Nail-cutting and hook-and-eye making employ others; and, if we take a book into our hand, women follow us through all the stages of its manufacture. A woman cut and cleaned the rags, counted the sheets of paper, and set off the reams; a woman may have set the types; perhaps some worn-out seamstress wrote the verses, or a female physician composed the thesis: a woman may print, a woman certainly will fold it down and stitch it for the binder. A woman will engrave on wood its illustrations, or color in her own home its fine photographs or drawings: at the very last, her white hand will touch with gleams of gold its tinted edges or many-hued envelope.
It is women who pack cards and throw off damaged paper. I have not obtained any reliable account of English female card-makers; but there must be many. In an old Nuremberg rate-book are the names of "Elizabeth and Margaret," Karten-mächerin, reported in 1436 and 1438. Cards were invented in 1361. In about seventy years, therefore, the manufacture had passed into woman's hand. In my notes from the census, I find no mention of wood-engravers: but, in 1839, Charlotte Nesbit, Marianne Williams, Mary Byfield, Mary and Elizabeth Clint, held honorable positions among English wood-engravers; while, at the close of the last century, Elizabeth Blackwell executed botanical plates, and Angelica Kauffman engraved on steel, to the satisfaction of Sir Joshua Reynolds. In London, recently, one accomplished female engraver has turned her steel plates into a pleasant country-house, which she means to furnish with the proceeds of her delicate painting on glass.
A whole volume might be written concerning English female printers. Turning over some old books the other day in the Antiquarian Rooms at Worcester, I came upon Elizabeth Bathurst's "Truth Vindicated," printed and sold by Mary Hinde, at No. 2 in George's Yard, Lombard Street, 1774. A little farther along, I found Sophia Hume's "Letters to South Carolina," printed and sold by Luke Hinde, at the Bible in George's Yard, Lombard Street, 1752. Good Quaker books, both of them; and the titlepages told a pleasant story. Here, at the sign of the Bible, Luke Hinde carried on his work in 1752. When he died, his widow kept the establishment open, and taught her girls to stand at the forms; so, twenty-two years after (in 1774), the place goes on in her name. No change; only some dissenting wind has blown down the Old Bible, and a gilded number two shines in its stead. It is the history of half the business-women in England, and a very creditable history for Mary Hinde.
On those dishes of Liverpool ware are pretty pictures in gray ink. Women took them wet from the copperplate, and, laying them along the biscuit, carried it to the furnace; there the paper burns away: while others paint and gild, or, with hideous clatter of blood-stones, polish off the finer ware.
In the next street, hundreds of women make paperbags and pill-boxes, without wasting a square inch of material.
Not long ago, two young girls, whose father's clerkship was ill paid, took to making artificial teeth, and succeeded so well as to obtain constant orders and a competence. More cheering still: a young servant, with strong elbows, took to French polishing, and gave desk and work-box and inlaid cabinet a gloss that no varnish of man could match. For two or three years she made contracts with upholsterers, and kept herself in profitable work: then Cupid pinched the strong elbows, and she slipped out of permanent reputation as a cabinetmaker's wife.
In brushmaking, women sort the hair, and set it in the holes. The delicate, cone-like arrangement of the badger's hair, in the modern shaving-brush, can be made only by a woman's hand; and she who has skill to do it well may ask her own wages.
Then there are glove-cleaners; women who strain silk, in fluting, across the old-fashioned work-bag or the parlor-organ front; women who shell pease and beans at so much a quart, and who make the thousands of baskets for the fruiterer's stall. Passing the white-lead factory at meal-times, you will see fifty women file away, whose duty it is to pile the lead for oxidation; and thousands, very different from these, sit making artificial flowers, many of them cheap enough, but others, from their exquisite grace and naturalness, bringing the artist's own price.
I have purposely dwelt on all these avocations. As you have followed me, has it seemed to you that we wanted more avenues for manual labor? As many as you please. We are bound to inherit the whole earth. But it seems to me that what is most needed is, first, respect for woman as a laborer, and then respect for labor itself.
When men respect women as human beings, consequently as laborers, they will pay them as good wages as men; and then uncommon skill or power to work will be set free from the old forcing-pump and siphon, and we shall see what women can do. When men respect labor,—respect it so far, that they hold a woman honored when she seeks it,—then women of a higher rank will seek to invest their capital in mercantile experiments; will establish factories or workshops; will organize groups of struggling sisters; and the class that most needs to be helped, the idle rich, will find happiness and honor, will find help, in offering opportunities to the lowest.