So it happened, that, after the publication of "Woman's Right to Labor," generous men came forward to help me carry out my plans. The best printer in Boston said, "I am willing to take women into my office at once, if you can find women who will submit to an apprenticeship like men." On the same conditions, a distinguished chemist offered to take a class of women, and train them to be first-class apothecaries or scientific observers, as they might choose. To these offers there were no satisfactory responses. "Yes," said the would-be printers, "we will go into an office for six months; but, by that time, our oldest sisters will be married, and our mothers will want us at home."
"An apprenticeship of six years!" exclaimed the young lady of a chemical turn. "I should like to learn very much, so that I could be a chemist, if I ever had to; but poison myself for six years over those 'fumes,' not I." It is easy to rail against society and men in general: but it is very painful for a woman to confess her heaviest obstacle to success; namely, the weakness of women. The slave who dances, unconscious of degradation on the auction-block, is at once the greatest stimulus and the bitterest discouragement of the antislavery reformer: so women, contented in ignominious dependence, restless even to insanity from the need of healthy employment and the perversion of their instincts, and confessedly looking to marriage for salvation, are at once a stimulus to exertion, and an obstacle in our way. But no kind, wise heart will heed this obstacle. Having spoken plain to society, having won the sympathy of men, let us see if we cannot compel the attention of these well-disposed but thoughtless damsels.
"Six years out of the very bloom of our lives to be spent in the printing-office or the laboratory!" exclaim the dismayed band; and they flutter out of reach along the sidewalks of Beacon Street, or through the mazes of the "Lancers."
But what happens ten years afterward, when, from twenty-six to thirty, they find themselves pushed off the pavé, or left to blossom on the wall? Desolate, because father and brother have died; disappointed, because well-founded hopes of a home or a "career" have failed; impoverished, because they depended on strength or means that are broken,--what have they now to say to the printing-office or the apothecary's shop? They enter both gladly; with quick woman's wit, learning as much in six months as men would in a year; but grumbling and discontented, that, in competing with men who have spent their whole lives in preparation, they can only be paid at half-wages. What does common sense demand, if not that women should make thorough preparation for trades or professions; and, having taken up a resolution, should abide by all its consequences like men?
Before cases like these my lips are often sealed, and my hands drop paralyzed. Not that they alter God's truth, or make the duty of protest against existing wrong any less incumbent: but they obscure the truth; they needlessly complicate the duty.
Perplexed and anxious, I have often felt that what I needed most was an example to set before young girls,--an example not removed by superiority of station, advantage of education, or unwonted endowment, beyond their grasp and imitation.
There was Florence Nightingale. But her father had a title: it was fair to presume that her opportunities were titled also. All the girls I knew wished they could have gone to the Crimea; while I was morally certain, that the first amputation would have turned them all faint. There was Dorothea Dix: she had money and time. It was not strange that she had great success; for she started, a monomaniac in philanthropy, from the summit of personal independence. Mrs. John Stuart Mill: had she ever wanted bread? George Sand: the woman wasn't respectable. In short, whomsoever I named, who had pursued with undeviating perseverance a worthy career, my young friends had their objections ready. No one had ever been so poor, so ill educated, so utterly without power to help herself, as they; and, provoking as these objections were, I felt that they had force. My young friends were not great geniuses: they were ordinary women, who should enter the ordinary walks of life with the ordinary steadfastness and devotion of men in the same paths; nothing more. What I wanted was an example,--not too stilted to be useful,--a life flowing out of circumstances not dissimilar to their own, but marked by a steady will, an unswerving purpose. As I looked back over my own life, and wished I could read them its lessons,--and I looked back a good way; for I was very young, when the miserable destitution of a drunkard's wife, whom I assisted, showed me how comfortable a thing it was to rest at the mercy of the English common law,--as I looked back over my long interest in the position of woman, I felt that my greatest drawback had been the want of such an example. Every practical experiment that the world recorded had been made under such peculiar circumstances, or from such a fortuitous height, that it was at once rejected as a lesson.
One thing I felt profoundly: as men sow they must reap; and so must women. The practical misery of the world--its terrible impurity will never be abated till women prepare themselves from their earliest years to enter the arena of which they are ambitious, and stand there at last mature and calm, but, above all, thoroughly trained; trained also at the side of the men, with whom they must ultimately work; and not likely, therefore to lose balance or fitness by being thrown, at the last moment, into unaccustomed relations. A great deal of nonsense has been talked lately about the unwillingness of women to enter the reading-room of the Cooper Institute, where men also resort.
"A woman's library," in any city, is one of the partial measures that I deprecate: so I only partially rejoice over the late establishment of such a library in New York. I look upon it as one of those half-measures which must be endured in the progress of any desired reform; and, while I wish the Cooper Institute and its reading-room God-speed with every fibre of my consciousness, I have no words with which to express my shame at the mingled hypocrisy and indelicacy of those who object to use it. What woman stays at home from a ball because she will meet men there? What woman refuses to walk Broadway in the presence of the stronger sex? What woman refuses to buy every article of her apparel from the hands of a man, or to let the woman's tailor or shoemaker take the measure of her waist or foot; try on and approve her coiffure or bernouse?
What are we to think, then, of the delicacy which shrinks from the reading-room frequented by men; which discovers so suddenly that magazines are more embarrassing than mazourkas; that to read in a cloak and hat before a man is more indelicate than to waltz in his presence half denuded by fashion?