In the English Parliament in 1866 a numerously signed petition in favour of Woman Suffrage was first presented by John Stuart Mill, one of the most enlightened minds of the democratic middle-class. Footnote 1: “Letters from a Citizen of Newhaven to a Citizen of Virginia on the Uselessness of Dividing the Legislative Power in Several Bodies.” These struggles for the emancipation of women have indeed secured some concessions, and many advantages have been gained; but the political emancipation of the female sex to-day, and especially in industrial lands, is as far off as ever, while the most stalwart exponents of middle-class democracy for men, having attained most of their demands, are no longer clamouring, as during the fight, for equal rights for women. The preliminary condition for success is that there should be a great increase in capitalist production. It stands in the closest relation with the revolutionising of the household. With the increase of industry, which in primitive conditions was carried on in the family, and when that family carried out industrial operations as a whole in the home, there was not then a demand for the emancipation of woman from the family and the household, and women did not then, always living at home, feel the need for political power. The same machinery which drove with decisive power the home industries from the family, allowed woman to become an active worker outside the home, and her advent on the labour market produced not only new economic, but also new social, effects. The destruction of the old middle-class woman’s world has created, of necessity, a new moral purpose in women’s lives, in order to secure to them new advantages. Therefore, the middle-class woman’s world was compelled to recognise the necessity of advocating the political emancipation of women as a precious and useful weapon, and with its help to endeavour to procure changes in the law, so that man should no longer enjoy a monopoly, and prevent women from earning their living. In the proletarian women’s world the need, so far from being less, was indeed much greater to obtain political power, and they advocated complete political emancipation. Hundreds of thousands, nay millions, of women workers have been exploited by capitalist methods. Statistics are there to show how in all capitalist countries women are more and more going into the labour market. In Germany, the last census (that of 1895) gives the number of women working as 6,578,350, and of these the workers in factories, etc., were no less than 5,293,277. In Austria, in 1890, there were 6,245,073 women working, and of these there were 5,310,639 working in factories; in France, in 1890, the numbers were 5,191,084 and 3,584,518; in the United States, in 1890, 3,914,571 and 2,864,818; in England and Wales, in 1891, 4,016,571 and 3,113,256.