e labor of women and
children to fifty-six hours a week will be in practice enforced upon
the adult males employed in the same mill.

Continental legislation has gone far beyond us in all these important
particulars. In most countries the conditions surrounding the labor of
women, particularly married women, are carefully regulated by law.
She is not allowed to go back to the mill for a certain period after
childbirth, and in many more particular respects her health is
carefully looked after. Such legislation would possibly be impossible
to enforce with our notions in America. The most interesting of all
is perhaps the attempt made in the State of Connecticut within a few
years to improve social conditions by providing that no married woman
should be employed in factories at all. The bill was not, of course,
carried, but it raises a most interesting sociological question.
Ruskin probably would have been in favor of it. He described as the
very last act of modern barbarism for the woman to be made "to shriek
for a hold of the mattock herself." It was argued in Connecticut that
the employment of married women injured the health of the children,
which is perfectly true. Indeed, the death-rate in England is very
largely determined by the fact whether their mothers are employed in
mills or not. It was also argued that her competition with man merely
halved his wages; that if no women were employed, the men would get
much higher wages. On the other side it was argued that the effect of
the law would be largely immoral because it would simply prevent women
from getting married. Knowing that after marriage they would get no
employment, they would simply dispense with the marriage ceremony; for
it is obvious that under such legislation a man living with a woman
unmarried could get double wages, which would be halved the moment he
made her his wife. This last was evidently the view which prevailed;
and so far as I know, no such law has in the civilized world yet been
enacted, though there is doubtless a much stronger social prejudice
against women entering ordinary employments in some countries than in
others.

The constitutional question underlying all this discussion was perhaps
best set forth by an experiment of the late Mr. Edward Atkinson, which
he always threatened to bring into the courts, but I believe did not
do so. "An Englishman's house is his castle"; an English woman's house
is her castle. Atkinson proposed that a