trunks, traveling bags, and toys, fifth floor."

Buying and selling, serving and being served--women. On every floor, in
every aisle, at every counter, women. In the vast restaurant, which
covers several acres, women. Waiting their turn at the long line of
telephone booths, women. Capably busy at the switch boards, women. Down
in the basement buying and selling bargains in marked-down summer
frocks, women. Up under the roof, posting ledgers, auditing accounts,
attending to all the complex bookkeeping of a great metropolitan
department store, women. Behind most of the counters on all the floors
between, women. At every cashier's desk, at the wrappers' desks, running
back and forth with parcels and change, short-skirted women. Filling the
aisles, passing and repassing, a constantly arriving and departing
throng of shoppers, women. Simply a moving, seeking, hurrying mass of
femininity, in the midst of which the occasional man shopper, man clerk,
and man supervisor, looks lost and out of place.

To you, perhaps, the statement that six million women in the United
States are working outside of the home for wages is a simple, unanalyzed
fact. You grasp it as an intellectual abstraction, without much
appreciation of its human significance. The mere reading of statistics
does not help you to realize the changed status of women, and of
society. You need to see the thing with your own eyes.

Standing on the corner of the Bowery and Grand Street, in New York, when
the Third Avenue trains overhead are roaring their way uptown packed
with homeward-bound humanity, or on the corner of State and Madison
streets, in Chicago, or on the corner of Front and Lehigh streets, in
Philadelphia; pausing at the hour of six at the junction of any city's
great industrial arteries, you get a full realization of the change. Of
the pushing, jostling, clamoring mob, which the sidewalks are much too
narrow to contain, observe the preponderance of girls. From factory,
office, and department store they come, thousands and tens of thousands
of girls. Above the roar of the elevated, the harsh clang of the
electric cars, the clatter of drays and wagons, the shouting of
hucksters, the laughter and oaths of men, their voices float, a shrill,
triumphant treble in the orchestra of toil.

You may get another vivid, yet subtle, realization of the
interdependence of women and modern industry if you manage to penetrate
into the operating-room of a telephone exchan