In a social condition in which practically all women but religious enthusiasts married, where child-bearing and the rearing and training of her children and the supporting of her household with food and clothing, and through them the whole race, occupied the entire strength and time of woman, she could not complain that she lacked social functions; nor would it have been possible for her to undertake other social duties without deserting those of more importance. If man's work was from sun to sun, while her work was never done, if she laboured under certain social disabilities which were not inevitable, she still knew that her labour was as valuable and essential to her race as that of man, and there is no evidence of any movement on her part to readjust her relations to life and to enter the fields of labour apportioned to the male. In the main she was satisfied with her condition. If isolated women here and there entered new fields of labour, became professors at universities, or took to statecraft or trade, it was because of some great individual aptitude in these directions, and not because woman felt ill at ease and in disco-ordination with her share of the world's labour or her place in social life.
With the rise of what we term modern civilization, all this has become slowly reversed.
The invention of modern machinery, and the discovery of modes of compelling natural forces to perform the labours in earlier times performed by the muscles of human creatures, with the resulting conditions, have profoundly modified all modern life, and above all they have affected the position of woman.
With steady and persistent advance the field of woman's domestic industries has been invaded and is passing from her. In remote country districts she still weaves and brews and bakes, not as a luxury and amusement, but from necessity, and still feeds and clothes her household, and marries early, and gives her children what training they get: but exactly as modern civilization advances, and where it is found in its fullest development, these conditions recede.
Her loom has been transformed into the vast factory where thousands of steam-driven machines, largely possessed and guided by men, accomplish the labour she performed in her home, and clothe the world; the steam-driven sewing-machine is fast supplanting the woman's needle, and even the domestic sewing-machine; bread, the manufacture of which has been through all ages one of woman's chief handicrafts, is increasingly the work of machinery, owned and guided almost exclusively by males; beer, the right brewing of which was our grandmother's pride, is exclusively the manufacture of machinery and males, who, for absorbing this branch of the female's work, are often rewarded with knighthoods and peerages; the very preserves and sweetmeats which our fore-mothers prepared are now produced cheaper, if not better, in vast factories; the milkmaid is vanishing, and cheese is as often a male as a female manufacture; clothes are washed, windows cleaned, carpets beaten, by machinery, and the smallest minutiæ of domestic life are more and more passing out of the hands of the woman householder; the male cook penetrates into the kitchen as the male accoucheur penetrates into the birth-chamber.