One result has been that thousands of women who, under the old régime, would have sat calmly like Priscilla by the window spinning, have been forced to seek other occupations. When the industrial revolution transformed the textile industries they naturally turned to the only other employment for which they were trained, sewing. This, however, only increased the pressure of competition in the sewing trades, already sufficiently supplied with laborers. In the middle of the century, moreover, before any effective readjustment had taken place, the sewing machine was introduced, greatly increasing productivity and at the same time further sharpening competition. Thus the increased productivity due to machinery and the simultaneous loss, by reason of the greater adaptability of men to certain machines, of woman’s practical monopoly of the textile trades has caused intense competition and has forced many women into other industries, not traditionally theirs. From the beginning, however, their choice of occupations has been hampered by custom. As early as 1829 a writer in the _Boston Courier_[3] said: Custom and long habit have closed the doors of very many employments against the industry and perseverance of woman. She has been taught to deem so many occupations masculine, and made only for men, that, excluded by a mistaken deference to the world’s opinion, from innumerable labors, most happily adapted to her physical constitution, the competition for the few places left open to her, has occasioned a reduction in the estimated value of her labor, until it has fallen below the minimum, and is no longer adequate to present comfortable subsistence, much less to the necessary provision against age and infirmity, or the every day contingencies of mortality. Economic necessity, however, with division of labor as its chief tool, sometimes aided by power machinery and sometimes alone, has gradually opened up new industries to women. As early as 1832 they were employed in as many as one hundred different occupations. In many of these, to be sure, they were as rare as women blacksmiths are today. But in 1836 a committee of the National Trades’ Union, appointed to inquire into the evils of “female labor,” reported that in the New England States “printing, saddling, brush making, tailoring, whip making and many other trades are in a certain measure governed by females,” and added that of the fifty-eight societies composing the Trades’ Union of Philadelphia, twenty four were “seriously affected by female labor.”[4] The census of 1850 enumerated nearly one hundred and seventy-five different manufacturing industries in which women were employed, and the number has steadily increased until there is now scarcely an industry in which they are not to be found.