Women have always been industrial workers. Otis T. Mason even went so far as to declare that “All the peaceful arts of today were once woman’s peculiar province. Along the lines of industrialism she was pioneer, inventor, author, originator.” This view is in rather striking contrast with the contemptuous derogation which has been for a long time current in European civilization, and has found expression in such cutting remarks as that of Proudhon, that woman “could not even invent her own distaff.” It is no doubt a fairer view, although it is probably somewhat exaggerated. There is certainly no valid reason to suppose that sex is a barrier to the invention and improvement of industrial processes. Be this as it may, it is undeniable that women have always been producers. Among some primitive tribes, indeed, they are the only industrialists, the men occupying themselves with war and the chase or, among maritime peoples, with fishing. The modern invasion of the industrial field by women does not, then, represent an attempt to do something that women have never done before. It does represent an attempt to adapt themselves to the new conditions created by the industrial revolution. The range of their opportunities has been considerably restricted by prejudices arising from the traditional sexual division of labour in European society. “In the developed barbarism of Europe, only a few simple household industries were on the whole left to women.”[26] It was natural, then, when women followed industry into the larger field of machine-production, that it should be assumed that the industries in which they might fittingly engage would be those most nearly akin to the occupations which European society has regarded as peculiarly feminine. Before the World War, according to the Women’s Bureau, “over seventy-five per cent of all women engaged in manufacture were concentrated in the textile and garment-making industries”; and we have the same authority for the statement that “except for certain branches of food-manufacture--such as flour making ... women constitute from a third to two-thirds of the working forces in the industries concerned with the business of clothing and feeding both the fighting and the civilian population.” The new opportunities opened up by the exigency of the war-period widened considerably the scope of women’s activity; they were employed in machine-shops and tool-rooms, in steel- and rolling-mills, in instrument-factories, in factories manufacturing sewing machines and typewriters, in utensil-factories, in plants working in rubber and leather, in wood-working industries.