It is interesting to note, in this connection, that the greatest economic success of women wage earners in manufacturing industries has been attained in occupations in which they have competed directly with men. Women printers and cigarmakers, who in many cases have been introduced as the result of strikes, have generally earned higher wages than their sisters who have made shirts and artificial flowers. Usually, however, when, as in certain classes of cigar making, they have entirely displaced men, they have soon lost their economic advantage. And it is exceedingly doubtful whether, in such cases, women have gained as much as men have lost. Certainly they have not regained what they themselves have lost through being displaced by men in their customary sphere of employment. The occupations grouped under the title “trade and transportation,” most of which are new and offer, therefore, no problems of displacement, have furnished working women, in general, their most remunerative employments. This, too, is the group of industries in which, within recent years, the most rapid increase in the number and proportion of women workers has taken place.[5] Though the number of saleswomen, stenographers, clerks, bookkeepers, telegraph and telephone operators, and so forth, is still small as compared with the number of women textile factory operatives, seamstresses, boot and shoemakers, paper box makers, and so on, it is rapidly increasing. In this movement, moreover, there is evident more than anywhere else a certain hopeful tendency for working women to push up from the level of purely mechanical pursuits to the level of semi-intellectual labor. The trade and transportation industries are, roughly speaking, middle-class employments, as contrasted with the manufacturing industries, which are, roughly speaking, working-class employments.