Now, it may not particularly interest you that you are like this, a phenomenon of the 20th century, but there are plainer terms that I am sure you will understand. Listen, Mrs. Lewis: Every Saturday night there is going to be money in your own pocket. The convenience of this is that never again will you under any circumstances have to go through any one’s else pockets for it. Do you see? Right across those portals there where they want you so much that every obstacle that used to be piled in your pathway has been so surreptitiously carted away overnight, that you would hardly believe it ever was there, lie all promised opportunities. Susan B. Anthony pioneered for them. Mrs. Pankhurst smashed windows for them. Mrs. Catt is even now politically campaigning for them. And you, Mrs. Lewis, are to enter in. What will happen to you when you’ve joined up with the new woman movement? Let us look at the advance columns over on the other side. No one met them with: “Woman, back to your kitchen!” Or, “This is unscriptural and your habits of marriage and maternity will interfere with shop routine.” It was one of the most significant decisions of all time since the day of the Cave Woman, that morning when Mrs. Black got her aunt to come in to look after the children and, hanging up her gingham apron, walked out of the kitchen. Women were doing it all over Europe. They are to be counted now by the hundreds of thousands. Altogether we know that they number in the millions although we have not the exact returns from every country. By 1916 England had enrolled in industry 4,086,000 women and Germany 4,793,472 of whom 866,000 in England and 1,387,318 in Germany had never before been gainfully employed outside their own homes. France, Italy, Russia all have similar battalions. And the important fact is that these new recruits are going into industry differently. Women before had to push their way in. Women now are invited in. Heretofore there were all the reasons in the world why a woman should not work outside her own home. Three generations of employment had not yet sufficed to efface the impression from the minds even of most young girls themselves who went out to earn their living that it was only a temporary expedient until they could marry and be supported ever after. Even when they discovered after marriage that they were still earning their own living just as much in their husband’s kitchen as anywhere they had been before, public opinion and the neighbours disapproved of their working for any one outside their own family. Who, Madam, would sew on your husband’s buttons? So strong was this sentiment that it even threatened to crystallise on the statute books. There were districts in Germany and in the North of England where they talked about passing a law against the employment of the married woman. Then fortunately about this time the world came to 1914 and the revolution of all established thought.