ents the neglected children, the wayward girls for whose mishaps society itself should be scourged, the rebellious boys whose unsteady feet have never known true guidance, the men and women incompetent to life's demands because a grudging fate has given them so small a portion of life itself, the prisoners whose poverty and ignorance demand a special plea, the "stranger within the gates" who rightly claims a friendly interpreter, the despised and misjudged whom race prejudice alone makes alien, the heroic but defeated on the field of labor who go down as those who face too heavy odds at cannon-mouth-these are her clients!

Our modern Portias, Attorneys of Compassion, to whom all juries must at last give heed, these are they who make radiant with prophecy this day of the spinster.

V

PATHOLOGY OF WOMAN'S WORK

AN immigrant, living in the slums of New York City, once said of himself and others of the sweatshop community to which he belonged, "We live under America, not in America." To-day, the able, welltrained, socially-advantaged women in "gainful occupations" are in the world of man's organized labor; the ignorant, unskilled and poverty-bound women are under that world of machine-dominated, capitalized and specialized industry. While the capable "spinster" has demonstrated the social usefulness of training and opportunity for the woman who, in professional or business life, is making her lifework respected in equal balance with that of men in the same field, the women wage-earners in manual labor, the "factory girls" and the "shop girls," are seeing chiefly the wrong side of industrial competition. The majority of girls have always worked at some kind of labor, of definite economic value, between the period of leaving school and of marriage; but they have for the most part worked at home. To-day, hundreds of thousands of girls, between the ages of fourteen and sixteen years, leave school and enter the ranks of wage

earners outside the home. The industrial condition of this large class of girls is intimately connected with five specific social evils which demand constant attention from all who work in "needy families" and from all who try to aid human failures toward a better condition.

These five social evils are related to charity and correction on one side and, on the other side, to the industrial training and vocational guidance of girls. They are:

II. Poverty; as caused by physical weakness and disease.

III. Poverty; as caused by character-weakness and by mental incapacity not due to actual defectiveness.

IV. Poverty; as caused or increased by the lack of thrift, of judgment and of household capacity on the part of the house-mother.

V. Poverty; as caused or increased by the general economic incapacity and weakness of the deserted wife or widowed mother upon whom the children depend.

This many-sided evil, so patent to all social workers, obliges the candid and earnest student of the problems involved in the condition of women in modern industry to consider the pathological as well as the normal side; the philanthropic as well as the educational significance of that problem.

What is the problem of women's industrial position?

Not that women are newly in industry-they have always been there. Marriage customs and laws fixing the economic value of the service of women to the family reach back to the beginnings of social organization. Women have but recently acquired the "pay envelope," it is true, their compensation through unnumbered centuries being given them in "truck" or in "kind"; but that fact did not prevent their constant labor.

It is the movement from domestic handicraft, and personal tool, and individual process, to the present power-driven machinery with its capitalized plant, that makes the worker go to it for his labor instead of taking his labor to the home, which creates the new element in women's work. The change which created the shop and the factory, makes the new problem of women's labor. Women, as cannot be too often insisted upon, are doing the old things-spinning, weaving, making garments of all kinds, manufacturing, preserving, preparing the food products, and continuing a thousand processes that give comfort to personal and domestic life; but they are doing these old tasks in a new place and by a new method.

The majority of women, however, have not changed the method and place of work wholly or for the whole of their lives. They have only as a large and increasing minority, which promises to become a majority, of the sex, adopted the new methods in the new place of work for a portion of their lives. Herein lies the reason for much that is confusing in the problem of women's labor to-day.

X

Let us examine these conditions:

1 From 20 to 30 per cent. of women and girls between the ages of 10 and 60 years are listed by the census and other official reports as in "gainful occupations," that is, in receipt of wages or salary; as contrasted with between 80 and 85 per cent. of men and boys of the same ages thus engaged in "gainful occupations." But this is not an accurate indication of the relative numbers of men and women employed for some portion of their lives for wages or salary. The facts show that fully one-half of the women over 16 years of age spend from 3 to 10 years of their lives in some forms of compensated labor outside their own homes, one-third of the young women between 15 and 24 years being so employed. The average working term for the wage-earning women is from 4 to 5 years; so that in a period of 20 years, in which the personnel of the wage-earning class of men would be fairly stable, the personnel of the wage-earning class of women would be four to five times changed. That means, that the number of women and girls at work at any given moment is not a fair showing of the number of women and girls working during some portion of their lives. It must be particularly noted that this wage-earning period is in early youth. The overwhelming majority of women engaged in gainful occupations are under 25 years of age; and most of them, the larger number, under 21. The youth of these workers and their short term of service in or

See Florence M. Marshall, Industrial Training for Women, Publications of "National Society for Promotion of Industrial Education."