out of the suds. She was still wiping them on her gingham apron as she talked. Do you know what she said? At house after house it was this, that Monday at home was her hardest day of the week. "O, yes, ma'am," she said, "much harder than any of the days that I am at the laundry." Why? Because at the laundry she has no lifting of any kind to do and no backbreaking scrubbing over a washboard. It is done by machinery, or if there are heavy sheets that must be lifted by hand, men are employed to do it. At home even when she's so fortunate as to have a faucet, all of the water she must carry in pails from the sink to the "copper" to be heated.
Do you know, each time as we turned from a cottage door where the woman in the gingham apron stood wiping her wet hands, I thought of that lady in the engineering trade who operates an electrical crane from her easy chair; and the women conductors in Manchester sitting down between fares on the "flap" seats put in for their comfort. I think I know what the medical journal, The Lancet, means when it announced in the February, 1917, number that "Factory work, under fitting conditions may be so beneficial to women that it may lead to permanent benefit to the race." And I am not surprised to learn that the Insurance Department of the English Government has recently discovered that the greatest percentage of illness among women occurs among domestic workers.
You see, these new tasks are not so much more
