The statement is made in Women’s Work and Wages, that “Nearly all the home makers who answered the question as to why they worked gave one of three reasons. The most frequent was that the husband’s wages were either too small or too irregular to keep the home. Fifty-two per cent gave their answer in many varying forms, of which a frequent one was, ‘It is all very well at first, but what are you to do when you have three or four children like little steps around you?’” “Others had worked all their lives; if the husband is a labourer earning at best 18s. per week and liable to many weeks without work, no other course seems possible.”[42] Miss Collet says, “I have never yet come across a married woman in the working classes with such eagerness for pocket-money that she would work for it at the rate of 1/2d or 1d an hour. Whenever I found women who said they worked at very low rates they have been working for their living and for that of their children; their husbands have always been men disabled or out of work.”[43] Frequently the wife of the unskilled worker does not go to the factory; her work is brought to her in her home. This is a great convenience to her for it enables her to remain with her children who are often too small to be left alone and it is impossible to take them to the factory. “The women who take work home from ware-houses, factories, or sub-contracting agents are, with comparatively few exceptions, married or widowed, if we exclude from consideration that large class described as dressmakers or seamstresses. The home workers are to be found in every grade of society among the wage-earning class; in the home of the middle-class clerk and in the room of the dock laborer; rarely, I think, in the tradesmen class, where wives can add to the family income more effectually by assisting in the management of the shop.”[44] The taking of work into the home is to the advantage of the employer as well as to the immediate advantage of the employee. It saves the employer rent and tools and procures him cheaper labor. Women can afford to work for less under their own roof when it is a question of working for less or not at all. These women do not often compete with men, for their work is the poorest paid and the least skilled. Few men compete with women in the lower grades of work unless they are physically unable to compete with men for the better kinds of employments. On the other hand women usually perform some branch of work which is wholly abandoned to them by the men and they refrain, whether willingly or not, from engaging in the branches monopolized by their male rivals.[45]