Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/495

 WOMEN'S WORK IN LEEDS 473 and 16s. In other words, the proportion of efficient women-workers is much greater in Leeds than in East London. Of the wages and condition of dressmakers and milliners in Leeds, I know nothing. There were 4,000 of them in 1881, and their numbers must have considerably increased in the last ten years. The num- ber of domestic servants was 6,597 in 1861, and rose to 9,636 in 1881, the population of Leeds increasing 50 per cent. during that period. It is noteworthy that in both these occupations the numbers above twenty years of age are considerably greater than the numbers below; the reverse is the case in the textile industries. This must be remembered in any comparison of the employment of women with the employment of men. If every girl in a certain class goes into the factory, nearly every girl comes out of it again. Regrettably high as the percentage of married to single women (excluding girls) in factories may be, the percentage of married women in factories to married women out of them is very small. In the census of 1881 the Industrial Class in Leeds included over 26,000 females and over 83,000 males; but the majority of the males were men, while the majority of the females were girls. . Cigar-rnking has not yet made its way in Leeds, notwith- standing the large Jewish population. The Dutch Jews, however, do not go to Leeds, and this may explain why the trade has not been taken up. In one small cigar factory where about thirty women and girls are employed, several have come from Nottingham, Leicester, Liverpool, or other towns, although to attract Leeds girls the usual five years' apprenticeship has been reduced to three, and high wages can be earned. Nowhere but in this cigar factory and in a Jewish workshop have I seen men and women doing the same kind of work. In both cases I was struck by the difference in intensity of appli- cation. The men worked much harder than the women; it seemed a means of livelihood to the former, merely an occupa- tion to the latter. In the cigar trade men are said to have a lighter touch than women, and to produce cigars of more equal quality than women as a rule. In the Jewish workshops the men machinists are paid a higher daily wage than the women, and the indifference with which the Jewish masters take on men or women at the different rates seems to show that women in the clothing trade are really being treated on equal terms with men, and that a substitution of men for women, although most impro- bable, is not inconceivable. CLARA E. COLLET