g--manufacturing. In agriculture, in the professions, in
domestic and personal service, in trade and transportation, the number
of women is creeping up, up, in proportion to the number of men. From
the point of view of national health and vitality for this and the
next generation, it is indeed a hopeful sign if women are giving way
to men in factories, mills, and plants, and pushing up into work
requiring more education and in turn not demanding such physical and
nervous strain as does much of the machine process. Also, since on
the whole as it has been organized up to date, domestic service has
been one of the least attractive types of work women could fill, it is
encouraging (though not to the housewife) to find that the proportion
of women going into domestic and personal service has fallen from
forty-four and six-tenths per cent, in 1880, to thirty-two and
five-tenths per cent, in 1910.

Women working at everything under the sun--except perhaps being
locomotive engineers and soldiers and sailors. Why?

First, it is part of every normal human being to want to work.
Therefore, women want to work. Time was when within the home were
enough real life-sized jobs to keep a body on the jump morning and
night. Not only mother but any other females handy. There are those
who grumble that women could find enough to do at home now if they
only tried. They cannot, unless they have young children or unless
they putter endlessly at nonessentials, the doing of which leaves them
and everybody else no better off than before they began. And it is
part of the way we are made that besides wanting to work, we need to
work at something we feel "gets us some place." We prefer to work at
something desirable and useful. Perhaps what we choose is not really
so desirable and useful, looked at in the large, but it stacks up as
more desirable and more useful than something else we might be doing.
And with it all, if there is to be any real satisfaction, must go some
feeling of independence--of being on "one's own."

So, then, women go out to work in 1921 because there is not enough to
do to keep them busy at home. They follow in part their age-old
callings, only nowadays performed in roaring factories instead of by
the home fireside. In part they take to new callings. Whatever the job
may be, women _want_ to work in preference to the nonproductiveness of
most home life to-day.

Graham Wallas, in his _Great Society_, quotes the answers given