Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/33

 Rh have been scalped as clean as if the most skilful redskin had done it with his knife. These cases are becoming common. Within the last few weeks five such cases have been reported in the papers that have come to my individual notice—three in the east, one in the middle west and one on the Pacific coast. Women's clothing also furnishes a particular source of danger. Many are the unfortunates whose dresses have been caught in the machinery and who have thus been hurled to an instantaneous death. While we scarcely would fall in line with the advocates of the bloomers as the only sure road to the millennium, we do unhesitatingly pronounce it criminal not to have proper safety appliances where women have to work in danger of such shocking deaths.

But as thousands upon thousands have gone under in humanity's onward course and thousands upon thousands: have been sacrificed upon the altar of progress, so these women are the sacrificed victims on the altar of a woman's broader life and approaching emancipation.

Woman's economic emancipation is necessary to her social and general emancipation. The road to economic emancipation leads through the factory. The old had to be entirely broken up to give room for the new. But in the process of transition, thousands are ground down with excessive toil, thousands suffer misery and degradation, others are maimed and murdered; but above all there is one bright star, the star of the emancipation of the human race from all forms of slavery.

In the process of evolution in our age there are at work two decided tendencies, an upward and a downward one. Capitalist society discards yearly thousands of unfortunates from the real race of life. The slums grow apace. Women and men equally are the recruits for the slums. To the slums belong not only the unfortunates that live by begging, petty stealing, and other immoral practices. To them belong the whole useless degraded hanging-on element in: society. The