Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/74

70 support?) for labor that is by no means unskilled $1.25 a day, while the unmarried Italian who digs ditches gets $1.75 or $2.00.

There are other causes, to be sure, besides sex discrimination, which have encouraged unequal wages. Foremost among these is that women have not realized their own worth, have not demanded equal wages, have not been able to do so, in fact, through lack of organization. Moreover, in the past, women were crowded into a very few callings, among which teaching was a very prominent one, and thus they competed with each other. In the past, too, when women left the home to work, it was because they were forced to. Any addition, however meager, to the family income was welcomed. In the higher walks of life, again, women were content to earn the luxuries, depending on their families for the home and necessities. The parents, meanwhile, took pride in the fact that their daughters did not "have to'"' work. The effect on the worker, on the profession and on the family was bad. You got cheap labor, poor and half-hearted labor, and the family was out something, too. With modern times has come the realization that labor and self-support are necessary for the dignity, the character and the development of women, and that the welfare of society and of the family demands that she become a contributor of wealth rather than a mere consumer. But we shall not have the best efforts from women in professions until professional rewards are open to them. That increase of salary, with advance in position, based on merit alone is a necessary stimulus no one can deny. It will be well when all women realize the harm that is done, not only to their sisters, but to their profession, when they permit themselves to be stamped as cheap labor.

And as for the man, we fear that it is not chivalry that fails to recognize the equal value of woman's labor with his own. "We fear that it is not chivalry that frowns upon the married woman teacher. And BO we hope that he will be moved to a more generous spirit when he realizes that woman's loss is his own. The modern marriage is a halving of resources, whereas the colonial family was a doubling of resources. That the wife formerly actually produced by the labor of her hands in the way of food, clothing and household supplies, in a personal field of industry, quite free from competition either with her own sex or with the other, she must now produce in the form of the wherewithal to buy the food, clothing and household supplies. Her field has become wider, she must compete with others, but her capabilities have also grown wider, and must increasingly grow as she, with her husband, progresses farther and farther from that rude and simple life that was enclosed by four walls and called forth only a few of the manifold potential powers of hand and mind. Men must come to an insight of the economic waste of an unproductive life for their women, or of production without fair returns. But perhaps they will also begin