[The Business of Being a Woman by Ida M. Tarbell]@TWC D-Link bookThe Business of Being a Woman CHAPTER IX 11/39
If she had been as poor a stick, as downtrodden and ineffective as sometimes painted, she would not be a fit mate for the man beside whom she has struggled, and she would be as utterly unfit for the larger life she desires as the most bigoted misogynist pictures her to be. Moreover, all things considered, she has been no greater sufferer from injustice than man.
I do not mean in saying this that she has not had grave and unjust handicaps, legal and social; I mean that when you come to study the comparative situations of men and women as a mass at any time and in any country you will find them more nearly equal than unequal, all things considered.
Women have suffered injustice, but parallel have been the injustices men were enduring.
It was not the fact that she was a woman that put her at a disadvantage so much as the fact that might made right, and the physically weaker everywhere bore the burden of the day.
Go back no further than the beginnings of this Republic and admit all that can be said of the wrong in the laws which prevented a woman controlling the property she had inherited or accumulated by her own efforts, which took from her a proper share in the control of her child,--we must admit, too, the equal enormity of the laws which permitted man to exploit labor in the outrageous way he has.
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