The story of working-women, of those women forced by changes in industrial and social conditions into occupations outside the home, is limited to the last hundred years. The division of labor resulting in the factory system, and the multiplication of trades, has opened many employments hitherto unknown, in which the use of female labor has become almost a necessity. Woman has had her share of work from the beginning, often much more than her share, but it ran usually in the simple lines of household requirements; and if it chanced, here and there, to be of larger scope, this was, after all, mostly tentative. Work with deliberate intent to earn a living is chiefly a fact of the nineteenth century, and any tangible estimate of woman as a competitor of man in the struggle for existence must be based upon the facts of the past hundred years. It is within hardly more than a generation that the importance of the subject has become plain, and now we are all questioning as to what is included in the life of the working-woman; what is her economic and social condition; what are her rights and her wrongs; what bearing have they on society at large, and what concern is it of ours why or how she works, or what wage she receives? We are well aware that humanity has always had the enforced work of women as an essential part of its development, enforced not by law but by the necessities of life. In any new country, the work of women is a vital factor in its success or failure, in its growth and general prosperity; and in the early days of our own country this was far truer than now. There were then no trades open to women, because the organization of society was much less complex than it now is, and the family represented a union of trades. This had been the case in England and, indeed, in all civilized countries, and is even true of those early days when skins were all that was needed, and thorns were the only needles and pins. But from the day of that disastrous experience in the Garden, clothing, and the necessities involved in it, has been the synonym of sorrow for women, and the needle stands as the visible token of disaster, sorrow, and wrong of every order--"the asp upon the breast of the poor." Civilization has always in the nature of things meant war. It is only out of the conflict of class with class, interest with interest, that advance comes. "Strife is the father of all things and the king of all things," was the word of Heraclitus the Wise. "It hath brought forth some as gods and others as men, and hath made some bond and others free. When Homer prayed that strife might depart from amongst gods and men, he wist not that he was cursing the birth of all things, for all things have their birth in war and enmity."