As I look about me today in this veiled world of mine, despite the noisier and more spectacular advance of my brothers, I instinctively feel and know that it is the five million women of my race who really count.  Black women (and women whose grandmothers were black) are today furnishing our teachers; they are the main pillars of those social settlements which we call churches; and they have with small doubt raised three-fourths of our church property.  If we have today, as seems likely, over a billion dollars of accumulated goods, who shall say how much of it has been wrung from the hearts of servant girls and washerwomen and women toilers in the fields?  As makers of two million homes these women are today seeking in marvelous ways to show forth our strength and beauty and our conception of the truth.

In the United States in 1910 there were 4,931,882 women of Negro descent; over twelve hundred thousand of these were children, another million were girls and young women under twenty, and two and a half-million were adults.  As a mass these women were unlettered,—­a fourth of those from fifteen to twenty-five years of age were unable to write.  These women are passing through, not only a moral, but an economic revolution.  Their grandmothers married at twelve and fifteen, but twenty-seven per cent of these women today who have passed fifteen are still single.

Yet these black women toil and toil hard.  There were in 1910 two and a half million Negro homes in the United States.  Out of these homes walked daily to work two million women and girls over ten years of age,—­over half of the colored female population as against a fifth in the case of white women.  These, then, are a group of workers, fighting for their daily bread like men; independent and approaching economic freedom!  They furnished a million farm laborers, 80,000 farmers, 22,000 teachers, 600,000 servants and washerwomen, and 50,000 in trades and merchandizing.

The family group, however, which is the ideal of the culture with which these folk have been born, is not based on the idea of an economically independent working mother.  Rather its ideal harks back to the sheltered harem with the mother emerging at first as nurse and homemaker, while the man remains the sole breadwinner.  What is the inevitable result of the clash of such ideals and such facts in the colored group?  Broken families.

Among native white women one in ten is separated from her husband by death, divorce, or desertion.  Among Negroes the ratio is one in seven.  Is the cause racial?  No, it is economic, because there is the same high ratio among the white foreign-born.  The breaking up of the present family is the result of modern working and sex conditions and it hits the laborers with terrible force.  The Negroes are put in a peculiarly difficult position, because the wage of the male breadwinner is below the standard, while the openings for colored women in certain lines of domestic work, and now in industries, are many.  Thus while toil holds the father and brother in country and town at low wages, the sisters and mothers are called to the city.  As a result the Negro women outnumber the men nine or ten to eight in many cities, making what Charlotte Gilman bluntly calls “cheap women.”