housework as a means of livelihood. You will find in every community a
few women of intelligence who are naturally so domestic in their tastes
and inclinations that they shrink from any work outside the home. Such
women do adhere to domestic service, but, broadly speaking, you behold
in the servant group merely the siftings of the real industrial class.

In a tentative, halting sort of fashion we are learning to humanize the
factory and shop. Factory workers, mill hands, department store clerks,
have been granted legislation in almost every State of the Union,
regulating hours of work, sanitary conditions, ventilation, and in some
cases they have been given protection from dangerous machinery. In
department stores they have been granted even certain special comforts,
such as seats on which to rest while not actually working.

Of course, we have done no more than make a beginning in this matter of
humanizing the factory and the shop. But we have made a beginning, and
the movement toward securing better and juster and healthier conditions
for workers in all the industries is bound to continue. So long as
manufacturing was carried on in the home, no such protective legislation
as workers now enjoy was dreamed of. We had to wait until the workers
came together in large groups before we could see their conditions and
understand their needs.

Housework, because it is performed in isolation, because it is purely
individual labor, has never been classed among the industries. It has
rather been looked upon as a normal feminine function, a form of healthy
exercise. No one has ever suggested to legislators that sweeping and
beating rugs might be included among the dusty trades; that bending over
steaming washtubs, and almost immediately afterwards going out into
frosty air to hang the clothes, might be harmful to throat and lungs;