But there is another form of industry that is a ghastly hybrid, the “home-work” that has been born of the union of advanced factory methods and primitive home appliances.  Such a combination could never have come into existence, had the working classes at the time of the inception of machine-driven industry possessed either an understanding of what was happening, or the power to prevent their own exploitation.  The effects of this home-work are in every way deadly.  There is not a single redeeming feature about the whole business.  Like the spinner or the weaver of olden times, the sewing-machine operator or the shirt-finisher of the present day provides her own workroom, lighting and tools, but unlike her, she enjoys no freedom in their use, nor has she any control over the hours she works, the prices she asks or the class of work she undertakes.

With the home-worker hard-driven by her sister in poverty, and driving her in turn, helpless both in their ignorance under the modern Juggernaut that is destroying them, pushed ever more cruelly by relentless competition, the last stronghold, the poor little home itself, goes down.  The mother has no time to care for her children, nor money wherewith to procure for them the care of others.  In her frantic desire to keep them alive, she holds the whip over her own flesh and blood, who have to spend their very babyhood in tying feather-flues or pulling out bastings.  Home-work, this unnatural product of nineteenth-century civilization, as an agency for summarily destroying the home is unparalleled.  Nor do its blighting effects end with homes wrecked, and children neglected, stunted and slain.  The proud edifice of modern industry itself, on whose account homes are turned into workshops, children into slaves, and mothers into slave-drivers, is undermined and degraded by this illegitimate competition, the most powerful of all factors in lowering wages, and preventing organization among regular factory hands.  The matter lies in a nutshell.  Industry which originated in the home could be safely carried on there only as long as it remained simple and the operations thereof such as one individual could complete.  As soon as through the invention of power-driven machinery industry reached the stage of high specialization and division of labor, at once it became a danger to the home, and the home a degradation to it.  It was at the call of specialized industry that the factory came into existence, and only in the factory can it be safely housed.

A similar and, if it were possible, a worse form of family and group slavery prevails outside of the cities in the poorer farming regions and in the cotton states.  It is harder to reach and to handle, and there is cause to fear that it is increasing.  Especially in the busy season when the corn has to be harvested or the cotton picked the mother is considered as a toiler first, and she is to have her babies and look after her poor little home and her children as a mere