gman's wife, as we know
it. She must be wife and mother, and manager of the family income, and
cook and laundress and housemaid and seamstress. The improvement of
her position and the amelioration of her lot can only come slowly,
through social changes, as expressed in the woman movement, and
through the widening scope of the principle of specialization.

Even today, without any such radical changes as are foreshadowed
above, the gap between schooldays and working years, between working
years and married life, can to some extent be bridged over if we plan
to do so from the beginning. As has been shown, organized women are
already advocating some such orderly plan for the girl's school
training, as should blend book-learning with manual instruction and
simple domestic accomplishments. But also, in order to deal justly
and fairly by the girl, any reasonable scheme of things would also
presuppose such strict control of the conditions of industry, that
hours would be reasonably short, that in the building and running of
machinery there should be borne in mind always the safety and health
of the workers, instead of, as today, expecting almost all the
adaptation to be on the part of the worker, through pitting the
flexible, delicate, and easily injured human organism against the
inflexible and tireless machine. Other essential conditions would be
the raising of the standard of living, and therefore of remuneration,
for all, down to the weakest and least skilled, and the insistence
upon equal pay for equal work, tending to lessen the antagonism
between men and women on the industrial field. Thus doubly prepared
and adequately protected the girl would pass from her wage-earning
girlhood into home and married life a fresher, less exhausted creature
than she usually is now. Further, she would be more likely to bring to
the bearing and rearing of her children a constitution unenfeebled
by premature overwork and energies unsapped by its monotonous grind.
Again, her understanding of industrial problems would make her a more
intelligent as well as a more sympathetic helpmate. Hand in hand,
husband and wife would more hopefully tackle fresh industrial
difficulties as these arose, and they would do so with some slight
sense of the familiarity that is the best armor in life's battle.

Besides there is the other possibility, all too often realized, that
lies in the background of every such married woman's consciousness.
She may be an i