r fellow man, how he lives and works; and,
third, under this same head, primitive lessons about animals and plants,
the industries of the bees, the habits of ants, the natural phenomena
which require no reasoning power to understand and which open the
thoughts upon a delightful unknown vista.

My first experience is drawing to its close. I have surmounted the
discomforts of insufficient food, of dirt, a bed without sheets, the
strain of hard manual labour. I have confined my observations to life
and conditions in the factory. Owing, as I have before explained, to the
absorption of factory life into city life in a place as large as
Pittsburg, it seemed to me more profitable to centre my attention on the
girl within the factory, leaving for a small town the study of her in
her family and social life. I have pointed out as they appeared to me
woman's relative force as a worker and its effects upon her economic
advancement. I have touched upon two cases which illustrate her relative
dependence on the law. She appeared to me not as the equal of man either
physically or legally. It remained to study her socially. In the factory
where I worked men and women were employed for ten-hour days. The
women's highest wages were lower than the man's lowest. Both were
working as hard as they possibly could. The women were doing menial
work, such as scrubbing, which the men refused to do. The men were
properly fed at noon; the women satisfied themselves with cake and
pickles. Why was this? It is of course impossible to generalize on a
single factory. I can only relate the conclusions I drew from what I saw
myself. The wages paid by employers, economists tell us, are fixed at
the level of bare subsistence. This level and its accompanying
conditions are determined by competition, by the nature and number of
labourers taking part in the competition. In the masculine category I
met but one class of competitor: the bread-winner. In the feminine
category I found a variety of classes: the bread-winner, the
semi-bread-winner, the woman who works for luxuries. This inevitably
drags the wage level. The self-supporting girl is in competition with
the child, with the girl who lives at home and makes a small
contribution to the household expenses, and with the girl who is
supported and who spends all her money on her clothes. It is this
division of purpose which takes the "spirit" out of them as a class.
There will be no strikes among them so long as