That women are already awaking to these responsibilities is shown by
the increasing number who choose the labor-saving devices in place of
the flesh-and-blood machine. Many of these women will tell you that
they make this choice to avoid the personal responsibility involved
in having a resident worker in the house. There _is_ comfort in not
having to consider "whether or not the vacuum cleaner likes to live in
the country," or the bread mixer "has a backache," or the electric
flatiron desires "an afternoon off to visit its aunt." It is the same
satisfaction we feel in urging the automobile to greater speed
regardless of the melting heat, the pouring rain, or the number of
miles it has already traveled to-day. Perhaps the future will see
machines for household work so improved and multiplied that we can
escape altogether this perplexing personal problem of "the woman who
works for us."

Whether or not we escape this problem when we patronize the laundry,
the bakeshop, the underwear factory, is a matter for further thought.
To many it seems a simpler matter to face the problem of one cook, one
laundress, than to investigate conditions in factory, bakery, and
laundry, to agitate, to "use our influence," to urge legislation, to
follow up inspectors and their reports, to boycott the bakery, to be
driven into the establishment of a coöperative laundry whether we will
or no, in order to fulfill our obligations to the "women who work for
us" in these various places. True, our duty to womankind requires that
we do all these things to a certain extent so long as the public
utilities exist, but with the multiplication of utilities to a number
sufficient to do a large portion of our work, it would seem that women
would be left little time for anything else than their supervision and
regulation.