THE INDUSTRIAL POSITION OF WOMEN. 397 



in the bearing and rearing of children, under the strain of maternity, 

 and the wear and tear of domestic duty. 



It is not only, nor chiefly, our college graduates and industrial 

 workers who crowd the offices of specialists, and the same department 

 in our charities. The girls who stay at home and are subjected to no 

 educational strain, the wives and mothers who are pursuing the most 

 natural of avocations, are quite as fully represented. We must be- 

 lieve that it is the physical education, not the organization, of women 

 that is at fault, unless we accept the conclusion that the special con- 

 stitution that is supposed to disqualify them for other work disquali- 

 fies them also for its own ends. 



It is generally assumed that the women who have broken down in 

 outside work would not have done so in married life, but it is precisely 

 the feeble health that fails in one that fails in the other also. There 

 is a general inclination to compare the results of work under unfavor- 

 able conditions with those of married life under favorable ones. If 

 we compare the health of the same class of women, under equally 

 favorable or unfavorable conditions of work or of married life, it is 

 extremely doubtful if the result would be as much in favor of the 

 latter as the opponents of non-domestic work for women take for 

 granted. 



Many of the difficulties which now embarrass women in work are 

 such as belong to a transition state. They will disappear as the pres- 

 ence of women in these new fields is accepted and provided for. The 

 fewness of the occupations open to women and their consequent over- 

 crowding ; the difficulty, often the impossibility, of acquiring special 

 education for occupations in which special skill is required ; the oppo- 

 sition of the workers already in the field these are only a few of the 

 obstacles which are due to the novelty of the effort. Business has 

 been arranged to suit men; and women, upon entering any new branch 

 of labor, are required to accept its existing conditions. There are 

 many kinds of work which women could do perfectly well if they 

 could modify these conditions. But if, without this, they fail to do it 

 as well as men, or suffer more in doing it, it is taken for granted that 

 the work is unfit for them, that the remedy is to exclude them from it, 

 not to adopt the mode of doing it to their requirements. 



As an illustration of the different effect of the same work accord- 

 ing to the circumstances under which it is done, take agricultural 

 labor. Nothing is more frequently quoted as an exemplification 

 of the brutalizing effect of masculine work upon women, than the 

 results of field-labor as it is carried on by them in some parts of Ger- 

 many and other places, where women are considered, and treated, 

 as mere drudges. Contrast with these reports the following state- 

 ments in regard to the effect of field-work upon women in the north 

 of England, extracted from the " First Report of the Commissioners 

 on the Employment of Children, Young Persons, and Women in Agri- 



