More serious still is the relation which has been shown to exist between criminality and household occupations.  Nothing, indeed, which recent investigation has established ought to startle the American woman more.  Contrary to public opinion, it is not the factory and shop which are making the greatest number of women offenders of all kinds; it is the household.  In a recent careful study of over 3000 women criminals, the Bureau of Labor found that 80 per cent came directly from their own homes or from the traditional pursuits of women![2]

The anomaly is the more painful because women are so active in trying to better the conditions in trades which men control.  Feminine circles everywhere have been convulsed with sympathy for shop and factory girls.  Intelligent and persistent efforts are making to reach and aid them.  This is, of course, right, and it would be a national calamity if such organizations as the Woman’s Trade Union League and the Consumer’s League should lose anything of their vigor.  But the need of the classes they reach is really less than the need of household workers.  In the first place, the number affected is far less.

It is customary, in presenting the case of the shop and factory girl, to speak of them as “an army 7,000,000 strong.”  It is a misleading exaggeration.  The whole number of American women and girls over ten years of age earning their living wholly or partially is about 7,000,000.[3] Of this number from 20 per cent to 25 per cent belong to the “army” in shops and factories; moreover, a goodly percentage of this proportion are accountants, bookkeepers, and stenographers,—­a class which on the whole may be said to be able to look after its own needs.  The number in domestic service is nearly twice as great, something like 40 per cent of the 7,000,000.

There are almost as many dressmakers, milliners, and seamstresses as there are factory operators in this 7,000,000.  There are nearly twice as many earning their living in dairies, greenhouses, and gardens as there are in shops and offices.

The greater number in domestic service is not what gives this class its greater importance.  Its chief importance comes from the fact that it is in a permanent woman’s employment; that is, the household worker becomes on marriage a housekeeper and in this country frequently an employer of labor.  The intelligence and the ideals which she will give to her homemaking will depend almost entirely on what she has seen in the houses where she has worked; that is, our domestic service is self-perpetuating, and upon it American homes are in great numbers being annually founded.  In sharp contrast to this permanent character of housework is the transientness of factory and shop work.  The average period which a girl gives to this kind of labor is probably less than five years.  What she learns has little or no relation to her future as a housekeeper—­indeed, the tendency is rather to unfit than to fit her for a home.