[49] Earle, Alice More, Home Life in Colonial Days, p. 158.
[50] Dawson, Germany and the Germans, Vol. I, p. 96.
[51] United States Census Report, 1900, p. CCXXIII.
[52] Lynch, French Life in Town and Country, p. 188.
[53] Patten, New Basis of Civilization, p. 193.
[54] William Hard; Rheta Childe Dorr, The Woman’s Invasion, Everybody’s Magazine, Nov., 1908.
[55] Patten, New Basis of Civilization, pp. 193-4.
CHAPTER V
Women of Leisure
Many laboring women are benefited by the transition of work from the home to the factory, or the introduction of new industries which were never allied to the home but represent an entirely new venture into the business world. But distinct from these, there is a class of women who reap the benefits of present industrial conditions in a greater or less degree by virtue of their parasitic relations to some man. These are the women “to whom leisure has come unsought, a free gift of the new industrial order.... Never before in the history of civilization have women enjoyed leisure comparable to that which falls to the lot of those in comfortable circumstances in America.”[56]
The new era of industrialism has brought into prominence a large class of successful or partially successful business men whose financial remuneration is sufficient to allow their homes to be adapted to all the industrial changes which lighten household tasks. The husband’s economic importance is often marked, and there is no necessity for the wife to add to the income of the family. She profits by the development of new industries in the business world which supersede those carried on in the home and her demand for the output of the new industry is no small item in determining its success. She is not deterred from trying the new because of the financial outlay it involves. She welcomes the era of canned meats and vegetables; the new uses of gas and electricity, and the application of compressed air for cleaning purposes. She is the household innovator in a conservative society.