The first is that it is difficult to determine where the health of a worker has been strained by industry and where by other causes.  Quite outside any of the narratives mentioned were those of two young women employed under Scientific Management whose health was hopelessly broken.  Both of these poor girls were subject to wrong and oppressive maltreatment at home.  Indeed, from oppression at home, one of the girls had repeatedly found refuge and protection in the consideration shown to her by the establishment where she worked.  It was not she who blamed the new way of management for her breakdown, but people whose impression of her situation was vague and lacked knowledge.

The whole tendency of Scientific Management toward truth about industry, toward justice, toward a clear personal record of work, established without fear or favor, had inspired something really new and revolutionary in the minds of both the managers and the women workers where the system had been inaugurated.  Nearly all of them wished to tell and to obtain, as far as they could, the actual truth about the experiment everywhere.  Almost no one wished to “make out a case.”  This expressed sense of candor and cooeperation on both sides seemed to the present writer more stirring and vital than the gains in wages and hours, far more serious even than the occasional strain on health which the imperfect installation of Scientific Management had sometimes caused.

These strains on women’s health in industry in America—­stooping and monotony in all the needle trades, jumping on pedals in machine tending, dampness and heat in cotton production, the standing without pause for many hours a day throughout the month, the lifting of heavy weights in packing and in distribution—­all these industrial strains for women constitute grave public questions affecting the good fortune of the whole nation and not to be answered in four years, nor by one firm.  It is undoubtedly the tendency of Scientific Management to relieve all these strains.

No one can see even in part the complications of contemporary factory work, the hundred operations of human hands and muscles required for placing a single yard of cotton cloth on the market, the thousand threads spinning and twisting, the thousand shuttles flying, the manifold folding and refolding and wrapping and tying, the innumerable girls working, standing, walking by these whirring wheels and twisting threads and high piled folding tables, without feeling strongly that ours is indeed an industrial civilization, and that the conditions of industry not only completely control the lives of uncounted multitudes, but affect in some measure every life in this country to-day.