Her solution was "to lift this vast army of poverty-stricken women who
now crowd our cities, above the temptation, the necessity, to sell
themselves in marriage or out, for bread and shelter." "Women," she
told them, "must be educated out of their unthinking acceptance of
financial dependence on man into mental and economic independence.
Girls like boys must be educated to some lucrative employment. Women
like men must have an equal chance to earn a living."[322]

"Whoever controls work and wages," she continued, "controls morals.
Therefore we must have women employers, superintendents, committees,
legislators; wherever girls go to seek the means of subsistence, there
must be some woman. Nay, more; we must have women preachers, lawyers,
doctors--that wherever women go to seek counsel--spiritual, legal,
physical--there, too, they will be sure to find the best and noblest
of their own sex to minister to them."

Then she added, "Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a
necessity; an incident of life, not all of it.... Marriage never will
cease to be a wholly unequal partnership until the law recognizes the
equal ownership in the joint earnings and possessions."

She asked for the vote so that women would have the power to help make
the laws relating to marriage, divorce, adultery, breach of promise,
rape, bigamy, infanticide, and so on. These laws, she reminded them,
have not only been framed by men, but are administered by men. Judges,
jurors, lawyers, all are men, and no woman's voice is heard in our
courts except as accused or witness, and in many cases the married
woman is denied the right to testify as to her guilt or innocence.

Never before had the audience heard the case for social purity
presented in this way and they listened intently. When the applause
was subsiding, Susan saw Parker Pillsbury and Bronson Alcott,
fellow-lecturers on the Lyceum circuit, coming toward her, smiling
approval. They were generous in their praise, Bronson Alcott
declaring, "You have stated here this afternoon, in a fearless manner,
truths that I have hardly dared to think, much less to utter."[323]

She repeated this lecture in St. Louis, in Wisconsin, and in Kansas,
and while most city newspapers, acknowledging the need of facing the
issues, praised her courage, small-town papers were frankly disturbed
by a spinster's public discussion of the "social evil," one paper
observing, "The best lecture a woman can give th