eatshop, which is the modern equivalent), the factory often shows
a gain in light and air, a decrease of effort, an added leisure; while,
on the other hand, there is a considerable loss of individual freedom
and an increase in monotony. But child labor, a too long working day,
bad working conditions, lack of protection from fire, personal
exploitation by foremen, inhumanly low wages, and all sorts of petty
injustice, though not essential to the system, are prominent features of
factory work as it generally exists.

People who consider every factory an Inferno, however, and have only
pity for its workers, are far from understanding the situation. Here is
a field of work which is capable of competing successfully with domestic
service, and even of attracting girls from homes where there exists no
absolute necessity for women's wages. Yet at its contemporary best, with
a ten-hour law in operation, efficient factory inspection, decent
working conditions and a just and humane management, the factory remains
an institution extremely perilous to the Whitmanic ideal of womanhood.

But there are women who, undaunted by the new conditions brought about
by a changing economic system, seize upon those very conditions to use
them as the means to their end: such a woman is Mrs. Robins. Has a new
world, bounded by factory walls and noisy with the roar of machinery,
grown up about us, to keep women from their heritage? She will help them
to use those very walls and that very machinery to achieve their
destiny, a destiny of which a physical well-being is, as Walt Whitman
knew it to be, the most certain symbol.

The factory already gives women a certain independence. It may yet give
them pleasure, the joy of creation. Indeed, it must, when the workers
require it; and those who are most likely to require it are the women
workers.

It is well known that with the ultra-development of the machine, the
subdivision of labor, the regime of piecework, it has become practically
impossible for the worker to take any artistic pleasure in his product.
It is not so well known how necessary such pleasure in the product is to
the physical well-being of women--how utterly disastrous to their
nervous organization is the monotony and irresponsibility of piecework.
This method--which men workers have grumbled at, but to which they seem
to have adjusted themselves--bears its fruits among women in
neurasthenia, headaches, and the derangement of the organs