DEATH OR DISHONOR.

"How high, beneficent, sternly inexorable, if forgotten, is the duty laid, not on women only, but on every creature, in regard to these particulars!"—T. Carlyle.

THE delicate ladies on Beacon Street, who order their ices and creams flavored with vanilla or pear-juice, may not know that bituminous coal, rope-ends, and creosote, furnish a larger proportion of the piquant seasoning than the blossoming bean or the orchard-tree; but every man of science does.[11]

Already the chemist furnishes the attar of Cashmere from heaps of offal that lie rotting by the way. It is as if God forced man face to face with every repellent fact of nature, and said, "Slake thy thirst at this turbid fountain, child of the dust; or the purer streams of the hillside shall trickle for thee in vain."

Somewhat so, I am compelled to turn your eyes to the most repulsive side of human life. I do not do it willingly, but of a necessity; not because I like it, but because it is essential to the argument. May the contact prove, that the perfumed joy of later years has disguised itself, for both of us, in the rotting accumulations of our social life!

It rests with yourselves to decide. These lectures may be useless; they may fill your minds with painful details, open hideous vistas, and blind you to the tempting, heavenward ways which we love to see the young and beautiful pursue.

But, in such case, the responsibility is not mine. I would have you look on vice, that you may learn to loathe it; I would have you realize, that what a noble friend of ours has called the "perishing classes" are made of men and women like yourselves.

Bidding you trust, to a certain extent, to the truth of those terrible statistics that crush Thomas Henry Buckle in their grasp, I would still have you remember, that, beside the active laws of moral and material life, there is ever the living God immanent in the world; and that it is always for you to change the results of history, at any given era, according to the great first law,—none the less real because so often forgotten,—that this living God helps or hinders you as you will, and becomes, at any moment that you choose, an important element in each calculation.

The subject at present before us is "Woman's Claims to Labor."

These claims rest upon three points:—

First, The absolute necessity of bread.

Second, A natural ability, physical and psychical; and an attraction inherent in the ability.

Third, An absolute want of the moral nature.

Having treated these in turn, I propose to show you what practical opposition man offers to her advance; what fault lies in herself; how much more numerous are the occupations open than is generally supposed; and what social obstructions have prevented her taking advantage of them.

In this connection, I shall speak of those women who have opened a way for their sex; and shall offer to you certain plans of action, by which, it seems to me, the convenience and the happiness of the employer and the employed may be materially advanced, especially as regards our own city. Like a wise child, who from his fretful pillow takes the pill first, and the conserve afterwards, I shall open the most painful branch of my subject in this lecture, and turn from it as soon as the needed impression has been made.

I ask for woman, then, free, untrammelled access to all fields of labor; and I ask it, first, on the ground that she needs to be fed, and that the question which is at this moment before the great body of working women is "death or dishonor:" for lust is a better paymaster than the mill-owner or the tailor, and economy never yet shook hands with crime.

Do you object, that America is free from this alternative? I will prove you the contrary within a rod of your own doorstep.

Do you assert, that, if all avenues were thrown open, it would not increase the quantity of work; and that there would be more laborers in consequence, and lower wages for all?

Lower wages for some, I reply; but certainly higher wages for women; and they, too, would be raised to the rank of partners, and personal ill treatment would not follow those who had position and property before the law.

You offer them a high education in vain till you add to it the stimulus of a free career. In this lecture, I undertake to prove to you, that a large majority of women stand in such relations to their employers, that they are compelled to death or a life of shame. Why not choose death, then?

So I asked once of a woman thus pressed to the wall. "Ah, madam!" she answered, "I chose it long ago for myself; but what shall I do for my mother and child?"

The superior has a right to every advantage which he can honestly gain, as well as the inferior; but he has no right to increase any natural difference in his favor, if he believe it to exist, by laws or customs which cripple the inferior. If, as political economists tell us, it is chiefly by man, collectively taken, that the property of society is created; and if, on that very ground, man's interest has the first claim to consideration,—does it not follow, that every friend of woman will try to induce her to become a capitalist, and open to her, as her first path to safety, the way to honorable independence? And, in this connection, I must repeat what some of you have often heard me say, that a want of respect for labor, and a want of respect for woman, lies at the bottom of all our difficulties, low wages included.

I will not admit that the argument of the political economist has, as yet, any rightful connection with the price of woman's work. "The price of labor will always rise or fall," he says, "as the number of laborers is small or large; and it is because there are too many women for a few avenues of labor that the wages are so low." If man believes this, let him help us to open new avenues, and so reduce the number in any one. But I claim that he has increased the natural difference in his own favor, supposing that there be any such, by laws and customs which cripple woman; and that his own lust of gain stands in the way of her daily bread. Just so in hydraulics, men tell us, that water rises everywhere to the level of its source; but you may raise it a thousand feet higher by the aid of your forcing-pump, or drop it from a siphon a thousand feet below. And a forcing-pump and a siphon has man imposed upon the natural currents of labor. If, in my correspondence with employers last winter, one man told me with pride that he gave from eight to fifty cents for the making of pantaloons, including the heaviest doeskins, he forgot to tell me what he charged his customers for the same work. Ah! on those bills, so long unpaid, the eight cents sometimes rises to thirty, and the fifty cents always to a dollar or a dollar and twenty-five cents.

The most efficient help this class of workwomen could receive would be the thorough adoption of the cash system, and the establishment of a large workshop in the hands of women consenting to moderate profits, and superintended by those whose position in society would win respect for labor. When I said, six months ago, that ten Beacon-street women, engaged in honorable work, would do more for this cause than all the female artists, all the speech-making and conventions, in the world, I was entirely in earnest.

It is pretty and lady-like, men think, to paint and chisel: philanthropic young ladies must work for nothing, like the angels. Let them, when they rise to angelic spheres; but, here and now, every woman who works for nothing helps to keep her sister's wages down,—helps to keep the question of death or dishonor perpetually before the women of the slop-shop.

Why? Because she helps to depress the estimate of woman's ability. What is persistently given for nothing is everywhere thought to be worth nothing. I throw open a door here for some stifled sufferer at the West End: let her open a clothing establishment, and employ her own sex; let her make money by it, and watch for the end. When an Employment Society or a Needle-woman's Friend becomes bankrupt in purse, it is bankrupt in morals and argument as well. The wheels of the world move on the grooves of good management, of success. Set these once firmly underneath, and the outcry against our moral Fultons will be hushed.

In country villages and farming districts, there is a great deal of harmful competition with the girls of the slop-shops, which can never be ended until it is considered respectable for women openly to earn money. The stitching of wallets, hat-linings, and shoe-bindings, the more delicate labor on linen collars and shirt-bosoms, is carried on now not merely by so-called benevolent societies who want to build churches, lecture-rooms, and so on, but by rich farmers' wives, who keep or do not keep servants, in the long, summer afternoons and winter evenings, because it is work that can be done privately, and is sought to supply them with jewelry and dress. If they will not educate their minds by profitable reading, it is earnestly to be desired they should work, but openly, for money, and at such trades as naturally fall to their lot. Herb and fruit drying, distilling, preserving, pickling, market-gardening, may yet lay the foundations of ample fortune for many a woman. I have passed a summer amid lovely landscapes, where the women found neither fruit nor vegetables for their table, but let the brown earth plead to them in vain; while they stitched, stitched, stitched the long hours away, every broken needle bearing witness against the broken lives of women who needed in distant cities, where they stood homeless and starving, the work their sisters pilfered, sitting at their ease beside the hearth-stone. Their ignorance was their excuse. Let it not be ours.

And, first, for a few general statements.

An indispensable requisite for what the Germans call a "bread study" is, that, for average talent, it should command moderate success. "Of all causes of prostitution in Paris," says DuchÂtelet, "and probably in all great towns, none is so active as the want of work, or inadequate remuneration. What are the earnings of our laundresses, seamstresses, and milliners? Compare the price of labor with the price of dishonor, and you will cease to be surprised that women fall. Out of 5,183 prostitutes in Paris, I found that 2,696 had been driven to the streets by starvation; and 89, to feed starving parents or children. That is 300 over one-half of the whole number."

"It is well known," writes Miss Craig, in Edinburgh, "how brief is the career that our female criminals run. How they are recruited, it is not hard to guess in a country where there are fifty thousand women working for less than sixpence a day, and a hundred thousand for less than one shilling."

When, a few years ago, the "Edinburgh Review" collected the statistics of female labor, it found the wages about half what were paid to men. But no reason was assigned for this difference; only, one master gardener ventured to assert, that women ate less than men!

An advertisement in London for fifty dressmakers brought seven hundred applicants to the door of the warehouse; and, after long waiting, a police-officer brought the employer to explain why they could not all be hired. Sir James Clarke tells us, that the results of the inquiry into the condition of this class of women exceeded in horror those of the factory commission. Eighteen hours a day was the allotted time for work; and nothing but strong coffee enabled them to ply their needles. Fifteen hundred employers keep fifteen thousand girls. In driving times, they work all night. One girl testified that she had worked through the whole Sunday fifteen times in two years.

The lace-makers also work from twelve to twenty hours; and, in families where a peculiar "knack" is thought to be transmitted, children are put to this work from the age of two years. There is no regular time for food or sleep in certain stages of the manufacture; and many of these overworked women become vagrants.

A terrible letter from a Manchester mantle-maker was lately published, in which she pleads to be permitted to earn twopence an hour, when compelled to work overtime (that is, over twelve hours a day); and says, pitifully, that, if the present regulations go on, nothing but death can save her from dishonor.

A Persian traveller, who visited the bazaar in Soho, was greatly shocked when he found that all those young women were earning their own living; and plumed himself on the superior happiness of the women of his own country. What would he have said, could he have followed the clergyman's daughter, as we must do, from a happy home and fine sewing, down, through all the degradations of the slop-shop, to the very gutter?

But this is England.

Out of two thousand women who work for their daily bread in New York, five hundred and thirty-four receive a dollar a week. "How many men," asks Dr. Chapin, "would keep off death and conquer the Devil on such wages? One woman had to do it by making caps at two cents each! Think of this, women who like to buy things cheap: for, if the veil could be lifted from your eyes, you would see—the angels do see—on your gay, white dresses many a crimson stain; and among the dewy flowers with which you wreathe your hair, the grass that grows on graves!"

Seven thousand eight hundred and fifty ruined women walk the streets of New York,—five hundred ordinary omnibus-loads. They are chiefly young women under twenty, and the average length of the lives they lead is just four years. Every four years, then, seven thousand eight hundred and fifty women are drawn from their homes, many of them from simple, rural hearths, to meet this fate. What drives them to it? The want of bread.

Last October, two vagrant women came before a Liverpool court, who testified that they had been driven to evil courses by blows, and forced to support in idleness, by their vice, the father of one, and the husband of the other.

This statement shocks you: but poor pay strikes as heavy a blow as a husband's right arm; and these seven thousand eight hundred and fifty women in New York supported hundreds of men in ease, before they dropped from the seamstress's chair to the curbstone and the gutter.[12]

Tait says that the permanent prostitution of any city bears a recognized numerical relation to its means of occupation. You ask for proof.

Out of two thousand cases in the city of New York, five hundred and twenty-five pleaded destitution as the cause.

One of the police-officers testified of one girl, "She struggled hard before she fell; living on bread and water, and sleeping in station-houses. In three years, I have known more than fifty such cases."

A young girl of seventeen was left with the care of a sick, crippled sister. They were left to touch the very brink of despair. A kindly, fair-faced woman brought work which saved them from death. More was promised, on conditions that you can guess; and the toils so skilfully woven, that the young and healthy longed for her sister's sickly face and broken limb to ward off her fate.

"When a whole day's work brings only a few pennies," said another to Dr. Sanger, "a smile will buy me a dinner."

Out of these two thousand women, one thousand eight hundred and eighty had been brought up "to do nothing:" but, of all the trades, dressmaking furnished the largest proportion; and yet you think you pay your dressmakers well!

Out of the two thousand, all but fifty-one had been religiously educated.

"It has been shown elsewhere," says Dr. Sanger, "that the public are responsible for this evil, because they persist in excluding women from many kinds of employment for which they are fitted, while for work that is open they receive inadequate compensation. The community are equally responsible for non-interference with openly acknowledged evils."

Thus far I have spoken of New York. I might speak to you of Philadelphia and Boston, and tell you of ruin wrought under my own eyes; of the daughter of a State-street merchant found in the gutters of Toronto years ago; of a daughter whom that wealthy father dared not deny, when I wrote to him, though he refused to furnish the bread that would have kept her from sin. I know how hard it is for a true and good man to open his eyes to the wickedness and misery near at hand. I have no desire to draw down upon myself the local wrath of small clothiers and petty officials. You know what wages are in England: let us go thither for our concluding facts.

There are five hundred thousand single women in England, and one out of every thirteen is a thing of shame; that is, there are thirty-eight thousand four hundred and sixty-one women of the town.

Almost none of these women are drawn from domestic service. Many were found in New York who had lived out for twenty-five cents a week, and from that dropped to moral death.

You know what to expect from the lot of English dressmakers, mantlemakers, and laceweavers; but does it not chill you with horror to think that the class of governesses and private teachers furnishes also a certain number?

There is in London a Governesses' Benevolent Institution. There were lately before its committee a hundred and twenty candidates for annuities of a hundred dollars a year. Ninety-nine were unmarried, eighty-three were literally penniless, all of them were over fifty years of age, and forty-nine of them were over sixty.

One woman had labored for twenty-six years, supporting a mother and five brothers and sisters, all of whom she had educated at her own expense; but she had not saved a penny. Three were ruined by attempting to sustain their fathers in business. Six had invalid sisters dependent upon them. These are the histories of pure, untarnished names: fancy for yourselves the tales told by dishonored lips. The labors of Mr. Mayhew among this forsaken class of women are probably familiar by name to you all. To deepen the impression which I wish to make, I shall quote some of the evidence offered by him in his letters to the "Morning Chronicle," and close this branch of my subject. Eleven thousand women under twenty are employed in the slop-shops. If their own words do not touch you, mine, of course, will fail.

1st Case.—"I work from six, A.M., to ten, P.M. In the best weeks, I clear a dollar and fifty cents; but I only average seventy-five cents the year round. My mother is sixty-seven, and seldom gets a day's work. She scours pots for the publicans at thirty-seven cents a day, but is otherwise dependent upon me. I was a good girl when I first went to work, and struggled hard to keep pure; but I had not enough to eat. Then I took up with a young man, turned of twenty, who said he would make me his lawful wife; but I hardly cared, so I could feed myself and mother.[13] Many young girls tempted me,—they were so happy with enough to eat and drink. Could I have honestly earned enough for food and clothes, I would never have gone wrong; no, never. I fought against it to the last. If I had been born a lady, it would not have been hard to act like one."

2d Case.—"I earn seventy-five cents a week clear. My husband has been dead seven year, and I have buried three children. I was happy so long as he lived (here she hid her face in a rusty shawl, and burst into tears). I was always true to him, so help me God! I was an honest woman up to the time my security[14] died. I swear it. I am glad my children are dead; for I could not feed them."

3d Case.—"I was an honest woman till my husband died. I can put my hand on my heart, and swear it. But I was penniless, and a baby to keep. The world has drove me about so. When I want clothes, I must go to the streets."

4th Case.—"I am the daughter of a minister of the gospel; and I pledge my word solemnly and sacredly, that it was the low price paid for my labor that drove me to sin. I could only make thirty-four cents a week at shirts, and should have starved but for the street. At last, I swore to myself that I would keep from it for my boy's sake. I had pawned my clothes, and slept in a shawl and petticoat under a butcher's shed. I was trying to get to the workhouse. I had had no food for two days. My baby's legs froze to my side, and I sank upon a doorstep. A lady found us, and would have fed us; but I could not eat. She rubbed the baby's legs with brandy. That night I got to the workhouse: but they would not take me in without an order; so I went back to sin for one month. It was the last. In my heart I hated it; my whole nature rebelled at it; and nobody but God knows how I struggled to give it up. I pawned my only gown more than once."

Look at the frightful calmness of this story: "They would not admit me to the workhouse without an order; so I went back to sin for one month." When this girl told her story to Mr. Mayhew, she had been eight years at service, honored by her employers. Her personal beauty was so great, and the whole story so romantic, that Mr. Mayhew could hardly believe that she had come to him of her own accord to save other women from the same fate; and he took a day's journey into the country to confirm the facts. Her employers spoke in high terms of her honesty, sobriety, industry, and modesty. For her child's sake, she begged him to conceal her name; and she told her story with her face hidden in her hands, sobbing so as scarcely to be understood, and the tears dropping through.

If you do not realize the commonness of these tragedies, may God help you! Some of you will assert that all this is necessary; that, in this age, a certain proportion of women must meet this fate; and wall me up with statistics.

I tell you to bring the battering-ram of a Divine Love to bear on that wall. You will find, then, that, just as much as it was decreed that such women should be, it was decreed that an infinite saving power should exist, and that you should help to make it available. You may make these statistics what you will, not in an hour or a day, but in time.

Some of you will assert that women capable of falling thus can hardly be worth saving. I know there is some wilful vice; I do not desire to blink the truth: but, among those whom ill-paid labor forces into sin, there are women nobler and more disinterested than many who remain pure. Look at the stories I have told you,—women working for their kindred; a young girl of seventeen ruined to find bread for a crippled sister. In New York, the thirty-seven women supporting infirm parents; twenty-nine providing for nephews and nieces; twenty-three, widows with the care of young children.

Those of you who have had personal experience of these women will not need me to tell you that they never pay low wages. The washerwomen and starchers whom they employ are always well paid and well treated. They give much in charity to save others, as they often say, from their fate, and doubtless in the secret hope that God will permit them thus to atone for their sin. A few years ago, three young girls lived together in Glasgow. One of them, the youngest and frailest, a girl whose story was like that of Mrs. Gaskell's "Ruth," had left a rural home for a dressmaker's workroom. She fell into a decline, and, in her frequent delirium, raved about the bleat of her father's sheep, the evening cow-bell, and the crowing of the cock. In her lucid moments, the thought that she must die in shame convulsed her with agony. The two remaining girls took counsel. "There is no hope for us," they said; "but perhaps God will forgive us if we save her. Let us send her into the country, and work for her till she dies." And so they did, adding to the reckless wear of their horrid life the toil of the needlewoman; but, believe me, they never forgot the dying smile of her they had saved. Did you or I ever make a sacrifice which would compare with that? It is painful for me to stand here, and present this subject; it is, perhaps, painful for you to listen: but, with such women among the ruined, only cowards, it seems to me, would refuse to risk all things to save them.[15]

In France, where all women of this class are registered, DuchÂtelet found 1,680 who had erased their names from the list, on the plea that they had found honest occupation. He traced them: 108 had become housekeepers; 864, seamstresses; 247, shopkeepers; and 461, domestics.

The Society for the Rescue of Young Women, in London, admitted two hundred members last year. It asks no questions of those who enter; and the wisdom of this is shown in the fact, that its subscription-list contains the names of sixty former inmates, whose subscriptions range from twenty-five cents to twenty dollars per annum.

A terrible account has lately been published of the straw-bonnet warehouses in London, by one who has worked in them. One single story will show you, how that touch of truth, which, far more than the touch of genius, makes the "whole world kin," revealed a noble human nature in the midst of what seemed utter depravity.

One day, the worn-out women tried to compel a young, fresh worker to do less than she was able, or to secrete a portion of her braid, instead of making it up. They could not prevail. "Are you a Metherdis, miss?" asked one woman. "I'm not a thief," she replied gently. A big, bad woman stole her extra plait; but no one dared insult her. Once she fainted, and some one offered her gin; but the big, bad woman started forward: "Would you make her a devil like the rest of us?" she cried; "I'd sooner see her stabbed!" and she got her a cup of tea from her own "screw."[16] When they were kept late, this woman walked home with her, cautioning her against gin, against young men, especially the gentry, and bidding her not forget her prayers: "for," said she, "you know how; I was never teached." As she parted from her one night, she said, "I don't expect it's any use; but it would do no harm if you prayed once for me." Who will say that this woman was irreclaimable? And, in estimating the chances of saving a depraved woman, you should always remember, that, in nine cases out of twelve, she sold herself, not to vice, but to what seemed, at least, to her longing heart, like love. Put yourself in her place. Do not start: it will do you no harm. Think what it would be to slave soul and body, day after day, for a crust and a cup of cold water. Not so much would your failing body crave one nourishing meal, as the aching, human heart within you one tender look, one loving word. If, in your misery, you had kept some beauty; if you had known no gentler touch than a drunken father's blow or a mother's curse,—how strong would be the temptation when one above you pleaded for affection! See how like an angel of light this demon would descend! O my sisters! you have never read this story right. Such a woman is no monster, only a gentle-hearted creature, unsupported by God's law, unrestrained by self-control. Your scorn, the world's rejection, may make her what you think. Meanwhile, are you above temptation? Does not conscience enforce my plea?

"Some positions," says LegouvÉ, "attract by their ease; but it is work that purifies and fills existence. God permits hard trials; but he has appointed labor, and we forget them all." A serious comforter, it gives always more than it promises, and dries the bitterest tears. A pleasure unequalled in itself, it is the salt of all other pleasures.[17]

You have seen that a necessity to live demands of you new fields for woman to work in; and the question arises, Is she fit for these new duties?[18]

I consider the question of intellectual ability settled. The volumes of science, mathematics, general literature, &c., which women have given to the world, without sharing to the full the educational advantages of man, seem to promise that they shall outstrip him here, the moment they have a fair start. But I go farther, and state boldly, that women have, from the beginning, done the hardest and most unwholesome work of the world in all countries, whether civilized or uncivilized; and I am prepared to prove it. I do not mean that rocking the cradle and making bread is as hard work as any, but that women have always been doing man's work, and that all the outcry society makes against work for women is not to protect women, but a certain class called ladies. Now, I believe that work is good for ladies; so let us look at the truth. "Let it once be understood," says one of our English friends, "that the young business-woman is shielded by the social intercourse of those who are called ladies, and it would obviate many of those grave objections which deter parents from consenting that their children shall brave the world in shops and warehouses."

Most certainly it would; and to this point we must frequently return. Meanwhile, says Sydney Smith, "so long as girls and boys run about in the dirt, and trundle hoop together, they are both precisely alike;" and I shall proceed to show that large numbers have not only played but worked in the dirt together, and trundled hoop, not merely through our own lives, but ever since work and play began.

I shall speak first of Asiatic women; and I can afford to begin by quoting a Cochin-China proverb, to the effect that "a woman has nine lives, and bears a great deal of killing." I do not know anything else about the Cochin-China women; but this looks as if their lot were no exception to the general rule. The Chinese peasant-woman goes to the field with her male infant on her back, and ploughs, sows, and reaps, exposed to all the changes of the weather. When her husband is proved criminal, she must die as his accomplice; having, at least, strength enough to suffer. In Calcutta, women are the masons who keep the roof tight; and you may see them daily carrying their hods of cement, spreading it on the tops of houses, and flattening it with a wooden rammer like that with which our Irishmen pave the streets.

You have heard of the Bombay ghauts. Ghaut is a native word, which means "passage through;" and it is applied by the resident not only to the railway cut between the hills, but to the hills themselves. These are of volcanic origin,—a sort of trap. Formed beneath the water, the mass cooled as it was thrown up, and the sides do not slope much. "When I gained an elevation of two thousand feet," says my correspondent, "and looked back, I saw hills of all shapes and sizes thrown up, and ravines thousands of feet below, all looking like the dried bed of an ocean. The table-land on which I stood is two thousand five hundred feet above the level of the sea; and, as this is the elevation at Poonah, the railroad from Campoolu winds as it can along the sides of the mountains. There are twenty-five tunnels through the solid rock on this road, each half a mile long or more. There are piers of solid stone, with arches spanning forty feet, which rise a hundred above the valley. Part of the grade was formed by lowering men with ropes, to drill the holes for blasting, a thousand feet above the ravine. There are twenty thousand workmen employed; and one-third, or about seven thousand, of these are"—what do you think? In a country where no European man can labor, where the native rests until compelled by his conqueror to work, in the year 1859 behold seven thousand women laboring in the ghauts! Climbing, climbing, through the cloudless day, women carry baskets of stone and earth upon their heads, to creep to the edge of the ravines, and fill with these tedious contributions thousands of perpendicular feet; and the men who pay them, doubtless, talk to their daughters about woman's lack of physical strength!

In Australia, the woman carries the burdens which man's indolence refuses; and the deserts of Africa bear the same testimony in freedom that we glean from the witness of slavery. In the West-India Islands, the patient negress toils by the side of her mate, doing to the full as hard a day's work, though encumbered by the weight of a child upon her back; but she does not share, in the same way, his hours of rest. The customs of Africa still prevail, and she offers her husband's food and tobacco on her knees.

Nor does the poetry of ancient Greece show us the so-long vaunted delicacy of the sex. Homer's princesses beat linen on the rocks, and Andromache shares all the functions of the groom:—

We have crossed the boundary line of Europe, without any change in the indications; and we may drop from Homer to the middle ages, or modern times, as well.

The traveller who gazes admiringly upon the vineclad hills of the Jura, rising, terrace upon terrace, till the eye can scarce distinguish the limit between the work of man and the rock of ages which still crowns the summit, will learn with surprise that the mind which conceived of such stupendous labor, and the hand which held out honor and freedom as its reward, were a woman's.

Under a burning sun, or exposed to a bitter, glacial bisÈ, the first cultivators, partly women, climbed slowly and painfully, by rocky ledges or crevices, along those dangerous slopes and beetling cliffs, where trees were to be hewn down and briers plucked up, raising by manual efforts alone the stone necessary for the steps and walls, and the deep tunnels for the safe passage of the torrents which vegetation now conceals. And among them, wherever her donkey's foot could find a way, went the woman who devised the work and bestowed the guerdon, with the distaff on her saddle, which gives her to this day the name of Bertha the spinner.

Yes, it was Bertha, of the Transjurane, who, about the middle of the tenth century, undertook this work; opened the old Roman roads; and, in defending her people against the Saracen hordes, first devised, it may be, the modern telegraph. A prolonged line from her Alps to the Jura is still set with the solid stone towers from which Bertha's sentinels warned each other.[19]

On the 13th of April, 1809, the French and Bavarian prisoners held by the Tyrolese at Steinach were marched to Schwatz, and thence to Salzburg, under an escort of women: and the prisoners, at least, felt sufficient confidence in the physical strength of the guard; for they made no attempt to escape.

"Not a year ago," writes Anna Johnson of Germany, "I saw a young girl standing up to her knees in a manure-heap, which she shovelled into a cart, and then drove to the field. She was hired to do this work at fourteen dollars a year. On the mountains, the women were carrying soil and manure to the vines in baskets, as Queen Bertha taught them nine centuries ago." A still less pleasant picture may be drawn from KÖhl's "Reminiscences of Montenegro." "Down among the stones, on the banks of the Fuimera," he says, "some Cattaro women and girls were washing and scraping the entrails of the goats that the men had brought to market. There was one tall, slender, handsome girl, dressed in a crimson petticoat, and jacket embroidered with gold, and her hair elegantly fastened with golden pins. A pair of richly wrought slippers lay on the stone beside her; and she laughed and talked merrily as she washed and scraped away. At last, she packed the whole into a tub, and lifted it on her gayly dressed head to carry home. The next day was Sunday; and I met her, radiant with beauty and gold embroidery, on her way to church. I often met these girls carrying on foot the baggage of the riding-parties."

In 1850, a clergyman of this city tells me that he saw women, wearing leathern breast-plates, harnessed to the canal-boats of the Low Countries, and doing the work of oxen.

In France, we find the same evidences of out-door work and physical ability. Galignani tells us, that, in consequence of the success of a certain Madame Isabelle in breaking horses for the Russian Army, the French minister of war lately authorized her to proceed officially before a commission of officers, with General RÉgnault de St. Jean d'Angely at their head, to break some horses for the cavalry. After twenty days, the animals were so completely broken, that the minister immediately entered into an arrangement with her to introduce her system into all the schools of cavalry in the empire, beginning with that of Saumur.

Marshal Baraguay d'Hilliers, at Nantes, recently made a distribution of St. Helena medals to the old soldiers of the empire. Among the number was a woman named Jeanne Louise Antonini, who had served ten years in the navy, and fifteen in the infantry, where she obtained the rank of non-commisioned officer in the seventieth regiment of the line. She received nine wounds while bravely fighting. "It is not the coat that makes the man," said our marshal when he gave the medal.

One of the great celebrities of the Invalides was buried, very lately, with great pomp. This "old invalid" was an individual of the softer sex,—the widow Brulow,—who entered the army, in 1792, as a soldier in the forty-second regiment of infantry, authorized to enlist, in spite of her sex, by General Casabianca. At Fort Gesco, she was promoted to the rank of sergeant, after being severely wounded in the encounter which took place. Perceiving that the troops were getting short of powder, she set out alone at midnight for Calvi, roused the women of that place to the number of sixty, and started them off for Gesco, laden with powder and ammunition, which enabled the little fort to hold out eight and forty hours longer, until relief came. A little after, at the siege of Calvi, the widow Brulow, while in charge of a gun, was so desperately wounded that she was forced to renounce her military career; and none other was open to her but the retirement of the Invalides, where she was admitted with the rank of sub-lieutenant. The present emperor, to whom the widow Brulow was introduced on his visit to the Invalides, presented her with the cross of the Legion of Honor and the medal of St. Helena; her comrades, by acclamation, having designated her as most worthy of the honor. By a decree, dated from the imperial headquarters, since our first edition was printed, we learn that the race of heroines is not extinct; for two other women, by that decree, obtained the military medal for their courage at the battle of Magenta.

There recently died, at Portsea, in England, a woman, ninety years of age, named Nelly Giles. She was one of the few surviving witnesses of the battle of the Nile; having been on board His Majesty's ship "Bellerophon," in the command of Captain Darby, and in all subsequent engagements under Nelson. During the action of the Nile, she was surrounded by heaps of slain and wounded; and she nursed the latter tenderly, undismayed by the horrors of the scene. Three days after the battle, she gave birth to a son.

The government, in consideration of her great attention to the sick and wounded, and of the assistance she gave the surgeons, awarded her a gratuity of seventeen pounds a year for her life.

A young patriot, named Francisco Riso, was killed on April 4, 1862, at Palermo, during a popular demonstration which took place before Garibaldi's arrival. On April 20, his father, Giovanni Riso, sixty years old, was shot by the Bourbon soldiers, without so much as the form of a trial. On the very day that Garibaldi entered Palermo, a young and beautiful nun, Ignacia Riso, the sister and daughter of the two Risos named above, left the convent, and, amidst a shower of balls and grape-shot,—a cross in one hand, and a poignard in the other,—placed herself at the head of Garibaldi's column, crying, "Down with the Bourbons! Death to the tyrant! Vengeance!" She kept her place as long as the fighting lasted; and her courageous attitude electrified the volunteers. Ever since that day, the name of Ignacia Riso has been held sacred. When she passes in the street, the soldiers bow low, and bless her with the most profound respect. Garibaldi himself pays her great attention, and loves her as if she were his own daughter.

From instances like these, refreshing because they tell of self-imposed labor and eccentric character, we turn with less pleasure to the statistics of the factories. Here men have left to women not only the worst paid but the most unwholesome work of the respective mills.

Women, in France, are employed in the manufacture of cotton, silk, and wool. The cotton manufacture compels two processes which are very injurious,—the beating of the cotton, which brings on a distressing phthisis; and the preparation, or dressing, which needs a degree of heat not to be endured after mature age. Both these departments are filled by women paid at half-prices.

The woollen manufacture compels only one unwholesome process,—that of carding; but all the carders are women at half-wages.

In the silk factories, again, there are two unwholesome processes entirely carried on by women. The first is the drawing of the cocoons, where the hands must be kept constantly in boiling water, and the odor of the putrefying insects constantly fills the lungs; the second is carding the floss, the fine lint of which affects the bronchial tubes. Six out of every eight women so employed die in a few months. Healthy young girls from the mountains soon develop tubercular consumption; and, to complete the dreadful tale, they are kept upon the lowest wages; being paid only twenty cents where a man would earn sixty.[20]

The Anglo-Saxons, says the historian, "had not been long settled in England before the more savage of their traits were softened down. The wife continued to be regularly purchased by her husband, and the contract was considered a mere money bargain, long subsequent to the reign of Ethelbert." And why? Not because love was mercenary; but because woman was regarded, in the first place, as a beast of burden, a laborer. In the "Romany Rye," we are told that the sale of a wife with a halter round her neck is still a legal transaction in England. "It must be done in the cattle-market, as if she were a mare; all women being considered as mares by the old English law, and, indeed, called mares in certain counties where genuine old English law is still preserved."

Such a sale as this was recently completed at Worcester, and the agreement between the men was published in the "Worcester Chronicle."

"Thomas Middleton delivered up his wife Mary Middleton to Philip Rostins for one shilling and a quart of ale; and parted wholly and solely for life, never to trouble one another.

"Witness. (Signed) Thomas × Middleton, his mark.
Witness. Mary Middleton, his wife.
Witness. Philip × Rostins, his mark.
Witness. S.H. Stone, Crown Inn, Friar St."

I have preserved the old expression mare in my quotation, to indicate, not the degradation to which women fell, but that it was as a beast of burden that men regarded her. Several cases of sales, such as is here referred to, have occurred within a few years; but this is the only certificate of transfer that I ever saw. I desire to direct your attention to the remarkable fact, that, of the three parties to it, the wife, who was sold, was the only one who could write her name. The men signed it by a mark.[21] "A generation back," says Cobbett, "it was a common thing to see women, half naked, working like beasts, chained to carts, upon the common roads of England."

When Lord Ashley's Commission reported, in 1842, five thousand females were at work, more than a thousand feet below the soil, in the coal-mines of the north of England. These women were nearly naked, and drew trucks, in harness, on all-fours, like beasts of burden. You cannot have forgotten the remarkable description of such women in D'Israeli's novel of "The Sibyl."

"They come forth. The plain is covered with the swarming multitude: bands of stalwart men, broad-chested and muscular, wet with toil, and black as the children of the tropics; troops of youth, alas! of both sexes, though neither their raiment nor their language indicates the difference. All are clad in male attire, and oaths that men might shudder to hear issue from lips born to breathe words of sweetness. Yet these are to be, some are, the mothers of England! Can we wonder at the hideous coarseness of their language, when we remember the savage rudeness of their lives? Naked to the waist, an iron chain fastened to a belt of leather runs between their legs, clad in canvas; while, on hands and feet, an English girl, for twelve, sometimes for sixteen, hours a day, hauls and hurries tubs of coal along subterranean roads, dark, precipitous, and plashy." These women, called free, were the wretched slaves of capital. In the life of Stephenson, the railway engineer, you will find a further account of them, and may read the chilling answer given by a woman whom he asked if she had ever heard of Jesus, "that no such hand had ever worked in her shaft!" Let the proprietors of English mines remember! No such hand did ever work in those shafts, yet they called themselves Christian men! True as death were the words. If the law is now free of reproach, the evil has by no means ceased to exist: the Master still stands knocking.

"Children," wrote Lord Ashley, "are taken to work when only four years old, girls as well as boys. Dragging the coal carriages requires the whole strength of either sex. Young men and women, married women and married men, work together through the same number of hours, almost, sometimes quite, naked, constantly demoralizing each other. It stints their growth and cripples their limbs." In the east of Scotland, they still toil up steep ladders from the shafts.

If it were my purpose to show you moral degradation, you could hardly bear what I must say; but I desire only, at this moment, to show you these men and women working, as Sydney Smith would say, in the dirt together. In 1842, the Earl of Durham knew of this; and he and the set with whom he lived dared, doubtless, to whisper to the ladies in their halls, that women were not made to labor!

In the calico-mills, girls grind and mix the colors. They are called teerers. They begin at five years of age, and labor twelve hours a day, sometimes sixteen; and are kept late into the night to prepare for the following day.

In Sedgely and Warrington, the fate of the female pinmakers is no better. They begin at five years of age, and work from twelve to sixteen hours a day. If refractory, they are struck at Wiltenhall with strap, stick, hammer, or file, in spite of the delicacy of the sex. In Sedgely, more women are employed than men; but they do not fare any better: their bodies are seamed by blows given with bars of burning iron.

O my sisters! why has God sheltered us in quiet homes? What have we done to deserve a happier fate? Why were we not left to writhe beneath the blows of the smith, or the outrage of a market-sale?

Because God has laid down a responsibility by the side of every privilege, and requires us to labor not merely to set such women free, but to establish a freedom and security by law,—the law of custom as well as the law of courts, which we only possess through usurpation or indulgence.

I will not leave these English shores without alluding to the physical strength shown by that lovely paralytic, Anna Gurney. Deprived of the use of her limbs in very early life, she acquired the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and finally the Teutonic tongues, with a facility and thoroughness that her Anglo-Saxon translations show. Men might be excused if they sheltered from contact with the world this infirm creature, dependent upon artificial aid for every movement; but what did she choose for herself?

In 1825, after her mother's death, she went to live at Northrepps. At her own expense, she procured one of Manby's apparatus for saving the lives of seamen cast upon that dangerous coast; and, in cases of great urgency and peril, she caused herself to be carried down to the beach, and, from the sick chair which she wheeled over the sand, directed every movement for the rescue and recovery of the half-drowned men.

Look at the pictures! See that grimy, tangled woman in harness, straining, in full health, along the coal-shafts! See, nearer, this lovely cripple, the Quaker cap folded over her soft, brown hair, her soul erect and noble, doing the duty of a Grace Darling! The first labors like the brute beast, the victim of human misgovernment and heathenish ignorance; the last chooses for herself a conflict with the storm, and earns, with as full right as any brother, the meed of the world.

Let us pass over to America. The Caribs of Honduras are a hardy race, and do not share the prejudices of Massachusetts on the subject of labor. Each man has several wives. For each he clears a plantation and builds a house. In a year, she has every kind of breadstuff under cultivation; and hires creers, which she freights for Truxillo and Belize, her husband often commanding for her. If her agricultural labors prove too heavy, as a thrifty woman will sometimes make them, she hires her husband to work for her at two dollars a week.

So the Northern Indian glides nimbly through the woods; while the squaw carries on her unlucky back their common food and covering, or perhaps hauls the canoe across the portage. A Jesuit priest rebuked an Orinoco woman for infanticide. "I wish my mother had been brave enough to part with me!" was her reply. "Our husbands go to hunt; and we drag after them, one baby at the breast, another on our back. When we return, we cannot sleep, but must grind maize all night for their chica. Drunken, they beat us, or stamp us under foot; and, after twenty years of such labor, a young wife is brought home to abuse us and such children as we have not killed. What ought I to do?"

At Santa Cruz, Theodore Parker writes to Francis Jackson that men and women work together to repair the public highway; hoeing the earth into trays, and throwing it into a cart which they drag and push together.

In Ohio, last year, about thirty girls went from farm to farm, hoeing, ploughing, and the like, for sixty-two and a half cents a day. At Media, in Pennsylvania, two girls named Miller carry on a farm of three hundred acres; raising hay and grain, hiring labor, but working mostly themselves. These women are not ignorant: they at one time made meteorological observations for an association auxiliary to the Smithsonian Institute. But labor attracts them, as it would many women if they were not oppressed by public opinion.

"In New York," writes a late correspondent of the "Lily," "I saw women performing the most menial offices,—carrying parcels for grocers, and trunks for steamboats. They often sweep the crossings in muddy weather; and I once saw one carrying brick and mortar for a mason."

During the late terrible destruction of property at the Lawrence mills, the women, heroic in every department, did not excuse themselves from the severest labor. When, after hours of extreme exertion, the firemen, worn down and quite exhausted, called for help, a bevy of ladies, who were standing on the sidewalk in Canal Street, flew over to the engines, and, "manning" the brakes, worked the machine, amid the cheers of the firemen.

You know what bodily strength and nervous energy carried Mary Patton round Cape Horn. Well, on the 25th of June, 1858, the British ship "Grotto" left Cuba; and, on the second day, the yellow-fever broke out in the worst form. Seven days after, so many had died, that there remained only the captain, his wife, and two of the crew. Then the captain was taken ill; and, beside nursing him, the poor wife, who had already nursed officers and men, took her station at the wheel, and steered by his instructions for Sandy Hook. There the steam-tug "Huntress" found them, the heroic woman at the wheel, the husband at that moment struggling with death; and, when they reached New York, three out of eleven, one of them the suffering wife, survived to tell the tale, and show how a woman can work. So common are such instances becoming, that you have hardly heard the name of this Mrs. Nichols, for whom tender charity soon cared.

A mutiny on board the ship "Maria," of New York, was put down Nov. 10, 1860, by the energy and decision of the wife of the master, Captain Clark, who, with pistols in her hands, threatened to shoot one of the mutineers if he did not desist. He was cowed into submission; and, a signal being made to the revenue cutter, the mutineers were taken into custody. The mate would have been killed, but for the heroic woman's intrepidity.

But all such labor is the result of compulsion,—compulsion of barbarism, of slavery, of unfair competition, or dire disease. Let us close this branch of our subject with a picture homely but attractive. "According to thy request," writes a Quaker friend from Wilmington, Del., "I send thee some facts concerning Sarah Ann Scofield. Some fifteen years since, her father became very much involved in debt. He owed some ten or twelve hundred dollars; having lost largely by working for cotton and woollen mills. His business was making spindles and fliers. His daughter, then just sixteen, proposed to go into her father's shop and assist him; she being the oldest of seven children. He accepted her offer, and told me himself, that, in twelve months, she could finish more work, and do it better, than any man he had ever trained for eighteen. She earned fifteen dollars a week at the rate he then paid other hands. Her father died. Her two oldest brothers learned the trade off her, and went away. She has now two younger sisters in apprenticeship, and a brother fourteen years of age, all working under her; turning, polishing, filing, and fitting all kinds of machinery. I went out to see her last week. She was then making water-rams to force streams into barns and houses. She is also beginning to make many kinds of carriage-axles. She is her own draughtsman, and occasionally does her own forging. To use her own words, 'What any man can do, I can but try at.' She has a steam-engine, every part of which she understands; and I know that her work gives entire satisfaction. When they have steady employment, they clear sixty dollars a week; and she says she would rather work at it for her bread, than at sewing for ten times the money. The truth is, it is a business she is fond of."

I have shown you that a very large number of women are compelled to self-support; that the old idea, that all men support all women, is an absurd fiction; and, if you require other evidence than mine, you may find it in the English courts, under the working of the new Divorce Bill. Nearly all the women who have applied for divorces have proved that the subsistence of the family depended upon them. Out of six million of British women over twenty-one years of age, one-half are industrial in their mode of life, and more than two millions are self-supporting in their industry like men. Put this fact fully before your eyes.

Driven to self-support, you have seen, also, that low wages and comparatively few and overcrowded avenues of labor compel women to vicious courses for their daily bread. The streets of Paris, London, Edinburgh, New York, and Boston, tell us the same painful story; and in glaring, crimson letters, rises everywhere the question,—"Death or dishonor?" I have shown you that there is encouragement for moral effort, because these women escape from vice as fast as they find work to do. "Have they strength for the conflict," you ask, "or desire to enter such fields?" Find your answer in what they have done from the earliest ages, with the foot of Confucius and Vishnu, of capital and interest, upon their necks. In the lovely lives of Bertha and Ann Gurney, and the powerful attraction of Sarah Scofield, you have found pleasanter pictures whereon to rest your eyes. Let no man taunt woman with inability to labor, till the coal-mines and the metal-works, the rotting cocoons and fuzzing-cards, give up their dead; till he shares with her, equally at least, the perils of manufactures and the press of the market. As partners, they must test and prove their comparative power.

We must next consider what need woman's moral nature has of work, and what sort of opposition man practically offers her.