great
loss of spiritual and mental vitality. It is time to call a halt, to
change our methods, or to supplement them by methods of individual
training. The beginning of such a work will mark an educational era,
the inception of which should not be longer delayed.

THE WORKING-WOMEN OF TO-DAY.

BY HELEN CAMPBELL.

The story of working-women, of those women forced by changes in
industrial and social conditions into occupations outside the home, is
limited to the last hundred years. The division of labor resulting in
the factory system, and the multiplication of trades, has opened many
employments hitherto unknown, in which the use of female labor has
become almost a necessity. Woman has had her share of work from the
beginning, often much more than her share, but it ran usually in the
simple lines of household requirements; and if it chanced, here and
there, to be of larger scope, this was, after all, mostly tentative.
Work with deliberate intent to earn a living is chiefly a fact of the
nineteenth century, and any tangible estimate of woman as a competitor
of man in the struggle for existence must be based upon the facts of
the past hundred years. It is within hardly more than a generation
that the importance of the subject has become plain, and now we are
all questioning as to what is included in the life of the
working-woman; what is her economic and social condition; what are her
rights and her wrongs; what bearing have they on society at large, and
what concern is it of ours why or how she works, or what wage she
receives?

We are well aware that humanity has always had the enforced work of
women as an essential part of its development, enforced not by law but
by the necessities of life. In any new country, the work of women is a
vital factor in its success or failure, in its growth and general
prosperity; and in the early days of our own country this was far
truer than now. There were then no trades open to women, because the
organization of society was much less complex than it now is, and the
family represented a union of trades. This had been the case in
England and, indeed, in all civilized countries, and is even true of
those early days when skins were all that was needed, and thorns were
the only needles and pins. But from the day of that disastrous
experience in the Garden, clothing, and the necessities involved in
it, has been the synonym of sorrow for women, and the needle stands as
the visib