Page:Meta Stern Lilienthal - From Fireside to Factory (c. 1916).djvu/21



We see then that even in colonial days there were a number of women who overstepped the narrow limits of the home, who performed tasks and achieved results that were regarded as being within the province of man. But as the exception always proves the rule, so these exceptional women only emphasize the fact that during the period of domestic industry the woman's place was home. The colonial home was the work-shop of colonial society. It was the place where the most essential necessities of life were produced, and women were the producers of these necessities. In every home at least one woman—usually several—was engaged in socially necessary labor. In every home women were performing their full share of the world's work. There was no need for women to seek employment outside the home, because there was a superabundance of work to be done within. There was no economic necessity that impelled women to compete with men in those occupations traditionally regarded as man's work, because woman's field of work was so large and so important that it required the services of all women.

Whether a woman labored only to supply the needs of her own family, or whether she labored for gain, the nature of her work remained the same and the place in which she labored remained the home. Since our minds are always strongly influenced by the kind of work we do and the way in which we do it, woman's mind was shaped and moulded by the constant home environment. Her thoughts, her ideas, her feelings, her entire outlook upon life, were essentially domestic. To the man who always observed mother, sister, wife and daughter diligently and usefully toiling in domestic seclusion, who always saw the woman at home and always needed her at home, it seemed as natural, as self-evident that woman must be at home and nowhere else, as that a tree must be rooted in the ground.

This generally accepted position of women, unchanged until a century ago, still determines the opinion of those who continue to assert that women should confine their interests and their activities to the home, without observing that the home has changed even more than