But passing over the fact that a dispensation is granted, enabling women to be employed for fourteen hours during certain times, there is the far more important consideration that most employments of women wholly escape the operation of the Factory Act.  In part this is due to the difficulty of enforcing the Act in the case of sweating workshops, many of which are unknown to inspectors, while others habitually break the law and escape the penalty.  Again, the Act does not and cannot be made to apply to a large class of small domestic workshops.  When the dwelling-room is also the work-room, it is impossible to enforce by any machinery of law, close limitation of hours of labour.  Something may be done to extend the arm of the law over small workshops; but the worst form of out-work, that voluntarily undertaken by women in their own homes, cannot be thus put down.  Nothing short of a total prohibition of outwork imposed on employers would be effectual here.  Lastly, there are many large employments not subject to the Factory Act, where the economic power of the employer over weak employees is grossly abused.  One of the worst instances is that of the large laundries, where women work enormously long hours during the season, and are often engaged for fifteen or sixteen hours on Fridays and Saturdays.  The whole class of shop-assistants are worked excessive hours.  Twelve and fourteen hours are a common shop day, and frequently the figure rises to sixteen hours.  Restaurants and public-houses are perhaps the greatest offenders.  The case of shop-assistants is most aggravated, for these excessive hours of labour are wholly waste time; a reduction of 25 or even of 50 per cent in the shopping-day, reasonably adjusted to the requirements of classes and localities, would cause no diminution in the quantity of sales effected, nor would it cause any appreciable inconvenience to the consuming public.

Sec. 5.  Sanitary Conditions.—­Seeing that a larger proportion of women workers are occupied in the small workshops or in their own overcrowded homes, it is obvious that the fourth count of the “sweating” charge, that of unsanitary conditions of work, applies more cruelly to them than to men.  Their more sedentary occupations, and the longer hours they work in many cases outside the operation of the Factory Act, makes the evils of overcrowding, bad ventilation, bad drainage, etc., more detrimental to the health of women than of men workers.

Sec. 6.  Special Burdens incident on Women.—­We have now applied the four chief heads of the “sweating” disease—­low wages, long hours, irregular employment, unsanitary conditions—­to women’s work, and have seen that the absolute pressure in each case is heavier on the weaker sex.

But in estimating the industrial condition of women, there are certain other considerations which must not be left out of sight.