Why is it that a female principal in a school gets only eight hundred and twenty-five dollars for doing work for which a male principal gets sixteen hundred and fifty?

I hear from all this land the wail of woman-hood.  Man has nothing to answer to that wail but flatteries.  He says she is an angel.  She is not.  She knows she is not.  She is a human being, who gets hungry when she has no food, and cold when she has no fire.  Give her no more flatteries:  give her justice!

There are thirty-five thousand sewing-girls in New York and Brooklyn.  Across the darkness of this night I hear their death-groan.  It is not such a cry as comes from those who are suddenly hurled out of life, but a slow, grinding, horrible wasting away.  Gather them before you and look into their faces, pinched, ghastly, hunger-struck!  Look at their fingers, needle-picked and blood-tipped!  See that premature stoop in the shoulders!  Hear that dry, hacking, merciless cough!

At a large meeting of these women, held in a hall in Philadelphia, grand speeches were delivered, but a needle-woman took the stand, threw aside her faded shawl, and, with her shrivelled arm, hurled a very thunder-bolt of eloquence, speaking out of the horrors of her own experience.

Stand at the corner of a street in New York at half-past five or six o’clock in the morning, as the women go to their work.  Many of them had no breakfast except the crumbs that were left over from the night before, or a crust they chew on their way through the street.  Here they come! the working girls of New York and Brooklyn!  These engaged in bead-work, these in flower-making, in millinery, enamelling, cigar making, book-binding, labelling, feather-picking, print-coloring, paper-box making, but, most overworked of all, and least compensated, the sewing-women.  Why do they not take the city-cars on their way up?  They cannot afford the five cents!  If, concluding to deny herself something else, she get into the car, give her a seat!  You want to see how Latimer and Ridley appeared in the fire:  look at that woman and behold a more horrible martyrdom, a hotter fire, a more agonizing death!  Ask that woman how much she gets for her work, and she will tell you six cents for making coarse shirts, and finds her own thread!

Last Sabbath night, in the vestibule of my church, after service, a woman fell in convulsions.  The doctor said she needed medicine not so much as something to eat.  As she began to revive in her delirium, she said, gaspingly:  “Eight cents!  Eight cents!  Eight cents!  I wish I could get it done!  I am so tired!  I wish I could get some sleep, but I must get it done!  Eight cents!  Eight cents!” We found afterwards that she was making garments for eight cents apiece, and that she could make but three of them in a day!  Hear it!  Three times eight are twenty-four!  Hear it, men and women who have comfortable homes!