bodes no good to the lasting interest of any of the workers. When a
trade passes out of the status of a home industry, and takes on the
dignity of an outside occupation, women are rarely in a position to
take hold of it in its new guise. We find men following it, partly
because they are more accustomed to think in terms of professional
skill, and partly because they are in the business swim, and can
more easily gain command of the capital necessary to start any new
enterprise. Men then proceed to hire the original owners as employés,
and women lose greatly in their economic status.

This is the general rule, though it is by no means wholly the sex
line that divides the old-fashioned houseworker from the specialized
professional, though this habitual difference in standing between
groups of different sex does tend to blur fundamental issues. The
economic struggle in its bare elements would be easy to follow
compared with the complex and perpetually changing forms in which it
is presented to us.

But the home industries are not yet fully accounted for and disposed
of. Some of the household occupations, essential once to the comfort
and well-being of the family, are shrinking in importance, prior to
vanishing before our eyes, because now they do not for the most part
represent an economical expenditure of energy. Meanwhile, however,
they linger on, a survival in culture, and in millions of homes today
the patient housewife is striving with belated tools to keep her
family fed and clothed and her house spotless.

Take the cleaning process, for example, and watch what is happening.
Dr. Helen Sumner draws attention to the fact that we ourselves are
witnessing its rapid transformation. It is being taken out of the