace than men. It seems hardly credible, that the desire of the men to keep down their wages should deprive the females of the customary hand-rest; which would, of course, diminish the fatigue, and make the pencil-stroke more certain. I am happy to believe that not an employer in the United States would submit to this absurd demand; and the result of any such attempt on the part of workmen would probably be a general permission to leave. We are, in this country, much more free from the control of guilds and unions of various sorts than the people of England; yet the conduct of our printers furnishes a fair parallel to these foreign facts. Within a few years, there have been more than twenty strikes in printing-offices, consequent upon the employment of a few women; and the result has generally been an entire change of hands, masters in America not enduring dictation.
In August of 1854, the journeymen employed in the office of the "Philadelphia Daily Register" left the office, in high dudgeon, because the publisher had employed two women as type-setters in a separate office. They acted in conformity to a resolve of the Printers' Union, and were permitted to depart. But this was not all. Threats of personal violence followed all who sought the waiting work, and an attempt was made to cut the rope by which the forms are raised. The result would have been to break up the type, prevent the issue of the paper, and run the risk of endangering life. Complaints were lodged against the printers; and, after a hearing, they were each held to bail in six hundred dollars, to answer to the charge of conspiracy, at the Court of Quarter Sessions.
About the same time, a printer in the same establishment with the "Lily," but working on the "Home Visitor," refused to give some necessary instruction to a girl employed on the first paper. It was found that all the hands had signed an agreement never to work with or instruct a woman! The men, after proper remonstrance, were dismissed, and their places supplied by four women and three men, who worked harmoniously together. That was only five years ago, and now there are hundreds of female printers in Ohio; and one orphan girl has risen from type-setting to an editor's chair and a handsome competence.
Jealousy in America sometimes takes a more comical form. Coming home lately from a Female School of Design in another city, I expressed some disappointment at the character of the work and management. A young man in the room spoke of the impossibility of a woman's ever learning to design, in terms so contemptuous that I did not think it worth while to answer him. Making some inquiries, however, in private, I found that his master had often reproached him with falling behind the women at the school; so that personal pique had more to do with the whole thing than any real experience.[22]
But, having made these remarks, I must recur to my previous statement,—that, in the main, no jealousy of cliques, no legal restrictions, prevent women from taking their proper place. A want of respect for woman, and a want of respect for labor, latent and unacknowledged in the public mind, must be overcome before she can do it. The overworked and ill-paid woman has seized every chance to slight her work; and an idea has gone abroad, that no slop-work will be fit for sale unless a man inspects it. So New York and Paris have man-tailors and man-milliners; and the poor, tempted, stricken girls are brought into contact, in the pursuit of bread, with the very men most likely to take advantage of every failure. Very sad stories could be told of work rejected day after day, on account of pretended faults, till the starving victim drops at the feet of the treacherous overseer, only to be trampled, in the end, under those of the whole town. Educated, respectable women should have the giving-out and the inspection of woman's work; but educated and respectable women will never stand in such a position till public opinion teaches them that all labor is honorable, and that no lady will ever sit with folded hands. How we rate an idle boy! how we bear with a dawdling girl! That father grows impatient whose son does not rise early, or show some desire for employment; but the same man keeps his daughters in Berlin wool and yellow novels, and looks to marriage as their salvation, even when he blushes to be told of it.
To prove this, let me show you that many employments have been open to a degree not generally acknowledged; and a safe foundation for this assertion will be found in the census of the United Kingdom and that of the United States.
It is a singular fact, that there are a great many more women in England in business for themselves than employed as tenders or clerks; while, in America, the fact, at the present day, is directly the reverse.
It was not so in the time of the Revolution. Then, as in France, the men went to the war. Women of shrewdness and ability managed their husbands' affairs,—the shops and trades of the nation,—and grew so independent thereby, that even Mrs. John Adams had to rebuke her husband for the absurd inequalities of privilege which his new government sustained. In England, the deficient education of the lower classes makes it almost impossible for the women to make change quickly, or keep accounts; and we smile as we find the "Edinburgh Review" gravely contending that woman may master the rule of three; that, at least, they ought to have a chance to try: and we can afford to smile; for our public schools have taught us how much quicker most women can count than most men. While, therefore, the want of education has prevented a certain class of English women from becoming clerks or book-keepers, the national habits of thrift, and a certain respectable pride in a family shop or trade, have induced thousands of a superior class to assume, upon a father's or husband's death, the charge of his establishment, and so secure a competence for the heirs. This is what we could wish our women to do. We all know how frequently the whole social position of a family here changes with the death of its head. Let our women prevent this for the future, by cherishing a natural ambition to do for their children what the fathers of those children would have done.