In woman, so long secluded in the sphere of the family, the social feeling of solidarity has been very slowly awakened. Therefore, organisation which could prevent the competition just mentioned has only in the last decade made great progress everywhere among working women. In the middle-class vocations this is almost entirely lacking. Among the working women slowness of organisation is natural, for the more wretched their position was, the more difficult was it for them to organise. But among middle-class women the reason was partly their individualism, partly their anti-socialism, partly the lack of feeling of solidarity just referred to. Home work for profit and pleasure in one’s own family or in service of the applied arts has become a means for the “sweat system,” the facts of which belong to the darkest side of modern working life. These facts alone would be sufficient to prove that _working women_ have little to gain from the luxury of the rich, an assertion with which luxury often vindicates itself. There is still for the women working at home as well as for the women working in the factory, beside their professional work, also the duty of caring for the children and managing the home. However insufficient this may be yet it still claims a great part of their already meagre leisure; and the more tender and conscientious the mothers are, the more they wear themselves out, and the sooner must society, after night-watching, lack of light and hunger have ruined them, maintain them as infirm or paupers. The life of these women passed in the factory often from childhood has made them moreover, generation after generation, more unfitted for household work. What does it profit to attempt to remedy the evil by housekeeping schools and instruction in the care of children? For where time and strength are lacking the home has lost its right. What can be expected of women who three or four days after confinement must again stand at the machine, who are compelled to leave their children behind them, shut in at home, exposed to all conceivable accidents? What can be expected of mothers, who have become mothers against their will,—mothers of children, who because of the conditions of their parents’ work have become scrofulous, rickety, idiotic—children who contract degeneration of the liver because the harassed, ignorant mother quieted them with brandy, ill-treated them,—herself a physical and psychic ruin who spreads destruction about her! The feminists are accustomed to rage over the custom which formerly condemned the Indian widows to be burned upon the funeral pyre—a custom which is only an innocent sport in comparison with the woman slavery which Europe has even brought to a system and which the woman movement long ignored.