not need to work, but I do not like staying at home. Another woman, the mother of several children, whom I had visited during her absence from the factory, said, 'I would rather be at work [in the factory] a hundred times than at home; I get lost at home.' Mrs. F is an experienced damask weaver and earns fair wages; her husband is a casual worker; she has six children and is shortly to be confined. She frankly admitted that she preferred working in the factory to housekeeping and the rearing of children, and that she returned to the factory as soon after confinement as possible. Mrs. M is employed in spinning, and her husband is in regular night work. She has had ten children, seven of whom have died; the remaining ones are aged respectively fifteen years, four years, and ten months, and she is to be confined again shortly. Her husband objects to her working, but she has just returned to the mill after an absence of eight years. In the majority of cases I have found that neglected, delicate children and dirty, ill-kept homes are the natural concomitants of the employment of married women.")

Concerning the unemployment of the husband in relation to the employment in industry of the wife, the Lady Inspector says, "Much of the work formerly done by men is now done by their wives at a lower wage." Lower wages of men must therefore be enumerated with the other concomitants of the employment of wives in industry.

The United States Census Report, "Women at Work," published in 1907, shows an increase in the percentage of married women employed in American industry. The relation of this situation to infant mortality has been very distinctly traced by medical authorities in Great Britain. It is the consensus of British medical opinion that "any attempt to combine the offices of child-bearer and breadwinner in one person must, of necessity, result in feeble, bottle-fed babies and premature births." It has been pointed out, moreover, by a Medical Officer of Health in an English factory town that "the damage done cannot entirely be measured by mortality figures, for these take no account of the impaired vitality of the infants who manage to survive to swell the ranks of the degenerate."

Categorically stated, then, as determined by scientific investi

gation, these evils are associated with the employment in industry of married women-the slaughter of infants, degeneracy of children, neglect of children and of the home, lower wages, unemployment of men. None of the sorrow, pain, privation, degradation, resulting from these evils do the women themselves escape by their occupation in industry, yet, in ever-increasing numbers, wives abandon work in the home for wage-earning. Why is it? What impels them, against the will of their husbands, when no actual necessity exists, to seek work in shop and factory at any price rather than stay at home? Is not the reason this:

Wives to-day realize that the situation of their work in the home is more intolerable than the worst possible consequences of their wage-earning.

Industry, at least, admits the fact of the woman's individual existence, of her individual contribution to production, of her individual right to live as well as to labor, to have her labor measured, the burden of it weighed, the product of it known, valued, priced, and paid. In the home, on the contrary, her labor is lost to sight; none of the evils of her situation there are known, her work there is not so much as credited with being work; during not one moment of the day, week in and week out, year in and year out, can she extricate consciousness from the overwhelming burden of toil, the prostrating sense of failure, the wastage of life-her own, her children's, her family's lifewhich her work imposes upon her. It seems perfectly reasonable, therefore, to conclude that the increasing demand of married women for occupation in industry is, au fond, a revolt of wives against the intolerable conditions of their occupation in the home.

In the United States other indications appear marking this revolt among wives. These are, in particular among women of the well-to-do class, the increasing number of divorces and the increasing tendency to race suicide. It is perfectly idle to preach against these evils, and tell women, as some good, foolish men do, that woman's place is in the home; that intermittent marriages and childless marriages are not pleasing in the sight of Heaven; that the family is the corner-stone of the Nation, and therefore women should seek to make the family permanent and numerous, and love to work at home. The American woman cannot reason

ably consider any duty to the family which does not properly provide for the fulfillment of her duty to herself. Before the good of the family can be urged upon her as a motive for doing or not doing, it must be shown that the family will be good to her. Heaven may wait to welcome her into glory when, as a wife and mother in the home, she shall have worked herself to death; but the education she has received and the ideals she has been taught to revere compel her, while working in the hope of heaven, to have some hope of life, liberty, happiness, and fair wages to recompense her here below. American women are bound to crowd into men's work, and to regard matrimony as an experiment and maternity as unprofitable, until the work done by wives is recognized as being work-work which has value; work which, as it is well or ill done, as it is well or ill conditioned, adds to or subtracts from the wealth of the Nation. The work done by wives in the home is the last determining factor of the problem of the cost of living, and is also the first determining factor of the cost of all production. Labor itself—the numerical strength of the workers of the Nation and their efficiency-depends in the beginning upon the industrial situation of wives. The question demanding investigation is not, Are wives supported by their husbands? but, How far are husbands—men in general—supported by the work of wives?

Carroll D. Wright said once, "Some notion of the economic importance of the labor which wives do in the home is to be had by considering what would be the consequences to general industry if these women were "to walk out." If all the women working without wages in our homes were suddenly to quit cooking, cleaning, sewing, taking care of babies, and planning to make ends meet, it would mean nothing less than a cessation of general industry. If one thinks of this situation as continuing indefinitely and including a strike against maternity, it would mean the collapse of our industrial empire and the end of the Nation."

Might it not be worth while for the Congress of the United States to vote an appropriation for an investigation of the work of wives? Remember Lysistrata !

Survey, 23: 383-6. December 18, 1909.

Shirtwaist Makers' Strike. Constance D. Leupp.

"We'd rather starve quick than starve slow." Such is the battle cry of the 30,000 striking shirtwaist makers (mostly girls) who since November 22 have made Clinton Hall the busiest and most interesting spot in New York city.

Since the union movement began among women, nothing so significant as this general strike has happened, and for generalship, obedience and good conduct under circumstances which would break a less determined and courageous host, these Jewish, Italian and American girls from the East Side can give points to trades practiced in striking.

The members of the trade in New York are estimated at 40,000; between 30,000 and 35,000 have joined the Ladies' Shirtwaist Makers' Union. Already 18,000 girls are again at their machines on their own terms, 236 firms having taken them back into closed shops. It is the smaller shops that have settled. The bitterest part of the fight is still ahead.

The history of the trouble has not yet been fairly given to the public. A few facts about the wholesale trade of machine shirtwaist making will make the whole story more comprehensible.

A Manhattan Trade School secretary who has much experience in placing girls in different trades, says that she likes to have her girls go into shirtwaist making because it has as great possibilities-many of them as yet unfulfilledas any other industry open to women in New York. A fast operator at piece-work, or even working by the day in a good shop, can earn $16 or more a week. The minimum piece-wage for strip tucking, for instance; is ten cents a hundred yards. Twelve cents is paid in many shops, and fifteen cents is probably what the strikers claim in most cases. A good operator can average 2,000 yards a day. A girl who averaged this at the Triangle Waist Company's shop where the strike began.-says that her wages were $7 a week in the busy season and $6 in slack time, while a sub-contractor

admits that he averaged $28 to $30 a week and paid $4 to $10 to his girls.

Sub-contracting is a system whereby the firm never makes any dealing directly with the operators. The sub-contractor undertakes to produce a definite amount of work for a definite price, and makes what bargains he sees fit with his girls. He can slave-drive and underpay as he pleases, and even if his intentions are of the best, he represents an extra profit, the burden of which falls on the operator rather than on the consumer.

Curiously enough, it was a sub-contractor who started the strike. Some eighteen months ago at the Triangle shop on Washington place (Harris and Blank's) this man because he "was sick of slave-driving" protested to the manager, saying he wanted to go and take his girls with him. He was not allowed to speak to the girls after he had expressed himself. but was told to report to the cashier for his pay. Fearful of a slugging on the way up in the elevator, he asked to have someone go with him, and was not only refused, but set upon and dragged out of the shop-the original "assault." As he was dragged along he shouted, "Will you stay at your machines and see a fellow worker treated this way?" And impulsively 400 operators dropped their work and walked out.

The union at that time numbered only about 500 members and the trade was in no way organized; so when Secretary Schindler suggested conciliatory methods, and the firm seemed willing to treat, it was not difficult to fill the shop again. The managers formed a society of the more intelligent workers, and with its members in council, terms were hit upon. "The society and a job or the union and no job" was the demand of the firm. The society having a membership limited to one hundred, there were five non-members to one member. By degrees it was discovered that the members got most of its benefits, and in frightened twos and threes the girls began to drift down to union headquarters and ask for help in organizing. Discontent grew even among the members. so that when last September a meeting was held at Clinton Hall to discuss the