To thousands of young women of New York to-day there is only this
alternative: starvation or dishonor. Many of the largest mercantile
establishments of our cities are accessory to these abominations;
and from their large establishments there are scores of souls being
pitched off into death; _and their employers know it!_

Is there a God? Will there be a judgment? I tell you, if God rises up
to redress woman's wrongs, many of our large establishments will be
swallowed up quicker than a South-American earthquake ever took down
a city. God will catch these oppressors between the two mill-stones of
his wrath, and grind them to powder!

Why is it that a female principal in a school gets only eight hundred
and twenty-five dollars for doing work for which a male principal gets
sixteen hundred and fifty?

I hear from all this land the wail of woman-hood. Man has nothing to
answer to that wail but flatteries. He says she is an angel. She is
not. She knows she is not. She is a human being, who gets hungry
when she has no food, and cold when she has no fire. Give her no more
flatteries: give her _justice!_

There are thirty-five thousand sewing-girls in New York and Brooklyn.
Across the darkness of this night I hear their death-groan. It is not
such a cry as comes from those who are suddenly hurled out of life,
but a slow, grinding, horrible wasting away. Gather them before you
and look into their faces, pinched, ghastly, hunger-struck! Look at
their fingers, needle-picked and blood-tipped! See that premature
stoop in the shoulders! Hear that dry, hacking, merciless cough!