There is, however, no fundamental opposition between these movements. Just as the working classes are striving through Syndicalism to express a rising discontent, not only with the economic conditions of their work, but also with the fact that they have no voice in its regulation and control, so women are striving, not only for political freedom and economic betterment, but for a voice in the collective control of society. Women have, until very lately, been left out from the arrangement even of matters which most vitally concern them and their children. The following incident in the history of the Factory Department will illustrate this fact. In 1879 the then Chief Inspector of Factories, Sir Alexander Redgrave, discussed in his annual report a tentative suggestion for the appointment of women inspectors that some person or persons unnamed had put forward. With the utmost kindliness and gentleness he negatived the proposal altogether, first on the assumption that the inspection of factories was work impossible for women and "incompatible with (their) gentle and home-loving character"; secondly, on the ground that in regard to the sanitary conditions in which women were employed "it was seldom necessary to put a single question to a female," and consequently there was no need to appoint women inspectors.[50] Thirteen years later came the Labour Commission. At that time it was unheard of for women to be appointed on Commissions, even when the subject was one in which women were most chiefly concerned. It is said, and I see no reason to doubt the statement, that the Labour Commission of 1892 did not at first intend even to hear evidence from women witnesses as to conditions in which women were employed. Having yielded to the urgency of two women who were working hard at the organisation of sweated workers in the East End and demanded to be heard, the Commission, as an afterthought, appointed women Assistant Commissioners, whose researches and reports subsequently led to the appointment of women Factory Inspectors--sixty years after the first appointments of men. Anyone who is likely to read this book will probably be already aware that women factory inspectors had no sooner been appointed than they very speedily were informed of flagrant sanitary defects in factories and workshops which had been suffered to continue simply because no woman official had been in existence, and men, with the best intentions, did not know what to look or ask for. The exclusion of women had involved in this case not merely a narrowing of the field of opportunity for professional women--a comparatively small matter--but a scandalous neglect of the elementary decencies of life for millions of women and girls in the working-class. It is unnecessary here to do more than remind my readers that until lately women were excluded also from local governing bodies which control the health, education, and conditions of life and work of women and children.