It is such extreme destitution that drives women to crime. In an English paper-mill, where the girls worked at counting the sheets in a room by themselves, and made good wages, they were all well-behaved and respectable. In another department of the same mill, where the work was dirty and the wages only a shilling a day, they were almost uniformly of bad character. The base employment degraded them,—the starvation wages demoralized them. Philanthropy has not been deaf to the cries of these unhappy classes, and has made repeated and herculean efforts to improve their condition and reform their morals. But the stumbling-block of excessively low wages was always in the way. It was found, that, until the physical condition was improved, the ordinary wants of life supplied, the moral status was incapable of elevation.
I grant that no one item of this long catalogue of calamities has yet overtaken the women of our own country. It would seem that the fact must be, that in other lands the sex is not more degraded than it was centuries ago, but that it has never been permitted to rise to its true level. Once put down, it has always been kept down.
The contrast between the condition of women in foreign countries and their condition here is too striking to be overlooked. We have our hardships, our trials, our privations; but what are they to those of our European sisters? If we get low wages, they are in most cases sufficient to enable us to maintain a respectable position and a decent appearance. If the influence of caste is felt among us, if by some it is considered ungenteel to work, this prejudice is not of American growth, but was transferred to our shores from the very people with whom woman is degraded to the level of the brutes. The first settlers brought it with them, and it has descended to us as an inheritance. While it is our province to confront it, we should do so bravely.
But as yet, no woman here is compelled to engage in labor that involves the necessity of dressing like a man. The law itself forbids such change of dress; and when it was proposed, some years ago, to so alter our costume as to make it half male and half female, not for working purposes, but for mere personal convenience, the public sentiment of the nation ridiculed and frowned it down. The other sex has been educated to regard us with a respect and deference too sincere to permit these foreign degradations to overtake us; while the spirit of independence infused by the nature of our government, the unrestricted intercourse of all classes with each other, and that robust training of thought which it is impossible that any American woman should fail to receive, will forever place us above the shocking contingencies to which the poor laborious Englishwoman is exposed. If, in common with her, we are compelled to work, our labor will keep us respectable, though it fail to make us rich.
These are some of the compensations which fall to the lot of the American working-woman. There are many others,—too many, indeed, to be recited here. Chief among them is the respect and courtesy accorded to us by all classes. A public insult to a well-behaved woman is never heard of. We may travel unattended over the vast network of railroads that traverse our country, and passenger and conductor will vie with each other in paying us not only respect, but attention. The former instinctively rises from his seat that we may be accommodated. It is the same in all public places,—in the streets, in churches, and in places of public entertainment. At table we are served first. In short, as we respect ourselves, so will others respect us. The laws have been modified in our favor. The property of a woman is her own, whether married or single. It is subject to no invasion by her husband's creditors, yet her dower in his estate remains good.
These are substantial concessions to our sex, and they are prime essentials to personal comfort. For my part, I am content with them, asking no other I have never slept uneasily because the law did not permit me to vote or to become a candidate for office. The time was, as I have heard, when women voted, all who were eighteen years old being entitled to deposit their ballots. They mingled in the crowds about the polls, and became as violently agitated by partisan excitements as the men. Those who would have been quiet home bodies, had no such foolish liberty been allowed them, became zealous politicians; while others, to whom excitement of some kind was a necessity of life, turned to this, and became so wild with political furor as to unsex themselves,—if throwing aside all modesty be doing so. They carried placards in their hands among the crowd to influence voters, distributed handbills and tickets, entered into familiar conversation with total strangers, many of them persons of infamous character, and pleaded and wrangled with them to secure their votes. They obeyed literally the injunction of modern political managers to "vote early,"—so many mere girls swearing that they were of legal age, when they were in reality much younger, that the singular statistical dislocation became apparent, that there were no women in the country under eighteen years old. With so loose a morality on this point, it cannot be doubted that the other injunction, to "vote often," was as generally obeyed. I have no positive information as to how the married women who thus devoted themselves to electioneering managed their domestic concerns,—who prepared the dinner, who rocked the cradle, who tended the baby,—or whether these cards were thrust upon the husbands. History is silent on this subject; but the more practical minds of the men of this generation can readily conceive how inconvenient it would be for them to be transformed into cooks and dry-nurses.
I have had no ambition to parade in Bloomer costume, or to be otherwise eccentric, even where it happened to be more comfortable. Neither have I figured as the chairman or secretary of a woman's convention, nor had my name ringing through the newspapers as an impatient struggler after more rights than I now possess. I do not think that I should be happier by being permitted to vote, and am sure there is no office I can think of that I would have for the asking. But I was never one of the strong-minded of my sex. I know that there are such, and that even in this noisy world they have made themselves heard. How attentively they have been listened to I will not stop to inquire. I have always believed that the truest self-respect lies, not in the exaction of questionable prerogatives, but in seeking to attain that shining eminence to which the common sentiment of our fellow-beings will concede honor and admiration as its rightful due.
Yet the picture which represents the true condition of our working-women has undeniably its harsh and melancholy features. It shows a daily, constant struggle for adequate compensation. There is everywhere a discrimination against them in the matter of wages, as compared with those of men. It looks, in some cases, indeed, as if women were employed only because they can be had at cheaper rates.
Probably the gay ladies covered with brilliants that flash out accumulated lustre from the footlights of the theatres they nightly visit have no suspicion that the delicate and graceful girls they see upon the stage are victims of this same unjust discrimination as regards compensation. I have never been inside a theatre, and know nothing of the stage, or of the dancing-girls, except what I hear and read. But I can readily imagine how beautiful these young creatures must appear, dressed in light and graceful attire, bringing out by all the well-known artifices of theatrical costume the most captivating charms of face and figure. As they crowd upon the stage in tableaux, which without long and toilsome rehearsal would become more confused and aimless groupings of gayly dressed dancers, they take their appointed places, and with a symmetrical unity repeat the graceful combinations of attitude and movement they have so laboriously acquired in private. The crowded house is electrified by the complicated, yet truly beautiful display. All is fair and happy on the outside. No step in painful, no grief shows itself, no consciousness of wrong appears, no face but is wreathed in smiles. The show of perfect happiness is complete.
But do the crowd of rich men who occupy box and pit bestow a thought on the domestic life of these young girls? Do their wives and daughters, lolling on cushioned seats, clothed in purple and fine linen, and waited on by a host of obsequious fops, ever think whether the dancing-girls have a domestic life of any kind or not? They came to the theatre to be amused,—not to meditate; why should they permit their amusement to be clouded by a single thought as to whether any others but themselves are happy?