lk 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 Brooklyn. Across the
sunlight comes their death groan. It is not such a cry as comes from
those who are suddenl