Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/100

96 But these philanthropies are not enough for the employment of women; and if all the spare energies of womankind were set to this work—to palliate the consequences of man's injustice—it would not be exactly the work which woman wants. There are some women who take no special interest in this. For woman is not all philanthropy, though very much: she has other faculties which want to be developed besides the heart to feel. Still more, that is not the only thing which mankind wants of woman. We need the justice which removes causes, as well as the charity that palliates effects; and woman, standing continually between the victim and the sabre which would cleave him through, is not performing her only function, not her most important: high as that is, it is not her highest. If the feminine swallow drives away the flies from a poor fox struggling for life, another set of flies light upon him, and suck every remaining drop of blood out of his veins, as in the old fable. Besides, if the fox finds that a womanly swallow comes to drive off the flies, he depends on her wing and not on his own brush, and becomes less of a fox. If a miser, or any base man, sees that a woman constantly picks up the man whom he knocks down with the left hand of usury, or the right hand of rum, he will go on with his extortion or his grog, because, he says, “I should have done the man harm, but a woman picked him up, and money comes to my pocket, and no harm to the man!” The evils of society would become worse and worse, just as they are increased by indiscriminate alms-giving. That is not enough.

Then there are various practical works left by common consent to woman.

First, there is domestic service—woman working as an appendage to some household; a hired hand, or a hired head, to help the housekeeper.

Then there is mechanical labour in a factory or a shop—spinning, weaving, setting type, binding books, making shoes, colouring maps, and a hundred other things.

Next, there is trade in a small way, from the basket-woman, with her apples at every street-corner, up to the confectioner and haberdasher, with their well-filled shops.