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educated women during the nineteenth century is assumed to have been a progress without class distinctions, in which women of all classes have shared alike. But the history of the employment of women in professional and in industrial life has been radically different. "Not exclusion but exploitation" has been the condition in most lines of manual labor. Working women have not been "denied the opportunity of using their muscles as their better-off sisters were, or are, of exercising their brains."

This will perhaps, become more obvious in the following historical review. Attention should, perhaps, be called to two points which will be especially emphasized: (1) That women have been from the beginning an important and indispensable factor in American industry-in the early half of the last century the number of women in proportion to the number of men employed was larger than it is today; (2) that throughout the colonial period and for more than half a century after the establishment of our republic, the attitude not only of the statesman but of the public moralist was that of rigid insistence on the gainful employment of women, either in the home or, as the household industries grew decreasingly profitable, away from it.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth ecnturies court orders directed that the women of the various towns should be kept employed, and Puritan ministers warned them of the sin of idleness. A law of the province of Massachusetts Bay for the session of 1692-93 ordered that every single person under twenty-one must live under some orderly family government; but contained the important proviso that the act should not be construed "to hinder any single woman of good repute from the exercise of any lawful trade or employment for a livelihood." One is led to suspect that in some ways the seventeenth century was broader minded than the twentieth, in spite of the fact that an act of 1695 required single women who were self-supporting to pay a poll tax equally with men.

In the eighteenth century spinning schools were founded to assist women in earning their own maintenance; and when the first cotton factories were established they were welcomed as a means of enriching the country by women's labor. In 1789 a petition asking state aid for the pioneer cotton mill in Massachusetts publicly called attention to the fact that it would "afford employment to a great number of women and children, many of whom," it was said, "will be otherwise useless, if not burdensome, to society!" A fac

tory in Boston was looked upon with favor at this time, because it promised "to give employment to a great number of persons, especially females who now eat the bread of idleness.

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The same confident approval of every means of providing gainful occupations for women-particularly poor women-is to be found in the discussions which centered about the policy of encouraging and protecting our "infant industries" after the present government had been established. The economic ideal of the statesmen of Washington's day was the development of our national resources -the attainment of the maximum utility, not only from our boundless and unexplored territories, but from our population. They were confronted with the problem of establishing manufacturing pursuits in a country where labor was scarce and dear. With land so cheap, and so much chance for success in agriculture, men could not be induced to work in the new mills and factories. But this lack of workmen was not considered an obstacle, for factory work, which was chiefly work in the new textile mills, was considered women's work at that time; and women's labor was confidently reckoned on as the means by which our infant manufactures could be built up. Moreover, to have the women of the country fully employed meant the more complete utilization of the country's labor force, and was a clear economic gain to the nation.

Looking back at the change in the domestic economy of the household which was being wrought at this time, we see the carding, spinning, weaving, dyeing the old historic occupations of women in the home-being taken away from them; a great demand for hands to police the new machines; and the women quietly following their work from the home to the factory. This was not only the natural thing for them to do, but it was demanded of them by the public opinion of their day. There was no voice lifted then to remind them that women's proper place was at home. That argument is never used when women are doing work which men want them to do.

During the period from the close of the War of 1812 until 1832 the tariff was the all-important subject of discussion, and the woman factory operative was called to the aid of the economists and statesmen who were supporting the Protectionist system, and who were hard pressed in argument by their Free Trade opponents. The fact that women formed so large a proportion of the employees in our "infant industries" was a valuable Protectionist argument, and

attention was frequently called in the public discussions of the period to the fact that not one-tenth of the factory operatives were able-bodied men fit for farming. Even Free Traders, who feared that manufactures would be developed at the expense of agriculture, were obliged to concede that the national wealth and prosperity would be greatly increased by the utilization in factories of the labor of women who would not otherwise be profitably employed.

Early inventors worked to discover possible means of using women's labor. It was a great recommendation for a new machine if it could be worked by women or even by children! Mr. E. B. Bigelow of Boston, in 1842, patented a series of devices "for making the carpet loom automatic, so that the costly labor of man might be dispensed with, and the whole process of weaving be conducted by women and boys."

But in the first half of the century, the presence of women in factories was approved on social as well as on economic grounds. The new manufacturing establishments, it was claimed, not only gave women a chance of earning their livelihood, but educated them in habits of honest industry. It was said that the rise of manufactures had "elevated the females belonging to the families of the cultivattors of the soil in their vicinity from a state of penury and idleness to competence and industry." The Committee on the Cotton Industry appointed by the New York Convention of the "Friends of Industry," in 1831, reported that thirty-nine thousand females were employed in the various cotton factories of the United States, their aggregate wages amounting to "upwards of four million dollars annually." In the words of the committee: "This immense sum paid for the wages of females may be considered so much clear gain to the country. Before the establishment of these and other domestic manufactures, this labor was almost without employment.

Matthew Carey, one of the well known philanthropists of his day, declared in a public address in 1824 that one-half of the "young females" in the cotton mills "would be absolutely or wholly idle but for this branch of business. While employed," he said in opposition to our modern ideas, "they contract habits of order, regularity, and industry, which lay a broad and deep foundation of public and private future usefulness. They become eligible partners for life for young men, to whom they will be able to afford substantial aid in the support of families. Thus," was his crowning

argument, "the inducement to early marriages *** is greatly increased *** and immensely important effects produced on the welfare of society."

The public moralist of today is inclined to be very severe upon girls who prefer to work in factories and live in their own homes instead of working in the kitchens of other people's homes-who, in other words, prefer to live and work in the way that makes them and their families happiest. That domestic service had few attractions was discovered long before the close of the first half of the century. Called upon to compete with factory occupations, it was proved inferior. A writer in the Boston Transcript of 1836 (April 22) deprecates the fact that the new employments for women make it "extremely difficult to procure good family help, or hire females at all, without giving prices comparatively high. The girls employed in the cotton and woolen factories," he says in explanation, "though kept at work for many hours, are well paid for their labor." The Factory Operatives Magazine of Lowell, in the issue of August, 1841, discussed the same question. The educated women then in the mills found many reasons for preferring factory work though their daughters in the women's clubs of today would almost invariably approve of the public moralist for scolding the women who perversely refuse to save them the drudgery of household work, but who are merely taking the point of view of Lucy Larcom and the other girls of the famous Lowell group.

It is, of course, clear that the employment of women was not considered on its own merits in this early period, any more than it is at the present time. Factory work for women was encouraged by the statesman, the economist, the public moralist of the first half century, because the scarcity of labor made the employment of women necessary if American industries were to be developed. Now, after the profuse immigration of the past seventy years, when the alarmist sees cause for fear lest there may not be sufficient work for men, the woman in industry is turned upon as an interloper, her right to her work is questioned, and she is denounced for driving out the men! That the men have also been driving out the women is a fact of history that is too often overlooked.

Take, for example, the cotton manufacture, which has been for more than a hundred years the most important woman's industry. Here even the census has discovered that there is "a slow but steady displacement of women by men." In 1831 eighty per cent. of the

cotton-mill operatives of Massachusetts were women, whereas in 1905 the proportion of women employed was barely fifty per cent. There are now more than fifteen thousand men engaged in the cotton mills in the work of spinning alone—the historic occupation of women in all nations, and in all ages but our own. There are more than fifty thousand men weaving in the cotton mills-work which, in the early days of the factory system, was considered so exclusively women's that a "man weaver" was a subject for public ridicule.

This tendency toward the driving out of the women in the cotton mills is by no means an isolated movement. The situation is much the same in the woolen mills, and the Twelfth Census showed other traditionally feminine occupations being taken over by men. They knit our stockings and underwear, and they make many of our hats. A single branch of the needle trades, the manufacture of clothing, employs upwards of two hundred thousand men more than thirty thousand men are engaged in the manufacture of women's clothing alone; and the part that men now play in the preparation of the food supply, from the baking of pies to the manufacture of jellies, is so magnificent that it beggars description!

The last census called public attention to the large numbers of women in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits; and the President of the United States, in a vigorous message to Congress, asked, and obtained, an appropriation that bids fair to reach a million dollars for an investigation of the condition of the hundreds of thousands of women in industry. This is all good in its way, provided that we do not forget that our gigantic American manufacturing enterprises are built upon the labor of women as a foundation; that the exigencies of early labor conditions demanded the industrial employment of women, and if they had stayed in the homes to which the public moralist of today would relegate them all the protective tariffs in the world could not have saved our infant industries.

If we look at the ten most important women's industries today -work in the cotton, woolen, hosiery and knitting, and silk mills, in the boot and shoe factories, in printing and bookbinding, in cigar and tobacco factories, and in the various branches of millinery and clothing manufacture-we find that in all of them women have been employed from the beginning; and, with perhaps two exceptions, there is reason to believe that they were more exclusively women's industries seventy-five years ago than they are today. It is a com

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