Page:The Woman Socialist - Snowden - 1907.djvu/92

 rearing of children and the care of a husband and the house, many a poor worker's wife has to turn out to earn a little in order to supplement the scanty wages of the husband, the natural breadwinner of the family. Competition, the competition of women and girls, the competition of unemployed work-mates, the competition of better workmen has lowered his own wage, and it is not sufficient for his increasing and rapidly growing family. The wife has to go out. She cooks, cleans, or washes—anything to earn a few shillings. Or she goes to the factory and spins or weaves alongside her husband.

Picture a life very common in Lancashire—in the greatest of all our manufacturing centres—where the husband and wife, and sometimes three or four children, turn into the same mill to work for wages.

They rise at five in the morning. The children's breakfast must be got ready, for they will have gone to school when the mother returns. They rush round the house, eyes half-closed with sleepiness, putting everything in readiness for the little sleepers when they awake. The youngest, a tiny baby, cannot be left. The others are