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!

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