rvice.

Now this ideal of labor it was for the woman to work out in the
household. To do this she must reconstruct the ideas to which she and
all her society had been trained. In the nature of the task there
could be no rules for it. It could be accomplished only by creating in
the household a genuine democratic spirit. This meant that she must
bring herself to look upon domestic service as a dignified employment
in no way demeaning the person who performed it. Quite as difficult,
she must infuse into those who performed the labor of the household
respect and pride in their service.

What has happened? Has the woman democratized the department of labor
she controls? If we are to measure her understanding of the system
under which she lives by what she has done with her own particular
labor problem, we must set her down as a poor enough democrat. This
great department of national activity is generally (though by no means
universally) in a poorer estate to-day than ever before in the history
of the country; that is, tested by the ideals of labor toward which we
are supposed to be working, it shows less progress.

Instead of being dignified, it has been demeaned. No other honest work
in the country so belittles a woman socially as housework performed
for money. It is the only field of labor which has scarcely felt the
touch of the modern labor movement; the only one where the hours,
conditions, and wages are not being attacked generally; the only one
in which there is no organization or standardization, no training, no
regular road of progress. It is the only field of labor in which there
seems to be a general tendency to abandon the democratic notion and
return frankly to the standards of the aristocratic regime. The
multiplication of livery, the tipping system, the terms of address,
all show an increasing imitation of the old world's methods. Unhappily
enough, they are used with little or none of the old world's ease.
Being imitations and not natural growths, they, of course, cannot be.

More serious still is the relation which has been shown to exist
between criminality and household occupations. Nothing, indeed, which
recent investigation has established ought to startle the American
woman more. Contrary to public opinion, it is not the factory and
shop which are making the greatest number of women offenders of all
kinds; it is the household. In a recent careful study of over 3000
women criminals, the Bureau of Lab