boys were working from necessity; the only industrial unit
complicating the problem were the girls who worked without being obliged
to--the girls who had "all the money they needed, but not all the money
they wanted." To them the question of wages was not vital. They could
afford to accept what the breadwinner found insufficient. They were
better fed, better equipped than the self-supporting hand; they were
independent about staying away from the factory when they were tired or
ill, and they alone determined the reputation for irregularity in which
the breadwinners were included.

Here, then, it seemed to me, was the first chance to offer help.

The self-supporting woman should be in competition only with other
self-supporting industrial units. The problem for her class will settle
itself, according to just and natural laws, when the purpose of this
class is equally vital to all concerned. Relief, it seemed to me, could
be brought to the breadwinner by separating from her the girl who works
for luxuries.

How could this be done?

There is, I believe, a way in which it can be accomplished naturally.
The non-self-supporting girls must be attracted into some field of work
which requires instruction and an especial training, which pays them as
well while calling into play higher faculties than the brutalizing
machine labour. This field of work is industrial art: lace-making,
hand-weaving, the fabrication of tissues and embroideries,
gold-smithery, bookbinding, rug-weaving, woodcarving and inlaying, all
the branches of industrial art which could be executed by woman in her
home, all the manual labour which does not require physical strength,
which would not place the woman, therefore, as an inferior in
competition with man, but would call forth her taste and skill, her
training and individuality, at the same time being consistent with her
destiny as a woman.

The American factory girl has endless ambition. She has a hunger for
knowledge, for opportunities to better herself, to get on in the world,
to improve. There is ample material in the factories as they exist for
forming a new, higher, superior class of industrial art labourers. There
is a great work to be accomplished by those who are willing to give
their time and their money to lifting the non-breadwinners from the
slavish, brutalizing machines at which they work, ignorant of anything
better, and placing them by education, by cultivation, in positions of
compar