“No—no; thanks very much; it’s right here. I can put my hand on it in just a minute.” From a desk near at hand she produced a government report.
“I came across this the other day, and I saved it because it proves what I have always felt about the unfairness with which women are treated in business. They may perform equal work with men but very few of them are paid as well. The average annual earning power of the male industrial worker now is at the rate of a thousand dollars a year; that of the woman industrial worker five to six hundred. Among office workers the disparity is much greater. When I was getting fifty dollars a week as Mr. Kipps’ chief assistant, there was a youth helping me who was being paid sixty.”
“I know,” agreed Jeannette. “When Tommy Livingston followed me as Mr. Corey’s secretary, he did not do the work half as competently as I had done,—Mr. Corey often told me so,—and yet he was paid more at the very start, and asked for and received one raise after another, until Mr. Corey was paying him nearly twice what he formerly had paid me; but when I went back to work after I left Martin, Mr. Corey started me in again at the old salary of thirty-five, and never suggested a higher rate. Walt Chase was getting eighty-five dollars weekly as head of the Mail Order Department, and when I took charge, I received only forty. Although I have doubled the amount of business the Corey Publishing Company does by mail, I am to-day being paid but fifty a week. Mr. Allister told me when I asked for my last raise, that it was the last he would ever give me.”
“Almost all employers underpay their women workers,” affirmed Miss Holland. “In general women are receiving to-day from a half to two-thirds what men are who do identically the same kind of work. I was discussing this question once with Mr. Kipps, and he defended himself by stating that the majority of girls who fill office positions only work for ‘pin money.’ ... ‘Pin money?’ What is ‘pin money’? Dollars and cents, I take it, with which to buy clothes and some amusement. Don’t men need ‘pin money,’ too? Doesn’t everyone? When the Corey Publishing Company employs a young man,—a High School or College graduate,—what he is paid per week is never spoken of as ‘pin money,’ yet he spends it for exactly the same things as girls do.... I’ve often wondered if Mr. Kipps considered the salaries he paid you and me, Mrs. O’Brien, and Miss Travers, Miss Whaley, Miss Foster, Miss Bixby, Miss Kate Smith, old Mrs. Jewitt, Mrs. M’Ardle, and Miss Stenicke as ‘pin money!’ Most of those women not only supported themselves but their old mothers and fathers, their younger brothers and sisters or some helpless relative. Mrs. O’Brien had two daughters she kept at Ladycliff for nine years; Miss Travers has a bed-ridden sister; Miss Whaley, her mother; Mrs. Jewitt, a tubercular husband; and Kate Smith is putting her young brother through dental college——”
“Yes,” interrupted Jeannette, “Mrs. M’Ardle has two children of her own she is taking care of, and one of her sister’s, and she’s getting only forty dollars a week.”
“How does she do it!” exclaimed Miss Holland.
“I’m sure I don’t know.... Beatrice Alexander has been sending thirty dollars a month to her helpless old aunt in Albany for the past fifteen years.”
“That’s where the ‘pin money’ goes!” declared Miss Holland with a note of scorn in her voice. “These silent, uncomplaining, hard-working women who give their lives to the grind of business! I feel keenly the rank injustice that is being done them!”
There was a moment’s silence, and Miss Holland continued:
“Mr. Kipps’ great argument was always that girls who came seeking employment did so with the intention of working only a year or two, and then getting married. He argued that a concern could not regard these women as permanent employees to be trained to fill important positions; they could not be depended upon to remain with a business and grow up with it——”