REVIEWS 699
In the consideration of these questions, a wide range of con- temporaneous literature has been examined — essays, biographies, reports, statistics, poems, journals, diaries, newspapers, official records, annuals, chronicles, local histories, provincial laws, mem- oirs, state papers, petitions, travels, legislative documents, transac- tions, proceedings, descriptions, catalogues, indentures, sermons, pamphlets, letters, corporation rules and regulations, as well as more or less manuscript material in the form of account books, personal letters, and general written memoranda; every conceivable form of printed and written record has been laid under requisition and compelled to bear testimony in the consideration of this subject. The materials seem to Miss Abbott herself more or less frag- mentary, yet the very fact that the record left in all these various forms has often been an unconscious one makes it in character and quality invaluable and this is more than compensation for its scattered location.
In examining the evidence. Miss Abbott has confined herself to the record it gives of the work of women in the five great industries where women today are found in the greatest numbers — the cotton industry, boots and shoes, cigar-making, clothing, and printing. The main conclusions reached, as far as they affect the questions raised by Miss Abbott at the beginning of the discus- sion, are that the gainful employment of women has not been peculiarly characteristic of the nineteenth century, that the growth of manufacturing industries has not provided a new field for the employment of women, although there has been an increase in the opportunity for work in those employments that have long existed, that it cannot be said that what was formerly "men's work" has passed into the hands of women, and that the fruits of the long struggle of the past century for what has been termed "women's rights" have gone almost exclusively to the women of the pro- fessional group — "the woman of the working-classes finds (the world), as far as her measure of opportunity goes, very much as her great-grandmother left it."
These conclusions, in the light of the evidence presented by Miss Abbott, must pass unchallenged. But interesting and conclu- sive as they are, they are not altogether surprising to students of our colonial and national history.
It is the by-products of Miss Abbott's investigation that in reality do most to shake preconceived theories and show the in-
