THE "NEW WOMAN" AND HER DEBTS. 66 7 



tures, let in gangs to the manufacturers, were herded like animals 

 in the mills and forges, sleeping under the machines, eating there 

 such poor food as they had to eat. Tasked day and night and 

 often days at a stretch, they were rudely shaken from brief slum- 

 ber to renew their work, and were goaded to labor by the whip. 



Generation after generation of English factory operatives was 

 thus martyred, devitalized, degraded, before reaction of public 

 feeling and tardy legislation gradually combined between 1802 and 

 1876 to repress these abuses. So, by toiling sixteen and eighteen 

 hours out of the twenty- four, by living in stables, by being beaten 

 and starved under employers drunk with avarice and power, 

 these early mill hands grandmothers, mothers, maidens, and tiny 

 children bought with blood and tears the right for woman to 

 compete industrially with man. In this sad, this heroic effort, a 

 million beings were engaged whose lives were needlessly short- 

 ened or sacrificed to the dreadful treatment and surroundings 

 they had to endure before the cry of their pain was heeded by the 

 lawmakers, before a century of suffering, demoralization, and op- 

 pression forced into existence that great saving and preventive 

 agency, the British Factory Acts. 



The crusade for government interference and protection of the 

 wage- earner against insane and inhuman greed alas! even the 

 greed that makes parents wreck their offspring by early labor 

 was carried on for seventy-five years by men alone. I am sorry 

 to count no feminine helper among the reformers, to blazon no 

 woman's name alongside Lord Shaftesbury's. 



In the United States the first mill employees enjoyed a better 

 fate. Nevertheless, long working hours, the toil of ignorant chil- 

 dren, and other abuses of unrestricted industrialism early called 

 for remedy ; and since 1840 Massachusetts has led the ever-widen- 

 ing movement for regulating factories and improving the condi- 

 tion of labor. 



The American girl who profits by this hard-won emancipa- 

 tion, to whom has fallen the precious heritage of economic inde- 

 pendence, who is able to-day to pursue freely and at ease in 

 laboratory, studio, office, and workshop all the skilled trades and 

 professions only because other humbler sisters have trodden a 

 rougher path and cleared the way by manual effort, this " new 

 woman" owes to all female breadwinners commensurate grati- 

 tude and many sacred duties. 



First, by virtue of ampler leisure, superior education, and 

 social importance, we owe protection. Do we give it ? No. It is 

 a significant fact that while in England the Factory Acts were 

 secured mainly by men of rank, wealth, and public spirit for the 

 laborer, in America such statutes usually originate with and are 

 pushed through by the workers themselves, half educated, un- 



