Among our modern working-women in urban localities, we find today no such settled plan for thus directing the activities of women to meet modern needs and conditions.  Neither home nor school furnishes our girls with a training fitting them for a rich and varied occupational life.  The pursuits into which most of them drift or are driven, do indeed result in the production of a vast amount of manufactured goods, food, clothing, house and personal furnishings of all sorts, and of machinery with which may be manufactured yet more goods.  Much of this product is both useful and beneficial to us all, but there are likewise mountains of articles fashioned, neither useful nor beneficial, nor resulting in any sort of use, comfort or happiness to anyone:  adulterated foods, shoddy clothes, and toys that go to pieces in an hour.

Certainly the girl worker of this twentieth century produces per head, and with all allowances made for the cost of the capital invested in factory and machinery, and for superintendence, far and away more in amount and in money value than did her girl ancestor of a hundred years ago, or than her contemporary girl ancestor of today in the Kentucky and Tennessee mountains, or than her other sister, the farmer’s daughter in agricultural regions, who still retains hold of and practices some of the less primitive industries.

But the impulse to congratulate ourselves upon this vastly increased product of labor is checked when we take up the typically modern girl’s life at a later stage.  We have observed already that her life during her first fourteen years is utterly unrelated to the next period, which she spends in store or factory.  The training of her childhood has been no preparation for the employments of her girlhood.  She is but an unskilled hand, the last cog in a machine, and if these prove but seven lean years for her, it is only what we might expect.  When they are ended, and married life entered upon, we are again struck by the absence of any relation between either of these two life-periods and the stage preceding, and by the fact that at no time is any intelligent preparation made either for a wage-earning or a domestic career.  This means an utter dislocation between the successive stages of woman’s life, a dislocation, the unfortunate results of which, end not with the sex directly affected, but bring about a thousand other evils, the lowering of the general wage standard, the deterioration of home life, and serious loss to the children of the coming generation.  As far as we know, such a dislocation in the normal development of women’s lives never took place before on any large scale.  I am speaking of it here solely in relation to the sum of the well-being of the whole community.  As it affects the individual girl and woman herself it has been dealt with under other heads.

The cure which the average man has to propose is pithily summed up in the phrase:  “Girls ought to stay at home.”  The home as woman’s sole sphere is even regarded as the ultimate solution of the whole difficulty by many men, who know well that it is utterly impracticable today.  A truer note was struck by John Work, when addressing himself specially to socialist men: