The great industrial population comes from crowded tenements. It is inconceivable that enough work could be found within those walls to make life attractive to the girls and young women growing to maturity in such households. So much for the psychological side. The fact remains that the great bulk of women in industry work because they _have_ to work—they enter industrial life to make absolutely necessary money. The old tasks at which a woman could be self-supporting in the home are no longer possible in the home. She earns her bread now as she has earned it for thousands of years—spinning, weaving, sewing, baking, cooking—only to-day she is one of hundreds, thousands in a great factory. Nor is she longer confined to her traditional tasks. Men are playing a larger part in what was since time began and up to a few years ago woman's work. Women, in their need, are finding employment at any work that can use unskilled less physically capable labor. Ever has it been the very small proportion of men who could by their unaided effort support the entire family. At no time have all the men in a country been able to support all the women, regardless of whether that situation would be desirable. Always must the aid of womenfolk be called in as a matter of course. We have a national ideal of a living wage to the male head of the family which will allow him to support his family without forcing his wife and children into industry. Any man who earns less than that amount during the year must depend on the earnings of wife and children or else fall below the minimum necessary to subsistence, with all which that implies. In 1910, four-fifths of the heads of families in the United States earned under eight hundred dollars a year. At that same time, almost nine-tenths of the women workers living at home in New York City working in factories, mills, and such establishments, paid their entire earnings to the family. Of 13,686 women investigated in Wisconsin in 1914, only 2 per cent gave nothing to the family support. Of girls in retail stores living at home in New York City, 84 per cent paid their entire earnings to the family. Work, then, for the majority of women, is more apt to be cold economic necessity—not only for herself, but for her family.