Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/101

Rh In a few retail shops, which venture to brave popular opinion, woman is employed at the counter.

As a fourth thing, there is the business of public and private teaching in various departments.

All these are well; they are unavoidable, they are absolutely necessary; they furnish employment to many women, and are a blessed resource.

I rejoice that the field-work of the farmer is not done by woman's hand in the free portions of America. It imbrutes women in Ireland, in France, and in Spain. I am glad that the complicated machinery of life furnishes so much more work for the light and delicate hand of woman. But I confess I mourn that where her work is as profitable as man's, her pay is not half so much. A woman who should teach a public school well would be paid four or six dollars a week; while a man who should teach no better would be paid two, three, four, or six times that sum. It is so in all departments of woman's work that I am acquainted with.

These employments are very well, but still they are not enough.

Rich women do not engage in these callings. For rich women there is no profession left except marriage. After school-time, woman has nothing to do till she is married: I mean almost nothing; nothing that is adequate. Accordingly she must choose betwixt a husband and nothing, and sometimes that is choosing between two nothings. There are spare energies which seek employment before marriage and after marriage.

These callings are not all that the race of woman needs and requires. She and man have the same human nature, and, of course, the same natural human rights. Woman's natural right for its rightfulness does not depend on the bodily or mental power to assert and to maintain it, on the great arm or the great head; it depends only on human nature itself, which God made the same in the frailest woman as in the biggest giant.

If woman is a human being, first, she has the nature of a human being; next, she has the right of a human being; third, she has the duty of a human being. The nature is the capacity to possess, to use, to develop, and to enjoy every human faculty; the right is the right to enjoy,