d is spoken for women, that,
however faithless and unbelieving women themselves may be, some noble men
do not with heart and hand attempt to give it efficiency.

If women themselves are hard upon their own sex, men are never so in
earnest. They realize more profoundly than women the depth of affection
and self-denial in the womanly soul; and they feel also, with crushing
certainty, the real significance of the obstacles they have themselves
placed in woman's way.

Reflecting men are at this moment ready to help women to enter wider
fields of labor, because, on the one side, the destitution and vice they
have helped to create appalls their consciousness; and, on the other, a
profane inanity stands a perpetual blasphemy in the face of the Most High.

I do not exaggerate. Every helpless woman is such a blasphemy. So, indeed,
is every helpless man, where helplessness is not born of idiocy or
calamity; but society neither expects, provides for, nor defends, helpless
men.

So it happened, that, after the publication of "Woman's Right to Labor,"
generous men came forward to help me carry out my plans. The best printer
in Boston said, "I am willing to take women into my office at once, if you
can find women who will submit to an apprenticeship like men." On the same
conditions, a distinguished chemist offered to take a class of women, and
train them to be first-class apothecaries or scientific observers, as they
might choose. To these offers there were no satisfactory responses. "Yes,"
said the would-be printers, "we will go into an office for six months;
but, by that time, our oldest sisters will be married, and our mothers
will want us at home."

"An apprenticeship of six years!" exclaimed the young lady of a chemical
turn. "I should like to learn very much, so that I could be a chemist, _if
I ever had to_; but poison myself for six years over those 'fumes,' not
I." It is easy to rail against society and men in general: but it is very
painful for a woman to confess her heaviest obstacle to success; namely,
the _weakness of women_. The slave who dances, unconscious of degradation
on the auction-block, is at once the greatest stimulus and the bitterest
discouragement of the antislavery reformer: so women, contented in
ignominious dependence, restless even to insanity from the need of healthy
employment and the perversion of their instincts, and confessedly looking
to marriage for salvation, are at once a stimulus to exertio