clerks, secretaries, heads of departments, &c., was violently opposed, not only by the women themselves through the noisy mouthpieces of their own sex, but also by many men who constituted themselves women's champions, and opposed their admission to the labour-market on various grounds.
Some went in for the sentimental business, and insisted that the softer sex should be spared the burdens for which they were neither physically nor morally adapted. They appealed to the delicacy of woman's frame, their excitable and impulsive character, their want of perseverance, their love of change, as disqualifying them from engaging in man's continuous work. They alleged that woman was so constituted as to be only fit for love and the tender emotions, and they contended that by rude manual or tedious intellectual occupations women would be rendered unfit for the one great business that nature had imposed on them, the propagation of the race. If hard work did not utterly disqualify them from child-bearing, it would have a most injurious effect on their progeny, and the race would either become extinct, or suffer such a degradation, that mankind would degenerate from the high standard of perfection it had attained.
Others, and these were the majority of the working men of the community, opposed the introduction of women into the occupations hitherto filled by men, on the ground that there was not sufficient work to give employment to both men and women. If women were to be allowed to flood the field of labour many men must starve; and it was a lesser evil to endow all women with a regular allowance from the state as at present, than to suffer them to earn their
