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?