Of Fall River it is said that “the impulse which makes a married woman continue to work in the mill may be far less urgent in the economic sense and simultaneously far more urgent in the social sense.” And further on they tell us, “These Fall River women are women of a fine kind. They are highly skilled for women. They are well paid for women. They are intelligent, attractive, ambitious.”[54] The woman who still “finds plenty to do at home,” and the woman who has become part of the industrial world represent two types of homes common in the middle class. There is still a third. It is the woman who lives in a modern apartment and can take full advantage of all the industrial changes that minimize her work. Probably Patten has her in mind when he says “Once the household industries gave to the staying-home woman a fair share of the labor, but today they are few, and the ‘home-maker’ suffers under enforced idleness, ungratified longing, and no productive time-killing.... Heredity has not been making idleness good for women while it has been making work good for men. Valuable qualities are developed by toil, and women improve as do men under the discipline of rewards.”[55] Thus we have the three types of women in the middle class and there is a marked difference in the social attitude toward them. The woman who is busy in her home is looked upon as a vanishing type. The idle woman is viewed doubtfully. She is thought of as enjoying a leisure which she, as a member of the middle class is not entitled to. Her idleness weighs more on the social conscience than the idleness of the woman of wealth. And justly so; for her past stands for many of the better things of our civilization which we cherish as ideals, and to see her become an idler is to witness a growing waste of energy which was previously utilized to the great advantage of society. She is already beginning to ask “What can I do?” lest public sentiment should condemn her for her social parasitism. It is the middle class woman who goes to work--whether married or single--who is arousing her sex from lethargy that threatens race degeneracy. She is taking her place with the men in trying to solve industrial and social problems. Her home life tends to represent a newer ideal. She often is not only the companion of her husband in the home but in the business world as well; a source of economic strength instead of weakness. What becomes of the children of these families? This question brings up the subject of “race-suicide” which will be discussed in another chapter. FOOTNOTES: [49] Earle, Alice More, _Home Life in Colonial Days_, p. 158. [50] Dawson, _Germany and the Germans_, Vol. I, p. 96. [51] _United States Census Report_, 1900, p. CCXXIII. [52] Lynch, _French Life in Town and Country_, p. 188. [53] Patten, _New Basis of Civilization_, p. 193. [54] William Hard; Rheta Childe Dorr, _The Woman’s Invasion_, Everybody’s Magazine, Nov., 1908.