Page:Meta Stern Lilienthal - From Fireside to Factory (c. 1916).djvu/13

 women were always and everywhere actively engaged in the manufacture of commodities, and that the making of all articles of food and the manufacture of wearing apparel was their special domain. In 1791 Alexander Hamilton, in a report to Congress on manufactures, stated that in various districts two-thirds, three-fourths, and even four-fifths of all the clothing worn by the inhabitants were made by themselves. It is self-evident that girls, brought up in such industrious households, received a thorough industrial training from their early childhood on. Without ever leaving their homes, they learned to master several processes of manufacture, and were adequately prepared for the only profession they were supposed to choose: marriage and housekeeping.

So far I have discussed the productive labor of colonial women only, inasmuch as such labor was performed in their own homes and in service of their own families. But there always were some women in each community who were obliged to earn their own bread; some women who were wage-workers, long before the rise of modern industry. It, therefore, is necessary to examine the avenues of employment open to these early wage-workers and the conditions affecting their toil.

During the early colonial period we find practically no women gainfully employed except in domestic service. There were three classes of domestic servants. On the lowest scale were the slave-women, bought and sold, owned body and soul, worked like beasts, beaten and abused, as was the privilege of slave-owners under that terrible institution. Only second to slavery was that other, now almost forgotten, institution of the indentured servant. These indentured servants, both men and women, were white people, and their servitude differed from that of the colored slaves inasmuch as it was only temporary. Most of them were persons who had committed some crime in the mother country and were punished by servitude in place of imprisonment. For England, eager to get rid of her criminals, shipped many of them to the American colonies and hired them out to the colonists for a term of