Page:Theresa Serber Malkiel - Woman of Yesterday and To-day.djvu/6

 beef and canned fruit long past sundown, all as a matter of wifely duty. She had no alternative. Illiterate, God-fearing and man-obeying, she had to submit to the fate of all married women of that period. Life out of wedlock was still worse.

Woman's opportunities for self-support were practically nil in those days. Marriage was really a girl's only hope. The thought of this was instilled into her from the cradle. At 21 and still unmarried a girl considered herself and was considered by others to be an old maid. To avoid such a disgrace, YOUR Great Grandmother married at 15, or 16 years of age. At 21 she was a sedate matron with growing children. A Grandmother at 35 she aged before her time, withered like a flower deprived of light.

YOU would have met the same fate, had not society made a turn in the road, The invention of machinery at the beginning of the last century changed its whole mode of existence and woman's life, too, had to change. The spinning jenny could produce ten times more yarn that anyone of your Great Aunts. It did not pay your Great Grandfather to compete with the machine, he sent his daughter to tend it instead.

She and many more daughters of American farmers went gladly, they rather liked the change. Fully 30,000 of them left home for the factory during the year 1814 when the first real factory was built on our shores.

YOU cannot begin to imagine what it meant to the girls of that period to get away from the lonely farm-house; to work for wages. You live in a state of comparative independence, if you do not earn