Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/724

 704 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

special renown for themselves in the sphere of economics. In Eng- land there is evidence to bear out the truth of this belief ; in this country, on the other hand, economics seems to be looked on to a marked extent as a masculine field of work.

In turning to the second branch of the nineteenth-century women's movement, we find ourselves in an entirely new atmosphere. Among middle-class women the agitation is entirely for equality with men and for freedom from restriction, and the presence of these restrictions or social prejudices often producing a legal or virtual masculine monopoly of certain branches of work gives rise too often to fierce antagonism to men. Hence the middle-class movement is definitely a woman's movement. Among the manual workers, on the other hand, there is only rarely the question of the right to entrance on a trade. The growth of machinery facilitates the employment of women outside their own home, and the women of the proletariate find no lack of opportunity for work. Unfortunately they bring with them the customs and habit of mind bred by centuries of a lonely and dependent existence. Their standard of life is lower than the man's, and too often their wages are subsidized by their parents, their husbands, or their lovers. Therefore, says Frau Braun, such a woman " seeks to conquer her masculine competitor, not by better work, but by lower demands." Hence she was an easy prey to the exploiting force of modern capitalism, and on page after page Frau Braun paints the low wages, the long hours, the wretched conditions of work found in one woman's industry after another. She gives statistics, which have every appearance of being carefully selected and put together, concerning the numerical proportion of the Arbeiterinnen to professional women, the increase in the number of working-women, the proportion of men to women engaged in manual industry, the growth of home work, etc. Among other unexpected facts which appear from these figures, we learn that the employment of working-women is greatly increasing in Austria, and that the proportion of wage-earning women to men is lower in America than in any other of the countries cited, the num- bers being :

United States - - 24.7 per cent.

England - 36.7 per cent.

Austria - 54.9 per cent.

For middle-class workers the corresponding figures are : United States - - 18.75 per cent.

England - 22.33 P er cent.

Austria - - 12.23 per cent.