Page:Meta Stern Lilienthal - From Fireside to Factory (c. 1916).djvu/46

 mechanism of socialized production, her interests expanded like her workshop; her mind grew and developed like the industries that she performed; her relation to society changed like the tools she employed. Slowly but inevitably she developed a social spirit that had been foreign to her home-bound ancestors.

The woman who had served only her family, who had worked and sacrificed and suffered only for her family, who had spent her entire life in the midst of her family, could rarely conceive of any higher, more important social unit than the family. To her the little group of blood relations had been the world. But the woman who became socially productive gradually felt herself to be part of a larger social group. She began to perceive that those who worked with her at the same occupation, who earned their bread in the same way as she, had interests that were identical with hers. She began to realize—vaguely at first, but more clearly as the number of wage-earning women increase—that alone she was weak and helpless, but that as a member of her class, the working class, she could command attention and wield power. So working women came into the labor movement at a time when there was as yet no organized woman movement. Years before middle class women began to struggle for woman's right to a higher education, her right to learn and practice the liberal professions, her right to equality before the law and, finally, her right to political equality, working women were struggling for a living wage, a reasonable working day, and decent conditions of toil. As a natural result of her social environment and her economic needs, the working woman's class consciousness was awakened long before her sex consciousness.

When women first became wage-workers, the advantages offered by their new position outweighed the disadvantages. We have seen that many of the pioneer women workers in Lowell and other early New England mill towns were intelligent, ambitious girls, to whom factory labor meant a first opportunity for a larger existence. Most of them came from small villages or isolated farms,