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 and the mill town was a revelation of new experiences and a new interest in life. For the first time they experienced the joy of companionship at work and during leisure hours, the joy of common interests, common pleasures, common ambitions, in a larger social group than the family. For the first time their mental faculties were aroused and stimulated by public libraries, lecture courses and literary clubs. For the first time—and this is the vital factor in the changed environment of women—they knew the meaning of economic independence. William Hard sums up the situation in the words: "Two documents of worth has woman won—the college diploma and the pay envelope." The college diploma naturally remained confined to a comparatively small group of women: but the pay envelope has become the well-earned document of worth of increasing millions. Such a striking difference did the pay envelope make in the position of women that people only began to notice that women were working after the women began to be paid for their work. "My wife doesn't work," a union printer, enjoying an eight-hour day, once said to me. What he meant was: "My wife doesn't receive any wages for her work." He was so accustomed to estimate work only in its relation to wages, that he did not realize that his wife, in her five-room apartment, with her three, small children, was working far harder and longer than he in his shop. Yet such was the general attitude toward woman's work while it remained unremunerated. Only when woman's work attained a marketable value did men begin to compare it with their own. What a difference the pay envelope made to the woman herself, how it gave her self-reliance and self-respect, cannot be understood by men unless they are able, mentally, to place themselves in the woman's position. Let a man work for an employer for just his board and lodging, and let him beg that employer for a few dollars every time he needs a new suit or a pair of new shoes, and he may be able to appreciate the difference the pay envelope has made to women.

A larger social life, intellectual opportunities and economic independence, these were the three inestimable