Page:The case for women's suffrage.djvu/85

 The increasing number of women who are entering the industrial as distinguished from the domestic spheres of employment, and the disabilities under which they labour, make it certain that legislation affecting women's employment will become more general. There are at present about 5½ millions of women engaged in outside employment, only about one-third of whom are engaged in domestic service, where the number of these is practically stationary. It is in the other spheres, those spheres where woman enters into competition with man, and where she has need of more self-reliance and self-protection, where the number of women engaged is increasing. It is obvious that if legislation affecting women workers is to be decided by men voters only that there is grave danger of the law being loaded against the non-voter.

Since, then, women are more and more taking part in the world's work, it surely follows that they ought also to enjoy the chief right of citizenship. Otherwise they will suffer from sex legislation quite as much as men have hitherto suffered from class legislation.

And if the industrial woman should have this chief right conferred upon her, so also should the wife and mother. The single woman engaged in outside employment for wages has a measure of economic freedom—she is as economically free as man under the present system—but when she gets married and becomes a housewife she is equally industrious in the work of the country and gets no wages, the result being that she loses what little independence she