sion of
this right over woman's subsistence which gives to him the power to
dictate to her a moral code vastly higher and purer than the one he
chooses for himself. Not less true is it, that the fact of woman's
dependence on man for her subsistence renders her utterly powerless to
exact from him the same high moral code she chooses for herself.

Of the 8,000,000 women over twenty-one years of age in the United
States, 800,000, one out of every ten, are unmarried, and fully one-half
of the entire number, or 4,000,000, support themselves wholly or in part
by the industry of their own hands and brains. All of these, married or
single, have to ask man, as an individual, a corporation, or a
government, to grant to them even the privilege of hard work and small
pay. The tens of thousands of poor but respectable young girls
soliciting copying, clerkships, shop work, teaching, must ask of men,
and not seldom receive in response, "Why work for a living? There are
other ways!"

Whoever controls work and wages, 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.

Independence is happiness. "No man should depend upon another; not even
upon his own father. By depend I mean, obey without examination--to the
will of any one whomsoever." This is the conclusion to which Pierre, the
hero of Madame Sand's "Monsieur Sylvestre," arrives, after running away
from the uncle who had determined to marry him to a woman he did not
choose to wed. In freedom he discovers that, though deprived of all the
luxuries to which he had been accustomed, he is happy, and writes his
friend that "without having realized it, he had been unhappy all his
life; had suffered from his dependent condition; that nothing in his
life, his pleasures, his occupations, had been of his own choice." And
is not this the precise condition of what men call the "better half" of
the human family?

In one of our western cities I once met a beautiful young woman, a
successful teacher in its public schools, an only daughter who had left
her New England home and all its comforts and luxuries and culture. Her
father was a member of Congr