College, the Market, and the Court, The…
Dall, Caroline. The College, the Market, and the Court; or Women’s Relation to Education, Labor, and Law. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1867.
8vo.; bookplate on front pastedown; brown cloth, spine stamped in gilt; rubbed; front panel bubbled; extremities nicked and frayed.
First edition of Dall’s seminal work; dedicated to Lucretia Mott, “for more than fifty years a preacher and reformer; spotless alike in all public and private relations; whose children’s grandchildren rise up to call her blessed; this book is dedicated, since she is the best example that I know of what all women may and should become.” Prints a series of lectures delivered in Boston from 1859 to 1862 on the following topics: The College (The Christian demand and the public opinion; How public opinion is made; The meaning of the lives that have modified public opinion); The Market (Death or dishonor; Verify your credentials; “The opening of the gates”); and The Court (The Oriental estimate and the French law; The English Common Law; The United States Law, and some thought on human rights). The final 100 pages of the volume are usurped by an appendix, “Ten Years,” expounding Dall’s most recent thoughts on these issues. Notable American Women identifies the substance of this significant collection:
In this book, while calling for the removal of educational and legal disabilities based on sex, [Dall] attributed the discontent of modern women to the lack of employment opportunities and suggested that the home no longer provided an adequate sphere of activity. Formerly, she wrote, “every woman found, in spinning, weaving, and sewing, in the active labor of a …household, full employment for time and thought… But with the wide intellectual culture that America has been the first country in the world to offer to women, individual tastes and wishes must develop in single women; and all men who value the moral health of society must aid this development” (179). This approach, going beyond the suffrage question to a fundamental critique of the economic role of women, anticipated such later feminist writers as Charlotte Perkins Gilman. (NAW I, p. 429)
(A 1914 edition of the title is in the NAWSA Collection in the Library of
Congress.)
(#3769)
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