Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/635

Rh the work at which he is most capable. Many men who teach school are free to say that they do it only as a stepping-stone to something else. A great many other occupations are occasionally or generally followed for the same purpose by young men. A very large part of the world's important work is "stepping-stone" work. It implies versatility of talent.

How shall woman acquire this versatility? Her industrial pre-disposition is a deeply-inherited instinct. How shall she break its fetters? Not very suddenly, we may rest assured. After long waiting she has slowly begun to take up, with slowly increasing success, those masculine tasks which the never-ceasing process of specialization has placed within her grasp. She works in those factories which have taken away from her general task of housekeeping some of the duties included in it in her grandmother's time. She watches the spindle and the loom of the factory, while the wheel and the loom of her grandmother gather and consecrate the dust of the garret. She carries her inherited instinct of baby-tending into the Kindergarten and the schoolroom. She even finds employment in those of the most mechanical masculine tasks which are not too muscular. It is gratifying, as well as scientifically instructive, that in all these lines her wages are gaining on man's.

Why not divide her main specialty of housekeeping? Men have made, out of much narrower and simpler ones, whole families of specialties. This it is that justifies our treating the woman question as a question of specialization, and taking it up so early. It is not a question of capital, banking, commerce, money, production, or distribution. It is a question of specialization, and, considered in respect of the number of specialists, one of the most important, since there are more women than men in the countries of greatest economic interest.

It is worthy our close attention for another reason. It is rich in revelations of general economic truth. Not all branches of any science are equally instructive. Some plants are botanically more interesting than others. Some animals are richer than others in zoölogical phenomena, and in explanations of phenomena. Woman's work, besides being everywhere present, so that we can all study it, is a peculiarly rich field of economic investigation.

It is not by any means a narrow specialty. It is intensely inbred, but of itself it is too broad rather than too narrow. Compare the variety of daily operations of man and woman. She must be constantly turning from one thing to another. She must dust, sweep, make the beds, watch the pot, spread the table, wash the dishes, attend the baby, sew, darn, and do so many petty things that almost any shallowness or distraction of mind on her part would be excusable.

Her husband, on the other hand, is doing one thing all day. He is laying bricks, carrying a hod, heaving coal, hammering iron, watching a loom, or doing some other single and simple thing all day. If,