ately, of women in the country as well as in the cities.

We have traveled a long way during the last hundred and fifty years
or so, and in that time have witnessed the complete transference from
home to factory of many home industries, notably spinning and weaving,
and soap-and candle-making. Others like the preparation of food are
still in process of transference. The factory industries are the
direct and legitimate offspring of the primitive home industries, and
their growth and development are entirely on the lines of a normal
evolution.

[Illustration: _Courtesy of The Pine Mountain Settlement_ Primitive
Industry. Kentucky mountain woman at her spinning-wheel. 1913]

[Illustration: _Courtesy of The Chicago School of Civics and
Philanthropy_ Italian Woman Home Finisher]

But there is another form of industry that is a ghastly hybrid, the
"home-work" that has been born of the union of advanced factory
methods and primitive home appliances. Such a combination could never
have come into existence, had the working classes at the time of the
inception of machine-driven industry possessed either an understanding
of what was happening, or the power to prevent their own exploitation.
The effects of this home-work are in every way deadly. There is not a
single redeeming feature about the whole business. Like the spinner
or the weaver of olden times, the sewing-machine operator or the
shirt-finisher of the present day provides her own workroom, lighting
and tools, but unlike her, she enjoys no freedom in their use, nor has
she any control over the hours she works, the prices she asks or the
class of work she undertakes.

With the home-worker hard-driven by her sister in poverty, and driving
her in turn, helpless both in their ignorance under the modern
Juggernaut that is destroying them, pushed ever more cruelly by
relentless competition, the last stronghold, the poor little home
itself, goes down. The mother has no time to care for her children,
nor money wherewith to procure for them the care of others. In her
frantic desire to keep them alive, she holds the whip over her own
flesh and blood, who have to spend their very babyhood in tying
feather-flues or pulling out bastings. Home-work, this unnatural
product of nineteenth-century civilization, as an agency for summarily
destroying the home is unparalleled. Nor do its blighting effects end
with homes wrecked, and children neglected, stunted and slain. The
proud edifi