250 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



census of 1890, three hundred and sixty-nine groups of industrial 

 work are enumerated, and in all but nine of these women are 

 employed, the actual ratio of women workers to men being 1 to 

 4'4. The United States Commissioner of Labor writes : " A care- 

 ful examination of the actual earnings of women discloses the- 

 fact that in many industries their average earnings equal or ex- 

 ceed the earnings of the men." 



It may be difficult for those not conversant with manufactur- 

 ing towns to realize that as far back as 1850 there were over 

 two hundred and twenty- five thousand women engaged in factory 

 work, or 27"30 per cent of the whole number of employees. To- 

 day, however, when women have swarmed into nearly all hives 

 of labor, statistics are scarcely needed to prove that, whether 

 "exempted" or not, they earn their livelihood in visible fashion. 

 Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi asks the observer to "station himself 

 on Broadway at six o'clock in the evening and watch the crowds^ 

 pouring out of the retail stores, the binderies, printing establish- 

 ments, and newspaper offices, or to visit the ring of ferries encir- 

 cling the city, and analyze into their component sexes the vast 

 throngs returning from work ; or, at the station of some manu- 

 facturing town, see the operatives disembarking for the day, and 

 after such inspection he will find it hard to believe that any 

 women remain at home to sew, dust, sweep, or mind the babies. 

 ... To his imagination the women of leisure would disappear 

 as completely as in the United States the men of leisure are wiped 

 out of the national census." 



This phase of the industrial evolution is unrecognized by our 

 antisuffragist, and he depicts for us how a census-taker would 

 find the sexes relatively employed — the man going to work and 

 the women engaged at home in household supervision and social 

 duties. He admits that now and then women teach, act as clerks, 

 or do literary work, but these are exceptions.* " In the healthy 

 normal society the true order seems to be that 'men must work 

 and women must weep,' unless a cheerful temperament converts 

 the weeping into a song." This, which might answer for a poet- 

 ical view of the lives of the fisher-folk of whom it was written, was 

 not typical of the general social condition even in Charles Kings- 

 ley's time. To-day it is not true of a respectable fraction. The 

 number of women who live in absolute leisure is an insignificant 

 item and is constantly diminishing. 



* The percentage of women workers for the United States in 1880 was forty-nine. In 

 1890 the gain ia stated to be ten per cent. The number of women employed in mechanical 

 and manufactm-iug industries for 1890 was 505,712. They received as wages $139,329,- 

 719. There are 549,804 women in New York city over fifteen years of age. Those regu- 

 larly employed number over 250,000. 



