The College, the Market, and the Court: or, Woman's relation to education, labor and lawDall, Caroline Wells Healey
History
The College, the Market, and the Court: or, Woman's relation to education, labor and law
Dall, Caroline Wells Healey
Women -- Education; Women -- Employment; Women -- Legal status, laws, etc.
But, having made these remarks, I must recur to my previous
statement,--that, in the main, no jealousy of cliques, no legal
restrictions, prevent women from taking their proper place. A want of
respect for woman, and a want of respect for labor, latent and
unacknowledged in the public mind, must be overcome before she can do
it. The overworked and ill-paid woman has seized every chance to slight
her work; and an idea has gone abroad, that no slop-work will be fit for
sale unless a man inspects it. So New York and Paris have man-tailors
and man-milliners; and the poor, tempted, stricken girls are brought
into contact, in the pursuit of bread, with the very men most likely to
take advantage of every failure. Very sad stories could be told of work
rejected day after day, on account of pretended faults, till the
starving victim drops at the feet of the treacherous overseer, only to
be trampled, in the end, under those of the whole town. Educated,
respectable women should have the giving-out and the inspection of
woman's work; but educated and respectable women will never stand in
such a position till public opinion teaches them that all _labor_ is
honorable, and that no lady will ever sit with folded hands. How we rate
an idle boy! how we bear with a dawdling girl! That father grows
impatient whose son does not rise early, or show some desire for
employment; but the same man keeps his daughters in Berlin wool and
yellow novels, and looks to marriage as their salvation, even when he
blushes to be told of it.
To prove this, let me show you that many employments have been open to a
degree not generally acknowledged; and a safe foundation for this
assertion will be found in the census of the United Kingdom and that of
the United States.
It is a singular fact, that there are a great many more women in
England in business for themselves than employed as tenders or clerks;
while, in America, the fact, at the present day, is directly the
reverse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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