The College, the Market, and the Court or, Woman's relation to education, labor and law — Story, Setting & Ideas

A Preface That Defends Before It Explains

The preface, titled “A Preface to Be Read After the Book,” is itself a revealing document. Dall recounts how she was pressured to drop the subject of prostitution, which she frames as the result of low wages. She did not yield, she says, because she was “not working for myself nor of myself.” This claim of impersonal mission recurs throughout the text, lending a tone of reluctant duty. The preface also establishes a pattern: Dall anticipates criticism and preemptively justifies her methods. She notes that the lectures were “fully attended and frequently repeated,” and that white-haired clergymen set aside their prejudices to attend. This defensive framing shapes the reader’s expectation: the book is not a neutral survey but a response to active opposition.

Cross-Cultural Evidence as Argument

Dall’s method is comparative and historical. She quotes Vishnu Sarma on women’s inconstancy, then immediately undercuts the authority by noting that such sayings “save modern women from any very strong desire to restore the ‘good old rule.’” She moves from Hindu scripture to Chinese writers, to Turkish customs, to the convent of Nuestra Senhora da Ajuda in Rio, where husbands locked up wives during travel. Each example is chosen to show a consistent pattern of control. Yet Dall also includes counterexamples: the republican government of Celebes where women serve as presidents, and the Garo people where property descends through the female line. These exceptions are not mere curiosities; they serve as proof that women’s subordination is not natural but contingent on custom and law.

Voice and the Shifting Pace of Persuasion

Dall’s narrative voice shifts noticeably between sections. In the preface, she is personal and defensive, using first-person anecdotes about letters and tickets. In the body, she adopts a scholarly, almost encyclopedic tone, piling up examples from ancient and foreign sources. The pace is deliberate, each paragraph a new piece of evidence. But occasionally the voice sharpens into irony: after quoting the Hindu law that a widow should burn herself, she remarks that many women “had been burnt during her whole conjugal life in the fires of tyranny.” This sudden shift from reportage to bitter commentary jolts the reader. The alternation between cool exposition and heated aside gives the prose a rhythmic tension, as if Dall is struggling to keep her indignation in check while building an airtight case.

Dall’s book rewards readers who attend to its structure as much as its arguments. The preface, meant to be read last, actually frames the entire work as a response to controversy. The cross-cultural evidence is not random but carefully selected to show both the universality of women’s subordination and the existence of alternatives. Pay attention to the moments when Dall’s voice breaks from scholarly neutrality into irony or anger—these are the hinges of her argument. The book is best read as a series of lectures, each building on the last, with the preface serving as a key to understanding why Dall chose to write in this particular way.

I came across Dall's careful, almost pained accounting of how little women's labor was worth, and found myself remembering another book—one that traces a district where women's circumstances were even more brutally prescribed. That quiet footnote about low wages leading elsewhere seemed to echo across continents and years. Holding both together felt like honoring a thread of shared history. The nightless city; or, The "history of the Yoshiwara Yūkwaku" — Themes and Context lingered beside it, unresolved, but connected.