But the factory is not content with thus disarranging the ancient scheme of things by invading the housewife’s province; it has dragged a large number of women, yearly increasing in number and proportion, into industry.  Thus it has made this condition of affairs:  that it takes the young girl from the home for the few years that intervene before her marriage.  She is thus initiated into wage-earning before she becomes a man’s wife, the housewife.

This industrial period of a girl’s life is important psychologically, for it profoundly influences her reaction to her status and work as homekeeper.

Of even greater importance to our study than the influence of the factory is the rise of what is known as feminism.  Of all the living creatures in the world the female of the human species has been the most downtrodden, for to every wretched class of man there was a still inferior, more wretched group, their wives.  She was a slave to the slaves, a dependent of the abjectly poor.  When men passed through the stage where woman’s life might be taken at a whim, she remained a creature without rights of the wider kind.  Men debated whether she had a soul, made cynical proverbs about her, called her the “weaker vessel,” and debarred her from political and economic equality, classing her up to this very moment in rights with the idiot, the imbecile, and the criminal.  Worse than this, they gave her a spurious homage, created a lop-sided chivalry, and caused her to accept as her ideal goal of womanhood the achievement of beauty and the entrance into wifehood.  After they tied her hand and foot with restrictions and belittling ideals, they capped the climax by calling her weak and petty by nature and even got her to believe it!

It is not my intention to trace the rise of feminism.  Brave women arose from age to age to glorify the world and their sex, and men here and there championed them.  Man started to emancipate himself from slavery, and noble ideals of the equality of mankind first were whispered, then shouted as battle cries, and finally chiseled with enduring letters into the foundations of States.  “But if all this was good for men, why not for women—­why should they be fettered by illiteracy, pettiness, dependence; why should they be voiceless in the state and world?” So asked the feminists.  The factory called for women as labor; they became the clerks, the teachers, the typists, the nurses.  Medicine and the law opened their doors, at least in part.  And now we are on the verge of universal suffrage, with women entering into the affairs of the world, theoretically at least the equals of man.