The socialistic women on their part, as speakers, agitators, journalists, members of special associations, have stood in rank and file beside the men as true comrades, and the middle-class women have much to learn from the feeling of solidarity of the women socialists. The masculine comrades have not always _in practice_ substantiated the principle of equality, for even the socialist is first man and then comrade; but _in theory_ he has generally supported it. Through socialism, feminism has penetrated to the masses. What the middle-class woman movement would have needed another century to effect, socialism has accomplished in a few decades. Nothing shows better than its fear of socialists how blindly prejudiced was the right wing of middle-class feminism. And nothing so clearly elucidates in what stage of feminism the upper-class movement was than its obstinate adherence to “the principle of personal freedom” in face of the atrocious actual conditions which resulted from the “freedom of work” of the women factory hands. I will here recall only in brief the progress of the economic woman movement in the class of factory workers. When machines transformed the whole method of production and a host of women no longer found sufficient occupation in the home, while at the same time the possibilities of marriage decreased because of the surplus of women and also for other reasons, the middle-class women looked about them for new fields of labour. The great industries in return looked about them for more “hands.” And since, with the machine, female hands were quite as serviceable as male—with a new machine it was possible to replace thirty men with one woman—and since in addition they were cheaper, then began that exodus of women from the home into the factory, the results of which we are now experiencing. When the mother is absent from the home, then there is lacking the cohering, supervising, warming force, and the home deteriorates and falls to pieces; the children are neglected, the husband suffers; the street takes possession of the children, the alehouse of the men. Moreover, the women work often for starvation wages, whereby less comes into the home than is lost by the absence and incapacity of the mother. In the middle classes daughters and wives, entirely or partly supported in the home, could be satisfied with smaller wages and have thus become the competitors of men and women wholly self-supporting. For the same reason wives working in these industries have often become the competitors of men, children again the competitors of women, and married women the competitors of unmarried.