Exactly for the same reason the average American working woman shuns housework as a means of livelihood. You will find in every community a few women of intelligence who are naturally so domestic in their tastes and inclinations that they shrink from any work outside the home. Such women do adhere to domestic service, but, broadly speaking, you behold in the servant group merely the siftings of the real industrial class. In a tentative, halting sort of fashion we are learning to humanize the factory and shop. Factory workers, mill hands, department store clerks, have been granted legislation in almost every State of the Union, regulating hours of work, sanitary conditions, ventilation, and in some cases they have been given protection from dangerous machinery. In department stores they have been granted even certain special comforts, such as seats on which to rest while not actually working. Of course, we have done no more than make a beginning in this matter of humanizing the factory and the shop. But we have made a beginning, and the movement toward securing better and juster and healthier conditions for workers in all the industries is bound to continue. So long as manufacturing was carried on in the home, no such protective legislation as workers now enjoy was dreamed of. We had to wait until the workers came together in large groups before we could see their conditions and understand their needs. Housework, because it is performed in isolation, because it is purely individual labor, has never been classed among the industries. It has rather been looked upon as a normal feminine function, a form of healthy exercise. No one has ever suggested to legislators that sweeping and beating rugs might be included among the dusty trades; that bending over steaming washtubs, and almost immediately afterwards going out into frosty air to hang the clothes, might be harmful to throat and lungs; that remaining within doors days at a time, as houseworkers almost invariably do, reacts on nerves and the entire physical structure; that steady service, if not actual labor, from six in the morning until nine and ten at night makes excessive demands on mind and body. Such conditions exist because the workers are too weak, too inefficient, too unintelligent to change them. Yet the demand for servants so far exceeds the supply that they are in a position, theoretically, to dictate the terms of their own employment. If they elected to demand pianos and private baths they could get them; that is, if instead of remaining isolated individuals they could form themselves into an industrial class, like plumbers, or bricklayers, or carpenters. Even as isolated individuals they are able to command a better money wage than more efficient workers, which proves how great is the need for their services.