womanly occupations, the sewing trades and the textile trades, were not only flooded by women but have also been invaded by men. Women did not really begin to displace men in their traditional occupations until men had invaded the traditional occupations of women. The over-crowding of those occupations that have always been regarded as woman's work brought about such deplorable conditions of endless working hours and v/retched pay that to the great mass of female breadwinners it meant a choice between starvation and the seeking of new means of self-support. Irresistible economic pressure was the force that opened to women this new, great field of employment: trade and transportation. To the more educated women of the middle class it opened that other great field of employment, classified in the census as professional service. Incidentally it may be remarked that the same economic pressure also gave the greatest impetus to the movement for woman's social and political equality.
THE MODERN WOMAN'S SPHERE
When the barrier between man's work and woman's work had once been broken down, when economic necessity compelled women to seek ever new fields of employment, woman's possibilities of achievement along any line of human work had become as boundless and unlimited as man's. There is practically no occupation to-day of which it cannot be truthfully said that women can perform it. Occupations requiring great muscular strength and occupations requiring the utmost manual skill, occupations requiring a keen, active brain and occupations requiring unusual courage and daring, they all are represented by at least some women. There are women captains and pilots, engineers and firemen, carpenters and blacksmiths, machinists and well-borers. There are women doctors and lawyers, clergymen and architects, civil engineers and astronomers. Even that most recent triumph of human ingenuity and daring, aviation, already numbers women among its inventors, its pioneers and its martyrs. When we remember that at the rise of the nineteenth century some kinds of factory labor, teaching, keeping boarders, sewing and domestic, service were practically the only
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