She is quite right in resisting any lowering of wages, but she will have to accept this inroad into the trades of these exceptionally placed married women.  She will have to throw her efforts into another channel, using organization to raise the position of working-women generally into dignified industrial independence.  For this still limited number of half-time married women workers are but the leaf on the stream, showing the direction events are taking.  As specialization goes on, as the domestic industries are more and more taken out of our homes, as the gifted and trained teacher more and more shares in the life of the child, more and more will the woman after she marries continue to belong to the wage-earning class by being a part-time worker.  To propose eliminating the present (sometimes unfair) competition of the married woman with the single girl, by excluding her from any or every trade is as futile as the resentment of men against all feminine rivals in industry.

We have been observing, so far, how the lives of women have been modified, often, not for the better, by the industrial revolution.  Let us glance now in passing at the old home industries themselves, and note what is still happening.  One after another has been taken, not merely out of the home, where they all originated, but out of the hands of the sex who invented and developed them.  Trade after trade has thus been taken over from the control of women, and appropriated and placed on a modern business basis by men.  I make no criticism upon this transference beyond remarking that you hear no howl about it from the supplanted ones, as you never fail to do over the converse process, when male workers are driven out of occupations to make way for women, whose cheapness makes them so formidable an industrial competitor.  But whichever way it works, sex discrimination usually bodes no good to the lasting interest of any of the workers.  When a trade passes out of the status of a home industry, and takes on the dignity of an outside occupation, women are rarely in a position to take hold of it in its new guise.  We find men following it, partly because they are more accustomed to think in terms of professional skill, and partly because they are in the business swim, and can more easily gain command of the capital necessary to start any new enterprise.  Men then proceed to hire the original owners as employes, and women lose greatly in their economic status.

This is the general rule, though it is by no means wholly the sex line that divides the old-fashioned houseworker from the specialized professional, though this habitual difference in standing between groups of different sex does tend to blur fundamental issues.  The economic struggle in its bare elements would be easy to follow compared with the complex and perpetually changing forms in which it is presented to us.

But the home industries are not yet fully accounted for and disposed of.  Some of the household occupations, essential once to the comfort and well-being of the family, are shrinking in importance, prior to vanishing before our eyes, because now they do not for the most part represent an economical expenditure of energy.  Meanwhile, however, they linger on, a survival in culture, and in millions of homes today the patient housewife is striving with belated tools to keep her family fed and clothed and her house spotless.