Society for Promoting the Employment of Women
England, 1859-1877

Yet, what is it we working women ask?  What is it we are made to think and feel through every fibre of the frame with which it has pleased God to endow us as well as men, and for the maintenance of which in health, ease, and comfort, we, with men have equal rights?

It is work we ask, room to work, encouragement to work, an open field with a fair day's wages for a fair day's work; it is injustice we feel, the unjustice of men, who arrogate to themselves all profitable employments and professions, however unsuited to the vigorous manhood they boast, and thus, usurping women's work, drive women to the lowest depths of penury and suffering.

We are sick to our hearts of being told "women cannot do this; women must not do thatl they are not strong enough for this, and that, and the other" while we know and see every hour of our lives that these arguments are but shams; that some of the hardest and coarsest work done in this weary world is done by women, while, in consequence of usurped and underpaid labor, they are habitually consigned to an amount of physical endurance and privation from which the hardiest man would shrink appalled.

"Association for Promoting the Employment of Women," English Woman's Journal, September 1860, p. 55.   Contained in Eleanor S. Riemer and John C. Fout, eds., European Women: A Documentary History, 1789-1945, (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), p. 32.