Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/46

 herbs, and dressed the game. She, with her subordinates, spun the flax and the wool, which she wove into linen for table and bed, or into warm garments for husband and child. She made the candles which lit the household, and every piece of soap used by her family was usually made by her. She tended the animals and collected the honey from the bees, and the eggs from the fowls. If she did not actually accomplish all these feats of skill and endurance herself, they were done under her direction by the women of her household, and there was not one task which the average woman of her times could not have done, and did not do, herself if and when the need arose.

Of most of these interesting and important duties the industrial revolution has robbed her, and is robbing her, for the days of profound economic change are not yet over. Those huge steam-driven machines, those ugly factories swallowed the work in which the busy wife and mother, maid and daughter, had found their happiness and their pride. Now everything is made in the workshop, in huge quantities, and by machinery. Soap, candles, beer, bread, sheets, blankets, boots, clothes, everything, apparently, that the human family requires can be made by men outside the home, where once they were made by the women of the household.