Next comes her isolation. Even the bottom-level of a universal average--even the blind patience of a working mother--could be helped up a little under the beneficent influence of association. In the days when the ingenious squaw led the world, she had it. The women toiled together at their primitive tasks and talked together as they toiled. The women who founded the beginnings of agriculture were founders also of the village; and their feminine constructive tendencies held it together while the destructive tendencies of the belligerent male continually tore it apart. All through that babyhood of civilisation, the hunting and fighting instinct made men prey upon the accumulated wealth resultant from the labouring instinct of women--but industry conquered, being the best. As industry developed, as riches increased, as property rights were defined, as religions grew, women were confined more and more closely at home. Later civilisations have let them out to play--but not to work. The parasitic female of the upper classes is allowed the empty freedom of association with her useless kind; but the housewife is still confined to the house. We are now giving great attention to this matter of home industry. We are founding chairs of Household Science, we are writing books on Domestic Economics; we are striving mightily to elevate the standard of home industry--and we omit to notice that it is just because it is home industry that all this trouble is necessary. So far as home industry had been affected by world industry, it has improved. The implements of cooking and cleaning, for instance--where should we be if our modern squaw had to make her own utensils, as did her ancient prototype? The man, in world industry, makes not only the house, with all its elaborate labour-saving and health-protecting devices; not only the furniture of the house, the ornaments, hangings, and decorations, but the implements of the home industries as well. Go to the household furnishing store of our day--remember the one pot of the savage family to boil the meat and wash the baby--and see the difference between "homemade" and "world-made" things. So far as home industry has progressed, it is through contact with the moving world outside; so far as it remains undeveloped, it is through the inexorable limitations of the home in itself.