nful employment in those cities.
The seven occupations listed are housekeeper, nursemaid, laundress,
saleswoman, teacher, dressmaker and servant. No less than forty-four
per cent. of the housekeepers are between twenty-five and forty-four.
Of dressmakers there are fifty-one per cent. between these two ages;
of teachers fifty-eight per cent.; of laundresses forty-nine per
cent., while the one occupation of which a little more than half are
under twenty-five years is that of saleswoman, and even here there are
barely sixty-one per cent., leaving the still considerable proportion
of thirty-nine per cent. of saleswomen over the age of twenty-five.
It is pretty certain that these mature women have given more than the
favorite seven years to their trade. It is to be regretted that the
investigation was not made on lines which would have included some of
the factory occupations. It is difficult to see why it did not. Under
any broad classification there must be more garment-workers, for
instance, in New York or Chicago, than there are teachers. However, we
have reason to be grateful for the fine piece of work which Dr. Ayres
has done here.

The _Survey_, in an editorial, also quotes in refutation of the
seven-year theory, the findings of the commission which inquired
into the pay of teachers in New York. The commissioners found that
forty-four per cent. of the women teachers in the public schools had
been in the service for ten years or more, and that only twenty-five
per cent. of the men teachers had served as long a term.

It can hardly be doubted that the tendency is towards the lengthening
of the wage-earning life of the working-woman. A number of factors
affect the situation, about most of which we have as yet little
definite information. There is first, the gradual passing of the
household industries out of the home. Those women, for whom the
opportunity to be thus employed no longer is open, tend to take up or
to remain longer in wage-earning occupations.

The changing status of the married woman, her increasing economic
independence and its bearing upon her economic responsibility, are all
facts having an influence upon woman as a wage-earning member of the
community, but how, and in what degree, they affect her length of
service, is still quite uncertain. It is probable too, that they
affect the employment or non-employment of women very differently in
different occupations, but how, and in what degree they do so