Around me I saw women overworked and underpaid, doing men's work

The cry of Anna Howard Shaw rises like a lamentation from the heart of ages: women overworked and underpaid, toiling at the same labor as men yet rewarded with but a fraction of their wage. This injustice did not spring from any weakness of skill or spirit, but from the simple decree that they were women. Here is the wound of civilization: that the hand which plows the soil, forges the steel, or tends the sick is judged not by its strength, but by the sex of the one who wields it.

In the factories of the nineteenth century, young women bent their backs beside men, feeding the machines that roared with iron hunger. Their fingers bled, their lungs filled with dust, and their spirits endured the unrelenting hours. Yet when wages were counted, the coins given to them were few, and always fewer than those given to their male companions. Not because their work was inferior, but because tradition decreed they were lesser beings. Shaw’s words immortalize this bitter truth, that worth was measured not by merit, but by prejudice.

One recalls the tale of the women textile workers of Lowell, Massachusetts. In the 1830s, they marched through the streets, protesting against wage cuts and long hours. Many were barely more than girls, yet they raised their voices with courage, crying that they too were citizens, not servants. Though mocked and dismissed, their defiance planted seeds that would bloom in later generations. Their labor was the same as men’s, their sweat equally real, but their reward was diminished, their dignity denied.

Thus, Shaw’s declaration is not merely the recounting of wrongs, but the clarion call of a warrior for justice. She reminds us that the struggle for equality is born in the fields, in the mills, in the hospitals, wherever women took up burdens as heavy as men’s. To see them denied their rightful wage is to see the chains of bondage disguised as custom. Such chains are not broken by silence, but by voice—the same voice Shaw lifted as a preacher, as a physician, and as a suffragist.

Let future generations remember: the measure of labor is not in the sex of the worker but in the toil itself. The sweat of a woman is not less salt than that of a man, nor her strength less real. To honor Shaw’s wisdom is to guard against complacency, to see that justice is never assumed but always defended. For as long as any are underpaid for the same work, freedom is yet unfinished, and the story of equality is still being written.