factory, more
than 200 girls are employed, but I can not ascertain their wages, and
therefore suppose them to be low. I know individuals who earn here $6
a week, but that must be _above_ the average.

The best looking body of factory operatives that I have ever seen are
those employed in the silk and ribbon mills on Boston Neck, lately
under the charge of Mr. J. H. Stephenson, and those at the Florence
Silk Mills in Northampton, owned by Mr. S. L. Hill. The classes,
libraries, and privileges appertaining to these mills, make them the
best examples I know, and this is shown in the faces and bearing of
the women. We are always referred to political economy, when we speak
of the low wages of women, but a little investigation will show that
other causes co-operate with those, which can be but gradually
reached, to determine their rates.

1. The willfulness of women themselves, which when I see them in
positions I have helped to open to them, fills me with shame and
indignation.

2. The unfair competition proceeding from the voluntary labor, in
mechanical ways, of women well to do.

For the first, we can not greatly blame the women whom employers
chiefly choose for their _good looks_, for expecting to earn their
wages through them, rather than by the proper discharge of their
duties. Their conduct is not the less shameful on that account, but I
seem to see that only time and death and ruin will educate them.

For the second, we must strive to develop a public sentiment which,
while it continues to hold labor honorable, will stamp with ignominy
any women who, in comfortable country homes, compete with the
workwomen of great cities. There are thousands of wealthy farmers'
wives to-day, who just as much drive other women to sin and death, as
if they led them with their own hands to the houses in which they are
ultimately compelled to take refuge. Still further it has come to be
known to me that in Boston, and I am told in New York also, wealthy
women who do not even do their own sewing, have the control of the
finer kinds of fancy-work, dealing with the stores which sell such
work under various disguises. I can not prove these words, but they
will strike conviction to the hearts of the women themselves, and I
wish them to have some significance for men, for if these women had
the pocket-money which their taste and position require, they would
never dream of such competition. One thing these men should know, that
such wom