for the excitement of numbers that often leads them to continue work after marriage. "The mill is the last place for my girl; housework learns a woman to be a woman," said a weaver, forty years of whose life had been spent in the mill.

The objections to housework seem to be: The hours are long and indefinite. There is invariably Sunday work. Work is not often specialized. Each household has its own method of doing things.

There is no chance to rise to a better place.

There is little opportunity to visit friends, and small satisfaction in receiving them.

The relations with employers seem more irritating than in other occupations. There is a solitude that is the result of continual contact with people with whom they have nothing in com

mon.

In the opinion of working girls the advantages do not weigh against the disadvantages, so that under existing circumstances any attempt to attract intelligent girls to housework seems to be futile.

Independent. 53: 834-7. April 11, 1901.

Employments Unsuitable for Women.

Besides the moral and hygienic tests for woman's work there is one more of superlative importance-that of womanliness. "Male and female created he them;" and male and female we I want them to remain, not only physically, but in the higher qualities of mind and character, which are an acquisition of culture. Whatever tends to unsex woman should be frowned on by public opinion, and, if necessary, prohibited by law. The great principle of the division of labor, which is now applied to all human activities, cannot be ignored in the apportionment of work to woman and men. The lowest savages already practiced sexual division of labor, but theirs was not based on natural principles, but on masculine selfishness. The men reserved for themselves the "honorable" employments of war and the chase, which they looked on as sport, while their wives

and daughters were obliged not only to care for the children and to do the cooking, but to undertake all the hard work of grinding corn, tilling the fields, carrying home the game, cutting and bringing in wood, moving the camp, building huts, and a hundred other things that the men should have done. The result of this cruel doubling of their burdens was that they aged prematurely and lost all traces of such feminine beauty and charm as they might have otherwise developed. They were female men. To the savage the womanly woman was unknown. He was too coarse to appreciate the charms of true femininity.

With a topsy-turviness worthy of a Japanese the impression has been created that the "emancipation of woman" means the liberty to compete with men in all employments whatever. In reality, it means her liberation from the masculine and masculinizing work she was formerly compelled to do. The change came slowly-to-day millions of European women are still obliged to till the fields-but it came, in proportion as men became refined enough to appreciate genuine womanly qualities; and the emancipated women showed their gratitude by becoming more and more unmistakably and delightfully feminine. Having once discovered the charm of the eternal womanly, men will never allow it to be taken away again, to please a lot of half-women who are clamoring for what they illogically call their "rights." Men will find a way of making these misguided persons understand that it is as unseemly for them to be-as many of them are now-butchers, hunters, carpenters, barbers, stump speakers, iron and steel workers, miners, etc., as it would be for them to try to take the places of our soldiers, sailors, firemen, mail carriers and policemen. All employments which make women bold, fierce, muscular, brawny in body or mind, will be more and more rigidly taboed as unwomanly. Woman's strength lies in beauty and gentleness, not in muscle. In literature, journalism, art, science (especially electric); in education, charity work, dressmaking; in typewriting (where there is no moral risk), watchmaking. jewelers' work, flower raising or making, and a hundred

other branches of work that require no muscular toil, women and girls have all the opportunities for earning a living they need. Let us by all means throw open to them all employments in which their health, their purity and their womanliness do not suffer; but let this be regarded, not as a special privilege and an indication of social progress, but as a necessary evil, to be cured in as many cases as possible by marriage or some other way of bringing the workers back to their deserted homes.

Independent, 61: 674-81. September 20, 1906.

Some New Adjustments for Women. Simon N. Patten.

My recent article on the social value of married women in industry called forth a number of letters from women in evident alarm lest discussion should expose the home-making class to dangerous modifications. The protests were surprising, because of the personal emotion in them, and because they were aimed at some subjective terror wide of my mark. It had been far from my purpose to invade any field now visible in the social landscape; my intention was the simple one of pointing out how the formal sanction of the place married women are taking in work would not be a revolutionary step, but a helpful recognition that energy must transmute itself in order that the parts may remain pliant in the growing social organism.

I pointed to the familiar parallelism between the women of a past era who succeeded in being well-homed by working for their board, and the women of certain groups in this epoch, who will only succeed in housing themselves properly if they know how to work for wages. It was claimed that the evil of a growing celibate class would be reduced if its youthful members, who are now intimidated by the heavy expenses of marriage, were encouraged by public opinion to pay its cost from a joint income earned by the production of commodities. The services of the young wife would then be as

clearly focussed as those of the pioneer bride of agricultural days when she undertook home and farm industries. Emphasis was laid upon the bad ethics of a situation in which new forces are ineffectively marshaled under standards which must induce deceit, waste and the jar of maladjustments between the ideals of rural American and the antipodal necessities of the tenement-house population. The increasing numbers of unmarried workers tend to hold wages near the level of subsistence for single people, so that employers will not be forced by lack of supply to pay rates which will maintain families. In conclusion it was suggested that the emerging civilization of the un-American factory and tenement world might be hastened more soundly by giving it immediate access to air, light, good food and simple esthetics in the home than by removing the young wife from her paid work and returning her to the semi-idleness of a constricted dwelling already largely de-industrialized. A final tentative assumption fixed an income of $20 a week, earned by the husband, as the level whereon the wife might profitably withdraw from industry; she would have scope there to exercise judgment, and a decent opportunity to rear children without besetting fears.

It was evident, however, that some women readers were affronted, shocked and confused. The discussion became, in some way, a personal affair, and they found in it a tacit criticism of the conduct of their own lives which they countered with the story of individual circumstances and a halfcontemptuous, half-satirical, query how they themselves could be molded to such a theory of function. They made a passionate defense of individual status, and in consequence failed to give the wider application to other times and classes than their own. This was due in part to the natural tendency to interpret a general tenet in terms of personal experience; in part to the vague feeling that strange men have no right to intrude upon that which is withdrawn from world concern, as they instinctively regard their wifely and motherly relations to be; and in part to the clear sight of irreducible obstacles around which great numbers of contemporary women can never find a way.

The situation itself gives abundant cause for such emotional and logical confusion; for while it may be theoretically apparent that old modes of energy cannot continue to do the new kinds of work, and while it is granted that imperfect adaptations are already wasting valuable material in the form of the supported leisure woman, yet it is equally true that the direct application of the general fact to the typical instances cited by the stirred letter-writers brings forth blunder, misapprehension and fruitless discontent. There is added error, in fitting the advantages of paid work, which are manifest when applied to the women of one group, to those of quite a different economic order. But the critics failed to find in their own blurring of directions, one of the roads to the impasse where they ended, and from which they impugned the author's motives, good faith and knowledge.

The field might be summarily cleared for discussion, however, by broadly fixing the economic distinctions between the three kinds of women in America. One is the leisure woman, who can pay from some other person's purse for the routine services of daily life; one is the hard-working mother of American descent moved by New England traditions; and the third is the alien tenement dweller unable to conform to type or to create it, because the conditions which molded the old have gone, and the new are still amorphous. The surplus energy of the leisure woman of the past generation channeled her home; she moved about in it, her useless white apron a mark of established opulence, packing it with preserved foods and superfluous needlework. She exists everywhere to-day, but she has ceased to be chief exponent of full-blooded vitality seeking a merely enjoyable outlet. The fancy apron is discarded as a badge of aristocracy; and the pent strength of the lady which it symbolized turns to courses that flow away from the mechanical administration of the home. In a more frankly physical and pleasure-seeking form, the currents of vigor give fresh distinction to the wide-ranging, out-of-door “selfish" woman; or they stimulate to the altruism of direct civic in