is proverbial that female venders of fish, in all countries and ages, have succeeded so far in overcoming their native meekness and bashfulness as to qualify them fully to hold their own whether in a bargain or in a wrangle. Nor would it be just to speak of female labor anywhere as if it were absolutely immobile. Country girls have always gone to the city to find employment in shops and stores; while the cotton factories and the boot and shoe shops of Massachusetts and Rhode Island have always been filled with women from the rural parts of New-England and even from the British Provinces.

Yet, after all allowances that require to be made, it remains true that while, from the specialization and localization of the industries in which female labor is employed, women have far more occasion than men to keep themselves free to seek their own market, they are in fact, from many causes, under serious disabilities in respect to movement from place to place,' with all which that implies for females poor and unprotected, and, it may be, also ignorant and fearful.

While much of this disqualification of woman for seeking the labor-market arises out of her physiological conditions, and is not to be cured by law or opinion, it is also true that no inconsiderable part has been due, in the past, to a lack of respect and sympathy for her in her capacity as a laborer, if not to positive prejudice and even to actual physical obstruction' offered to her industrial movements.

'The disability which women suffer on account of their sex, when the conditions of industry require emigration from the country of their birth, may be seen from the following facts brought out by the Scotch census of 1871. Between 15 and 25 years of age there are 105.4 females for every 100 males; between 25 and 30 years there are 119.7 females for every 100 males. (Report, pp. xvi, xvii.)

"We can not forget that some years ago certain trades-unionists in the potteries imperatively insisted that a certain rest for the arm which they found almost essential to their work, should not be used by wo. men engaged in the same employment. Not long since, the London tailors, when on a strike, having never admitted a woman to their union, attempted to coerce women from availing themselves of the remunerative employment which was offered in consequence of the strike. But this jealousy of women's labor has not been entirely con

Of the insults and violence not infrequently offered to women seeking employment in departments of industry which men have chosen to regard as exclusively their own, it is not necessary to speak. Women scarcely need this to restrain them from pursuing their economical interests. Intensely sensitive to opinion,' they shrink from the faintest utterances of blame; while coldness and indifference alone are often sufficient to repress their impulses to activity.

fined to workmen. The same feeling has extended itself through every class of society. Last autumn a large number of Post-Office clerks objected to the employment of women in the Post-Office."-Henry Fawcett, House of Commons, July 30th, 1873. (Speeches, p. 133, 134.)

"An important strike is now going on in the town of Leicester, and what is the cause of it? Certain manufacturers wished to introduce women into their factories, and the men claimed a right not only to determine the price of labor, but also on what conditions women should be permitted to work. Nor is this all. Within the last fortnight there has been a great meeting of delegates of the Agricultural Laborers' Union. Women were not admitted. Why? On the express ground that the agricultural laborers of this country do not wish to recognize the labor of women.”—Ibid, June 23d, 1874. (TheNews' Report.)

In their report made to the Local Government Board in 1873, Dr. Brydges and Mr. Holmes take note of the peculiar sensitiveness of female laborers to the praise or blame of their employers or overseers: “It would appear, from statements made to us which we have reason to think accurate, that it is very much easier to bring pressure to bear upon the energies of female operatives than of male. It is well known that with many workmen, especially if they be members of tradesunions, the consciousness that their fellow-workmen are present and are watching their work, tends rather to moderate than to intensify their zeal. Animated by the common object of selling their labor dear, they are apt to think an exceptionally zealous workman a traitor to the cause of labor. With women the reverse would seem to be the Less able to fix their eyes upon a distant object, less apt to enrol themselves in a well-drilled organization for which sacrifices are to be made, the ultimate compensation for which themselves and those immediately connected with them may never, or not for a long time, touch, they are far more keenly sensitive to the motives of approbation and vanity, and also to those of immediate tangible reward. It would seem to be as easy to goad women as it would be difficult to goad men into doing the greatest amount of piece-work in a given time. The admiration of their companions and the approbation of the overlooker appear to be at least as powerful inducements as the increase of their wages." (Report, p. 20.)

case.

This unfortunate result-namely, a public opinion unfavorable, or less favorable than is desirable, to the extension of female labor-is doubtless due in some part to the comparative newness of the occasion which women have to enter the general market of labor, from which it results that their entrance is not unnaturally greeted by the body of male laborers interested therein as an intrusion threatening a reduction of their own wages, while the outside community, though disinterested, remains indifferent, not having been educated up to the point of giving women a warm and strong moral support in their efforts to find employment, and of providing adequate protection to them in the casual and often rude encounters which the search for employment may involve.

1

The necessity for the employment of women in wagelabor not agricultural, in any thing like the extent which exists at present, dates from the decay of the system of domestic manufactures which followed the extensive introduction of machinery in the latter part of the eighteenth century. "The original artisans," says Mr. Mill, “were either slaves or the women of the family." It was the women who wove and spun, fashioned and sewed, the garments, the blankets, and the nets of our ancestors. It is true we occasionally find record of women earning wages in other occupations. Prof. Rogers has pointed cut that, in the fourteenth century, the thatcher's help, or "homo," was generally a woman.' But, speaking broadly, there was, until the inventions of Watt, Hargreaves, and Arkwright antiquated the distaff and the spinning-wheel, work enough within the house for all the women of the family if we except the harvest season, when agriculture was, as it is to-day in Europe, the occupation, and in Russia the equal occupation, of both sexes.*

1 Pol. Econ., i. 285.

Brewing and baking were formerly purely domestic operations, and hence were performed by women, as the feminine termination of the words brew-ster and back-ster, like web-ster and spin-ster, indicates, 'By 37th Edward III. women were exempted from the prohibition against exercising more than one craft.

In European Russia exclusive of the Baltic Provinces the number

But no longer can the wife and daughter, in a family where children must needs go mainly uncared for, and housekeeping becomes reduced to the minimum by the scantiness at once of space and of food, do their equal share, or at any rate seem to do their equal share, in the support of the household, within the house. All which now enters into domestic consumption must come in from without; and so wife and daughter must, or think they must, go out and bring in a part of it. At the same time the extension of water and steam-power has made the labor of women useful in a thousand operations for which their strength was formerly inadequate.' This it is which has driven women into the labor-market. In families where bread comes hardly, the services of the house are foregone, and wife and daughter, no longer working as of

of females engaged in agriculture is reported as 12,917,593 against 13,444,842 males. In Prussia the number of farm-laborers was reported, in 1867, as follows: 1,054,213 females, 2,232,741 males. In England the census-tables show the following proportion between the sexes in agriculture: 183,450 females, 1,264,031 males. In Scotland the numbers are as follows: 50,464 females, 184,301 males. In the United States it is only among the late servile population of the South, and occasionally among recently-arrived foreigners at the extreme West, that women are seen laboring in the fields, even during the height of the harvest season. But women are probably nowhere cmployed through so long a period in the year as men. Lord Brabazon (Report on the Condition of the Industrial Classes, 1872, p. 44) gives the number of days on which men are employed in France at day labor in agriculture, as 200; for women the number of days is but 120. In England, as Mr. Purdy says, women in agriculture are "employed as supernumeraries to the men, and are only taken on at busy times." Arthur Young gives the following account of the Palatines settled in Ireland: "The women are very industrious, reap the corn, plough the ground sometimes, and do whatever work may be going on; they also spin and weave, and make the children do the same. . . . The industry of the women is a perfect contrast to the Irish ladies in the cabins, who can not be persuaded, on any consideration, even to make hay, it not being the custom of the country; yet they bind corn and do other work more laborious." (Pinkerton, iii. 849, 850.)

1 "Whereas the workman," says M. Jules Simon, in L'Ouvrière, "was once an intelligent force, he is now only an intelligence directing a force that of steam-and the immediate consequence of the change has been to replace men by women, because women are cheaper and can direct the steam force with equal efficiency."

old for the head of the house, go out to seek strange employers and be jostled in public places. Shame on the man, if he be man, who will not gladly give them room!

Coincidently with this great industrial change, involv ing the necessity of wives and daughters contributing by wage labor to the support of the family, have occurred social changes, of scarcely less importance, which have resulted in a steady increase in the proportion' of women who are wholly dependent on themselves for main tenance. What these social changes are I need not point out; the result itself is patent, palpable, and needs no proof I have spoken of wife and daughter entering the market of wage labor, as a necessity resulting from the social and industrial changes indicated. And so, in a melancholy proportion of cases, it is. Yet there can be little doubt that it is sometimes accepted as a necessity where more courage and patience and a broader view of selfinterest would prove that this might be avoided; and in such a case it would often be truer economy to forego wages to be earned at the expense of leaving the house uncared for. "I find," says Mr. Fraser, Assistant Commissioner on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture, "that in my own parish, in Berkshire, the women have a sort of proverb that there's only fourpence a year difference between what she gets who goes

1 These causes operate with much greater force in some countries than in others. The following table shows the number of spinsters in each 100,000 women in England and in Scotland severally, as by the census of 1871. I only insert the figures for the period 20-65.