With steady and persistent advance the field of woman's domestic industries has been invaded and is passing from her. In remote country districts she still weaves and brews and bakes, not as a luxury and amusement, but from necessity, and still feeds and clothes her household, and marries early, and gives her children what training they get: but exactly as modern civilization advances, and where it is found in its fullest development, these conditions recede. Her loom has been transformed into the vast factory where thousands of steam-driven machines, largely possessed and guided by men, accomplish the labour she performed in her home, and clothe the world; the steam-driven sewing-machine is fast supplanting the woman's needle, and even the domestic sewing-machine; bread, the manufacture of which has been through all ages one of woman's chief handicrafts, is increasingly the work of machinery, owned and guided almost exclusively by males; beer, the right brewing of which was our grandmother's pride, is exclusively the manufacture of machinery and males, who, for absorbing this branch of the female's work, are often rewarded with knighthoods and peerages; the very preserves and sweetmeats which our fore-mothers prepared are now produced cheaper, if not better, in vast factories; the milkmaid is vanishing, and cheese is as often a male as a female manufacture; clothes are washed, windows cleaned, carpets beaten, by machinery, and the smallest minutiæ of domestic life are more and more passing out of the hands of the woman householder; the male cook penetrates into the kitchen as the male accoucheur penetrates into the birth-chamber. Yet far more noticeable is the shrinkage of woman's ancient field of labour in other directions. The mother, who in primitive societies was the guide and instructress of her daughter till adult years were reached, and whose son grew up about her knees till youth began, now finds, whether a city workwoman or a duchess, the education and training of her children pass largely from her hands into those of specialized instructors, almost from infancy. From the infant school and kindergarten to the college and university, the education of the young has now become a complex and highly specialized business, the successive classes in schools being instructed by persons distinctly trained for their work, and the average mother's calling as trainer and educator of her own offspring is rapidly dwindling. Further, all branches of labour are becoming more specialized, requiring distinct, long-continued, and often very complex training for their performance.