ABSTRACT
Behind every revolution there lies a spiritual striving, a grasping after an ideal felt rather than seen. Most emphatically is it true that there is a social impulse independent of economic conditions, which has over and over again asserted itself in the demand for the emancipation of women. Of all the changes introduced by the industrial revolution there is none greater than the alteration brought about in the position of women. Before the industrial revolution, then, the household was, as a general rule, the unit of industry, and women worked in it as members of the family for the production of exchange as well as of use values. As the nineteenth century wore on other tendencies came into play which further increased the hardships of middle class women. The presence of a surplus of women in the middle classes made itself more and more apparent. Few men understand what importance the modern middle class woman attaches to her economic independence.
