I do not wish to be understood as accepting either the girl’s present economic position or the absorption in purely domestic occupations of the workingman’s wife as a finality.  It is a transitional stage that we are considering.  I look forward to a time, I believe it to be rapidly approaching, when the home of the workingman, like everyone’s else home, will be truly the home, the happy resting-place, the sheltering nest of father, mother and children, and when through the rearrangement of labor, the workingman’s wife will be relieved from her monotonous existence of unrelieved domestic drudgery and overwork, disguised under the name of wifely and maternal duties, when the cooking and the washing, for instance, will be no more part of the home life in the humblest home than in the wealthiest.  The workingman’s wife will then share in the general freedom to occupy part of her time in whatever occupation she is best fitted for, and, along with every other member of the community she will share in the benefits arising from the better organisation of domestic work.

However, this blessed change has not yet come to pass, and of all city-dwellers, the wife of the workingman seems to be furthest away from the benefits of the transformation.  Therefore, in considering the connection between the girl’s factory life and her probable occupational future in married life, I have purposely avoided dwelling upon what is bound to arrive some time in the future, and have tried to face facts as they exist today, dealing as far as possible with the difficulties of the generation of girls now in the factories, those about to enter, and those passing out, remembering only, with a patience-breeding sense of relief, that the conditions of today may not necessarily be the conditions of tomorrow.

I therefore accept in its full meaning domesticity, as practiced by the most domestic woman, and as preached by the domestic woman’s most ardent advocate among men.  Nor am I expressing resentment at the fact that when a girl leaves the machine-speeded work of the factory, it is only to take up the heavy burden of the workingman’s wife, as we know it.  She must be wife and mother, and manager of the family income, and cook and laundress and housemaid and seamstress.  The improvement of her position and the amelioration of her lot can only come slowly, through social changes, as expressed in the woman movement, and through the widening scope of the principle of specialization.

Even today, without any such radical changes as are foreshadowed above, the gap between schooldays and working years, between working years and married life, can to some extent be bridged over if we plan to do so from the beginning.  As has been shown, organized women are already advocating some such orderly plan for the girl’s school training, as should blend book-learning with manual instruction and simple domestic accomplishments.  But also, in order to deal justly