definite statements as to the occupations of women and
children. Scattered returns of an earlier date had shown that the
percentage of those employed in factories was a steadily increasing one,
but in what ratio was considered as unimportant. In fact, statistics of
any order had small place, nor was their need seriously felt, save here
and there, in the mind of the student.

To comprehend the blankness of this period in all matters relating to
social and economic questions, it is necessary to recall the fact that
no such needs as those of the mother country pressed upon us. To those
who looked below the surface and watched the growing tide of emigration,
it was plain that they were, in no distant day, to arise; but for the
most part, even for those compelled to severest toil, it was taken for
granted that full support was a certainty, and that the men or women who
did not earn a comfortable living could blame no one but themselves.

There were other reasons why any enumeration of women workers seemed not
only superfluous but undesirable. For the better order, prejudice was
still strong enough against all who deviated from custom or tradition to
make each new candidate for a living shrink from any publicity that
could be avoided. Society frowned upon the woman who dared to strike out
in new paths, and thus made them even more thorny than necessity had
already done.

It is impossible for the present, with its full freedom of opportunity,
to realize, or credit even, the difficulties of the past, or even of a
period hardly more than a generation ago. It was of this time that Dr.
Emily Blackwell, one of the pioneers in higher work for women, wrote:--

"Women were hindered at every turn by endless restraint in endless
minor detail of habit, custom, tradition, etc.... Most women who
have been engaged in any new departure would testify that the
difficulties of the undertaking lay far more in these artificial
hindrances and burdens than in their own health, or in the nature
of the work itself."

It was this shrinking from publicity, among all save the most ordinary
workers, by this time largely foreign, that made one difficulty in the
way of census enumerators. By 1860 it had become plain that an enormous
increase in their numbers was taking place, and that no just idea of
this increase could be formed so long as industrial statistics were made
up with no distinction as to sex. The spread of th