He says she is an angel. She is
not. She knows she is not. She is a human being, who gets hungry
when she has no food, and cold when she has no fire. Give her no more
flatteries: give her _justice!_
There are thirty-five thousand sewing-girls in New York and Brooklyn.
Across the darkness of this night I hear their death-groan. It is not
such a cry as comes from those who are suddenly hurled out of life,
but a slow, grinding, horrible wasting away. Gather them before you
and look into their faces, pinched, ghastly, hunger-struck! Look at
their fingers, needle-picked and blood-tipped! See that premature
stoop in the shoulders! Hear that dry, hacking, merciless cough!
At a large meeting of these women, held in a hall in Philadelphia,
grand speeches were delivered, but a needle-woman took the stand,
threw aside her faded shawl, and, with her shrivelled arm, hurled a
very thunder-bolt of eloquence, speaking out of the horrors of her own
experience.
Stand at the corner of a street in New York at half-past five or six
o'clock in the morning, as the women go to their work.
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