of the eighteenth and the rise of the nineteenth century has completely transformed the position of women. It has also obliterated the distinction between man's work and woman's work. It has socialized industry; it has made man woman's co-worker in the task of clothing and feeding the world, and it has extended woman's sphere to the full length and breadth of human work. The industrial revolution, by bringing women out of the home into the world, has wrought a transformation in every phase of woman's life. It was the universal, fundamental cause of woman's unrest and woman's awakening. The machine, though enslaving millions of individual women, still was the liberator of womanhood. The factory door, though signifying hopeless drudgery in countless individual lives, nevertheless meant for woman the open gate-way to freedom.
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
During the early eighteenth century there were only a few establishments in this whole country that might be called factories. There were some flour and lumber mills driven by wind and water power, some paper mills, a very few iron foundries, and a few printing shops. The making of wearing apparel, that constitutes such an important factor in American manufactures of the present day, was still entirely and exclusively a domestic function. Everything a man wore was made in his own or some other home, from the straw-hat made of meadow grass, picked dried, bleached and braided by women of his family or of his neighborhood, to the socks knitted by his wife or mother, and the shoes made by the village cobbler in his little domestic shop. In all New England, industrially so important to-day, there was not one single manufacturing town. It was during the second half of the eighteenth century that the industrial revolution set in, first in the mother country, England, and later in America.
When speaking of historical epochs it can never be said that they began at any definite time or place. The changes were always slow and gradual, and usually people were in the midst of them before they were recognized at all. Undoubtedly countless social and economic causes and
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