In England a long agitation has resulted in the enactment of the trade boards law, in force since January 1st, 1910, providing for the creation of minimum wage boards and the establishment of minimum wage scales. How effective this may prove time alone can tell.
Several lines of action are clearly desirable and possible:
1. There must be a body of knowledge which we do not yet possess as to the number of married women at work and the industries which employ them, and this must be kept up to date from year to year. Why have the federal and state bureaus of labor statistics hitherto neglected this inquiry?
2. Such laws as are already in force against deserting husbands and fathers can be more rigorously enforced than is common at present, and their scope can be widened.
3. Orphans and widowed mothers of young children can be pensioned and removed from the labor market. This is the most useful palliative yet attempted.
4. The lives and working careers of husbands and fathers can be prolonged by prevention of accidents and disease. Effort in a large way to this end is only now beginning.
5. Those legislative measures which make work more endurable for all women (such as the obligatory provision of seats) can be promoted with especial reference to the urgent needs of married women.
6. A campaign of education among philanthropists can be carried on to induce them to cease from their cruelty to widows and deserted wives, and to lead them to imagine how any one of themselves would feel if she had to work all day in a mill or factory or laundry and then gather her babies from the day nursery for the night.
7. Public opinion can be created in favor of a minimum wage sufficient to enable fathers to support their families without help from wage-earning wives.
8. Finally, effort to substitute coöperative work for competitive work can be promoted. And herein lies the ultimate solution of the problem of married women’s industrial employment. For it is only in the coöperative commonwealth that they can find just and beneficent conditions in which to carry on those industries which were theirs from the foundation of human life.