Woman's Right to Labor; or, Low Wages and Hard Work.
Dall, Caroline H. “Women’s Right to Labor”; or, Low Wages and Hard Work…Boston: Walker, Wise and Company, 1860.
8vo.; interior nearly pristine but for some light foxing on a page or two; brown endpapers, bookplate of previous owner on front endpaper, light signature of another previous owner on same; brown cloth, very lightly used.
First (and perhaps only?) edition of this uncommon collection of three related lectures by Dall devoted to the subject of women and labor. In this book Dall, a legendary and eccentric activist on behalf of women’s rights, addresses the plight of women in the job market and the lack of acceptable employment opportunities for women:
If, as political economists tell us, it is chiefly by man, collectively
taken, that the property of society is created; and if, on that very ground,
man’s interest has the first claim to consideration, -- does it not follow,
that every friend of woman will try to induce her to become a capitalist,
and open to her, as her first path to safety, the way to honorable
independence? (p. 6)
Caroline Wells Healey Dall (1822-1912), the oldest of eight children born to Mark and Caroline (Foster) Healey, was best known for the fact that she studied under Margaret Fuller – at age 19 – and took part in the latter’s famed “Conversations.” She later became the vice-principal of a girls’ school in Georgetown; an abolitionist involved with the Underground Railroad; a contributor to the Liberty Bell, an anti-slavery annual; and the corresponding editor at Una, a women’s journal. She was married at age 22 to Charles Henry Appleton Dall, a Unitarian minister, with whom she had two children, Sarah and William. The Dalls often shared ministerial duties: Caroline taught a religion class and would often take the pulpit as well.
Dall’s late, short career championing women’s rights—she was most active during the 1850s and ‘60s— began in 1855, when her husband went to India leaving her in Boston with their two small children. A former teacher, girls’ school principal, abolitionist, and essayist—a number of her early essays on moral and religious subjects, which appeared in newspapers and periodicals from the time she was thirteen, were collected in 1849 as Essays and Sketches—Dall tried her hand at working on conventions: “She helped Paulina Davis organize a woman’s rights convention in Boston in September 1855 and delivered an exhaustive report on the legal status of Massachusetts women. In 1859 she organized the New England Woman’s Rights Convention, also in Boston, and delivered one of the principal addresses.”
This volume, published the following year, contains reworked examples of some of those very addresses, as noted in the subtitle (“Delivered in Boston, November, 1859.”) The essays deal with such issues as prostitution and the economic circumstances that lead women to it; factory work and its oppressive environment; women and self-employment; the ghettoization of women into traditional female occupations; female child laborers; and women’s role in the global economy. Dall’s extensive critique of the economic place of women in society anticipated and laid the groundwork for other more famous studies on the subject such as those engaged in by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Dall’s somewhat abrasive manner made her an unlikely candidate for a leadership role in “cooperative undertakings” (Elizabeth Peabody had taken issue with her outspokenness at Margaret Fuller’s weekly “Conversations” in the early 1840s), and so she turned exclusively to writing and speaking, publishing several collections of her lectures: Historical Pictures Retouched (1860); this collection of three lectures; Woman’s Rights Under Law; and her most significant work, and a reworked version of these lectures published six years later, entitled The College, the Market, and the Court; or Women’s Relation to Education, Labor, and Law (1867), which the New York Evening Post called “the
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