that their progress towards industrial emancipation would ever be helped
along by the wives and daughters of the employing classes was
unthinkable. That the releasing of one class of women from household
labor by sending another class of women into the factory, there to
perform their historic tasks of cooking, sewing, and laundry work, was
to result in the humanizing of industry, no mind ever prophesied.

Yet these things are coming. The scabs of the labor world are becoming
the co-workers instead of the competitors of men. The women of the
leisure classes, almost as fast as their eyes are opened to the
situation, espouse the cause of their working sisters. The woman in the
factory is preparing to make over that factory or to close it.

The history of a recent strike, in a carpet mill in Roxbury,
Massachusetts, is a perfect history, in miniature, of the progress of
the working women.

That particular mill is very old and very well known. When it was
established, more than a generation ago, the owner was a man who knew
every one of his employees by name, was especially considerate of the
women operatives, and was loved and respected by every one. Hours of
labor were long, but the work was done in a leisurely fashion, and wages
were good enough to compensate for the long day's labor.

The original owner died, and in time the new firm changed to a
corporation. The manager knew only his office force and possibly a few
floor superintendents and foremen. The rest of the force were "hands."

The whole state of the industry was altered. New and complicated
machinery was introduced. The shortened work day was a hundred times