adaptation to be on the part of the worker, through pitting the
flexible, delicate, and easily injured human organism against the
inflexible and tireless machine. Other essential conditions would be
the raising of the standard of living, and therefore of remuneration,
for all, down to the weakest and least skilled, and the insistence
upon equal pay for equal work, tending to lessen the antagonism
between men and women on the industrial field. Thus doubly prepared
and adequately protected the girl would pass from her wage-earning
girlhood into home and married life a fresher, less exhausted creature
than she usually is now. Further, she would be more likely to bring to
the bearing and rearing of her children a constitution unenfeebled
by premature overwork and energies unsapped by its monotonous grind.
Again, her understanding of industrial problems would make her a more
intelligent as well as a more sympathetic helpmate. Hand in hand,
husband and wife would more hopefully tackle fresh industrial
difficulties as these arose, and they would do so with some slight
sense of the familiarity that is the best armor in life's battle.

Besides there is the other possibility, all too often realized, that
lies in the background of every such married woman's consciousness.
She may be an ideally domestic woman, spending her time and strength
on her home and for the Welfare of her husband and children, yet
through no fault of hers, her home may be lost to her, or if not
lost, at least kept together only by her own unremitting efforts as a
wage-earner. It often happens that marriage in course of time proves
to be anything but an assurance of support. Early widowed, the young
mother herself may have to earn her children's bread. Or the husband
may become crippled, or an invalid, or he may turn out a drunkard and
a spendthrift. In any of these circumstances, the responsibility and
the burden of supporting the entire family usually falls upon the