c science marches on with giant strides.

In all this progress woman had shared many of the material benefits, but
her industrial position had altered but slightly. Driven from the
trades, she had passed into the ranks of agricultural laborers; and
Thorold Rogers, in his "Work and Wages," records her early work in this
direction. France held the most enlightened view, and even then women
took active part in business, and had a position unknown in any other
country; but they had no place in any system of the economists, nor did
their labor count as a force to be enumerated. Slowly machinery was
making its way, feared and hated by the lower order of workers, eyed
distrustfully and uncertainly by the higher. Men and women struggling
for bare subsistence had become active competitors, till, in 1789, a
general petition entitled "Petition of Women of the Third Estate to the
King" was signed by hundreds of French workers, who, made desperate by
starvation and underpay, demanded that every business which included
spinning, weaving, sewing, or knitting should be given to women
exclusively. Side by side with the wave of political revolution,
strongest for France and America, came the industrial revolution; and
the opening of the nineteenth century brought with it the myriad changes
we are now to face.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Dynamic Sociology, or Applied Social Science as based upon Statical
Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences. By Lester F. Ward, A.M., vol.
i. p. 649.

[2] Economics, book i. chap. ix.

[3] Ancient Law, p. 147.

II.

EMPLOYMENTS FOR WOMEN DURING THE COLONIAL PERIOD, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF
THE FACTORY.

For nearly a century and a half, dating from the landing of the Pilgrims
on Plymouth Rock, the condition of laboring women was that of the same
class in all struggling colonies. There were practically no women
wage-earners, save in domestic service, where a home and from thirty to
a hundred dollars a year was accounted wealth, the latter sum being
given in a few instances to the housekeepers in great houses. Each
family represented a commonwealth, and its women gave every energy to
the crowding duties of a daily life filled with manifold occupations.

The farmer--for all were farmers--was often blacksmith, shoemaker, and
carpenter, and more or less proficient in every trade whose offices were
called for in the family life. The farmer's wife spun and wove the
cloth he wore and the linen that made his