To many women-workers, the duties of maternity and the care of children, which in a civilized human society ought to secure for them some remission from the burden, of the industrial fight, are a positive handicap in the struggle for a livelihood.  When a married woman or a widow is compelled to support herself and her family, the home ties which preclude her from the acceptance of regular factory work, tell fatally against her in the effort to earn a living.  Married women, and others with home duties which cannot be neglected, furnish an almost illimitable field of casual or irregular labour.  Not only is this irregular work worse paid than regular factory work, but its existence helps to keep up the pernicious system of “out-work” under which “sweating” thrives.  The commercial competition of to-day positively trades upon the maternity of women-workers.

In estimating the quantity of work which falls to the lot of industrial women-workers, we must not forget to add to the wage-work that domestic work which few of them can wholly avoid, and which is represented by no wages.  Looking at the problem in a broad human light, it is difficult to say which is the graver evil, the additional burden of the domestic work, so far as it is done, or the habitual neglect of it, where it is evaded.  Here perhaps the former point of view is more pertinent.  To the long hours of the factory-worker, or the shopwoman, we must often add the irksome duties which to a weary wife must make the return home a pain rather than a pleasure.  When the industrial work is carried on at home the worries and interruptions of family life must always contribute to the difficulty and intensity of the toil, and tell upon the nervous system and the general health of the women-workers.

Other evils, incident on woman’s industrial work, do not require elaboration, though their cumulative effect is often very real.  Many women-workers, the locality of whose home depends on the work of their husband or father, are obliged to travel every day long distances to and from their work.  The waste of time, the weariness, and sometimes the expense of ’bus or train thus imposed on them, is in thousands of cases a heavy tax upon their industrial life.  Women working in factories, or taking work home, suffer also many wrongs by reason of their “weaker sex,” and their general lack of trade organization.  Unjust and arbitrary fines are imposed by harsh employers so as to filch a portion of their scanty earnings; their time is wasted by unnecessary delay in the giving out of work, or its inspection when finished; the brutality and insolence of male overseers is a common incident in their career.  In a score of different ways the weakness of women injures them as competitors in the free fight for industrial work.

Sec. 7.  Causes of the Industrial Weakness of Women.—­This brief summary of the industrial condition of low-skilled women-workers will suffice to bring out the fact that the “sweating” question is even more a woman’s question than a man’s.  The question which rises next is, Why do women as industrial workers suffer more than men?