666 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



chinery found her an economic and financial cipher ; it has trans- 

 formed her into an economic and financial power. The invasion 

 of women and children into the lower grades of paid industries 

 has made possible the advance of females into higher pursuits. 

 Untaught manual workers hewed the way for intellectual and 

 professional workers. 



I referred a while ago to the new woman's debt to primitive 

 mothers. I would speak now of the new woman's debt to the real 

 working woman ; to her who first leaped over the home threshold 

 and broke the fetters of tradition that confined the gentler sex 

 strictly within the domestic sphere ; to the first female wage- 

 earners who dared public opinion, suffered odium, and underwent 

 the hardships inevitable to new and untried conditions in order 

 to open up all the noble crafts, trades, and professions on which 

 the girl of to-day enters without strife or penalty. The multitude 

 of pursuits in which the modern Eve may attain higher useful- 

 ness and development, the careers that crown her with honor, 

 fame, and fortune, are a heritage to us of the last decade of the 

 nineteenth century from women and girls who toiled in factories 

 in the last decade of the eighteenth century. 



These privileges are not of our creation. Let that fact sink 

 deep and make us humble. Enjoying the fruit of economic lib- 

 erty, we are apt to forget who won it for us. We are even prone 

 to persuade ourselves that ive won it, prone to magnify and vaunt 

 ourselves, shutting our eyes to the struggles and tasks of hun- 

 dreds of thousands of ignorant, despised mothers and maids and 

 tiny children whose lives were one long martyrdom in mills and 

 workshops in Great Britain and on the Continent, in order to ren- 

 der gainful pursuits and the control of their own earnings possible 

 for womankind. All the blessings which we accept as a matter 

 of course the shortened working day, decent sanitary surround- 

 ings, frequent payments are the outcome of a hundred years of 

 toil and stress, of snail-like legislation following on timid pro- 

 test, of concessions wrung from careless or hostile public senti- 

 ment, until, finally, the present factory acts were secured. 



Nothing in history is more dramatic than that bitter industrial 

 revolution by which the factory system displaced the domestic 

 industries. Machinery came to stay. It had to be fed, fed actually 

 with human fuel, females and little ones scarcely out of babyhood 

 being set to tend it in buildings hastily constructed, in barns or 

 barracks on village outskirts and in temporary sheds near cities. 

 When in sparsely settled districts there was lack of small hands 

 to run spindle and loom, the dregs of the population were utilized. 

 Women, and children down to four and five years old, were 

 brought in droves from afar, or taken from almshouses or pauper 

 institutions and even from the prisons. These miserable crea- 



