Page:Meta Stern Lilienthal - From Fireside to Factory (c. 1916).djvu/22

 the women. For our sluggish brains do not keep pace with social evolution. We often cling to traditions and are blind to facts. We uphold and proclaim what has once been useful long after its usefulness has ceased. While manufacture was almost exclusively a domestic function and was mainly in the hands of women, while society depended for its commodities upon the thrift and skill of its women within their homes, it was only natural that the home should be regarded as woman's sphere, and that the assumption, a woman's only place is home, should become deeply rooted in the ethical conceptions of mankind. It must be remembered that woman was immured within the four walls of home during almost the entire history of civilization. In the heroic age of Greece we find the women spinning and weaving in their homes, while the men produced a philosophy, a literature, an art at which we still marvel to-day. We find the Roman maids and matrons spinning and weaving in the Roman houses, while the men made Rome mistress of the world. All through the Middle Ages, in every European country, we find the women spinning and weaving in separate chambers, sometimes even in separate buildings set aside for their use, while men were engaged in terrible religious and political struggles from which modern Europe gradually evolved, and we still find women spinning and weaving at the colonial fireside in the new world, up to the dawn of the nineteenth century, while men established a republic and founded a nation.

It has been woman's lot through the ages to perform the quiet, unostentatious, but exceedingly necessary work of clothing and feeding the world. This work has always and everywhere been performed within the shelter of the home. Is it to be wondered at, that the conceptions, home and woman, became inseparably linked? From this fundamental idea that the woman's only place is home, all our other traditional ideas concerning women have sprung. The idea of woman's supposed weakness and dependence, her supposed mental inferiority, her supposed unfitness for the larger duties and responsibilities of public life, are all the results of her age-long seclusion in the home.

The great industrial revolution that marked the close