[5] This estimate supposes the actual cost of board for each employee to be $3.00 per week, which is probably less than would be paid by each employee for table-board of the quality furnished by the employer. It excludes the cost of house-rent furnished, and also fuel and light, all of which are factors to be considered in computing the cost of service received. [6] It is difficult to estimate the value of the materials of which domestic employees have the almost exclusive control. If the number of domestic servants and launderers and laundresses in private families, hotels, and restaurants is placed at 1,700,000, the number of employees in each family as two, and the number of persons in each family, including servants, as seven, it will be seen that at a rough estimate the food and laundried articles of clothing of six million persons pass through the hands of this class of employees. It was formerly a common saying, “a servant eats her wages, breaks her wages, and wastes her wages.” If this verdict of experience is taken as approximately true rather than as scientifically exact, it will be seen that the actual expense involved in domestic service is probably double that included under the items of wages and support. [7] _The Factory System_, Tenth Census, II., 533-537. [8] A. E. Kennelly, “Electricity in the Household,” _Scribner’s Magazine_, January, 1890; E. M. H. Merrill, “Electricity in the Kitchen,” _American Kitchen Magazine_, November, 1895. [9] In Massachusetts, in 1885, the number of women employed in manufacturing industries exceeded the number of men in eight towns. These were Dalton, Dudley, Easthampton, Hingham, Ipswich, Lowell, Tisbury, and Upton. _Census of Massachusetts_, II., 176-187. A weaver in Lawrence, Massachusetts, reported in 1882: “One of the evils existing in this city is the gradual extinction of the male operative.” _Fall River, Lowell, and Lawrence_, p. 10. Reprinted from _Thirteenth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor_, p. 202. In Massachusetts, in 1875, women predominated in fifteen occupations, eleven of them manufacturing industries. In 1885 there were also fifteen occupations in which women exceeded men in numbers, twelve of them manufacturing. These were manufacturers of buttons and dress-trimmings, carpetings, clothing, cotton goods, fancy articles, hair work, hosiery and knit goods, linen, mixed textiles, silk and silk goods, straw and palm-leaf goods, and worsted goods. _Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor_, 1889, pp. 556-557. [10] George Eliot in _Felix Holt_ speaks of Mrs. Transome as engaged in “a little daily embroidery—that soothing occupation of taking stitches to produce what neither she nor any one else wanted was then the resource of many a well-born and unhappy woman.” [11] Eddis, p. 63. [12] DeFoe, _Moll Flanders_, _Colonel Jack_; Mrs. Alpha Behn, _The Widow Ranter_. [13] Sir Joshua Child, pp. 183-184.