As a result of these three causes a class of idle women sprang up--not only among the rich and well-to-do, but even among artisans, small farmers and shopkeepers. And this class came to be regarded as typical and exemplary. In reality it is neither. It has no place in our tradition of mothers and grandmothers who spun and made preserves, did their own housework, and were busy every waking moment about matters which are now attended to in shops and factories. It has no place in common sense--the women who insist most strenuously that child-bearing and home-making are woman’s whole duty are the women who, as a class, leave the care of the home to servants and bear few children and consign them to nurses at the earliest possible moment. And manifestly it has no place in our future; it must inevitably go the way of all else that is undemocratic and parasitic. Our society is founded upon the two ideas--work and equal opportunity to all to work. It abhors the idler as nature abhors a vacuum. And as the old-time occupations of woman are carried on in a different way, she must find other occupations. Must, because man will be unable both to support himself in the comfort he ever more exactingly demands and also to support her in idleness as well as she insists upon being supported. Must, because her own increasing aversion to restraint will not let her rest content with the slavish and shameful position of a cajoler and dependent. The sex instinct is powerful enough to triumph over even the instinct of self-preservation for a time; but it cannot withstand the steady, day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year pressure of that instinct of self-preservation incessantly stimulated by the operations of economic forces. The old order, bulwarked by tradition and by the sex-passion and by woman’s ingenuity and man’s weakness where women are concerned, will survive long, will disintegrate gradually. But how can it be saved? Thus we have a social organization which is in process of revolutionary change. The women are rapidly pushing out or are rapidly being pushed out into occupations which have been transferred from the domestic to the general sphere; they are entering upon occupations new and old which it was thought a few years ago would be for the men only. The men on their part not only are working as formerly, but also are entering occupations once followed exclusively by women. Some of the new employments of women have already been enumerated. The new employments of men in this country include laundry work, cooking, general housework, nursing, keeping boarding-houses, teaching primary and kindergarten pupils, dressmaking, millinery. The list is far shorter and, from the old viewpoint where the equal dignity of all honorable labor was denied, seems far less dignified than the women’s list. The reason for this is of course that the men had small room to expand their already multiform activities, while the women had all the room in the world.