Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/714

700 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY stability of their foundation. Under the Puritan domination, idleness was a sin and industry a virtue—hence women and even children were exhorted not to live idly and thus become "useless, if not burdensome, to society." In obeying these injunctions women engaged in industry at home and when inventions changed the processes of industry, they naturally followed their work from the home to the factory; it is only today that "the public moralist … finds that (their) proper place is at home and that the world of industry was created for men."

Another important by-product is found in the disclosure that in Bohemia women are exclusively employed in cigar factories, that in the early days of the Bohemian emigration to America the women came first, leaving their husbands to work in the fields, earned money by cigar-making to pay for their husbands' passage and then "the entire united family would take up the manufacture of cigars, emulating the industry of the mother." Among the Russian Jews, on the contrary, there is a general opposition to the employment of women outside of the home—an interesting illustration of the embarrassment attending generalizations affecting all women.

Another interesting by-product is seen in the movable character of women's work—what has at one time been considered women's work becomes men's work, and may again become women's work. The palisades dividing the two are changed not by virtue of inherent changes in the nature of men and women, or of change of theory in regard to the province of each, but rather by reason of change in industrial processes—in cigar-making, for example, "the machine, the large factory, and the increased employment of women go together"; in printing, on the other hand, "the machine would seem rather to have diminished than to have increased the opportunities of the woman printer"; in the clothing industry, the organization and development of the occupation "has meant, to a considerable extent, the substitution of men for women"—men are now doing work that was formerly held to belong to the dress-maker and the seamstress.

Again, the work of women has been affected by local conditions—what is true of conditions in towns and villages may not be true of women employed in cities; what is true in New England, may not hold true in other sections.

The attitude of the labor unions toward women has also been