Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/48

 moral and religious amelioration of mankind.

.—The possession of votes, it is asserted, will increase the earnings of women. This prophecy is of itself enough to enlist every underpaid and underfed seamstress or maid-of-all-work in the ranks of the fighting suffragists. The plain answer to it is that the prediction, if it means (as every working woman does understand it to mean) that a vote will in itself raise the market value of a woman's work, is false. The ordinary current price of labour depends on economical causes. They are some of them obscure. The lowness of a woman's wages is due in part to her weakness compared with the strength of men, in part to her necessary exclusion from all careers, such as employment in the army and navy, labour in the docks, and the like, for which she is physically unfitted, and in part it may be in England to the excess in the number of women over men, or to the fact that many women do not depend upon their wages for a livelihood. I have always admitted that woman suffrage will increase the chance of Parliament turning its attention