New Tabernacle SermonsTalmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Religion
New Tabernacle Sermons
Talmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Presbyterian Church -- Sermons; Sermons, American
Go with me and I will show you a woman who by hardest toil supports
her children, her drunken husband, her old father and mother, pays her
house rent, always has wholesome food on her table, and when she can
get some neighbor on the Sabbath to come in and take care of her
family, appears in church with hat and cloak that are far from
indicating the toil to which she is subjected. Such a woman as that
has body and soul enough to fit her for any position. She could stand
beside the majority of your salesmen and dispose of more goods. 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 women 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. Oh! 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 woman 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. Start
with the National Government. Women clerks in Washington get nine
hundred dollars for doing that for which men receive eighteen hundred
dollars. The wheel of oppression is rolling over the necks of
thousands of women who are at this moment in despair about what they
are to do. Many of the largest mercantile establishments of our cities
are accessory to these abominations, and from their large
establishments there are scores of souls being pitched off into death,
and their employers know it. Is there a God? Will there be a judgment?
I tell you, if God rises up to redress woman's wrongs, many of our
large establishments will be swallowed up quicker than a South
American earthquake ever took down a city. God will catch these
oppressors between the two millstones of his wrath and grind them to
powder.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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