During the winter of 1875, while the Beecher-Tilton case was being tried in Brooklyn, she delivered her speech on "Social Purity" at the Chicago Grand Opera House, in the Sunday dime-lecture course, facing with trepidation the immense crowd which gathered to hear her. Even the daring Mrs. Stanton had warned her that she would never be asked to speak in Chicago again, and with this the manager of the Slayton Lecture Bureau agreed. But they were wrong. The people were hungry for the truth and for a constructive policy. In the past they had heard the "social evil" described and denounced in vivid thunderous words by eloquent men and by the dramatic Anna E. Dickinson. Now an earnest woman with graying hair, one of their own kind, talked to them without mincing matters, calmly and logically, and offered them a remedy. Calling their attention to the daily newspaper reports of divorce and breach-of-promise suits, of wife murders and "paramour" shootings, of abortions and infanticide, she told them that the prevalence of these evils showed clearly that men were incapable of coping with them successfully and needed the help of women. She cited statistics, revealing 20,000 prostitutes in the city of New York, where a foundling hospital during the first six months of its existence rescued 1,300 waifs laid in baskets on its doorstep. She courageously mentioned the prevalence of venereal disease and spoke out against England's Contagious Diseases Acts which were repeatedly suggested for New York and Washington and which she described as licensed prostitution, men's futile and disastrous attempt to deal with social corruption. Declaring that the poverty and economic dependence of women as well as the passions of men were the causes of prostitution, she quoted more statistics which showed a great increase in the poverty of women. Work formerly done in the household, she explained, was being gradually taken over by factories, with the result that women in order to earn a living had been forced to follow it out of the home and were supporting themselves wholly or in part at a wage inadequate to meet their needs. No wonder many were tempted by food, clothes, and comfortable shelter into an immoral life. Her solution was "to lift this vast army of poverty-stricken women who now crowd our cities, above the temptation, the necessity, to sell themselves in marriage or out, for bread and shelter." "Women," she told them, "must be educated out of their unthinking acceptance of financial dependence on man into mental and economic independence. Girls like boys must be educated to some lucrative employment. Women like men must have an equal chance to earn a living."[322]