Page:Meta Stern Lilienthal - From Fireside to Factory (c. 1916).djvu/44

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occupations open to women, and that to-day only a few occupations remain in which women are not yet represented, we realize what a tremendous distance we have travelled, what a profound transformation has taken place in the historically brief space of a single century. When women first became wage-workers in large numbers they still were regarded as a negligible factor. So great was the general indifference toward the women workers that even the census did not take the trouble to enumerate them separately. The early reports on manufacture merely refer to "hands employed," without telling us how many men there were and how many women. The first census that contains reliable information on the subject is that of 1860. In that year the number of working women in the United! States had reached the million mark. Since then that number has steadily and rapidly increased, as the following figures show:

1880. 1890. 1900. 1910.
2,647,157 4,005,532 5,319,397 8,075,772

Woman has come into the world of affairs, and she has come to stay. With the tremendous growth of industry and commerce, with the economic and intellectual development of the nation, woman has grown and developed and has stepped forever from those narrow confines in which the economic conditions of the past maintained her. Ours is no longer a man's world, but a world of men and women. There is no public question, no social problem, that does not concern women as deeply, as vitally as men. Since man's work and woman's work have become merged in socialized industry, men and women have learned to work together, not only in the factory, the office and the store, but also in the realms of learning and on the wide arena of public life. This entirely new relation of the sexes, a relation of comradeship and co-operation, is one of the greatest gains to humanity brought about by the industrial revolution.

CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS AWAKENED

The powerful influence of environment is a social factor that is generally recognized to-day. We know that heredity

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