Can they add even a fraction to the understanding of anyone else? CORNELIA STRATTON PARKER. Woods Hole, _August_, 1921. WORKING WITH THE WORKING WOMAN I _No. 1075 Packs Chocolates_ Wise heads tell us we act first—or decide to act first—and reason afterward. Therefore, what could be put down in black and white as to why we took up factory work is of minor value or concern. Yet everyone persists in asking why? So then, being merely as honest as the Lord allows, we answer first and foremost because we wanted to. Isn't that enough? It is the why and wherefore of almost everything anyone does any place at any time. Only the more adept can concoct much weightier reasons as an afterthought. There is only one life most of us doubting humans are absolutely sure of. That one life gets filled with so much of the same sort of performance day in and day out; usually only an unforeseen calamity—or stroke of luck—throws us into a way of living and doing things which is not forever just as we lived and did things yesterday and the day before. Yet the world is so full of the unexplored! To those who care more for people than places, around every corner is something new—a world only dreamt of, if that. Why should all one's life be taken up with the kind of people we were born among, doing the sort of things our aunts and our uncles and our cousins and our friends do? Soon there creeps in—soon? yes, by six years or younger—that comforting belief that as we and our aunts and our uncles and our cousins and our friends do, so does—or should do—the world. And all the time we and our aunts and our uncles and our cousins and our friends are one little infinitesimal drop in one hundred million people, and what those above and below and beyond and around about think and do, we know nothing, nor care nothing, about. But those others are the world, with us, a speck of—well, in this case it happened to be curiosity—in the midst of it all. Therefore, being curious, we decided to work in factories. In addition to wanting to feel a bona-fide part of a cross section of the world before only viewed second or third hand through books, there was the desire better to understand the industrial end of things by trying a turn at what some eight million or so other women are doing. “Women's place is the home.” All right—that side of life we know first hand. But more and more women are not staying home, either from choice or from necessity. Reading about it is better than nothing. Being an active part of it all is better still. It is one thing to lounge on an overstuffed davenport and read about the injurious effect on women of long hours of standing. It is another to be doing the standing.