r who were without such enrolment, such as fifty-two
thousand shirtmakers and seamstresses and four hundred thousand
dressmakers and milliners; and these were but a mere fraction of
the immense host of women who, outside of the home, found themselves
earning their own bread by their personal labor. With the growth of
manufactures, women were drawn from the rural districts. It became an
uncommon thing, where formerly it was the usual practice, for women to
perform the work of field laborers, or to depend chiefly for support
upon butter and cheese making, or service at the inns or in the shops
of the neighboring towns. It is now only the women of the lowest rank
who devote themselves for a livelihood to berry picking, hop picking,
garden weeding, and like menial outdoor services.

The competition of women with men in manufactures was greeted at first
with the sullen resentment and open opposition with which machinery
was viewed when first introduced; but as women have been drawn into
manufactures, men have absorbed many of the outdoor duties
which formerly fell to woman's lot in the country districts. The
"bakeresses," "brewsters," and the "regrateresses"--retailers of
bread--are now known simply in the history of industry; their names
have become archaic and their offices obsolete. As machinery took the
place of the individual intelligence of the handworker of other days,
leaving only a monotonous series of mechanical manipulations for the
men, aside from the superior skill called into play by the complexity
of the machinery, which demanded expert and intelligent direction,
women found relegated to them the simplest parts of factory work
and those which did not require any large degree of mentality. As a
result, the women of the factories have not developed cooerdinately in
intelligence with their sisters in other lines of active work. This
has unfortunately led them to be looked down upon as inferior to
girls who work in stores or in offices. As the factory laws came to
be framed with regard to greater investigation and regulation of the
conditions of women's work in factories, many of the abuses were to
a degree corrected. It is not now commonly the case that a
self-respecting operative is without redress if subjected to the
coarse insults of brutalized foremen, nor are women now permitted
to work as formerly under conditions so harmful to their peculiar
constitutions. Better sanitation, fewer hours of employment, and