But it is said that her nature is so delicate that she is unfitted for exhausting toil.  I ask, in the name of all past history, what toil on earth is more severe, exhausting, and tremendous than that toil of the needle to which for ages she has been subjected?  The battering-ram, the sword, the carbine, the battle-axe have made no such havoc as the needle.  I would that these living sepulchres in which women have for ages been buried might be opened, and that some resurrection trumpet might bring up these living corpses to the fresh air and sunlight.

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 woman 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.  O 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 women 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.

To thousands of young women of New York to-day there is only this alternative:  starvation or dishonor.  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 mill-stones of his wrath, and grind them to powder!