advancement. I have touched upon two cases which illustrate her relative
dependence on the law. She appeared to me not as the equal of man either
physically or legally. It remained to study her socially. In the factory
where I worked men and women were employed for ten-hour days. The
women's highest wages were lower than the man's lowest. Both were
working as hard as they possibly could. The women were doing menial
work, such as scrubbing, which the men refused to do. The men were
properly fed at noon; the women satisfied themselves with cake and
pickles. Why was this? It is of course impossible to generalize on a
single factory. I can only relate the conclusions I drew from what I saw
myself. The wages paid by employers, economists tell us, are fixed at
the level of bare subsistence. This level and its accompanying
conditions are determined by competition, by the nature and number of
labourers taking part in the competition. In the masculine category I
met but one class of competitor: the bread-winner. In the feminine
category I found a variety of classes: the bread-winner, the
semi-bread-winner, the woman who works for luxuries. This inevitably
drags the wage level. The self-supporting girl is in competition with
the child, with the girl who lives at home and makes a small
contribution to the household expenses, and with the girl who is
supported and who spends all her money on her clothes. It is this
division of purpose which takes the "spirit" out of them as a class.
There will be no strikes among them so long as the question of wages is
not equally vital to them all. It is not only nature and the law which
demand protection for women, but society as well. In every case of the
number I investigated, if there were sons, daughters or a husband in the
family, the mother was not allowed to work. She was wholly protected. In
the families where the father and brothers were making enough for bread
and butter, the daughters were protected partially or entirely. There is
no law which regulates this social protection: it is voluntary, and it