Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/660

 638 THE ICONOMIC JOURNAL details, t may probably be safely inferred that the women employed in manufacturin ndustries earn only from one-third to two-thirds of the amount earned by the men. The average wage of the women approaches nearest to that of the men in the textile manufactures (cotton goods, hosiery, and carpetings in Great Britain; woollens and worsteds in Massachusetts). Even at manual labour women occasionally earn hh standard wages. Out of 13,822 workers in twenty-two cities of the IJnted States, 537, or nearly 4 per cent., were found in 1887 to be earning 500 a year, or over.  (5) s/ W'. But even f it be true as a general statistical result that women earn less than men, it still remains necessary to inquire, by care- fu! comparison of crucial nstances, how far this inferiority of reward is merely a concomitant of inferiority of work. ' Tme wages' of women might be less than those of men without their ' task wages' being lower. The chief dfliculty in this problem is what seems to be the impossibility of discovering any but a very few instances n which men and women do precisely similar work, in'the same place and at the same epoch. When women are first introduced into a trade n substitution of men there are, generally speaking, two scales of wages, the men's old rate, and a lower one for the women. And there is a not unnatural tendency for the different grades of work to become very quickly dvided between the two sexes, and even work which in one place s clone almost exclusively by men will, n another place, be releated equally exclusively to women. The tailoring trade, for instance, in which both men and women work, affords, as I am told by Mr. David Schloss and Mss Beatrice Potter, no case fit for exact comparison. Both women and men can be found worki as coat-machinists, but those in London are almost exclusively men, and it would be useless to compare the wages of the London male coat-machinist with those of provincial female coat-machinists. The few female coat- machinists n London perform work of much lower grade than the men. Smlarly, the machining of trousers and waistcoats in London is performed exclusively by women. IJnder these cumstances it does not aid us to learn that the women employed n various branches of the tailor,n trade in London .about half as much wages as the men employed branches. earn only in other Fourth Annual Report of Federal Commissioner of Labor, 1888.