Let woman consent to be a
doll, and there was no finery so gorgeous, no baby-house so costly, but
she might aspire to share its lavish delights;--let her ask simply for
an equal chance to learn, to labor, and to live, and it was as if that
same doll should open its lips, and propound Euclid's forty-seventh
proposition. While we have all deplored the helpless position of
indigent women, and lamented that they had no alternative beyond the
needle, the wash-tub, the school-room, and the street, we have yet
resisted their admission into every new occupation, denied them
training, and cut their compensation down. Like Charles Lamb, who atoned
for coming late to the office in the morning by going away early in the
afternoon, we have, first, half educated women, and then, to restore
the balance, only half paid them. What innumerable obstacles have
been placed in the way of female physicians! what a complication of
difficulties has been encountered by female printers, engravers, and
designers! In London, Mr. Bennett was recently mobbed for lecturing to
women on watchmaking. In this country, we have known grave professors
to refuse to address lyceums which thought fit to employ an occasional
female lecturer. Mr. Comer states that it was "in the face of ridicule
and sneers" that he began to educate women as book-keepers, eight years
ago; and it is a little contemptible in the authoress of "A Woman's
Thoughts on Women" to revive the same satire now, when she must know
that in one half the retail shops in Paris her own sex rules the ledger,
and Mammon knows no Salic law.
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