Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/722

702 deals more in detail, and with a fuller employment of economic discussion, with the woman's movement in the nineteenth century. This falls into two divisions: the first describes the fight of the middle-class woman for employment, Der Kampf um Arbeit in der bürgerlichen Frauenwelt; the second discusses the allied, but in some respects divergent, movement among the working-class women—Die Arbeiterinnen.

The first question taken up is the reform in education, and Frau Braun shows how this comes about from the need of earning a livelihood. The changed economic conditions of the beginning of the last century, the break-up of the domestic industry, the disappearance of the semi-patriarchal family of earlier times, also the absorption of men by the great wars of the period, left many solitary or widowed women face to face with the necessity of providing for their own wants. For the women of the working classes, the first steps were easy. The growth of machine industry demanded more and ever more cheap labor. The women of the middle class, on the other hand, found this path blocked alike by their lack of general education and special training, as well as by their definite exclusion from those fields of work wherein their fathers and brothers gained their incomes. Accordingly, the one cry of the middle-class woman is for equality with men, equality of opportunity, equality of education, equality of political rights. Frau Braun traces the progress of women's education in the various civilized countries of the world, noting at the same time the different professional careers open to them. In both these matters America leads the world; but, says Frau Braun, "one must take into consideration that not merely the greater generosity or the deeper comprehension of the American man for the strivings of the feminine sex is the cause of this, but to a much greater extent the fact that the United States looked back upon only a short period of economic development, and that there was no thought of an overcrowding of professional careers which would inevitably have called forth the opposition of men." One is tempted to conjecture that the present movement against coeducation is due to the fact that this overcrowding of the professions has now begun to appear, and that therefore American men are instinctively endeavoring to check the nascent competition of women in these spheres.

The author next proceeds to discuss the compelling motives of the middle-class women's movement. She gives some useful statistics showing the proportion of women to men in the different countries