girl as
to overcome her powers of resistance. Many a working girl at the end of
a day is so hysterical and overwrought that her mental balance is
plainly disturbed. Hundreds of working girls go directly to bed as soon
as they have eaten their suppers. They are too tired to go from home for
recreation, too tired to read and often too tired to sleep. A humane
forewoman recently said to me as she glanced down the long room in which
hundreds of young women, many of them with their shoes beside them, were
standing: "I hate to think of all the aching feet on this floor; these
girls all have trouble with their feet, some of them spend the entire
evening bathing them in hot water." But aching feet are no more usual
than aching backs and aching heads. The study of industrial diseases has
only this year been begun by the federal authorities, and doubtless as
more is known of the nervous and mental effect of over-fatigue, many
moral breakdowns will be traced to this source. It is already easy to
make the connection in definite cases: "I was too tired to care," "I was
too tired to know what I was doing," "I was dead tired and sick of it
all," "I was dog tired and just went with him," are phrases taken from
the lips of reckless girls, who are endeavoring to explain the situation
in which they find themselves.

Only slowly are laws being enacted to limit the hours of working women,
yet the able brief presented to the United States supreme court on the
constitutionality of the Oregon ten-hour law for women, based its plea
upon the results of overwork as affecting women's health, the grave
medical statement constantly broken into by a portrayal of the
disastrous effects of over-fatigue upon character. It is as yet
difficult to distinguish between the results of long hours and the
results of overstrain. Certainly the constant sense of haste is one of
the most nerve-racking and exhausting tests to which the human system
can be subjected. Those girls in the sewing industry whose mothers
thread needles for them far into the night that they may sew without a
moment's interruption during the next day; those girls who insert
eyelets into shoes, for which they are paid two cents a case, each case
containing twenty-four pairs of shoes, are striking victims of the
over-speeding which is so characteristic of our entire factory system.

Girls working in factories and laundries are also open to the
possibilities of accidents. The loss of only two