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 women 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.  Oh! 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 woman 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 dollars.  The wheel of oppression is rolling over the necks of thousands of women who are at this moment in despair about what they are to do.  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 millstones of his wrath and grind them to powder.

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 dollars?  I hear from all this land the wail of womanhood.  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 sixty-five thousand sewing-girls in New York and