The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.11, page 249, July 1911, U. of Illinois Press

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JULY - I9I I man In the same level of life, and perhaps a more deserving object of study and observation. In a certain way all that I saw of the condition of women at the bottom connected itself in my mind with the agitation that is going on with regard to woman at the top. Except in England, the women's movement has not, so far as ~ was able to learn, penetrated to any extent into the lower strata of life, and that strikes me as one of the interesting facts about the movement. It shows to what extent the interests, hopes, and ambitions of modern life have, or rather have not, entered into and become a force in the lives of the people at the bottom. Thus it came -about that my interest in ad that ~ saw of workingwomen in Europe was tinged with the thought of what was going to happen when the present agitation for the emancipation and the wider freedom of women generally should reach and influence the women farthest down. In my journey through Europe I was interested in each of the different countries I visited, in certain definite and characteristic things. In London, for example, it was some of the destructive effects of a highly organized and complicated city life, and the methods which the Government and organized philanthropy have employed to correct them, that attracted my attention. Elsewhere it was chiefly the condition of the agricultural populations that interested me. In Al my observation and study, however, ~ found that the facts which ~ had learned about the condition of women tended to set themselves off and assume a special importance in my mind. It is for that reason that I propose to give, as wed as ~ am able, a connected account of them at this point. What impressed me particularly in London were the extent and effects of the drinking habit among women of the lower classes. Until I went to London I do not believe that I had more than once or twice in my life seen women standing side by side with the men in order to drink at a public bar. One of the first things I noticed in London was the number of drunken, loafing women that are passed in the streets of the poorer quarters. More than once ~ ran across these drunken and besotted creatures, with red, blotched faces, which told of years of steady excess ragged, dirty, and disorderly In their clothing lean249