Prisoners of Poverty

Publisher Marketing: Excerpt from Prisoners of Poverty: Women Wage-Workers, Their Trades and Their Lives A comprehensive view of the attainments made by American women in this century, and especially during the last fifteen years, cannot but be of great importance and value. The cruel kindness of the old doctrine that women should be worked for, and should not work, that their influence should be felt, but not recognized, that they should hear and see, but neither appear nor speak, - all this belongs now to the record of things which, once measurably true, have become fabulous. The theory that women should not be workers is a corruption of the old aristocratic system. Slaves and servants, whether male or female, always worked. Women of rank in the old world were not necessarily idle. The eastern monarch who refused an army to a queen, sent her a golden distaff. The extremes of despotism and of luxury, undermining society and state, can alone have introduced the theory that it becomes the highly born and bred to be idle. With this unnatural paralysis of woman's active nature came ennui, the bane of the so-called privileged classes. From ennui spring morbid passions, fostered by fantastic imaginations. A respect for labor lies at the very foundation of a true democracy. The changes which our country has seen in this respect, and the great uprising of industries among woman, are then not important to women alone, but of momentous import to society at large. The new activities sap the foundation of vicious and degraded life. From the factory to the palace the quickening impulse is felt, and the social level rises. To the larger intellectual outlook is added the growing sympathy of women with each other, which does more than anything else to make united action possible among them. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.