706 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
for thorough cleaning will certainly appear before long. But so long as home-life continues and the love for it is too deeply rooted among the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic races to vanish before even a revolu- tion of our economic conditions so long will every family require the major part of the time of at least one woman in order to keep its home running smoothly and to foster that atmosphere of rest and recreation necessary if the workers in the outside world are to be properly invigorated for their toil. And this conclusion seems rather to lead to the view of several notable English women economists (e. g., Mrs. Sydney Webb and Miss Clara Collet) who believe that, while it should be our aim to foster independence among unmarried women, and to encourage them in every way possible to earn their own living, the married women should be counseled rather to devote themselves to the task of home-making and of bringing up their children ; they should not by accepting a pocket-money wage bring down the wages of the woman who has only her own exertions to depend on. But if this conclusion be adopted, we cannot hope ever to see women's work attain anything like the same level of efficiency as men's, nor again can we expect more than a partial introduction of scientific and up-to-date methods of housekeeping, which depend on a concentration and gradation of labor impossible in the single house- hold.
The remaining chapters are devoted to the working-women's move- ment (<?. g., the enrolment in trade unions and clubs) and to the relation of the middle-class women's movement to the questions of women's labor in the manual working classes ; and, finally, there is a chapter on factory and other social legislation and its problems. The author returns again in these chapters to the note which she struck at the beginning of the treatment of women's work in the nineteenth century --the difference in the attitude of the professional and working-class women. The one has to fight for an opportunity to work at all, and therefore her cry is for equality. She distrusts the law, and her attitude toward men is mostly antagonistic. The other finds work in plenty, but she is forced by poverty and lack of power to combine to accept work at wretched prices and under miserable conditions. Therefore to her the law, prescribing by factory legislation the minimum condi- tions of employment, is not an enemy, but a friend, and she combines more readily when grouped with her masculine fellow-workers (as Frau Brown points out, following Mrs. Sydney Webb, it would rarely be accurate to call them her competitors) than with her own sex.
