AN EASY OCCUPATION

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 9, 1890

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 16, No. 22.

AN EASY OCCUPATION.

HERE is a suggestion which those who are helping poor women to help themselves may find useful: Any woman in the United States who will take the trouble to write to the silk bureau of the Department of Agriculture in April, with a request for silk-worm eggs, will receive a quarter of an ounce of them, which will contain about 9,000, in a little box. The department will also furnish information as to the best and most approved method for preparing and raising the cocoons. Cocoons are now worth over $1.00 a pound. When the great demand for cocoons arrives, as it surely will before long, some of those interested in the matter at the Department of Agriculture seem to think that more than 100,000 women will find very profitable employment in supplying these cocoons to the silk factories in this country. In France every farmer’s wife raises a few pounds of cocoons every spring, and makes money by selling them, and in this way mainly is the silk crop in that country grown. There are few occupations more easy or agreeable for a woman than the raising of cocoons. We have already pointed out the possible moral benefit of introducing cocoon culture into our women’s reformatories,—the humanizing effect of an interest in living creatures. The refining and elevating influence upon women who have committed no crime, yet who are hardly less rigidly shut in by poverty from all uplifting influences, is a consideration worth thinking of.—Exchange.