618 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



as some economists have feared, the minute division of labor has a 

 narrowing and dwarfing effect on the laborer's mind, then we might 

 expect semi-specialized woman to be the mental superior of man, un- 

 less otherwise dwarfed. For, although the metes and bounds of her 

 sphere are more rigid than bis are, within those bounds each woman 

 must as a rule cover the whole field, while he marks out for himself a 

 small and constantly decreasing stint, leaving the rest to others. 

 Much of her former work, to be sure, he has taken from her ; and the 

 moment he got it he began to divide it into specialties. But enough 

 still remains for nobody knows how many specialties. What keeps 

 these possible specialties fast bound in one ? 



The family implies a home, the home a home-keeper. The family 

 system, plus monogamy, implies one woman to one home, and no more. 

 The appearance of two women at work in one home implies that one 

 of them has not yet been fitted into her normal place in the mono- 

 gamic family system, or has dropped out of it. She is filling a gap 

 in her own life by a service aimed to ease and anrplify the life of 

 another. In this way the home of the well-to-do may contain sev- 

 eral women, and in such cases they generally do divide and specialize 

 the work. So do the women who are filling interstices in their lives by 

 working in hotels and boarding-houses. 



But taking the average woman, even in the most civilized commu- 

 nities, whatever of her hardest-worked female ancestor's household 

 duties are still necessary to be done, and can not be done away from 

 home, she must do herself alone. She must also do whatever new 

 kinds of work the diversifying tastes of herself and family have called 

 into being. Has she any escape consistent with the maintenance of 

 the family system ? 



Are we driven to this dilemma, that either the institution of the 

 family, which has done so much to ennoble the race, must go, or else 

 woman's work must for all time be prescribed, like that of the slave, 

 while man's is elective ? Must the already excessive heredity of her 

 occupation and aptitudes be still further bred in and in ? If so, what 

 manner of person will she finally be ? 



I confess myself unable to answer these questions to my own satis- 

 faction. Before attempting it let me call attention to the light they 

 throw on the nature of the science of political economy. It has been 

 called a mental science. It has been called a moral science. It has 

 been treated as a deductive science. It has even been treated as a 

 matter of mathematics. Yet here, at the very outset, we find half the 

 objects of its solicitude bound fast in the embrace of biological evolu- 

 tion. Their economic destiny is sealed before they are born. It is a 

 biological fact, and as such we must study it. It is a fact not wholly 

 psychological, nor wholly ethical, nor sociological, but physiological as 

 well. It comes as near as anything to being omni-biological. 



It will serve us no good purpose to deceive ourselves in such mat- 



