Woman's Profession as Mother and Educator, with Views in Opposition to Woman Suffrage

by Catharine Esther Beecher

Educational Association, for securing endowed collegiate and professional schools for women, which has established several flourishing institutions at the West. The most important of these is the Milwaukee Female College, which for more than fifteen years has been conducted by the chief agent of this Association, Miss Mary Mortimer; and which now numbers 180 pupils, and exhibits many of the benefits of our plan, although only partially endowed. The object of this meeting is to gain your influence in order to secure, not only what has been gained at Milwaukee, but to accomplish the whole plan of a fully endowed Woman's University, as the model which we hope to see reproduced all over the nation.

In all these educational efforts, I have been led by a deep and painful sense of the depressed and suffering condition of large portions of our sex, and to an extent little realized by women in easy and prosperous circumstances. I introduce here an extract from a published article of mine that gives some small exhibition of these painful facts.

That there is something essentially wrong in the present

condition of women, is every year growing more and more apparent, while the public mind is more and more perplexed with diverse methods proposed for the remedy. In one of our leading secular papers we read this statement of the case from the pen of a working woman:

"There are so few departments of labor open to women, that, in those departments, the supply of female labor is frightfully in advance of the demand. The business world offers the lowest wages to eager applicants, certain that they will be ravenously clutched. And, indeed, to see the mob of women that block and choke these few and narrow gates open to them—the struggle—the press—the agony—the trembling eagerness—you might suppose they were entering the temple of fame or wealth, or, at least had some cosy little cottage ahead, in which competence awaited the winner. Nothing of the sort. These are blind alleys, one and all. The mere getting in, and keeping in, are the meagre objects of this terrible struggle. A woman who has not genius, or is not a rare exception, has no opening—no promotion—no career. She turns hopelessly on a pivot; at every turn the sand gives way, and she sinks lower. At every turn light and air are more difficult, and she turns and digs her own grave. Do you say these are figures of speech? Here, then, are figures of fact. There are now thirty thousand women in New York, whose labor averages from twelve to fifteen hours a day, and yet whose income seldom exceeds thirty-three

cents a day. Operators on sewing-machines, and a few others, enjoy comparative opulence, gaining five to eight dollars a week, though from this are to be paid three or four dollars for a bed in a wretched room with several other occupants, often without a window or any provision for pure air, and with only the poor food found where such rooms abound. Thousands of ladies, of good family and education, as teachers receive from two to six hundred dollars a year. Few women get beyond that, and a large proportion of them are mothers with children. Over these poorly-paid laborers broods the sense of hopeless toil. There is no bright future. The woman who is fevered, hurried, and aching, who works from daylight to midnight, loathing her mean room, her meaner dress, her joyless life, will, in ten years, neither better herself nor her children. The American working-woman has no share in the American privilege given to the poorest male laborer—a growing income, a bank account, and every office of the Republic, if he have brain and courage to win them."

This describes the condition and feelings of not all, but of a large class of women in many of our larger cities, who must earn their own livelihood. But, in the medium classes, as it respects wealth, the unmarried or widowed women feel that they are an incumbrance to fathers and brothers, who often unwillingly support them from pride or duty. For such, also, there is "no opening—no promotion—no career;" and they must remain dependent chiefly on the

labor of others till marriage is offered, which to vast numbers is a positive impossibility.

This has lately been proved, from the census, by a leading New York paper. In that it is shown that, in all our large cities, the male inhabitants, under fifteen and over the usual marriageable age, are greatly in excess of the females, and, consequently, the women at the marriageable age are greatly in excess of the marriageable men. Thus, in New York City, according to the statements of the New York Times, there are eleven thousand more females than males, of all ages, while there are one hundred and thirty-two thousand more women of marriageable age than men of that age. This is perhaps a large estimate, but the disproportion is at all events enormous.

And, in the rural districts of New York State, we find a similar state of things; for the excess of females, of all ages, is twenty-one thousand, while the excess of marriageable women, if at the same ratio as that stated in New York City, would be two hundred and sixty-three thousand. A similar state of things will be seen in all our older States.