In other spheres of activity, especially social service, women steadily enlarged their interest.  Nothing human did they consider alien to them.  They inveighed against cruel criminal laws and unsanitary prisons.  They organized poor relief and led in private philanthropy.  Dorothea Dix directed the movement that induced the New York legislature to establish in 1845 a separate asylum for the criminal insane.  In the same year Sarah G. Bagley organized the Lowell Female Reform Association for the purpose of reducing the long hours of labor for women, safeguarding “the constitutions of future generations.”  Mrs. Eliza Woodson Farnham, matron in Sing Sing penitentiary, was known throughout the nation for her social work, especially prison reform.  Wherever there were misery and suffering, women were preparing programs of relief.

=Freedom of Speech for Women.=—­In the advancement of their causes, of whatever kind, women of necessity had to make public appeals and take part in open meetings.  Here they encountered difficulties.  The appearance of women on the platform was new and strange.  Naturally it was widely resented.  Antoinette Brown, although she had credentials as a delegate, was driven off the platform of a temperance convention in New York City simply because she was a woman.  James Russell Lowell, editor of the “Atlantic Monthly,” declined a poem from Julia Ward Howe on the theory that no woman could write a poem; but he added on second thought that he might consider an article in prose.  Nathaniel Hawthorne, another editor, even objected to something in prose because to him “all ink-stained women were equally detestable.”  To the natural resentment against their intrusion into new fields was added that aroused by their ideas and methods.  As temperance reformers, they criticized in a caustic manner those who would not accept their opinions.  As opponents of slavery they were especially bitter.  One of their conventions, held at Philadelphia in 1833, passed a resolution calling on all women to leave those churches that would not condemn every form of human bondage.  This stirred against them many of the clergy who, accustomed to having women sit silent during services, were in no mood to treat such a revolt leniently.  Then came the last straw.  Women decided that they would preach—­out of the pulpit first, and finally in it.

=Women in Industry.=—­The period of this ferment was also the age of the industrial revolution in America, the rise of the factory system, and the growth of mill towns.  The labor of women was transferred from the homes to the factories.  Then arose many questions:  the hours of labor, the sanitary conditions of the mills, the pressure of foreign immigration on native labor, the wages of women as compared with those of men, and the right of married women to their own earnings.  Labor organizations sprang up among working women.  The mill girls of Lowell, Massachusetts, mainly the daughters of New England farmers, published a magazine, “The Lowell Offering.”  So excellent were their writings that the French statesman, Thiers, carried a copy of their paper into the Chamber of Deputies to show what working women could achieve in a republic.  As women were now admittedly earning their own way in the world by their own labor, they began to talk of their “economic independence.”