Any measure calculated to encourage virtue and subdue vice must be the wisest and best policy of a nation. In new countries there is a dignity in labour and a self-supporting woman is alike respected and respectable. Why should the door of hope be closed on those poor women, and why refuse them the means of attaining that independence in other countries which they are debarred from in this?
Share this quote
Source, in full
Speaking to the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society in Ireland at the meeting after 1863-05 urging that there was need to educate woman who had become destitute and needed to go to the workhouse without money to emigrate needed skills to enable them to emigrate. This was in the context of famines and mass emigrations from Ireland.