She could go into your wheelwright shops and
beat one-half of your workmen at making carriages. We talk about woman
as though we had resigned to her all the light work, and ourselves had
shouldered the heavier. But the day of judgment, which will reveal
the sufferings of the stake and inquisition, will marshal before the
throne of God and the hierarchs of heaven the martyrs of wash-tub and
needle.
Now, I say, if there be any preference in occupation, let woman have
it. God knows her trials are the severest. By her acuter sensitiveness
to misfortune, by her hour of anguish, I demand that no one hedge up
her pathway to a livelihood. O the meanness, the despicability of
men who begrudge a woman the right to work anywhere, in any honorable
calling!
I go still further, and say that women should have equal compensation
with men. By what principle of justice is it that women in many of our
cities get only two-thirds as much pay as men, and in many cases only
half? Here is the gigantic injustice--that for work equally well, if
not better done, woman receives far less compensation than man.
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