8.  How did reform movements draw women into public affairs and what were the chief results?

9.  Show how the rise of the factory affected the life and labor of women.

10.  Why is the year 1848 an important year in the woman movement?  Discuss the work of the Seneca Falls convention.

11.  Enumerate some of the early gains in civil liberty for women.

12.  Trace the rise of the suffrage movement.  Show the effect of the Civil War.

13.  Review the history of the federal suffrage amendment.

14.  Summarize the history of the suffrage in the states.

CHAPTER XXIV

INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY

=The New Economic Age.=—­The spirit of criticism and the measures of reform designed to meet it, which characterized the opening years of the twentieth century, were merely the signs of a new age.  The nation had definitely passed into industrialism.  The number of city dwellers employed for wages as contrasted with the farmers working on their own land was steadily mounting.  The free land, once the refuge of restless workingmen of the East and the immigrants from Europe, was a thing of the past.  As President Roosevelt later said in speaking of the great coal strike, “a few generations ago, the American workman could have saved money, gone West, and taken up a homestead.  Now the free lands were gone.  In earlier days, a man who began with a pick and shovel might come to own a mine.  That outlet was now closed as regards the immense majority....  The majority of men who earned wages in the coal industry, if they wished to progress at all, were compelled to progress not by ceasing to be wage-earners but by improving the conditions under which all the wage-earners of the country lived and worked.”

The disappearance of the free land, President Roosevelt went on to say, also produced “a crass inequality in the bargaining relation of the employer and the individual employee standing alone.  The great coal-mining and coal-carrying companies which employed their tens of thousands could easily dispense with the services of any particular miner.  The miner, on the other hand, however expert, could not dispense with the companies.  He needed a job; his wife and children would starve if he did not get one....  Individually the miners were impotent when they sought to enter a wage contract with the great companies; they could make fair terms only by uniting into trade unions to bargain collectively.”  It was of this state of affairs that President Taft spoke when he favored the modification of the common law “so as to put employees of little power and means on a level with their employers in adjusting and agreeing upon their mutual obligations.”