Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/117

 at the suggested "indignity" of compulsory baths at the pithead. The freeborn Briton reserves to himself the right to bring his coal dust home to the scrubbed boards and washed pillows of his domestic drudge, and when he secures his eight-hour day, does not dream of employing some other woman to help his wife with her extra shifts, so that she, as well as he, may go "rightly to bed."

Those who are intimate with the lives of poor people know how desperately hard on the women are the quick-coming children and the dreadful inadequacy of the money she gets for housekeeping. The increase in drugging as a preventive is a matter for very serious consideration. It is not only hard work and under-feeding that makes so many of our working women look old at thirty.

The dissatisfaction that is caused by all the defects of housing is purely to the good. It is to be wished that the women would all strike against the vile houses and the antiquated and decrepit implements and arrangements. Unhappily the women, having known no other, are often sunk in indifference. When people criticise the "folly" of teaching girls to cook on convenient stoves and to housekeep under reasonable conditions, because everyone knows they never will have convenient stoves or reasonable conditions, and it will only make them dissatisfied, I for one hail this dissatisfaction as the one star of hope for the housewives of the future. For it is