Above all, that their progress towards industrial emancipation would ever be helped along by the wives and daughters of the employing classes was unthinkable.

That the releasing of one class of women from household labor by sending another class of women into the factory, there to perform their historic tasks of cooking, sewing, and laundry work, was to result in the humanizing of industry, no mind ever prophesied.
Yet these things are coming.

The scabs of the labor world are becoming the co-workers instead of the competitors of men.

The women of the leisure classes, almost as fast as their eyes are opened to the situation, espouse the cause of their working sisters.

The woman in the factory is preparing to make over that factory or to close it.
The history of a recent strike, in a carpet mill in Roxbury, Massachusetts, is a perfect history, in miniature, of the progress of the working women.
That particular mill is very old and very well known.