The conditions of effective combination would be secured, public opinion would assist in securing decent wages, factory inspection would provide shorter hours and fair sanitary conditions, and last, not least, women whose home duties precluded them from full factory work would be taken out of the field of competition.
Whether it would be possible to successfully crush the whole system of industrial "out-work" may be open to question; but it is certain that so long as, and in proportion as "out-work" is permitted, attempts on the part of women to raise their industrial condition by combination will be weak and unsuccessful.

So long as "out-work" continues to be largely practised and unrestrained, competition sharpened by the action of married women and other irregular and "bounty-fed" labour, must keep down the price of women's work, not only for the out-workers themselves, but also for the factory workers.

Nor is it possible to see how the system of "out-work" can be repressed or even restricted by any other force than legislation.

So long as home-workers are "free" to offer, and employers to accept, this labour, it will continue to exist so long as it pays; it will pay so long as it is offered cheap enough; and it will be offered cheaply so long as the supply continues to bear the present relation to the demand.
But there is another force required to give any full effect to such extensions of the Factory Act as will crush private workshops, and either directly or indirectly prohibit out-work.

The real reason, as we saw, why woman's wages were proportionately lower than man's, was the competition of a mass of women, able and willing to work at indefinitely low rates, because they were wholly or partly supported from other sources.