The era of inventions and resulting business activity has therefore changed materially the condition of affairs within the household. Before this time all women shared in preparing and cooking food; they spun, wove, and made the clothing, and were domestic manufacturers in the sense that they changed the raw material into forms suitable for consumption. But modern inventions and the resulting change in the system of manufactures, as has been seen, necessarily affected household employments. The change has been the same in kind, though not in degree, as has come in the occupations of men. In the last analysis every man is a tiller of the soil, but division of labor has left only a small proportion of men in this employment. So in the last analysis every woman is a housekeeper who “does her own work,” but division of labor has come into the household as well as into the field, though in a more imperfect form. It has left many women in the upper and middle classes unemployed, while many in the lower classes are too heavily burdened; in three of the four great industries which absorb the energies of the majority of women working for remuneration—manufacturing, work in shops, and teaching—the supply of workers is greater than the demand, while in the fourth—domestic service—the reverse is the case. But it cannot be assumed that all of those in the first three classes have necessarily been taken from the fourth class. It has been well said that “through the introduction of machinery, ignorant labor is utilized, not created.” Many who under the old order would have been able to live only under the most primitive conditions, and whose labor can be used under the new order only in the simplest forms of manufacturing, would be entirely unfit to have the care of an ordinary household in its present complex form. One more effect must be noted of this transference of many forms of household labor to large centres through the operation of inventive genius. It has been seen that many women have thus been left comparatively free from the necessity of labor. The pernicious theory has therefore grown up that women who are rich or well-to-do ought not to work, at least for compensation, since by so doing they crowd out of remunerative employment others who need it. It is a theory that overlooks the historical fact that every person should be in the last analysis a producer, it is based wholly on the assumption that work is a curse and not a blessing, and it does not take into consideration the fact that every woman who works without remuneration, or for less than the market rates, thereby lowers the wages of every person who is a breadwinner. It is a theory which if applied to men engaged in business occupations would check all industrial progress. It is equally a hindrance when applied to women.