ted, the number kept in ease was always very
small compared with the women slaves and servants who spun, cooked and
served. Hence men were used to seeing women at work; and while
industrial adjustments have not been easily made, they have still been
accepted as a matter of course. But who, fifty years ago, could have
imagined that to-day women would be steadily monopolizing learning,
teaching, literature, the fine arts, music, the church and the theater?
And yet that is the condition at which we have arrived. We may scoff at
the way women are doing the work, and reject the product, but that does
not alter the fact that step by step women are taking over the field of
liberal culture as opposed to the field of immediately productive work.

Some of the reasons for this change are so clear that it seems as though
they might have been anticipated. In a comparatively few years the
greater part of Western Europe and all of America has become rich, not
this time through the enslavement of other peoples and the confiscating
of their wealth, but through the enslaving and exploitation of the
material forces of nature. This wealth is not well distributed, but
large numbers of families have received enough so that the women do not
have to work constantly with their hands. At this point all historic
precedent would have turned these women into luxury-loving parasites and
playthings. A good many of them have taken this easiest way and entered
the peripatetic harems of the rich. But several million women refused to
repeat the old cycle of ruin; they knew too much.[27] What then should
they do? Faith in the value of conventual life for women had passed;
industrial changes had transformed their homes so that the endless
spinning, weaving, sewing and knitting were no longer there, even to be
supervised. Penelope's tasks had passed to foremen, working under trades
union agreements, in the factories of Fall River and Birmingham. Even
the function of the lady bountiful who looked after the spiritual and
family affairs of her tenants and servants and distributed doles and
Christmas baskets was gone. Her tenants owned their own farms, and her
chauffeur resented her interference with his personal life. What should
she do?

[27] RHETA CHILDE DORR, _What Eight Million Women Want,_ Boston: Small,
Maynard & Co., 1910.

And this movement was not confined to the rich, for those who were not
yet economically free were still deeply influenced by the