Page:Meta Stern Lilienthal - From Fireside to Factory (c. 1916).djvu/28

 the power-loom, when one time-honored woman's work after another was transferred from the home to the factory, it was only natural and inevitable that woman should follow her work, that she, too, should accomplish the transition from her age-long work-shop, the family homestead, to the world's new work-shop, equipped with machinery and steam-power, the factory. It must be remembered that the first factories established in this country were all devoted to the textile industries, the very traditional industries of women, and that therefore the first women who went to work in them did not do anything new and startling, did not perform tasks that were unusual for women. They did the same work they had always done, the same work their mothers and grandmothers had done before them; they only did it in a new way. We have seen that when a woman was obliged to become self-supporting under the old, domestic system of industry, she usually entered domestic service. That meant that she went to spin and weave and perform other industrial labors in some other person's home. When industry had been taken out of the home, when the factory system had become established, a woman obliged to be self-supporting no longer went to another person's home. She went to spin or weave in a factory. We have seen that under the domestic system daughters were valuable workers in the family group. They remained at home and helped their mothers to spin and weave, to knit and sew, and when they produced more than the family could consume they carried their products to market. When industry had been taken out of the home there no longer was enough work left to require the presence of several women. If daughters would be of economic value to their families, they had to leave their homes and go to the factories. It is a noteworthy fact that in the early textile factories the percentage of women workers, as compared to men workers, was greater than it is to-day. Women were skilled in that particular line of work, and to tend the machines that replaced their manual tools required no great physical strength. It seemed perfectly natural then that women should spin and weave in factories, as they had spun and woven at home. Another cause that favored the employment of women in factories was the scarcity of male labor