There never has been a time when women were not in industry. When the loom left the home, women followed it into the factory. More than eight million women and girls were employed in gainful occupations outside the home in the United States just before the war began. This number has been increased, yet it is not out of proportion to the number of women in the country. It is logical that women should continue in industry. A woman must live, and for her living a certain amount of money is required. This money must be given to her or she must earn it; not only that, but the women of to-day will demand the right to do some constructive work in the midst of the new conditions under which we live. =The Field of Women’s Activity.= Certain vocations are closed to women. All those occupations which demand great physical strength belong of right to man. The heavy work in the steel-mills, much of the work in constructural iron trades, wood-work, bridge-building, stone masonry, heavy carpentry, mining, smelting, refining minerals, and the heavy work of shoveling and lifting are men’s tasks. Many of the trades are also closed to women, because in these trades it takes at least five years’ apprenticeship before a man is able to earn a salary. Women do not care to enter into such a long apprenticeship. They will not give five years to non-productive work, for the great majority of women have not accepted industrial work in preference to married life. If the right man comes along, the average woman would feel that as a home-maker cooperating with her husband she could accomplish more than by continuing alone as an industrial unit. Of this attitude Miss Alice Henry says, “Give her fairer wages, shorten her hours of toil, let her have a chance of a good time, of a happy girlhood, and an independent, normal woman will be free to make a real choice of the best man. She will not be tempted to accept passively any man who offers himself, just in order to escape from a life of unbearable toil, monotony, and deprivation.”[4] [4] Alice Henry, _The Trade Union Woman_. [Illustration: Press Illustrating Service. In the army of laborers the girl and the woman are drafted as well as the boy and the man.]