Little attention has been given until quite recent times to the position of the woman worker and the special problems concerning her industrial and commercial employment. The historical material relating to the share of women in industry is extremely scanty. Women in mediaeval times must have done a very large share of the total work necessary for carrying on social existence, but the work of men was more specialised, more differentiated, more picturesque. It thus claimed and obtained a larger share of the historian's attention. The introduction of machinery in the eighteenth century effected great changes, and for the first time the reactions of the work on the workers began to be considered. Women and children who had previously been employed in their own homes or in small workshops were now collected in factories, drilled to work in large numbers together. The work was not at first very different, but the environment was enormously altered. The question of the child in industry at first occupied attention almost to the exclusion of women. But the one led naturally to the other. The woman in industry could no longer be ignored: she had become an economic force. The position of the industrial woman in modern times is closely related, one way or another, to the industrial revolution, but the relation cannot be stated in any short or easy formula. The reaction of modern methods on woman's labour is highly complex and assumes many forms. The pressure on the woman worker which causes her to be employed for long hours, low wages, in bad conditions, and with extreme insecurity of employment, is frequently supposed to be due to the development of industry on a larger scale. It is, in my view, due rather to the survival of social conditions of the past in an age when an enormous increase in productive power has transformed the conditions of production. New institutions and new social conditions are needed to suit the change in the conditions of production. It is not the change in the material environment which is to blame, so much as the failure of organised society so far to understand and control the material changes. The capitalist employer organised industry on the basis of a "reserve of labour," and on the principle of employing the cheapest workers he could get, not out of original sin, or because he was so very much worse than other people, but simply because it was the only way he knew of, and no one was there to indicate an alternative course--much less compel him to take it. Much more guilty than the cotton-spinners or dock companies were the wealthy governing classes, who permitted the conditions of work to be made inhuman, and yet trampled on the one flower the people had plucked from their desolation--the joy of union and fellowship; who allowed a system of casual labour to become established, and then prated about the bad habits and irregularity which were the results of their own folly.