Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/71

Rh salary, for as a single person he requires no more. No doubt such a sliding scale would be most acceptable to college instructors so long as it went up and would encourage early marriage. The only bitter pill would be to have the scale slide down. In the actual world, however, the bachelor does not receive less because he has no family and the married man does not receive more because he has. The woman teacher still generally receives even as high as fifty per cent, less than a man, whether she has a family to support or not.

But, it is replied, the single man expects to have a family in the future for which he must lay a financial foundation now. Is then the young woman not expected to have a family? Will her savings be less of a help to the future family because they are feminine? Or will they go farther for the same reason and do they therefore not need to be so great? Is not the family the ultimate loser by this principle of stinting women, since the family funds are derived from one source alone? After marriage, if both father and mother are capable of earning, is the family not the gainer if the earnings of the mother are at the same rate as those of the father? If the father dies, is the family not the gainer by having full support instead of two thirds or thereabout?

The highest expediency that attaches to natural justice is brought out by an economic principle that few will dispute. Women who are discriminated against in the matter of pay immediately become a cheap labor class, and cheap labor is bound to injure the cause "of well-paid labor. This injustice bears within itself the germ of that economic vengeance that has wrought such harm in the profession of teaching, and has been so conducive a factor in driving men out of the ranks. This principle has been brought home to the laborers in industry, and in the ranks of labor the feeling is becoming wide-spread that men and women have a common cause, and all movements that make for economic improvement for women are apt to find there much greater support than in the so-called higher ranks of society. The world of trade could easily appreciate the principle also. If a woman set up a successful business with a margin of profit 25 per cent, or 50 per cent. less than that of her masculine competitors in the same business, would the men not immediately protest and combine to force her to sell at their terms or to wreck her trade?

It has been stated that where men and women teachers receive equal wages the men will vanish. This assertion, however, seems to rest on the implication that the wages are low, for when it has been suggested that women receive the high wages of men, opening the way for a natural competition irrespective of sex, the answer has frequently been that the natural result of this competition would be that the men would be chosen and the women would be left. Now certain qualities excellent in a teacher have been conceded to women. For instance: