The distress experienced by workers of this class wrought that great revolution in thought which involved the education of women. This is one of the accepted factors of the present period. At that time agitation was rife as to what should be done for the advancement of women as workers. Miss Virginia Penny, in a book called “Think and Act,”[175] advocated the entrance of women into the trades and professions that were monopolized by men. “Apprentice,” she says, “ten thousand women to watchmakers; train ten thousand for teachers to the young; make ten thousand good accountants; put ten thousand more to be deaconesses trained by Florence Nightingale; put some thousands in the electric telegraph offices all over the country; educate one thousand lecturers for mechanics’ institutes; one thousand to read the best books to the working-people; train up ten thousand to manage washing-machines, sewing-machines, etc. Then the distressed needle-woman will vanish, the decayed gentlewoman and broken-down governess cease to exist.” Writers like Gail Hamilton in the North and Catherine Cole in the South urged the higher education of women; their right to be educated the same as man; “to enter the same pursuits, receive the same wages, occupy the same posts and professions, wield the same influence, and, in a word, be independent of man as a means of support.” These strangely reasonable, though novel propositions, met with as much public condemnation at the time as though, in place of being suggestions for elevating women into skillful, rational workers, they had advocated turning them into gamblers and drunkards. The fact was ignored that the majority of women had always been engaged in carrying on some kind of necessary industry, if only in untaught, helpless ways. Hence it became fashionable to say that “woman as a worker was a product of modern times.” Her entrance into the ranks of wealth-producers and wage-earners was called the “New Departure,” and was deplored by writers as calculated, by thwarting nature’s evident design in making her child-bearer, child-trainer, and house-mother, to rob her of special gifts of grace, beauty, and tenderness. The error of the day, it was argued, lay in the thought that woman should be self-supporting, and she was implored to stop and consider what homes would become, Where woman reigns, the mother, daughter, wife, Strews with fresh flowers the narrow way of life, if “woman was to take her place beside man in every field of coarse, rough toil.”