Little change has been effected in their status since the industrial revolution excepting an increase in their numbers in the factories. So many of them lack sufficient nourishment or leisure or power to help themselves--the same applies to the men--that they are seemingly powerless even at the present time to change their lot. The effort is coming from another class which has been far more fortunate in its economic adjustments. The hopelessly poor are the victims of our industrial regime. Just ahead in the social scale are the middle class workers. It is in their homes a favorable readjustment to the new economic conditions can be found. With the departure of each occupation from the home came an expansion of wants. A greater variety of food and clothing increased the kinds of work women performed. They were just as busy as when they wove and spun. If new economic problems had not arisen out of the fact that men did not receive adequate compensation for their labor to warrant a higher plane of living in the home, the women of this class would not have been compelled to change their habits of life to any extent. In many families of the middle-class, women’s work in the household has little money value unless performed in the household of another. It is when the men of the household are out of work that the small economic importance of women’s work to the family is manifest. It most often does not satisfy the primary needs for food and shelter of those about them. Here lies the essential difference between the work of the modern housewife and that of the housewife of the era before machine industry. This difference is constantly increasing and making the family more dependent for its support upon employment outside the home. As an institution the home is becoming one of sentiment alone, and not one of economic expediency. Women’s work in the home is rapidly becoming a luxury, and less of a necessity; and unless a different economic regime is brought in, women will be compelled to add to the incomes of the families or marriage will become a luxury of the well-to-do alone. Either men of the middle-class must receive an ever increasing wage or the women engage in money-gaining occupations. It is true many women resist the removal of all productive industry from the home to the factory, but it is like resisting a glacial movement down a mountain side. The home must adapt itself to the change to save itself. When the home no longer possesses economic value, when marriage “means a doubling of expense and the halving of income, the accountability of one person for the welfare of another, and the certainty of no resource if the sole wage earner falls by chance into the abyss of the unemployed,” people will not so readily enter into a relation which involves so great a responsibility and sacrifice.[115]