“_Woman’s Right to Employment._ To woman equally with man has been given the right to labor, the right to employment for both mind and body; and such employment is as necessary to her health and happiness, to her mental and physical development, as to his. All women need employment, active, useful employment; and if they do not have it, they sink down into a state of listlessness and insipidity and become enfeebled in health and prematurely old simply because denied this great want of their nature. Nothing has tended more to the physical and moral degradation of the race than the erroneous and silly idea that woman is too weak, too delicate a creature to have imposed upon her the more active duties of life,—that it is not respectable or praiseworthy for her to earn a support or competence for herself. “We see no reason why it should be considered disreputable for a woman to be usefully employed, while it is so highly respectable for her brother; why it is so much more commendable for her to be a drone, dependent on the labors of others, than for her to make for herself a name and fortune by her own energy and enterprise. A great wrong is committed by parents toward their daughters in this respect. While their sons as they come to manhood are given some kind of occupation that will afford not only healthy exercise of the body and mind but also the means of an honorable independence, the daughters are kept at home in inactivity and indolence, with no higher object in life than to dress, dance, read novels, gossip, flirt and ‘set their caps’ for husbands. How well the majority of them are fitted to be the companions and mothers of men, every day’s history will tell. “Certainly, our girls would be far better and happier than now if they were educated and encouraged to occupy their hands and minds in some useful business occupation; and parents do a great injustice to their daughters when they doom them to a life of idleness or, what is worse, to a life of frivolity and fashionable dissipation.