Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/678

 656 THE ECONOMIC JOURNT. with men in the same school, I am informed that the women habitually receive lower salaries than the men, the difference being greatest in the South, less in the North-east, still less in the Vest, anal disappearing altogether in the State of Vyoming, where (coincident with the right of women to vote) men anal women teachers receive equal salaries for equal work.  This seems to indicate that custom (again aided by the lower standard of life and the dependent position of women) has much to do with the inferiority of their salaries elsewhere in this class of work. III.--ARTISTIC WORK. Here we enter on a new field, in which I have no facts. But it is matter of common observation that, in many grades of work connected with 'the arts,' there is no general inferiority in women's earnings compared with those of men. Indeed it is probable that in some cases women obtain higher remuneration than men, merely because they are women. Actresses and female singers and dancers often earn more than their male colleagues. It is difficult to estimate how far this is to be ascribed to the monopoly value which still attaches to some kinds of public performances by women, and how much to the market value of' sexual attraction. I.--INTELLECTUAL WORK. Here again we have few {acts of economic significance. When a woman is exceptionally efficient, and does work of a kind usually performed by en, she seems to obtain her full 'Rent of Ability' without deduction on account of sex. The lady who acts as the Paris correspondent of the Daily News, and she who governs the important Post Office at Gibraltar, e both receive emoluments on at least a masculine scale. Ten thousand pounds was raid to George Eliot for Romo/a, and a similar price is said to have been refused by a living lady novelist. In other occupations the exceptional character of feminine training and ability gives women still something of'monopoly value.' The earnings of the first women-doctors probably included See. 9 of Wyoming School Act; see The Working of Woman Suffrage in ]4yoming, by the Hon. Horace Plunkerr (Fortnightly Review, May, 1890). See Colonial Oce List for 1891 (Harrison and Sons).