390 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Here we find most marked the personal affection, the intimate com- 

 panionship, the community of interests, the common responsibility and 

 care for the children, which are the characteristics of the family. The 

 related life of the group so formed constitutes domestic life. But if 

 the personal relations of woman to the family are thus fixed and en- 

 during, her industrial relation to it is by no means so unchanging. 

 The work which she must do for it varies according to external con- 

 ditions. There is no one kind of work which absolutely belongs to 

 domestic life ; there is hardly any kind of work that has not in some 

 phase of society been considered to belong to it. 



In the savage state, women built the wigwam, raised the corn, pre- 

 pared the clothes, carried on in its rudest and most elementary form 

 all the work which is to-day the object of modern industry. But since 

 these simple forms of labor have developed into architecture and agri- 

 culture and manufactures, it is held that women can not follow their 

 old occupations under their new forms, under penalty of personal de- 

 terioration and social disaster. It is the conditions under which work 

 is done, apparently, which constitute it domestic work, rather than the 

 nature of the work itself. Weaving was domestic work when done at 

 home, but ceased to be so when done in a factory. 



Domestic work, therefore, is all work for the family which, under 

 our present arrangements, must be done at home, upon a small scale, 

 by individual workers, free from the organization and comjDetition of 

 business. Precisely in the degree that outside occupations partake of 

 any of these characteristics of domestic work, are they considered ap- 

 propriate to women. On the other hand, how feminine soever the 

 nature of a work, as soon as it is seized upon by the modern system 

 of outside labor, begins to be carried on upon a large scale, and to be 

 subject to the laws of business competition, it thenceforth ceases to 

 belong to women. It has departed from the conditions of domestic 

 work. 



If this definition of domestic work be correct, two questions natu- 

 rally arise in connection with it : 1. Will the work now done at home 

 always continue to be so done ? 2. If the conditions of domestic 

 work are those most favorable to the well-being of women, what is the 

 reason of their growing distaste for domestic service ? The answers 

 to these two questions are very closely connected with each other, and 

 with the main question of the industrial position of Avomcn. 



When we consider, on one hand, how pressing and increasing an 

 evil is the lack of skillful and reliable servants, how severely the want 

 of efficient service weighs upon the mothers of families, and, on the 

 other hand, how liberal is the compensation and how certain the em- 

 ployment for women having even a moderate degree of skill in house- 

 work, there seems, at first sight, some truth in the assertion that the 

 difficulty with women is not the want of work, but the inclination to 

 shirk their own work in order to invade that of men. The complaint 



