From the second group of working women are drawn our better-paid factory girls, our tailoresses, domestic servants, and a large number of our dressmakers and milliners, shop-assistants, barmaids, clerks, and elementary teachers. A considerable number of dressmakers, shop-assistants, and clerks are, however, drawn from the lower middle class, and a few from the professional class. Although this second group is the largest group in London, and probably in England, it is the one about which we have least general information. They have hardly been made the subject of industrial inquiry, do not regard themselves as persons to be pitied, and work in comparatively small detachments. They are nevertheless of more industrial importance than the working women of the first group. Their work is skilled and requires an apprenticeship. They are in the majority of cases brought into direct contact with the consumer, and education, good manners, personal appearance and tact all raise their market value. In this second group would be included the majority of the Lancashire and Yorkshire weavers by anyone competent to deal with England as a whole; and what applies to the group in London would not apply to this section of it, who occupy a unique position. The extent to which women compete with men is very much exaggerated. Of the three million and a half women and girls who were returned as occupied in industry in 1881 in England and Wales, over one-third were domestic indoor servants, 358,000 were dressmakers, milliners, or stay-makers; midwifery and subordinate medical service, charing, washing and bathing service, hospitals and institutions, shirt-making and sewing employed another 400,000. The textile trades employed altogether only 590,624 women and girls, and of these over 300,000 were in the cotton trade. Their aggregation in large factories and in special localities has attracted to them an undue amount of attention, and the history of industry in Lancashire is often given as the history of industry in England, whereas no other county is less typical.