It is only as we are familiar with the oppression that has been the common lot of women since the beginning of time that we can realize that her lot has been sweetened, her condition ameliorated, and her progress within the century marvelous indeed. The woman question, historically considered, contains all the physical subjugation and consequent inferiority which constituted all the differentiation between the physical and mental powers of men and women. It contains all the humiliation, uncertainty, and ultimate hope of her future. The history of the woman question is analogous with the history of the labor question, with the difference that woman slavery had its origin in the peculiarities of her sexual being, while the laborer’s slavery began when he was robbed of the land which is the birthright of every human being. It will be seen, therefore, that woman’s slavery antedates the thralldom of the thrall, and “was more humiliating, more degrading, because she was treated and regarded by the laborer as his servant, his inferior.” This condition largely prevails among laborers to-day, and was indirectly given utterance to a few weeks ago, when some of the members of the American Federation of Labor formulated a traditional resolution demanding that “women be excluded from all public work and relegated to the home,”—a demand that would be to some extent reasonable, and no doubt acceptable, to the great army of working-women, had the chivalrous laborers who formulated the demand the ability and industry to provide a home for the women whom they would render paupers by deprivation of work, and for the children for whom their fathers were unable to provide. It is gratifying to know that this resolution was lost in the committee room, and that its formulation was greeted by the press of the whole country with a storm of deserved disapproval.
Inasmuch as the rapidly increasing number of bread-winners among women makes it evident that men are either unable or incompetent to provide for them, it remains for the working-women of the country to formulate a resolution demanding that men be excluded from all work that has hitherto been considered as belonging to or peculiarly adapted to women. What an army of mosquito-legged men from the eating-houses, laundries, and dry-goods establishments would rise up to proclaim the idiocy of women and protest against such injustice!