About five hundred women had been garment workers, dressmakers, and seamstresses, but how far these were skilled or unskilled was not stated. The department store, at that time little more than a sweat shop so far as wages and long hours of work were concerned, contributed one hundred and sixteen recruits to the list. On the whole, these groups were what the investigators had expected to find. There were two other large groups of prodigals, and these were entirely unexpected by the investigators. Of the 3,866 girls examined 1,236, or nearly thirty-two per cent, reported no previous occupation. The next largest group, 1,115, or nearly thirty per cent, had been domestic servants. The largest group of all had gone straight from their homes into lives of evil. A group nearly as large had gone directly from that occupation which is constantly urged upon women as the safest and most suitable means of earning their living--housework. Now you may, if you want to drop the thing out of your mind as something too disagreeable to think about, infer from this that at least sixty-two per cent of those 3,866 women deserved their fate. Some of them were too lazy to work, and the rest preferred a life of soiled luxury to one of honest toil in somebody's nice kitchen. Apparently this was the view taken by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, because it never carried the investigation any farther. It never tried to find out _why_ so many girls left their homes to enter evil lives. It never tried to find out _why_ housework was a trade dangerous to morals. Fortunately it did occur to the women's organizations to examine the facts a little more carefully. In this article I am going to take you over some of the ground they have covered and show you where their investigations have led them. South Chicago is a fairly good place to begin. Its ugliness and forlornness can be matched in the factory section of almost any large city. South Chicago is dominated by its steel mills,--enormous drab structures, whose every crevice leaks quivering heat and whose towering chimneys belch forth unceasingly a pall of ashes and black smoke. The steel workers and their families live as a rule in two and three family houses, built of wood, generally unpainted, and always dismally utilitarian as to architectural details. In South Chicago, four years ago, there was not such a thing as a park, or a playground, or a recreation center. One lone social settlement was just seeking a home for itself. There were public schools, quite imposing buildings. But these were closed and locked and shuttered for the day as soon as the classes were dismissed.