d disappear with the increase in the incomes of
working-people. Assuming that ignorance is the fundamental cause of vice
(an assumption which does not "stand to reason") the results of ignorance
must manifest themselves through the institutions of society. Some
institutions, such as slavery, encourage vice. Likewise, any caste system,
such as feudalism in the Middle Ages, in which there must be depths as
well as heights, supplies the vicious classes. The aim of this chapter is
to show that, while modern economic conditions do not create "the social
evil" they furnish an environment favorable to its spread. If this is so,
an improvement in these conditions must accompany all other measures for
the eradication of vice.

One of the most significant facts of the industrial evolution of the last
half-century is the increase in the number of women who have become
wage-earners outside the home. According to the Federal Census the number
of females fifteen years of age and over, employed as breadwinners in
1900, was 5,007,069, an increase of 34.9 per cent over the number thus
employed in 1890.[2] The largest number in any one occupation, 1,213,828,
were servants and waitresses. Of this class the domestics were not
employed "outside the home." The homes, however, were not their own, and
salutary influences of home life do not exist for the majority of
domestics. In the decade between 1900 and 1910 the increase in the number
of wage-earning women has been even more accelerated than in previous
decades, and to-day probably from 8,000,000 to 10,000,000 women in the
United States are industrially employed.

One important aspect of this influx of women into industry is that the
proportion of those in domestic and personal service, which has always
been women's work, has decreased; whereas the proportion of those in
manufacturing, trade, and transportation, which are new employments for
women, has increased.[3] This means that not only are working-girls and
women leaving the homes, but they are also abandoning in increasing
numbers those occupations to which in times past their sex has been most
accustomed. It is impossible that this prodigious change in the sphere and
work of women should not be accompanied by some change in the social and
moral standards that were nourished in the seclusion of the home. Miss
Jane Addams has made the suggestion that perhaps the superior reputation
of women for virtue is due to the fact that, generall