WOMAN'S LABOR IN EUROPE. 309 



mainly to the superiority of our women. It is worth while to 

 consider for a moment in what that superiority consists, as ger- 

 main to the subsequent inquiry whether it will be lessened by 

 an education in provinces commonly considered to belong ex- 

 clusively to man. This superiority may be sexual, or as con- 

 trasted with the condition and qualities of females of other 

 countries, and it is the latter phase to which the political phi- 

 losopher undoubtedly alludes. The right of woman to labor is 

 common to the old and new continents, but women ha' e not 

 been, as a class, doomed to labor of a degrading or unsexual 

 nature, under the free institutions of the United States, and no 

 traveler from hence can record in his note-book, as Senator 

 Wilson did in his, during his tour abroad last summer, of Ayr, 

 in Scotland, that he saw seventeen women hoeing in a field, and 

 a man, without a hoe, overseeing them ! 



No women are seen here, as in Germany, working with bar- 

 rows on railroads, carrying coal, or mortar in a hod up a ladder 

 to the tops of six-story buildings, nor, horribile dictu ! yoked 

 with dogs, bulls and cows ; nor is the hermaphrodite class, called 

 by Count Gasparin " female men," yet common among us, 

 though a few specimens occasionally crop out just to deter us from 

 desiring or fostering their increase. In Europe, generally, the 

 right of woman to labor is not only conceded, but the right of 

 man to live in idleness upon the fruits of such labor is ac- 

 quiesced in, and as shop-keeper, stall-tender, street-cleaner in 

 France, outdoor laborer at all employments in Germany, Swit- 

 zerlandj South of Europe, and even in England, and also there 

 as hotel-keeper, boarding-house and lodging room tender, woman 

 assumes the occupations of the other sex, and is substantially 

 the head and support of the family, performing that daily toil 

 for bread, which is man's inheritance, and which he cannot 

 without infamy impose upon his helpmeet, thus compelling her 

 to bear a double curse for the original sin of both. 



We have not as yet confounded together the different charac- 

 teristics of the sexes, making man and woman into beings not only 

 equal but alike ; much less have we turned women into inferior 

 beings, fit only as companions for those whom she, equally with 

 man, was created to rule over, but conceding her equality in 

 the highest sense, we have admitted the wide differences be- 

 tween her physical and moral constitution and that of man, and 



