spinning. As all this had to be done by hand, it was a slow, laborious task. To pick the seed from one pound of cotton was generally considered a good day's work. When the manufacture of cotton-cloth on a larger scale began, greater quantities of cotton were raised, but the difficulty and expense of preparing the cotton for the market prevented it from becoming a very profitable article. Then came the cotton gin and with it a revolution in the industrial conditions of the whole country that was as rapid as it was complete. In the South this great invention drove all other products from the field and made cotton king. It also instilled new life into the almost decayed institution of slavery, by making slave labor tremendously valuable to the owners of cotton plantations. In the North it gave a strong incentive to the manufacture of cotton goods, it led to the establishment of factories on a large scale, and it was the immediate cause of that great transition of women from the home to the factory, which marks the beginning of the modern woman movement. With the aid of the cotton gin three hundred-weight of cotton could be prepared in the same time that it had formerly taken to prepare one pound. Just before the invention of the cotton gin 100,000 pounds of cotton were exported to Europe. Two years after its invention 6,000,000 pounds were sent out of the country.
Eli Whitney is the man whose name has always been associated with the cotton gin, but some modern historians claim this great invention to have been the work of a woman, the widow of General Nathaniel Green. In an article on "Women as Inventors," by Mrs. Gage, published some years ago in the North American Review, this claim was made and substantiated and has since been quoted by several modern writers. It is said that Mrs. Green concealed her identity, and allowed young Whitney to get the credit for her invention, because she feared the ridicule of her acquaintances and the loss of her social position. Women were not supposed to have inventive powers. To think and to achieve was unwomanly, and to have given the world a new machine of incalculable, industrial value would have been a disgrace to a lady. Such still was the prevailing conception of woman's place, as late as the last decade of the eighteenth
