mes with a brush?
A tenth of the European population must be compelled to sell itself in
exchange for a miserable shelter and insufficient food, and woman must
consider herself a slave, in order that millions of her sex should go
through this performance every morning.

But hairdressers have already machines for brushing glossy or woolly
heads of hair. Why should we not apply, then, the same principle to the
other extremity? So it has been done, and nowadays the machine for
blacking boots is in general use in big American and European hotels.
Its use is spreading outside hotels. In large English schools, where the
pupils are boarding in the houses of the teachers, it has been found
easier to have one single establishment which undertakes to brush a
thousand pairs of boots every morning.

As to washing up! Where can we find a housewife who has not a horror of
this long and dirty work, that is usually done by hand, solely because
the work of the domestic slave is of no account.

In America they do better. There are already a number of cities in which
hot water is conveyed to the houses as cold water is in Europe. Under
these conditions the problem was a simple one, and a woman--Mrs.
Cochrane--solved it. Her machine washes twelve dozen plates or dishes,
wipes them and dries them, in less than three minutes. A factory in
Illinois manufactures these machines and sells them at a price within
reach of the average middle-class purse. And why should not small
households send their crockery to an establishment as well as their
boots? It is even probable that the two functions, brushing and washing
up, will be undertaken by the same association.

Cleaning, rubbing the skin off your hands when washing and wringing
linen; sweeping floors and brushing carpets, thereby raising clouds of
dust which afterwards occasion much trouble to dislodge from the places
where they have settled down, all this work is still done because woman
remains a slave, but it tends to disappear as it can be infinitely
better done by machinery. Machines of all kinds will be introduced into
households, and the distribution of motor-power in private houses will
enable people to work them without muscular effort.

Such machines cost little to manufacture. If we still pay very much for
them, it is because they are not in general use, and chiefly because an
exorbitant tax is levied upon every machine by the gentlemen who wish to
live in grand style and who hav