the law.  She appeared to me not as the equal of man either physically or legally.  It remained to study her socially.  In the factory where I worked men and women were employed for ten-hour days.  The women’s highest wages were lower than the man’s lowest.  Both were working as hard as they possibly could.  The women were doing menial work, such as scrubbing, which the men refused to do.  The men were properly fed at noon; the women satisfied themselves with cake and pickles.  Why was this?  It is of course impossible to generalize on a single factory.  I can only relate the conclusions I drew from what I saw myself.  The wages paid by employers, economists tell us, are fixed at the level of bare subsistence.  This level and its accompanying conditions are determined by competition, by the nature and number of labourers taking part in the competition.  In the masculine category I met but one class of competitor:  the bread-winner.  In the feminine category I found a variety of classes:  the bread-winner, the semi-bread-winner, the woman who works for luxuries.  This inevitably drags the wage level.  The self-supporting girl is in competition with the child, with the girl who lives at home and makes a small contribution to the household expenses, and with the girl who is supported and who spends all her money on her clothes.  It is this division of purpose which takes the “spirit” out of them as a class.  There will be no strikes among them so long as the question of wages is not equally vital to them all.  It is not only nature and the law which demand protection for women, but society as well.  In every case of the number I investigated, if there were sons, daughters or a husband in the family, the mother was not allowed to work.  She was wholly protected.  In the families where the father and brothers were making enough for bread and butter, the daughters were protected partially or entirely.  There is no law which regulates this social protection:  it is voluntary, and it would seem to indicate that civilized woman is meant to be an economic dependent.  Yet, on the other hand, what is the new force which impels girls from their homes into the factories to work when they do not actually need the money paid them for their effort and sacrifice?  Is it a move toward some far distant civilization when women shall have become man’s physical equal, a “free, economic, social factor, making possible the full social combination of individuals in collective industry”?  This is a matter for speculation only.  What occurred to me as a possible remedy both for the oppression of the woman bread-winner and also as a betterment for the girl who wants to work though she does not need the money, was this:  the establishment of schools where the esthetic branches of industrial art might be taught to the girls who by their material independence could give some leisure to acquiring a profession useful to themselves and to society in general.  The whole country would be benefited