Page:Lily Gair Wilkinson - Revolutionary Socialism and the Woman's Movement.djvu/18

 Rh which capitalism produces in the columns of statistics relating to its female slave-driving. If we look down the rows of figures given in reports of investigations made into the conditions of the "sweated" workers we find over and over again the same terrible story told in the same chill words. The earnings of women working as much as 14, 15, and 16 hours daily are frequently shown to amount to no more than 4/ or 5/ per week. We even find cases quoted in which the worker toils for as much as 18 hours a day and earns only 5/ weekly. Cases are given of women making shirts for 1/3d. per dozen, and as one woman doing this work expressed it:—"It is just putting out our life to keep it in; but the putting out is the quickest." Another woman who was given trousers to finish at ½d. per pair (the finishing taking two hours for each pair), found it, as she said, "easier to starve without the work." Suits of "shoddy" for children are made by women working for 14d. per suit, the net result of twelve hours of very hard work being no more than 9d. A woman doing this work in Scotland had had a family of seventeen, of whom seven survived. With unconscious irony she expressed the bitterness of her life of misery: "God took most of my bairns," she said. "He is the best friend we poor folks have."

Such cases are by no means exceptional, but are quoted in the various reports with sickening recurrence: Figures are totally inadequate to express the meaning of such conditions; the slaves who suffer day by day what the cold and lifeless statistics are incapable of expressing, alone know that meaning in all its horrible reality.

As has been said, woman's wage "is too low to live upon and too high to die upon." The fact is that modern capitalism calculates on, and to a great extent flourishes upon, the most odious of social evils. Many employers of female labour do not scruple to make this plain to the women who apply to them for situations. No wonder that the bourgeoisie recognises prostitution as a "necessary evil." "Necessary" to capitalism, which grows fat upon it!

Bitter want drives countless wives and daughters to this horrible resource as the one means of warding off starvation; and before all working women, existing in the terrible uncertainty which is now the condition of working class life, is always the possibility of having some day to make the ghastly choice between shame and starvation. On the one hand, the hypocritical bourgeois moralists are crying, "Woman's sphere is the home!"—on the other hand,