And there are all the cloak-rooms with the plate-glass mirrors and the canteen dining-rooms done in pink, and blue, and duck’s-egg green and the new uniforms that Parliament made for the woman in industry! Oh, gentlemen, after all, why should she go home? For the new place in industry is the most comfortable place in which she has ever been in the world! Oh, I know the sociologists used to talk about the factory as so unhealthful for a woman. But you see, that was because no man knew how hard was domestic labour: he had never done it. And it was before the experts began to gather data on how unhealthful is the home. FACTORY WORK EASY COMPARED WITH KITCHEN WORK There is now a most interesting investigation under way in London. It is a scientific intensive study of the housewife, who is at last to be tabulated and indexed, just like any other labourer. The Women’s Industrial Council, who have undertaken it with the endorsement of the Government, announce: “It is quite probable the results may prove that the stretching motions involved in such domestic tasks as the washing of heavy sheets and blankets are more harmful than the stretching motions of the shop assistant or the vibrations which certain engineering employés meet in their work.” I went one day in London with the sociological investigator who is trying to find this out. She took me to Acton, which is the district where the washing is done for the great city. There are probably more laundries here than in any similar area in the world. We stopped to look at one of them. It is in a sanitary, new, up-to-date building with plenty of light and air and every new labour-saving device known to the trade. Then we called at some of the little cottages where live the women who work at this laundry. But to-day is Monday, which is the “slack” day of the week in the laundry business, and on Monday the employés remain at home to do their own “wash,” with the same appliances that have been used in home industry for a hundred years! The woman who came to the door when we knocked had just taken her hands out of the suds. She was still wiping them on her gingham apron as she talked. Do you know what she said? At house after house it was this, that Monday at home was her hardest day of the week. “O, yes, ma’am,” she said, “much harder than any of the days that I am at the laundry.” Why? Because at the laundry she has no lifting of any kind to do and no backbreaking scrubbing over a washboard. It is done by machinery, or if there are heavy sheets that must be lifted by hand, men are employed to do it. At home even when she’s so fortunate as to have a faucet, all of the water she must carry in pails from the sink to the “copper” to be heated.