Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/229

 women citizens. Women are working for the Government, making army clothing and mail-bags for wages which would disgrace the private employer. Quite recently a poor woman who was charged with trying to commit suicide told the magistrates that she was engaged in making trousers for the police and clothing for soldiers, and that, by working nearly eleven hours a day, she could scarcely make a shilling a day. For making a pair of Territorial riding breeches she received eightpence, and she found it to be utterly impossible to make two pairs in one day.

Women receive no advantage from the Fair Wages Clause, which, by law, is supposed to secure fair rates of pay to all employed in Government work. 'Having regard to wages current in the district' is the phrase employed in the Fair Wages Clause, and, as women are very badly paid in most districts outside Lancashire, the inevitable result appears, and the Government takes no steps to remedy it. In every case, the women employees of the Government are paid less than the men, even when the work is the same, with the single very modern exception of the Insurance Commissioners, who were given the same salaries as the men because it would have been a valuable argument for the woman suffragists if this had not been done. In