leadership in such primitive life as we find depicted in
the pages of Homer or in the epic of the Jews. True, woman was his first
lieutenant, but he spoke for her in most of the larger matters of the
industrial life.

With settled conditions and accumulation of wealth, the most desirable
women were almost entirely freed from physical labor and gradually
became luxury-loving parasites and playthings, as we pointed out in the
second chapter of this volume. Meantime slaves were multiplying, male
and female and, while the most desirable women passed to the harem, the
mass of them became drudges in house and field. It is hard for us to
realize that it is exactly in those times when a few women are
surrounded with great luxury that most of the sex are reduced to heavy
labor and wretchedness.

During the early Christian ages, a tradition was gradually formed
concerning woman's place in industry, or rather three traditions were
formed. The working woman of the lower classes was to be the
housekeeper, which meant that she was to care for food, cook, spin,
weave, sew and mend, scrub and wash, bear children and nurse and tend
them. If she were of the middle class, she was to be a mother, to
supervise this range of work, look after dependents, conserve social
conditions and be the lady bountiful of her district. The second ideal
was the woman of religion, who was to subdue her passions, observe set
prayers and other religious exercises, and do the menial work of the
convent. The third ideal was the lady of chivalry, who appeared after
the tenth century. She was to be cared for and protected from work or
anxiety; menials were to prepare her food, clothes and ornaments;
gallants were to await her orders and do her bidding.

With the rise of Protestantism, and later with the rise of modern
democracy, these ideals were blended, and women found themselves, not
indeed slaves and subject to sale, but serfs, entangled in a mass of
feudal obligations and bound to the house. Practically, most men still
hold this threefold conception of woman's place in the social organism.
She is to be a combination of housekeeper, nun and lady. It is the
kitchen, church and children ideal of the German Emperor.

Meantime forces were set at work which were to change the economic
foundations of the family and enable the woman to emerge from serfdom
into some new form of industrial relationship. From the rise of the
European cities in the twelfth century,