Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/103

Rh in its historical development. They are all necessary for the development of mankind—machines which the human race has devised, in order to possess, use, develop, and enjoy their rights as human beings, their rights also as men.

These are just as necessary for the development of woman as of man; and as she has the same nature, right, and duty as man, it follows that she has the same right to use, shape, and control these four institutions for her general human purpose and for her special feminine purpose, that man has to control them for his general human purpose and his special masculine purpose. All that is as undeniable as anything in metaphysics or mathematics.

So, then, woman has the same natural rights as man. In domestic affairs she is to determine her own sphere as much as man, and say where her function is to begin, when it shall begin, with whom it shall begin; where it shall end, when it shall end, and what it shall comprise.

Then she has the same right to freedom of industry that man has. I do not believe that the hard callings of life will ever suit woman. It is not little boys who go out as lumberers, but great men, with sinewy, brawny arms. I doubt that laborious callings, like navigation, engineering, lumbering, and the like, will ever be agreeable to woman. Her feminine body and feminine spirit naturally turn away from such occupations. I have seen women gathering the filth of the streets in Liverpool, sawing stone in a mason's yard in Paris, carrying earth in baskets on their heads for a railway embankment at Naples; but they were obviously out of place, and only consented to this drudgery when driven by Poverty’s iron whip. But there are many employments in the departments of mechanical work, of trade, little and extended, where woman could go, and properly go. Some women have a good deal of talent for trade—this in a small way, that on the largest scale. Why should not they exercise their commercial talents in competition with man? Is it right for woman to be a domestic manufacturer in the family of Solomon or Priam, and of every thrifty husband, and wrong for her to be a public manufacturer on her own account? She might spin when the motive power was a wheel-pin of wood in her hand: may she not use the Merrimac and the Con-