Page:Woman and her possibilities.djvu/12

 with impunity; how in science, politics, religion, and economics we find the very same people at the head of all progressive thought; how the women's movement was originated and helped, and public opinion influenced in various ways by Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Mary Somerville, and Florence Nightingale; how the new ideal arose of woman as a spiritual creature, a social being, a citizen, a wife and mother, and what adjustments were necessary in consequence; and how the questions of marriage and motherhood are demanding discussion and solution. Staars does not deal with the relations between lovers, engaged couples, and married people; and he deals only with women of the educated classes. He promises to treat of working class women in another book.

In the meanwhile, however, we possess a great deal of information regarding the working classes generally. Take some examples of what has been done in England and elsewhere. About ten years ago, two American society ladies, Mrs. John van Vorst and Miss Marie van Vorst, published a book giving an account of their experiences during the time that they went and lived the life of working girls in American mills and factories, eating the same sort of food, wearing the same sort of clothes, lodging among the toilers; studying their needs, acquainting themselves with their desires, their hopes, their aspirations, their fears, their temptations; finding what their capacities are as compared with other women's; studying the effects of their surroundings on their character; comparing factory discipline with the discipline of parents; finding out the effects of factory life, the physical conditions of the bodies of the workers, the mental character of the workers, their bodily sensations in the matter of