Let us now once more consider the home, and compare factory operations with the domestic arts.  There is no doubt that in cooking, for instance, the housewife finds scope for a far higher range of qualifications than the factory girl exercises in preparing tomatoes in a cannery, or soldering the cans after they are filled with the cooked fruit.  The housewife has first of all to market and next to prepare the food for cooking.  She has to study the proper degree of heat, watch the length of time needed for boiling or baking in their several stages, perhaps make additions of flavorings, and serve daintily or can securely.  There is scarcely any division of housework which does not call for resource and alertness.  Unfortunately, however, although these qualities are indeed called for, they are not always called forth, because the houseworker is not permitted to concentrate her whole attention and interest upon any one class of work, but must be constantly going from one thing to another.  Hence women have indeed acquired marvelous versatility, but at what a heavy cost!  The houseworker only rarely acquires perfect skill and deftness or any considerable speed in performing any one process.  Her versatility is attained at the price of having no standards of comparison established, and worse than all, at the price of working in isolation, and therefore gaining no training in team-work, and so never having an inkling of what organized effort means.

Our factory systems, on the other hand, go to the other extreme, being so arranged that the majority of workers gain marvelous dexterity, and acquire a dizzying rate of speed, while they are apt to lose in both resourcefulness and versatility.  They do not, however, suffer, to anything like the same degree, from isolation, and factory life, even where the employers are opposed to organization, does open a way to the recognition of common difficulties and common advantages, and therefore leads eventually in the direction of organization.  In the factory trades the workers have to some extent learnt to be vocal.  It is possible for an outsider to learn something of the inner workings of an establishment.  Upon the highly developed trades, the searchlight of official investigation is every now and then turned.  From statistics we know the value of the output.  We are also learning a good deal about the workers, the environment that makes for health or invalidism, or risk to life, and we are in a fair way to learn more.  The organized labor movement furnishes an expression, although still imperfect, of the workers’ views, and keeps before the public the interests of the workers, even of the unorganized groups.