Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/633

Rh III. But the man who pursues a specialty to success often learns rules of his art which he can impart to others, or even can not help imparting, since, like the peculiarities of the general form of a violin, they remain embodied and visible in the product of his art. He invents new machines or processes which survive him and are permanently added to the world's industrial power. This advantage of specialization is the last to be realized, and is probably the greatest.

Under which head shall we place the utilization of pre-existing special aptitudes? Under the first, on the ground that part of the advantage gained from them is immediate, under the second because they are susceptible of development by exercise, or under the third on the theory that they are due to heredity? They may be a part of the legacy of past specialization. Presumably this is true in general, and particularly in the most prominent of all specializations—that which separates man's work from woman's.

This brings us to an important practical subject which we may as well pause to consider. We all want a solution of the vexed problem of woman's industrial status. She wants it vitally and primarily, and is clamoring for it. She wants to know how best to make her living. In the great scheme of mutual helpfulness which constitutes the subject-matter of economic science, she wants her best possible place, as we all want ours. And we, in turn, aside from our sympathy for her, are interested in having such industrial capacities as she possesses, and is in a position to exercise, made the most of. I have stated as a general and vital economic truth that "the better living others make the more they help us to make ours." And yet half the population belongs to a sex which feels that it is denied, either by prejudice or some other cause, or both, the privilege of making the best living of which it is capable. If this be true, the first step toward reform is to find out why it is true. If we incidentally discover, in taking this first step, that reform is difficult or even impossible, none the less must we take it; for it will save us the waste of toilsome, futile steps in wrong directions.

A painstaking inquiry into the relations subsisting between specialization, heredity and special aptitudes can not fail to furnish us a clew to some part of the trouble. We often speak of the various differences, mental and otherwise, between man and woman. Among them all there is none more striking than this, that man's work has been highly specialized, while woman's has not. True, several specialties have been evolved out of her original specialty—as weaving, spinning, baking, etc. But these new specialties have mostly been given to men, not women. To all intents and purposes woman has now, as always, one specialty—housekeeping.

Hence the intense heredity of it. It is bred in the bone. The carpenter's son may fail to develop a special aptitude for working in wood; but the son of a long line of carpenters, whose male ancestors