In connexion with so-called welfare-legislation, it is interesting to observe that women and children are customarily grouped together as classes requiring protection; and that various laws affecting their position in industry have been sanctioned by the courts as being for the good of the race and therefore not to be regarded as class-legislation. Such decisions certainly would appear to be reasonable in so far as they apply to children, who are the rising generation of men and women, and should be protected during their immaturity. But they can be held valid as they affect women only if woman is regarded as primarily a reproductive function. This view, apparently, is held by most legislators, courts, and uplifters; and they have an unquestionable right to hold it. Whether, however, they are just in attempting to add to the burdens of the working woman by imposing it upon her in the form of rules that restrict her opportunities, is another question. One thing is certain: if discriminative laws and customs are to continue to restrict the opportunities of women and hamper them in their undertakings, it makes little difference for whose benefit those laws and customs are supposed to operate, whether for the benefit of men, of the home, of the race, or of women themselves; their effect on the mind of woman and her opportunities, will be the same. While society discriminates against her sex, for whatever reason, she can not be free as an individual. Should nothing, then, be done to protect women from the disabilities and hazards to which they are subject in the industrial world? Better nothing, perhaps, than protection which creates new disabilities. Laws which fix fewer hours of work for women than for men may result in shortening men’s hours also in factories where many women are employed; but they may result in the substitution of men--or children--for women in factories where but few have been employed. Laws prohibiting night-work may reduce the chances of women to get much-needed employment, and may sometimes shut them out of work which would offer higher returns on their labour than anything they might get to do during the day--as, for example, night-work in restaurants, where the generous tips of after-theatre patrons add considerably to the earnings of waiters. Moreover, it is hard to see on what ground night-work could be held to be more harmful for women than for men. Minimum-wage laws may fix a legal limit to the greed of employers, but they can not prevent the underpayment of women workers, for they are based on theoretical notions of a living wage, and have no relation to the actual value of the individual’s labour. Where they are fixed by law, as I have remarked, a rise in the cost of living may render them ineffectual. As for those laws which undertake to protect women against the hazards of industry, they have usually, as the Women’s Bureau has shown, very little relation to the hazards to which women are actually