A Practical Illustration of "Woman's Right to Labor" Part 1

A Practical Ill.u.s.tration of Woman's Right to Labor.

by Marie E. Zakrzewska.

Preface.

It is due to myself to say, that the manner in which the Autobiography is subordinated to the general subject in the present volume, and also the manner in which it is _veiled_ by the t.i.tle, are concessions to the modesty of her who had the best right to decide in what fashion I should profit by her goodness, and are very far from being my own choice.

Caroline H. Dall.

49. Bradford Street, Boston, Oct. 30, 1860.

Practical Ill.u.s.tration of "Woman's Right to Labor"

It never happens that a true and forcible word is spoken for women, that, however faithless and unbelieving women themselves may be, some n.o.ble men do not with heart and hand attempt to give it efficiency.

If women themselves are hard upon their own s.e.x, men are never so in earnest. They realize more profoundly than women the depth of affection and self-denial in the womanly soul; and they feel also, with crushing certainty, the real significance of the obstacles they have themselves placed in woman's way.

Reflecting men are at this moment ready to help women to enter wider fields of labor, because, on the one side, the dest.i.tution and vice they have helped to create appalls their consciousness; and, on the other, a profane inanity stands a perpetual blasphemy in the face of the Most High.

I do not exaggerate. Every helpless woman is such a blasphemy. So, indeed, is every helpless man, where helplessness is not born of idiocy or calamity; but society neither expects, provides for, nor defends, helpless men.

So it happened, that, after the publication of "Woman's Right to Labor,"

generous men came forward to help me carry out my plans. The best printer in Boston said, "I am willing to take women into my office at once, if you can find women who will submit to an apprenticeship like men." On the same conditions, a distinguished chemist offered to take a cla.s.s of women, and train them to be first-cla.s.s apothecaries or scientific observers, as they might choose. To these offers there were no satisfactory responses. "Yes,"

said the would-be printers, "we will go into an office for six months; but, by that time, our oldest sisters will be married, and our mothers will want us at home."

"An apprenticeship of six years!" exclaimed the young lady of a chemical turn. "I should like to learn very much, so that I could be a chemist, _if I ever had to_; but poison myself for six years over those 'fumes,' not I." It is easy to rail against society and men in general: but it is very painful for a woman to confess her heaviest obstacle to success; namely, the _weakness of women_. The slave who dances, unconscious of degradation on the auction-block, is at once the greatest stimulus and the bitterest discouragement of the antislavery reformer: so women, contented in ignominious dependence, restless even to insanity from the need of healthy employment and the perversion of their instincts, and confessedly looking to marriage for salvation, are at once a stimulus to exertion, and an obstacle in our way. But no kind, wise heart will heed this obstacle.

Having spoken plain to society, having won the sympathy of men, let us see if we cannot compel the attention of these well-disposed but thoughtless damsels.

"Six years out of the very bloom of our lives to be spent in the printing-office or the laboratory!" exclaim the dismayed band; and they flutter out of reach along the sidewalks of Beacon Street, or through the mazes of the "Lancers."

But what happens ten years afterward, when, from twenty-six to thirty, they find themselves pushed off the _pave_, or left to blossom on the wall? Desolate, because father and brother have died; disappointed, because well-founded hopes of a home or a "career" have failed; impoverished, because they depended on strength or means that are broken,--what have they now to say to the printing-office or the apothecary's shop? They enter both gladly; with quick woman's wit, learning as much in six months as men would in a year; but grumbling and discontented, that, in competing with men who have spent their whole lives in preparation, they can only be paid at half-wages. What does common sense demand, if not that women should make thorough preparation for trades or professions; and, having taken up a resolution, should abide by all its consequences like men?

Before cases like these my lips are often sealed, and my hands drop paralyzed. Not that they alter G.o.d's truth, or make the duty of protest against existing wrong any less inc.u.mbent: but they obscure the truth; they needlessly complicate the duty.

Perplexed and anxious, I have often felt that what I needed most was an example to set before young girls,--an example not removed by superiority of station, advantage of education, or unwonted endowment, beyond their grasp and imitation.

There was Florence Nightingale. But her father had a t.i.tle: it was fair to presume that her opportunities were t.i.tled also. All the girls I knew wished they could have gone to the Crimea; while I was morally certain, that the first amputation would have turned them all faint. There was Dorothea Dix: she had money and time. It was not strange that she had great success; for she started, a monomaniac in philanthropy, from the summit of personal independence. Mrs. John Stuart Mill: had she ever wanted bread? George Sand: the woman wasn't respectable. In short, whomsoever I named, who had pursued with undeviating perseverance a worthy career, my young friends had their objections ready. No one had ever been so poor, so ill educated, so utterly without power to help herself, as they; and, provoking as these objections were, I felt that they had force.

My young friends were not great geniuses: they were ordinary women, who should enter the ordinary walks of life with the ordinary steadfastness and devotion of men in the same paths; nothing more. What I wanted was an example,--not too stilted to be useful,--a life flowing out of circ.u.mstances not dissimilar to their own, but marked by a steady will, an unswerving purpose. As I looked back over my own life, and wished I could read them its lessons,--and I looked back a good way; for I was very young, when the miserable dest.i.tution of a drunkard's wife, whom I a.s.sisted, showed me how comfortable a thing it was to rest at the mercy of the English common law,--as I looked back over my long interest in the position of woman, I felt that my greatest drawback had been the want of such an example. Every practical experiment that the world recorded had been made under such peculiar circ.u.mstances, or from such a fortuitous height, that it was at once rejected as a lesson.

One thing I felt profoundly: as men sow they must reap; and so must women.

The practical misery of the world--its terrible impurity will never be abated till women prepare themselves from their earliest years to enter the arena of which they are ambitious, and stand there at last mature and calm, but, above all, _thoroughly trained_; trained also at _the side of the men_, with whom they must ultimately work; and not likely, therefore to lose balance or fitness by being thrown, at the last moment, into unaccustomed relations. A great deal of nonsense has been talked lately about the unwillingness of women to enter the reading-room of the Cooper Inst.i.tute, where men also resort.

"A woman's library," in any city, is one of the partial measures that I deprecate: so I only partially rejoice over the late establishment of such a library in New York. I look upon it as one of those half-measures which must be endured in the progress of any desired reform; and, while I wish the Cooper Inst.i.tute and its reading-room G.o.d-speed with every fibre of my consciousness, I have no words with which to express my shame at the mingled hypocrisy and indelicacy of those who object to use it. What woman stays at home from a ball because she will meet men there? What woman refuses to walk Broadway in the presence of the stronger s.e.x? What woman refuses to buy every article of her apparel from the hands of a man, or to let the woman's tailor or shoemaker take the measure of her waist or foot; try on and approve her coiffure or bernouse?

What are we to think, then, of the delicacy which shrinks from the reading-room frequented by men; which discovers so suddenly that magazines are more embarra.s.sing than mazourkas; that to read in a cloak and hat before a man is more indelicate than to waltz in his presence half denuded by fashion?

Of course, we are to have no patience with it, and to refuse utterly to entertain a remonstrance so beneath propriety.

The object of my whole life has been to inspire in women a desire for _thorough training_ to some special end, and a willingness to share the training of men both for specific and moral reasons. Only by sharing such training can women be sure that they will be well trained; only by G.o.d-ordained, natural communion of all men and women can the highest moral results be reached.

"Free labor and free society:" I have said often to myself, in these two phrases lies hidden the future purification of society. When men and women go everywhere together, the sights they dare not see together will no longer exist.

Fair and serene will rise before them all heights of possible attainment; and, looking off over the valleys of human endeavor together, they will clear the forest, drain the mora.s.s, and improve the interval stirred by a common impulse.

When neither has any thing to hide from the other, no social duty will seem too difficult to be undertaken; and, when the interest of each s.e.x is to secure the purity of the other, neither religion nor humanity need despair of the result.

It was while fully absorbed in thoughts and purposes like these, that, in the autumn of 1856, I first saw Marie Zakrzewska.[1] During a short visit to Boston (for she was then resident in New York), a friend brought her before a physiological inst.i.tute, and she addressed its members.

She spoke to them of her experience in the hospital at Berlin, and showed that the most sinning, suffering woman never pa.s.sed beyond the reach of a woman's sympathy and help. She had not, at that time, thoroughly mastered the English language; though it was quite evident that she was fluent, even to eloquence, in German. Now and then, a word failed her; and, with a sort of indignant contempt at the emergency, she forced unaccustomed words to do her service, with an adroitness and determination that I never saw equalled. I got from it a new revelation of the power of the English language. She ill.u.s.trated her n.o.ble and nervous thoughts with incidents from her own experience one of which was told in a manner which impressed it for ever on my consciousness.

"Soon after I entered the hospital," said Marie, "the nurse called me to a ward where sixteen of the most forlorn objects had begun to fight with each other. The inspector and the young physicians had been called to them, but dared not enter the _melee_. When I arrived, pillows, chairs, foot-stools and vessels had deserted their usual places; and one stout little woman, with rolling eyes and tangled hair, lifted a vessel of slops, which she threatened to throw all over me, as she exclaimed, 'Don't dare to come here, you green young thing!'

"I went quietly towards her, saying gently, 'Be ashamed, my dear woman, of your fury.'

"Her hands dropped. Seizing me by the shoulder she exclaimed, 'You don't mean that you look on me as a woman?'

"'How else?' I answered; while she retreated to her bed, all the rest standing in the att.i.tudes into which pa.s.sion had thrown them.

"'Arrange your beds,' I said; 'and in fifteen minutes let me return, and find every thing right.' When I returned, all was as I had desired; every woman standing at her bedside. The short woman was missing; but, bending on each a friendly glance, I pa.s.sed through the ward, which never gave me any more trouble.

"When, late at night, I entered my room, it was fragrant with violets. A green wreath surrounded an old Bible, and a little bouquet rested upon it. I did not pause to speculate over this sentimentality, but threw myself weary upon the bed; when a light tap at the door startled me. The short woman entered; and humbling herself on the floor, since she would not sit in my presence entreated to be heard.

"'You called me a woman,' she said, 'and you pity us. Others call us by the name the world gives us. You would help us, if help were possible. All the girls love you, and are ashamed before you; and therefore _I_ hate you--no: I will not hate you any longer. There was a time when I might have been saved,--I and Joanna and Margaret and Louise. We were not bad.

Listen to me. If _you_ say there is any hope, I will yet be an honest woman.'

"She had had respectable parents; and, when twenty years old, was deserted by her lover, who left her three months pregnant. Otherwise kind, her family perpetually reproached her with her disgrace, and threatened to send her away. At last, she fled to Berlin; keeping herself from utter starvation, by needlework. In the hospital to which she went for confinement, she took the small-pox. When she came out, with her baby in her arms, her face was covered with red blotches. Not even the lowest refuge was open to her, her appearance was so frightful. With her baby dragging at her empty breast, she wandered through the streets. An old hag took pity on both; and, carefully nursed till health returned, her good humor and native wit made those about her forget her ugly face. She was in a brothel, where she soon took the lead. Her child died, and she once more attempted to earn her living as a seamstress. She was saved from starvation only by her employer, who received her as his mistress. Now her luck changed: she suffered all a woman could; handled poison and the firebrand. 'I thought of stealing,' she said, 'only as an amus.e.m.e.nt: it was not exciting enough for a trade.'. She found herself in prison; and was amused to be punished for a trifle, when n.o.body suspected her crime.

It was horrible to listen to these details; more horrible to witness her first repentance.

"When I thanked her for her violets, she kissed my hands, and promised to be good.

"While she remained in the hospital, I took her as my servant, and trusted every thing to her; and, when finally discharged, she went out to service.

She wished to come with me to America. I could not bring her; but she followed, and, when I was in Cleveland, inquired for me in New York."

It will be impossible, for those who have not heard such stories from the lips and in the dens of the sufferers, to feel as I felt when this dropped from the pure lips of the lecturer. For the first time I saw a woman who knew what I knew, felt what I felt, and was strong in purpose and power to accomplish our common aim,--the uplifting of the fallen, the employment of the idle, and the purification of society.

I needed no farther introduction to Marie Zakrzewska. I knew nothing of her previous history or condition; but when I looked upon her clear, broad forehead, I saw "Faithful unto death" bound across it like a phylactery. I did not know how many years she had studied; but I saw thoroughness ingrained into her very muscle. I asked no questions of the clear, strong gaze that pierced the a.s.sembly; but I felt very sure that it could be as tender as it was keen. For the first time I saw a woman in a public position, about whom I felt thoroughly at ease; competent to all she had undertaken, and who had undertaken nothing whose full relations to her s.e.x and society she did not understand.

I thanked G.o.d for the sight, and very little thought that I should see her again. She came once more, and we helped her to establish the Women's Infirmary in New York; again, and we installed her as Resident Physician in the New-England Female Medical College.

I had never felt any special interest in this college. I was willing it should exist as one of the half-way measures of which I have spoken,--like the reading-room in New York; but I was bent on opening the colleges which already existed to women, and I left it to others to nurse the young life of this. The first medical men, I felt a.s.sured, would never, in the present state of public opinion, take an interest in a _female_ college; and I desired, above all things, to protect women from second-rate instruction.

But, when Marie Zakrzewska took up her residence in Springfield Street, it was impossible to feel indifferent. Here was a woman born to inspire faith; meeting all men as her equals till they proved themselves superior; capable of spreading a contagious fondness for the study of medicine, as Dr. Black once kindled a chemical enthusiasm in Edinburgh.