John Graham Brooks, in a lecture delivered in New York in the winter of 1895-6, on "Some Economic Aspects of the Woman Question," said: "Woman who used to do her work in the house now does it in the factory, and the same work, doing her work under absolutely new and different conditions, a change so great that it closes finally one argument that I hear again and again by those opposed to woman suffrage--namely, that the place for woman is in the home."
One condition under which she works that is not "absolutely new and different" is that of sex. Whatever as a woman she could not do in the home she cannot do abroad as a working-woman. She is in business as a business woman, not as a business man. Economic equality in such things as she can do is as unlike to a similarity in work which ignores sex conditions as a business corporation is to the government under whose laws it exists and by which its rights are defended. But even the external conditions are not so changed as might at first appear. The statistical proof of the youth of the majority of workers, the comparatively small number out of the whole population who go into business, and the fact that the domestic work for these very workers must be done by women, all show this.
The United States Census of 1890 shows that not quite four million women are "engaged in gainful occupations." Of these more than one and a half million are in domestic service, and nearly half a million in professional service, mainly as teachers. The most striking gain has been made in the lighter forms of profitable labor--by stenographers, typewriters, telegraph and telephone operators, cashiers, bookkeepers, etc. In 1870 there were 19,828 of these; in 1890, there were 228,421. The invention of the type-writing machine appears to be the ballot that has mainly produced this result. Carrol D. Wright says that in twenty cities examined in the United States he found, among 17,000 working-women, that 15,887 were single, 1,038 were widows, and 745 were married. This tells the same story. The mass of these women, like the mass of men, are working, not for public influence or station, but for the owning and holding of a home. The latest effort in self-help for the working class is the wise one of building them good homes. The best renting property has been found to be that which gives privacy and those distinctions that mark the family.