as their own daughters have to take wages for the hours they spend
in schoolroom or in office. The single men but echo the views of the
older ones when such unfortunately is the shop tone, and may be even
more indifferent to the girls' welfare and to the bad economic results
to all workers of our happy-go-lucky system or no-system.

I do not wish to be understood as accepting either the girl's present
economic position or the absorption in purely domestic occupations of
the workingman's wife as a finality. It is a transitional stage that
we are considering. I look forward to a time, I believe it to be
rapidly approaching, when the home of the workingman, like everyone's
else home, will be truly the home, the happy resting-place, the
sheltering nest of father, mother and children, and when through the
rearrangement of labor, the workingman's wife will be relieved from
her monotonous existence of unrelieved domestic drudgery and overwork,
disguised under the name of wifely and maternal duties, when the
cooking and the washing, for instance, will be no more part of
the home life in the humblest home than in the wealthiest. The
workingman's wife will then share in the general freedom to occupy
part of her time in whatever occupation she is best fitted for, and,
along with every other member of the community she will share in the
benefits arising from the better organisation of domestic work.

However, this blessed change has not yet come to pass, and of all
city-dwellers, the wife of the workingman seems to be furthest away
from the benefits of the transformation. Therefore, in considering
the connection between the girl's factory life and her probable
occupational future in married life, I have purposely avoided dwelling
upon what is bound to arrive some time in the future, and have tried
to face facts as they exist today, dealing as far as possible with the
difficulties of the generation of girls now in the factories, those
about to enter, and those passing out, remembering only, with a
patience-breeding sense of relief, that the conditions of today may
not necessarily be the conditions of tomorrow.

I therefore accept in its full meaning domesticity, as practiced by
the most domestic woman, and as preached by the domestic woman's most
ardent advocate among men. Nor am I expressing resentment at the fact
that when a girl leaves the machine-speeded work of the factory, it is
only to take up the heavy burden of the workin