Women -- Employment -- United States; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women in politics -- United States
As conservers of morals and as leaders in higher ideals of life, the
advanced women of America came early face to face with two outgrown
abuses. One of these was human slavery and the other was intemperance.
In attacking these abuses, women had to break with all the traditions
that defined their position.
The wealthy and intelligent Englishwoman, Frances Wright, who came to
this country in 1818 to attack slavery, found herself doubly opposed
because she was a woman speaking in public. Had not St. Paul declared:
"It is a shame for women to speak in the church"? Lucretia Mott, born in
the Society of Friends in Nantucket, had escaped the full force of this
injunction, but even she found, when she attacked slavery in public,
that she had invaded a world sacred to men, and she was sternly warned
back. Miss Susan B. Anthony also began her public life as a teacher and
a temperance reformer. It was only when she found herself helpless, in
presence of the prejudices against her sex, that she turned her
attention to freeing women from all purely sex limitation in public
life.
When the Civil War broke out, the women were ready to do their part. It
is quite possible that the names of Clara Barton and Dorothea Dix may be
remembered when Grant and Sherman are forgotten. With the establishing
of new human values the historian of the future may consider the saving
of life and the preventing of misery as more worthy of lasting record
than even military genius. These women and their millions of helpers
had not the resources of organized government at their disposal; but,
instead, they had oftentimes to work against the jealousy of those in
authority. At the close of the war, the Sanitary Commission comprised
seven thousand aid societies scattered over the country, and it had
raised over fifteen millions of dollars. Those women who remained at
home, in the absence of fathers and sons for four years, faced all the
problems of practical life. Who can estimate the value of training in
cooperative work and organization which the Civil War gave to the
American women?
In the Civil War, women directly served men; but in the great industrial
reorganization which came afterward they served mainly women and
children. Here the victories have been won in the press, in the
legislative halls, and in courts of law. Working with men, or alone,
they have perfected organization, agitated, raised money, printed
appeals, and carried cases through the courts, until factories and
stores have been made safer, excessive working hours have been cut down,
young children have been exempted from labor, many sweat-shops have
been closed, and women workers have begun to be organized to care for
their own needs. Much has been done; more remains to be done; but the
training of the women has gone steadily forward.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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