Here perhaps the former point of view is more pertinent. To the
long hours of the factory-worker, or the shopwoman, we must often add
the irksome duties which to a weary wife must make the return home a
pain rather than a pleasure. When the industrial work is carried on at
home the worries and interruptions of family life must always contribute
to the difficulty and intensity of the toil, and tell upon the nervous
system and the general health of the women-workers.
Other evils, incident on woman's industrial work, do not require
elaboration, though their cumulative effect is often very real. Many
women-workers, the locality of whose home depends on the work of their
husband or father, are obliged to travel every day long distances to and
from their work. The waste of time, the weariness, and sometimes the
expense of 'bus or train thus imposed on them, is in thousands of cases
a heavy tax upon their industrial life. Women working in factories, or
taking work home, suffer also many wrongs by reason of their "weaker
sex," and their general lack of trade organization. Unjust and arbitrary
fines are imposed by harsh employers so as to filch a portion of their
scanty earnings; their time is wasted by unnecessary delay in the giving
out of work, or its inspection when finished; the brutality and
insolence of male overseers is a common incident in their career. In a
score of different ways the weakness of women injures them as
competitors in the free fight for industrial work.
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