“I must say,” broke in Jeannette with fine sarcasm, “that great inducements are offered them to do so! At the end of twenty and twenty-five years’ faithful and efficient work in such positions as you filled and as I fill to-day, they are paid fifty dollars a week!”
“I answered him,” Miss Holland went on, after an appreciative nod, “that neither could the men he employed be considered as fixtures. I reminded him of Van Alstyne, Max Oppenheim, Humphrey Stubbs, Walt Chase, Tommy Livingston and Francis Holm. There are a hundred others. How many boys starting in to business, do you suppose, stick for the balance of their lives with the concern for which they first began to work?”
“Not many.”
“Few indeed! It’s to keep and hold these same boys and young men that the large corporations to-day are offering to sell them stock at advantageous rates.”
“Of course, it is the girls living at home,” observed Jeannette, “partially supported by their fathers and mothers or some relative, willing to work for small salaries to buy themselves a few extra clothes and a measure of amusement, that are keeping down the salaries paid to women entirely dependent on their earnings.”
“During the war,” observed Miss Holland, “a hundred thousand women were employed by the railroads to perform the work which the men formerly did before they went into the army. Women cleaned locomotives, tended stock-rooms of repair shops, sold tickets, took charge of signal stations, worked as carpenters, machinists, and electricians; women took the places of men in the steel mills, in the munition plants, in the foundries and even in coal mines. The National War Labor Board, headed by William H. Taft, undertook to protect the women workers, and laid down the principle that women doing the work formerly performed by men should receive the same pay. In other words, the pay was to be fixed by the job and not by the sex of the employee. Employers throughout the nation followed the ruling of the Labor Board.”
“But that was a war-time measure,” said Jeannette, “and we all did things, then, that were altruistic and patriotic.”
“If women had the physical strength of men,” Miss Holland asserted, “and could defend their principles by force, there would be a speedy end of injustices. Why do male waiters in our restaurants get higher wages than waitresses? Certainly they don’t work any harder, or give better service. Suppose all the women workers in New York City formed unions, and struck for what they decided adequate pay, a uniform scale of salaries, and could use the same methods that men would use in preventing women who had not joined the ranks from taking their places! Think what would happen! The work in every office, every bank, every corporation in this city would come promptly to a standstill; the strike would last forty-eight, seventy-two hours, and then the demands of the women would be conceded.... You want to remember one thing, my dear: women never banded together since history began, and asked anything that was unfair or unjust!”
“I was having a very interesting talk with my niece as we were coming here,” broke in Jeannette; “Etta wants to go to work, wants a position as stenographer in some office, not only to earn extra money with which to help out at home, but to acquire an interest in life that will fill her days. There are a hundred thousand young girls like her in this city to-day. Consider what effect a job would have on an immature character like Etta’s! I’ve been all through the bitter mill, and I speak from experience. Financial independence is a dangerous thing for such young girls. It makes them regard marriage with indifference. There is many a girl who has declined to marry a young man to whom she undoubtedly would have made a good wife merely because his income, which would have to do for both of them, was no more, or perhaps only a little more, than what she was earning herself.”
Jeannette’s lips closed firmly a moment and she stared out of the window at the bleak prospect of the Yard’s quadrangle bordered by closed and silent brick warehouses.